Liquid Modernity – Bauman (2000)

In Liquid Modernity, Bauman examines how society has moved from a “heavy” and “solid,” hardware-focused modernity to a “light” and “liquid,” software-based modernity. He argues that this transition has brought profound changes to every aspect of the human condition. The new remoteness and inaccessibility of global systemic structures, combined with the unstructured and fluid character of everyday life, politics and human togetherness, require a rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frameworks used to describe individual experience and shared history. Bauman devotes the book to this task, selecting five basic concepts that have helped make sense of communal human life—emancipation, individuality, time and space, work, and community—and tracing their successive forms and changing meanings. Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis begun in his two previous books, Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together, the three volumes offer an analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.