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Liquidity Crisis: Zygmunt Bauman and the Incredible Lightness of Modernity

Martin Jay Theory Culture Society 2010 27: 95 DOI: 10.1177/0263276410382024 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/27/6/95

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Liquidity Crisis: Zygmunt Bauman and the Incredible Lightness of Modernity

Martin Jay

Abstract After having promoted and then tacitly abandoned the rhetoric of postmodernism, Zygmunt Bauman settled on the metaphor of a modernity that was growing more liquid and lighter than before. This essay explores the strengths and weaknesses of these metaphors, and attempts to contextualize Baumans insights in what has been called by the historian Y uri Slezkine the Mercurian culture of diasporic Jewish life. Key words liquidity j Mercurian

metaphor

modernity

modernization

It was six oclock and late arrivals were scurrying up, out of breath, dodging round barrels and hawsers and laundry baskets; the crew were turning a deaf ear to any enquiries; there was a lot of bumping and jostling; baggage was piling up between the two paddle-boxes; and through all this racket the hiss of steam could be heard escaping through the iron plates and covering everything in a whitish pall. (Flaubert, 1989)

S
j

O READS the celebrated opening tableau of Flauberts l869 novel A Sentimental Education, which describes a boat on a quai in the Paris of l840, belching clouds of smoke, all ready to sail . It will carry the novels fallible hero, Fre de ric Moreau, home to the provinces for a brief respite from the frantic turmoil of the modern metropolis. At around the same time that Moreau was trying to penetrate the opacity of a world lost in a steamy haze, his real-life contemporary, Charles Baudelaire, was contemplating the vaporization of the self in his
Theory, Culture & Society 2010 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore), Vol. 27(6): 95^106 DOI: 10.1177/0263276410382024

