Zygmunt Bauman
Zygmunt Bauman
Zygmunt Baumanis a Polish sociologist. He has resided in England since 1971 after being driven out of Poland by an anti-semitic campaign engineered by the communist government of the Polish People's Republic. Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leeds, Bauman is one of the world's most eminent social theorists writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity...
NationalityPolish
ProfessionSociologist
Date of Birth19 November 1925
CountryPoland
Madness is no madness when shared.
I suspect that one of capitalism's crucial assets derives from the fact that the imagination of economists, including its critics, lags well behind its own inventiveness, the arbitrariness of its undertaking and the ruthlessness of the way in which it proceeds.
The carrying power of a bridge is not the average strength of the pillars, but the strength of the weakest pillar. I have always believed that you do not measure the health of a society by GNP but by the condition of its worst off.
Human attention tends to be focused on the satisfactions relationships are hoped to bring, precisely because somehow they have not been truly satisfactory. And if they do satisfy, the price of this satisfaction has often been found to be unacceptable.
Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.
Civilisation, the orderly world in which we live, is frail. We are skating on thin ice. There is a fear of a collective disaster. Terrorism, genocide, flu, tsunamis.
We belong to talking, not what talking is about... Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.
The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.
Like the phoenix, socialism is reborn from every pile of ashes left day in, day out, by burnt-out human dreams and charred hopes.
Ideally, nothing should be embraced by a consumer firmly, nothing should command a commitment till death do us part, no needs should be seen as fully satisfied, no desires considered ultimate. There ought to be a proviso 'until further notice' attached to any oath of loyalty and any commitment. It is but the volatility, the in-built temporality of all engagements that truly counts; it counts more than the commitment itself, which is anyway not allowed to outlast the time necessary for consuming the object of desire (or, rather, the time sufficient for the desirability of that object to wane).
In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change - as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.
Unlike 'real relationships', 'virtual relationships' are easy to enter and to exit. They look smart and clean, feel easy to use, when compared with the heavy, slow-moving, messy real stuff.
The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.
Power, in a nutshell, is the ability to get things done, and politics is the ability to decide which things need to be done.