Liquid Bauman

Abstract

In December 2016, Zygmunt Bauman’s self-described “recent heart failure” did not deter him from providing the author with “three pieces I have scribbled” to use in revising Bauman’s chapter for the second edition of the Handbook of Cultural Sociology. The author draws from this experience working with Bauman at the end of his life to reflect on the man as a person, a scholar, and a public intellectual. He argues that Bauman had a broad methodological strategy that derived from his 1978 book, Hermeneutics and the Social Sciences. Reconciling himself to the historicist relativity of Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle, Bauman proposed that the hermeneutic self-understanding of society “is the way in which history itself moves” (Bauman, 1978: 46). The author connects this hermeneutic project to Bauman’s conceptualization of “liquid modernity” as the condition of contemporary society, and he draws on Bauman’s three “scribbled” pieces to show how Bauman connected recent “liquid” developments –especially shifts in the character of migration– to recent political events (Brexit and the us election of Donald Trump as President). For Bauman, the goal of cosmopolitan tolerance in a global society is undercut by a lag between new worldly conditions and “outdated consciousness.”