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autobiographical Mon Coeur mis a' nu (Baudelaire, 1968).1 And Karl Marx, in words that have since become emblematic of the corrosive power of capitalist industrialization, was writing in his l848 Communist Manifesto: All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with his sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind (Marx and Engels, 1977: 224).2 In short, in the middle of the l9th century, three of the most perspicacious European thinkers could talk of a gaseous modernity, in which the transitional stage of liquidity was being by-passed with the rapid dissolution of the traditional world. The century that followed also experienced the unsettling, often sinister, power of gas, whether in the trenches of the First World War, the extermination chambers of the Second, or the greenhouse effects of climate change at the centurys end. There can be few more chilling examples of the vaporization of the self than the utter absence of bodies in the wreckage of the World Trade Center towers, when the toxic smoke clouds finally dissipated. And at a moment when we are all too familiar with economic bubbles bursting, it seems more than ever an age of gaseous instability. Modernity, however, was never fully a matter of the vaporization of matter, and the metaphor of its gaseous evanescence could take observers only so far. Marx, after all, saw enduring patterns of commodification and exploitation underpinning the surface effect of solids melting into air; indeed, their structural causes were now precisely what was visible to the sober senses of those who could now finally confront them straight on. For all its exposure of the vaporous haze of modern life, Flauberts novel, as Pierre Bourdieu brilliantly showed, revealed a field of social and cultural forces whose deep structure was ultimately intelligible (Bourdieu, 1993). And Baudelaire followed his reference to vaporizing the self with the recognition that it could be centralized again. Modernity, it seemed to many, was just as much the rigid, bureaucratic iron cage of which Max Weber famously spoke as the air its inmates breathed, just as much the bulky, massive steam engine as the steam it belched forth. Although the institutions, routines and belief systems of the premodern world had been undone and the links of the great chain of Being unfastened, new structures and constraints were just as swiftly fashioned, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, in their place. The process of dis-embedding people from their settled ways of life was accompanied by a re-embedding in new forms of social, economic and political order. Zygmunt Bauman, one of the most acute contemporary analysts of modernity, has himself acknowledged the existence of an earlier version of modernity that was, in his terminology, heavy, bulky, solid, immobile and rooted .3 This was the modernity that was produced by a gardening impulse, whose purveyors ^ sometimes he called them landscape architects ^ thought they could refashion the natural and historical world according to the principles of horticultural pruning, weeding and nurturing. It was the modernity of those he once dubbed legislators, authoritative and
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binding arbiters of opposing positions, who sought to replace the haphazard residues of historical accretion with the benecial eects of rational planning (Bauman, 1987). It was the modernity exemplied by the repetitive discipline, routinized time and dierentiation of function of the Fordist factory and the surveillance model of the Panopticon. It was the modernity that valued production over consumption, fostered settled identities and believed in bureaucratic organization and the steering power of the state. At its most sinister, it was the modernity that reduced reason to bureaucratic, instrumental rationality, which could lead, so he argued in his controversial book on the Holocaust, to the extermination of human weeds in the name of racial hygiene (Bauman, 1989).4 But even in its benign forms, it involved subordination, colonization, hierarchy and the control of dierence. The reign of heavy modernity, Bauman has argued, was, however, finite, and although full vaporization was not ^ or is not yet ^ the result, we are now experiencing a modernity that has lost its weightiness, immobility and solidity. Despite vain attempts to contrive new forms of stability ^ Bauman is especially critical of nationalism as one such effort ^ we are now uprooted and disembedded in ways that have no easy remedy. Building new communities by the time-honored strategies of abjection or assimilation, what Le ' vi-Strauss called anthropophagic and anthropoemic, are ineffective in an epoch of virtually universal nomadism, in which we are all diasporic wanderers unable to settle permanently in a territory we can call home. Individual consumers with volatile identities driven by mediated desires that can never be satisfied, we can never achieve communal solidarity. Divided, we shop (Bauman, 2000). For a while this new state of affairs seemed worthy of being called post-modern and Bauman was among the first sociologists in the l980s to champion the designation. But ever sensitive to the winds of change, he soon recognized that this terminology was losing favor,5 and so retreated to the metaphor of a modernity that was liquid, writing not only a book on Liquid Modernity in 2000, but rapidly produced sequels called Liquid Love (2003), Liquid Life (2005), Liquid Fear (2006) and Liquid Times (2006). Each of these develops variations on fundamentally the same argument: we now live in a world of precarious uncertainty, short-term planning, instant gratication, the weakening of institutions, ephemeral relationships, struggles to manage risk, volatile consumerist identities and the collapse of viable communities. Capitalism, once tied to the ground, seeking dominion over territories, is now light, unmoored to any one locality. Solid modernity, reads a typical formulation from Liquid Modernity, was an era of mutual engagement. Fluid modernity is the epoch of disengagement, elusiveness, facile escape and hopeless chase. In liquid modernity, it is the most elusive, those free to move without notice, who rule (Bauman, 2000: 120). The epochal transformation thus described is, according to Bauman, of extraordinary importance: The passage from high to light capitalism, from solid to fluid modernity, may yet prove to be a departure more radical
