Liquid Modernity

In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a ‘heavy’ and ‘solid’, hardware-focused modernity to a ‘light’ and ‘liquid’, software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history. <br /> <p>This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life – emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community – and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning.<br /> </p> <p><i>Liquid Modernity</i> concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman’s two previous books <i>Globalization: The Human Consequences</i> and <i>In Search of Politics</i>. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.</p>