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.
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.