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and seminal than the advent of capitalism and modernity themselves, previously seen as by far the most crucial milestones of human history at least since the Neolithic revolution (Bauman, 2000: 126). In contrast to what happened after the dissolution of traditional society, there has been no reinvention of stable and recurrent institutions and behavioral patterns on new grounds. Liquidization now extends from the system to personal life experiences, from the macro to the micro level, and there is no real possibility for a collective response that might subvert the whole. We are all nomadic extraterritorials, who restlessly transgress the increasingly porous boundaries left by solid modernity. We have learned to value transience over duration, and cope ^ more or less ^ with the erosion of even our sense of enduring individual selves. *** How are we to judge such sweeping, hyperbolic assertions? What are we to make of Baumans bold attempt to define the Geist of our Zeit? How convincing is his mapping of epochal changes? Have the events of the first decade of the 21st century confirmed the intuitions he had at the waning of the 20th? Written in a somewhat breathless style, as light as the modernity he seeks to describe, Liquid Modernity and the books that followed often depend for their effect on the telling anecdote or revealing statistic, the well-chosen citation from a learned authority, or the power of Baumans compelling rhetoric to make their case. There is little of the deliberate amassing of data by the cautious social scientist carefully weighing alternative explanations, crunching large quantities of numbers, or making nuanced discriminations based on a welter of contradictory evidence. Instead, they hazard bold generalizations about epochal transformations and sweeping predictions of the kind only a life-time of sociological observation might justifiably authorize. As Gran Therborn has put it, Baumans recent writings travel light, burdened neither by research nor by theoretical analytics, but borne up by an unusual life wisdom, a trained observers eye and a fluent pen (Therborn, 2008). They also unashamedly draw on the power of metaphor to make their case, with all of the advantages and dangers of that approach.6 More than mere ornaments of speech, metaphors work to imbue the objective world with attributes that are understood to exceed the anthropomorphic projection of the observing subject. They yoke together what is conceptually or empirically distinct, producing a ash of illumination that may be absent in more sober conceptual language. Baumans root metaphor, the contrast between solid and liquid, functions suggestively to characterize complexes of phenomena that might otherwise seem unrelated. Reinforced by the light/heavy binary metaphor, which he superimposes on it, it provides us with a heuristically fruitful way to organize a welter of material from economic, social, political and cultural sources that only the most daring of analysts would try to render coherent. It also does so without positing a
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hierarchy of causation in which, say, the economy is determinant in the last instance, to use the familiar Althusserian terminology (always muddied by the admission that the last instance never comes). And it refrains from smuggling in or blatantly announcing an inherent value judgment in its periodization, allowing us to work out the ambiguous implications of both stages of modernity. This is not, in other words, a simple story of ascent or decline. Bauman, to be sure, is not advocating a value-neutral sociology ^ the nal essay in Liquid Modernity is devoted precisely to defending the inevitability and even virtue of engagement ^ but the metaphor of liquid/ solid does not do the work of presupposing what the values should be. The potential costs of relying on metaphor are, however, also apparent, especially when they suppress their self-awareness as metaphors and become confused with reality tout court. By leaning so much on the transition from solid to liquid, Bauman sometimes leaves us with an impression that the two states are mutually exclusive, one passing into the other in the way ice melts above 32 degrees Fahrenheit. There is thus little acknowledgment of the delicate and uneven dialectic of the two, even after the tipping point of epochal transition is passed. Might there be, for example, fluidity on the surface level of subjective experience, while on the deeper, more objective level of enduring institutions there is much that resists liquidization? The old Marxist distinction between classes for themselves and classes in themselves is one way to express the disjuncture. Self-conscious class identities may seem more contingent than ever, but deeper regularities of continuity based on property and wage labor relations do not entirely disappear. However much we have come to be defined primarily as consumers, our capacity to spend is inextricably tied to our compensation for our labor as producers. Another variant of this tension is that between the way in which capitalism generates new desires met only by rapid changes in fashion, seemingly leading to the erosion of anything deemed outmoded, but which then works to perpetuate the deeper economic relations that define capitalism, light or heavy, is still capitalist. Although hierarchies have been toppled, the result has not been a genuine leveling of all playing fields. Beneath the flux there is the ever same, as Benjamin and Adorno often insisted. In addition, as the three European figures cited at the beginning of this paper indicate, as early as the mid-l9th century some observers were claiming that solidity had already passed through the liquid stage and arrived all the way at a modernity that could rightfully be called vaporous. Even if they were atypical prophets ahead of their time, their observations complicate any linear and irreversible progression towards de-solidification. To avoid any teleological reading of historical change, fluctuations among solid, liquid and gaseous stages would have to be taken into account, both as historical phenomena as well as future possibilities. Describing epochal changes based on the suggestive power of metaphor may, in other words, work to shade the interpretation of ambiguous evidence only in one direction. Take the role of human rights, whose recent
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importance Bauman sees as evidence of the withering of an institutionally supported public sphere and the triumph of the private individual qua consumer. In Liquid Modernity, he goes so far as to define human rights as the imperative to let everyone go her or his own way, and to enable everyone to do it in peace ^ by guarding the safety of her or his own body and possessions, locking actual or would-be criminals in prisons and keeping the streets free from muggers, perverts, beggars and all other sorts of obnoxious and malevolent strangers (Bauman, 2000: 36). But might it not also be argued that the concept of human rights is dependent precisely on intersubjective recognition, involving reciprocity and mutual acknowledgment of the humanness of all who fall under its umbrella? Rather than producing more isolation and selshness, either individual or tribal (rights accorded only to a specic religious, ethnic or national group and denied to strangers), human rights ^ or at least a good number of the principles included among them ^ have an inclusive implication that dees radical individualization. Even arch-individualists and unapologetic defenders of selshness like Ayn Rand, who reduce human rights to self-preservation and the right to property, acknowledge that any alleged right of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right. No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man (Rand, 1964: 96). That is, despite the dissolution of traditional and heavy modernist bonds, the growing recognition of human rights suggests that new ones are being formed that resist the unchecked liquidization of social and political relations. Another potential drawback of over-reliance on metaphor is the tendency to homogenize distinctions based on the seductive power of images. Bauman is not reluctant to posit epochal changes that we have experienced without pausing to question the extent and pervasiveness of the collective subject invoked. Modernization theory in its more traditional guise was rightly criticized for projecting a Western view of the stages of development onto a world that had other trajectories in mind (Gilman, 2003).7 Liquid modernization theory may well suer from the same aw, even if the momentum of globalization does produce pressures to integrate the world into a single narrative. Bauman has been justiably taxed for smoothing out the unevenness of development, which in many parts of the world still involves the active construction of solid, heavy, re-embedded socio-economic institutions (Lee, 2005). For all its recent economic success, China, with a fth of the worlds population, remains largely a society of producers rather than consumers. You will look, however, in vain for a reference to the Chinese experience in Liquid Modernity or in later works like Consuming Life (Bauman, 2007).8 Baumans response would likely be that he is only pointing to incipient trends, rather than providing an historical account of irreversible epochal changes that can be called, as it were, watertight. And despite all the reservations one may have about the limits of his metaphorically driven
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narrative, it is hard to gainsay that many of the observations in Liquid Modernity still ring true a decade later, perhaps even truer. In the wake of the Great Recession, we are more aware than ever of the fragility, ephemerality and riskiness of an interconnected globe whose future course is anything but clearly chartered. The solidity of possessions, including real estate, has eroded as life even in the most advanced countries has become more precarious. Whatever residues of the earlier modern faith in progress that may have survived into the 21st century are now weaker than ever. Even in the case of still developing countries like China, where producers are more important than consumers, Baumans terminology can still help make sense of the rapidly changing situation. Take, for example, the very Baumanian opposition posited by the celebrated New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in response to Googles threatened withdrawal from the Chinese market:
There are actually two Chinese economies today. There is the Communist Party and its affiliates; lets call them Command China. These are the very traditional state-owned enterprises. Alongside them, there is a second China, largely concentrated in coastal cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong. This is a highly entrepreneurial sector that has developed sophisticated techniques to generate and participate in diverse, high-value flows of business knowledge. I call that Network China. . . . We are shifting from a world where the key source of strategic advantage was in protecting and extracting value from a given set of knowledge stocks ^ the sum total of what we know at any point in time, which is now depreciating at an accelerating pace ^ into a world in which the focus of value creation is effective participation in knowledge flows, which are constantly being renewed. (Friedman, 2010)

In short, as Therborn correctly says, many of Zygmunt Baumans insights have indeed been borne up by an unusual life wisdom, a trained observers eye and a fluent pen . What, we might ask in conclusion, is the source of that life wisdom? Out of what milieu did Bauman emerge and how did it enable him to be so sensitive to changes in modern life? Although Bauman has resisted connecting his life with his work,9 there is, in fact, no mystery about his general background. Born in 1925 in Poznan of non-observant Jewish parents, he moved to the Soviet Union in l939 and joined the Polish army near the end of the war, serving in military intelligence, as it helped liberate his native country from Nazi rule. He came of age intellectually and politically in the turbulent years after the imposition of Communism in the postwar era, seeking Party membership in l946. Bauman rose to the rank of major in the army before being discharged dishonorably in l953, apparently because of his fathers expressed interest in moving to Israel. Precisely what his role may have been in these deeply vexed times has been the source of heated dispute, but for our purposes it is less important to try to set the record straight than to register the fact that he gradually
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moved away from Communism, indeed Marxism in any of its varieties. Gramsci, however, remained an inuence in his later work and he never adopted the god-that-failed bitterness of his fellow lapsed Polish Marxist, Leszek Kolakowski. By the late l960s, at a time when anti-Semitism was on the rise and Communists of Jewish background, however secular, were purged from the government, Bauman reluctantly was forced to acknowledge his Jewish identity. With considerable regret he left Warsaw for a position in Tel Aviv in 1968, his wife Janina, who had relatives in Israel, having vetoed another possible position in Australia. It was her autobiography, Winter in the Morning, that apparently rst aroused his interest in the Holocaust, which he had previously ignored as a topic of scholarly concern. Unhappy in Israel, he migrated again three years later to Leeds, where he began the distinguished career that has yet to draw to a close. These are the barebones of a story that is important as much for its emblematic character as its personal implications. As a recent flood of literature has made clear, the Jews of central and eastern Europe ^ many of them secular non-Jewish Jews in Isaac Deutschers well-known formulation (Deutscher, 1981) ^ were among the harbingers of modernity, in particular its liquid variety. Yuri Slezkine, to take a salient example, begins his extraordinary narrative of The Jewish Century by distinguishing between two ideal types of cultures he calls Apollonian and Mercurian (Slezkine, 2004). The former are the autochthonous population, settled on the land, which they cultivate and leave to their heirs. Organized hierarchically, they understand the importance of dignity and honor. When they evolve into post-agrarian cultures, they remain producers rather than providers of services. Their values are solidity, rmness, toughness, decisiveness, earnestness, simplicity, inarticulateness, and courage (Slezkine, 2004: 212). Although they sometimes lose control and approach the state of frenzy Nietzsche famously called Dionysian, they are really the same people, sober or not. When the festival is over, they go back to tilling their land. Mercurians, in contrast, are derived from stranger minorities who facilitated exchange between communities and did the dirty work that was beneath the dignity of the majority population. Nomadic, diasporic, restless, unsettled, they develop skills of negotiation, curiosity and mental agility. Like the trickster God for whom they are named, they are cunning, wily and learned in the arts of survival, both individual and communal. Rather than valuing martial courage or aristocratic honor, they esteem cleverness and wit. Often compelled to move swiftly from community to community, they pick up the languages and habits of others. If they pause in their wanderings, it is to live in anonymous cities rather than small towns or rural villages. Entrepreneurial, unmoored to the land, skilled in the uses of concepts and symbols, reflexive and ironic, they turn their outsider status ultimately to their advantage, emerging in our time as the dominant type of modern life. There have been many versions of Mercurian culture, according to Slezkine. Parsis, gypsies, overseas Chinese, Armenians and Indians in
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East Africa are salient examples, but the quintessential variant he examines are, of course, the Jews. All Mercurians represented urban arts and rural labors, and most scriptural Mercurians emerged as the primary beneficiaries and scapegoats of the citys costly triumph, but only the Jews ^ the scriptural Mercurians of Europe ^ came to represent Mercurianism and modernity everywhere (Slezkine, 2004: 39). There were, to be sure, costs as well as benets for the pioneers of Mercurian modernity, and not surprisingly many Jews decided it was unwise to continue in that role. The creation of the State of Israel was a conscious attempt to reverse allegiances: Israel of the l950s and l960s was not simply Apollonian and anti-Mercurian ^ it was Apollonian and anti-Mercurian at a time when much of the Western world, of which it considered itself a part, was moving in the opposite direction (Slezkine, 2004: 328). When Zygmunt Bauman was hounded out of Poland, as we know, he tried the Israeli solution, but soon found it unpalatable. Nationalist communalism based on returning to the land was not in his bones. And so, as a good Mercurian, he moved on, mastering a new language, finding a new audience, re-inventing himself once again. The story of non-Jewish Jews from Poland is one of quintessential Mercurian restlessness and uprootedness, with all the attendant dangers and opportunities.10 Bauman was one of the lucky ones, a survivor who managed to avoid or at least survive the compromises and moral dilemmas of so many of his compatriots. And with his survival went an extraordinary sensitivity ^ that unusual life wisdom of which Therborn speaks ^ that allowed him to formulate his grand metaphoric vision of a modernity undergoing rapid liquidization. There are two main ways to evaluate the implications of this background. The reductive, uncharitable response would be to see Bauman as merely extrapolating his particular situation into a more general condition, projecting the liquidity of his own experience and that of the cohort he represents on to the modern world as a whole. What John Murray Cuddihy did for Freud and other Jewish thinkers in The Ordeal of Civility ^ seeing their work as universalizations of the Jewish experience of exclusion from polite society ^ might, mutatis mutandis, be extended to Bauman (Cuddihy, 1987).11 To say we are all Mercurians now, living in a modernity that is entirely liquid, would be an unconscious revenge for the exclusion from the world of Apollonian solidity, a world which has by no means entirely vanished. Maybe it is not true that we are all rootless cosmopolitans and nomadic wanderers, at least not yet.12 The second, more generous response would be to say that an advantage of Baumans background and life experiences, if scarcely compensation for the pain they may well have caused, was a special sensitivity to real tendencies in modern life that were less obvious to others. As he himself acknowledged in works like Modernity and Ambivalence, Jews have long been quintessential strangers, ambivalent outsiders with access to a different perspective on the world from those who are comfortably on the inside (Bauman, 1991).13 Learning to walk on quicksand, as he calls one of the
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chapters in Liquid Life, is a skill worth mastering in a world in which terra is not as rma as it once seemed. Some people get a chance to walk ahead of the rest of us. Time in liquid modernity merely ows, he tells us, it doesnt march on in a meaningful direction. But well into his ninth decade, Zgymunt Bauman is still resolutely showing us the value of knowing when to go with the ow.
Notes 1. The famous passage reads Concerning the vaporization and the centralization of the Self. Everything is in it (Baudelaire, 1968: 630). 2. The original German reads: Alles Stndische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige wird entweiht, und die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen, ihre Lebensstellung, ihre gegenseitigen Beziehungen mit nchternen Augen anzusehen. It was, of course, Marshall Berman (1982) who made clear the relevance of this passage for an analysis of modern life. 3. All these terms can be found in Zgymunt Bauman (2000: 56). 4. For a powerful critique of his argument see Yehuda Bauer (2001: ch. 4). 5. The change is registered in his Postmodernity and its Discontents (Bauman, 1997). 6. For a defense of the imprecision and polyvalence of metaphors over concepts, see Hans Blumenberg (1997). A translation of his classic essay Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie is scheduled for publication in 2010 with Cornell University Press. 7. For a general account of its rise and fall, see Nils Gilman (2003). 8. There are, of course, moments in his work where he acknowledges the importance of China, but only in terms of potential consumption. See for example his 2005 interview with Lukasz Galecki: The situation becomes more serious when we consider that China as well as India are both in the process of motorising their billions of inhabitants. Imagine a world in which every Chinese and Indian family decides to buy a car and fill it up with fuel! (Bauman, 2005). 9. I find it very difficult to connect events in life with events in whatever happens when I am sitting in front of my word processor, think and write. So Bauman responded to a question about his work on the Holocaust and his personal connection with it (Bauman, 2002: 102). See also the joint interview he gave with his wife Janina to Ulrich Bielefeld in the same issue (Bauman and Bauman, 2002). 10. For an account of the generation just before his, see Marci Shore (2006). 11. For a critique, see Daniel Boyarin (1994). 12. Already in 2000, in a book that ironically was dedicated to Bauman (and Lolle Nauta), the Dutch sociologist Dick Pels (2000: 176^7) could write, it has become a cliche for connoisseurs of postmodern sensibility to say that we live in a world of flux, where mobility, experimentation, and transgression have turned into core signifiers of the daily management of lifestyles. To seek adventure, to live the experimental life, to probe the limits of ones
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Jay ^ Liquidity Crisis 105 identity, has become a singularly powerful motif in popular and elite culture alike . . . this discourse of nomadism has recently turned into a cognitive plaything of the educated elite, into the newest fad in self-stylization and selfcelebration. 13. For a discussion of Baumans work on Jews and other strangers, see Vince Marotta (2002).

References ' tes. Paris: Editions Baudelaire, C. (1968) Mon Coeur mis a' nu, in Oeuvres comple du Seuil. Bauer, Y. (2001) Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bauman, J. and Z. Bauman (2002) Conversation with Janina Bauman and Zygmunt Bauman [with Ulrich Bielefeld], Thesis Eleven 70: 113^17. Bauman, Z. (1987) Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity and Intellectuals. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bauman, Z. (1991) Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (1997) Postmodernity and its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (2002) On the Rationality of Evil: An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman [with Harald Welzer], Thesis Eleven 70: 100^112. Bauman, Z. (2003) Liquid Love. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (2005) