Issue 195, August 2026

Bauman in Chengdu: Legacy and Promise

Guest editors: Peter Beilharz, Fu Qilin and Sian Supski

Articles

Zygmunt Bauman: Mapping modernity?

Peter Beilharz

This survey of the work of Zygmunt Bauman and its subsequent reception literature was originally written for a Chinese audience. It begins from the general challenge of how to approach or reduce this immense body of work and its complexity. I suggest a different line of approach to the common, conversational reduction – ‘Bauman is A; Bauman is B’. I suggest that his work may be viewed as a General Sociology, including the echoes of this historic idea into anthropology. I scan recent secondary writing published in the English language. The idea of general sociology may take in micro-, meso- and metalevels; and Bauman’s focus shifts as his sociological vocation shifts. At the same time, new and recent work does a great deal to expand the optic that we may bring to Bauman’s work. We can seek to map Bauman’s modernity, just as he also endeavoured to map the modernities that confronted him across the path of his life.

Solidifying modernity: Theorising the contemporary condition

Dariusz Brzeziński

The aim of this article is to introduce a new way of theorising the contemporary condition, which is defined as ‘solidifying modernity.’ This notion references the process of solidification to describe an intermediate state between ‘solid’ and ‘liquid’ and evokes the manner in which Zygmunt Bauman theorised the transformations of modernity. The paper emphasises that from the very beginning of his reflections on the process of’ ‘liquefaction,’ Bauman also highlighted the increasing significance of opposite phenomena. His analyses culminated in the concept of retrotopia. Continuing these reflections in relation to the present day, I highlight the various and intensifying influences of retrotopia on today’s politics, social life and culture. I argue that this process is most conspicuously expressed in the increasing criticism of cultural pluralism and the concomitant reinforcement of strong national identities. My primary focus is on the implications of these changes for the theorisation of contemporaneity.

Reflections on Zygmunt Bauman: Visibility, privacy and prepositional sociology

Harry Blatterer

This paper offers a critical reflection on Zygmunt Bauman’s diagnosis of digital modernity, particularly his concern with the erosion of privacy in an era of confessional culture and performative self-disclosure. Engaging Bauman’s work alongside thinkers such as Blumenberg, Honneth, Arendt and Thompson, it explores visibility as an anthropological and political condition. The paper fields the notion of ‘prepositional sociology’, inspired by Maria Markus, as a mode of analysis that foregrounds the creative capacities of individuals to construct meaningful lives despite the pressures of a commodified, surveillant world. In this context, friendship is discussed as a form of non-instrumental intimacy that resists the logic of economic rationality. The paper seeks to contribute to a critical sociology that recognises both the dehumanising dynamics of modernity and the ordinary practices that exceed them.

The exile’s high-maintenance identity

Anna Sfard

This paper offers a highly personal narrative on national identity as a fragile, labor-intensive construct shaped by exile, coercion, and moral resistance. Drawing on the autobiographical writings of the author’s father, Zygmunt Bauman, and her mother, Janina Bauman, the essay traces the father’s lifelong struggle with national belonging across three geopolitical contexts: postwar Poland, Israel after the Six-Day War of 1967, and ultimately England. Framed by a theoretical view of identity as a constellation of socially negotiated stories, the analysis highlights the persistent dissonance between first-person self-identification and third-person ascription imposed by collectives. Through this account, the author argues that national identity, far from being effortless or benign, often demands conformity at the expense of moral integrity, and that opting out of belonging may serve as an ethical response to the divisive logic inherent in nationalism.

Zygmunt Bauman in France − puzzle assembly in 3 times: Past−present−future

Izabela Wagner

This article examines Zygmunt Bauman’s limited academic reception in France, despite his global influence and numerous French translations. Building on Simon Tabet’s ‘missed appointment’ concept, it analyses the fragmented publishing history and lack of a strong academic patron that hindered his integration. Challenges included postmodernism controversies and Bourdieu’s dominance, leading to Bauman’s perception as a public intellectual rather than a rigorous academic. The paper then explores recent shifts: growing interdisciplinarity; stabilized publishing; and President Macron’s unexpected political use of Baumanian concepts. This political visibility, though ironic, has pushed Bauman’s ‘liquid’ metaphors into mainstream discourse. The article suggests that France’s current societal changes may finally foster deeper academic engagement with Bauman’s work.

Zygmunt Bauman, Maxine Greene, and wide-awakeness in somnambulant times

Christopher G Robbins

The author considers the politics and public pedagogy of “anti-woke” backlash as a component of the cultural politics of U.S. fascism. Concerned about the threat posed by the somnambulance promoted by anti-woke politics to democracy and humanization, the author puts Bauman and Greene into conversation. In particular, Bauman’s abiding concerns with moral sensitivity and Greene’s notion of wide-awakeness are juxtaposed to the cultural politics of U.S. fascism, the “somnambulant form.” Writing from two different disciplinary vantage points, Bauman and Greene, both unapologetic in their engagements with literature and the arts as sources of sociological and philosophical insight and creative grist, sought to encourage the sociological imagination (Bauman) and the imagination as such (Greene) in the interests of heightening people’s moral sensitivities. Critically, they help people see differently to remember that the world, as it is, could be different.

Postmodern social theory and modern moral philosophy

JF Dorahy

In the opening passages of A Short History of Ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre remarks that ‘moral philosophy is often written as if the history of the subject were only of secondary and incidental importance’. According to MacIntyre, the philosophical point of grappling with the history of moral philosophy lies in recognising its fundamental historicity; that is, in recognising and dealing with the fact that ‘moral concepts are embodied in and are partially constitutive of forms of social life’. In this paper I explore this thesis via a critical reconstruction of the social-theoretical cum ethical writings of the Polish-born critical theorist Zygmunt Bauman. More specifically, I develop a critical reconstruction of Bauman’s guiding contentions that: a) attendant to the project of nation building, Western modernity gives rise to a historically determinate and historically specific form of moral discourse; b) the moral framework characteristic of Western modernity has been rendered problematic by the social, cultural and political developments associated with the ‘postmodern condition;’ and, c) in light of these developments, the demands of the day require a renewal of ethical thinking, if we are not to succumb to the contemporary dangers of atomisation, and the never-ending imperatives of hedonistic individualism and egocentric self-fulfilment.

Reflections on economic life under conditions of liquid modernity

Norbert Ebert

This paper reflects on Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of ‘liquid modernity’ as a social condition rooted in a deeper transformation of the human condition into social conditions. Rather than understanding liquidity simply as a late-modern outcome of economic or cultural change, the paper situates Bauman’s diagnosis within a broader sociological account of existential precarity and the enduring human need to construct stable social orders. Drawing on Bauman’s ‘Searching for a centre that holds, liquid modernity is interpreted as a paradox: efforts to stabilise social life simultaneously generate new forms of instability. Economic life is central to this process, as it mediates the satisfaction of material and social needs through work and social organisation. The paper then critically examines three entrenched ‘bad habits’ of economic sociology, namely quantitative reductionism, the separation of economy and society and individualisation. These obscure how economic life unfolds under conditions of liquid modernity namely as a blend of economic, economically relevant and economically conditioned phenomena, an idea gleaned from Max Weber. The paper argues that liquid modernity should not be understood as the disappearance of social order, but as a condition of interdependent economic and social flows in which new, albeit fragile, forms of solidity may emerge.

Still in search of politics: Disability, productivism, and socialism in liquid modernity

Tom Campbell

This article returns to Zygmunt Bauman’s lifelong search for politics through the lens of disability, arguing that disability is not marginal to his social theory but revelatory to its moral core. Bauman’s essay ‘Society Enables and Disables’ is read alongside major contributions from Disability Studies to reconstruct the philosophical anthropology that underpins Bauman’s liquid period: a humanism not grounded in labour or productivity, but in mutual enablement and interdependence. Disability exposes the mutual economy of worth that structured life across solid and liquid modernity alike, illustrating how productivism continues to invalidate us. It builds upon Beilharz’s claim that socialism is a principle rather than a programme, it argues that a politics adequate to liquid modernity must be anti-productivist. In the context of automation and artificial intelligence, it proposes a liquid socialism grounded in interdependence committed to opening the social question beyond labour.

Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology of aesthetic knowledge

Fu Qilin

As a well-known neo-Marxist critical theorist from Eastern Europe, Zygmunt Bauman continues reflecting on aesthetic issues. On the basis of sociology of knowledge, especially Antonio Gramsci’s theory of intellectuals, he establishes the intimate relation between this knowledge and aesthetic autonomy and develops the understanding of aesthetic modernity. He deeply explores the transformation from the aesthetic legislators in modernity to interpreters in postmodernity. It is obvious that there is some continuity in his whole theory from the 1960s to the new century. The continuity is evident from the perspective of sociology of knowledge, especially of aesthetic knowledge. With the critical sociology of knowledge, semantic analysis and cultural anthropology, Bauman provides a new paradigm for contemporary aesthetics and a new version of critical theory in his over sixty of years academic life.

Working through the intellectual legacies of Zygmunt Bauman

Jack Palmer

This article reflects on how Zygmunt Bauman’s intellectual legacy might be worked with after his death, distinguishing between legacy understood as artefact and legacy understood hermeneutically. Drawing on extensive research in and editorial work on Bauman’s archive, his unpublished and lesser-known writings, it examines the opportunities and risks involved in interpretive engagements with a major sociological oeuvre. The article situates Bauman’s thought within the hermeneutic tradition of interpretive sociology and argues that dialogue, rather than canonization or free appropriation, provides the most productive orientation to his work. For exemplary purposes, particular attention is given to Bauman’s early cultural sociology, his engagement with decolonization and problematization of Eurocentrism, and his theorization of plurality, possibility and understanding across difference. The article suggests that Bauman’s legacy lies less in a closed body of doctrine than in an ethos of dialogical, globally attuned social thought.

Zygmunt Bauman and the digital society

Carlo Bordoni

Bauman has repeatedly expressed his reservations about the indiscriminate use of digital technologies that allow communication without involvement or responsibility. They lead to the destruction of privacy, in the search for the affirmation of individuality in a virtual community. The more intimate the confessions, the better, in order to arouse interest and collect likes. On the other hand, digital devices allow for social control to which individuals voluntarily submit. Everyone carries around their own personal Panopticon, Bauman observes, through which they can be tracked and monitored, at the expense of personal freedom.