What is the role of education in a world where we no longer have a clear vision of the future and where the idea of a single, universal model of humanity seems like the residue of a bygone age? What role should educators play in a world where young p…

In this engaging dialogue, Zygmunt Bauman, sociologist and philosopher, and Stanislaw Obirek, theologian and cultural historian, explore the place of spirituality and religion in the world today and in the everyday lives of individuals. Their convers…

Contemporary understanding of human subjectivity has come a long way since the Cartesian 'thinking thing' or Freud's view of the self struggling with its unconscious. We no longer think of ourselves as stable and indivisible units or combinations the…

Unde malum from where does evil come? That is the question that has plagued humankind ever since Eve, seduced by the serpent, tempted Adam to taste the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Throughout history the awareness of goo…

Sociology is concerned with modern society, but has never come to terms with one of the most distinctive and horrific aspects of modernity – the Holocaust. The book examines what sociology can teach us about the Holocaust, but more particularly conce…

When Freud wrote his classic Civilization and its Discontents, he was concerned with repression. Modern civilization depends upon the constraint of impulse, the limiting of self expression. Today, in the time of modernity, Bauman argues, Freud's anal…

Zygmunt Bauman is one of the leading figures in contemporary social thought. His work ranges across issues of ethics, culture and politics. It never forgets that social thought ought to help men and women make sense of their lives and aspire towards …

In our individualized society we are all artists of life – whether we know it or not, will it or not and like it or not, by decree of society if not by our own choice. In this society we are all expected, rightly or wrongly, to give our lives purpose…

Modern civilization, Bauman argues, promised to make our lives understandable and open to our control. This has not happened and today we no longer believe it ever will. In this book, now available in paperback, Bauman argues that our postmodern age …

Society is under siege – under attack on two fronts: from the global frontier-land where old structures and rules do not hold and new ones are slow to take shape, and from the fluid, undefined domain of life politics. The space between these two fron…

The production of ‘human waste’ – or more precisely, wasted lives, the ‘superfluous’ populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts – is an inevitable outcome of modernization. It is an unavoidable side-effect of economic progress and the quest…

Modernity was supposed to be the period in human history when the fears that pervaded social life in the past could be left behind and human beings could at last take control of their lives and tame the uncontrolled forces of the social and natural w…

This book is about the central figure of our contemporary, ‘liquid modern’ times – the man or woman with no bonds, and particularly with none of the fixed or durable bonds that would allow the effort of self-definition and self-assertion to come to a…

With the advent of liquid modernity, the society of producers is transformed into a society of consumers. In this new consumer society, individuals become simultaneously the promoters of commodities and the commodities they promote. They are, at one …

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 cond…

'Liquid life’ is the kind of life commonly lived in our contemporary, liquid-modern society. Liquid life cannot stay on course, as liquid-modern society cannot keep its shape for long. Liquid life is a precarious life, lived under conditions of const…

This topical new book by Zygmunt Bauman explores the notion of identity in the modern world. As we grapple with the insecurity and uncertainty of liquid modernity, Bauman argues that our socio-political, cultural, professional, religious and sexual i…

'Community' is one of those words that feels good: it is good 'to have a community', 'to be in a community'. And 'community' feels good because of the meanings which the word conveys, all of them promising pleasures, and more often than not the kind …

More than ever before, our conflict-ridden, drifting planet needs the qualities that Europe, unique among the continents, has developed in more than two millennia of history: its self-criticism, its urge to self-transcendence, exploration and experim…

We have long since lost our faith in the idea that human beings could achieve human happiness in some future ideal state—a state that Thomas More, writing five centuries ago, tied to a topos, a fixed place, a land, an island, a sovereign state under …