Zygmunt Bauman Quotes on Politics
Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017), the Polish-British sociologist whose Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) and the long sequence of "liquid" books — Liquid Modernity (2000), Liquid Love (2003), Liquid Times (2007) — supplied late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century social thought with one of its most influential diagnostic vocabularies, defended the case that the political conditions of the present are best understood through the metaphor of "liquidity." The framework treats the dissolution of the durable institutional, geographic, and biographical solidities of high modernity as the structural feature of contemporary life, with the corresponding political consequences — the privatization of insecurity, the erosion of long-term commitments, the consumer rather than producer mode of citizenship — that Bauman's late writings systematically traced.
Quotes
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Attributed to Zygmunt Bauman:
“Modernity is liquid; nothing solid lasts long enough to take its shape.”
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Attributed to Zygmunt Bauman:
“The Holocaust was not a deviation from modernity but one of its possibilities.”
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Attributed to Zygmunt Bauman:
“Strangers are people who do not fit our cognitive maps; that is what makes them strange.”
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Attributed to Zygmunt Bauman:
“Freedom in liquid modernity is the freedom to choose, but not the freedom to escape choice.”
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“[Following the second world war] If you looked at the political spectrum in Poland at that time, the Communist party promised the best solution. Its political programme was the most fitting for the issues which Poland faced. And I was completely dedicated. Communist ideas were just a continuation of the Enlightenment.”
Wikiquote -
“[Asked "What did that involve, exactly?"] Well, it's counter-espionage. Every good citizen should participate in counter-espionage. That was one thing that I kept secret, because I signed an obligation that it would be kept secret ... So that's the only thing.”
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“A good society is a society which believes that it is not good enough; that it is the task of the collectivity to insure individuals against individually suffered misfortune; and that the quality of society is measured by the quality of life of its weakest, just like the carrying power of a bridge is measured by its weakest pillar.”
Quoted in "Ziggy Stardust" , New Humanist (2004, posted 31 May 2007)