Another Bauman: The Anthropological Imagination

Abstract

Zygmunt Bauman who is widely known as the postmodern sociologist is now also known as the theorist of liquid modernity. My sense is that he really is neither. Bauman’s project is mobile, as befits its object. Modernity moves. The earlier enthusiasm for the postmodern, from Legislators and Interpreters (1987), was in part a reaction to the sense of sea change. After communism, modernity was bound to mean something different. But the postmodern was also a cultural phenomenon with a use by date, except in the most general sense, that of following modernism. The idea of the liquid modern, in turn, refers both to the sense of heightened mobility associated with revived uncertainty — all that is solid melts into air — and to the closer, post-war sense that the robust institutions associated with Fordism and Keynesianism now dissolve before our eyes. Whatever happened to full employment and the social regime which constructed it? There is your answer.