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Library | Item Barcode | Call Number | Material Type | Item Category 1 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... | 30000010253983 | HC79.C6 B353 2008 | Open Access Book | Book | Searching... |
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Summary
Summary
Bauman seeks to liberate us from the thinking that renders us hopeless in the face of our own domineering governments and threats from abroad. In this book he shows us we can give up belief in a hierarchical arrangement of states and powers and urges us to think in new ways about a newly flexible, newly challenging world.
Reviews 2
Booklist Review
Immanuel Kant extrapolated the trajectory of eighteenth-century history into a future that would demand a universal morality. That future, Bauman announces, has now arrived. But serious thinkers must proceed with the Kantian project in circumstances more difficult than the German philosopher could ever have anticipated, as traditional, locally grounded absolutes dissolve in the flux of twenty-first-century lifestyle consumerism. Tragically, some uprooted groups have tried to recreate the reassuring ethical order of a monolithic community, even when doing so has meant unleashing genocidal violence against outsiders (as in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Kosovo). Doubtful that an American superpower that excels only in military technology will offer better cultural options, Bauman adumbrates a hopeful orientation inspired by the transnational aspirations of Europeans. These aspirations are already restraining profit-seeking global capitalism while advancing a progressive code of planetary responsibility. Some readers may suspect that the very different universalism of a resurgent Islam deserves more attention that it receives, but Bauman poses questions deserving attention from anyone trying to understand our rapidly globalizing society.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2008 Booklist
Choice Review
Bauman (emer., sociology, Univ. of Leeds) provides a clear, illuminating picture of the consumer world. He draws on scholarly studies in philosophy and social sciences, in combination with contemporary icons like popular reality-based television, to support and illustrate his analysis that consumerism's "hurried nowist" life "makes unhappiness a permanent state" since needs are not market-driven but based on disposable desires. The liquid modern world of consumers, he claims, resembles the empirical world of swarming bees: rapid movement of groups, no centralized authority, no social hierarchy, and no discernible leader or clear rational intentional basis for decision making. This world breaks all the models and stereotypes familiar to sociologists and anthropologists with a focus on culture, unity, and coherence of identified citizens in nation-states or other groups. Instead the consumer world is an "astonishing multitude of permutations and mind-boggling variety of forms and likenesses" that even involves fundamental changes in traditional notions of time and space. Unfortunately Bauman's considerations of ethics, limited by a postmodernist perspective, are not fully effective. His final chapter on the possibility of European society saving people from American-inspired consumerism seems an ill-considered afterthought. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and faculty/researchers. J. Gough Red Deer College
Table of Contents
| Introduction: Threats or Chances? | p. 1 |
| 1 What Chance of Ethics in the Globalized World of Consumers? | p. 31 |
| 2 Categorial Murder, or the Legacy of the Twentieth Century and How to Remember It | p. 78 |
| 3 Freedom in the Liquid-Modern Era | p. 110 |
| 4 Hurried Life, or Liquid-Modern Challenges to Education | p. 144 |
| 5 Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire, or the Arts between Administration and the Markets | p. 194 |
| 6 Making the Planet Hospitable to Europe | p. 225 |
| Notes | p. 259 |
| Index | p. 269 |
