Zygmunt Bauman: Liquid Modernity (2000-) [EN, PT, CZ, ES, PL, RU]

12 February 2013, dusan

In this 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.

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.

Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman’s two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. 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.

Publisher Polity Press
ISBN 074562409X, 9780745624099
240 pages

publisher
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Liquid Modernity (English, 2000)
Modernidade líquida (Portuguese, trans. Plínio Dentzien, 2001)
Tekutá modernita (Czech, trans. Blumfeld s.m., 2002)
Modernidad líquida (Spanish, trans. Mirta Rosenberg with Jaime Arrambide Squirru, 2003)
Płynna nowoczesność (Polish, trans. Tomasz Kunz, 2006)
Текучая современность (Russian, trans. С. А. Комаров, 2008)

Nicholas Gane: The Future of Social Theory (2004)

10 January 2011, dusan

“The basic concept of society has come under attack – political acts, critical theory, new media and even history itself have undermined what we think of as the social. The Future of Social Theory brings together new interviews with the world’s leading social theorists on what society means today: Zygmunt Bauman, John Urry, Saska Sassen, Bruno Latour, Scott Lash, Nikolas Rose, Judith Butler and Francoise Verges. The topics covered include: liquid modernization and the individualization of the society; the shift towards global forms of chaos and complexity; the displacement of the social into global city networks; the shift away from a theory of the social to a theory of space; the transformation of society with the rise of new technology; the continuing influence of historical forms of political power; society as a gendered idea; and society as a product of Empire.”

Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004
ISBN 0826470661, 9780826470669
210 pages

Publisher

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