The eminent late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, a looming intellectual, often paroxysmal, who saw and analysed the great socio-political changes right up to his death in early 2017. His analysis called “Liquid modernity”, included poverty, inequality to migration, fear of the other and decline of nation state, the outcast generation, on building fortresses under siege, o internet, slander, irresponsibility, the unclass of precarians, soft power and hard facts, does the richness of the few benefit us all, the Charlie Hebdo attack reveals, Neoliberalism and Trump and his quick fix for existential anxiety.
In his 2000 book Liquid modernity and in subsequent volumes Liquid fear, Liquid surveillance and Liquid evil, he demonstrated his fluid writing.
Bauman a Polish Jew born in 1925, his parents were forced to go to Soviet Russia, to flee the Nazis for the duration of the second world war. After the end of the hostilities he returned to Poland to lecture at Warsaw university. In late 1960s he immigrated to Israel, before settling in UK in 1971, where he held the chair of sociology at Leeds University.
He analysed the creation of |”precariat” working in insecure and temporary jobs – the common experience of generation Y, born between 1980s and 1990s, these young people have little loyalty to the companies that offer them nothing but insecurity, and drove them to a life elsewhere.
Politics, according to Bauman and the French historian Pierre Rosanvallon, the politicians are elected not on trust, but only because the others are worse. The violence becomes increasingly likely, as the Jihadists seeks vengeance on contemporary society through “spectacular acts”.
US president Donald Trump, like Viktor Orban of Hungry, Jaroslaw Kaczynski of Poland and Robert Fico of Slovakia, all got elected and given the public acclaim to act, because enough back them in their country, to follow the rule of law, separation of powers.
Bauman is a essential reading for all as his search for structural antidotes to the evils continues.
A Chronicle of Crisis 2011-2016 by Zygmunt Bauman, Social Europe £12.99, 178 pages.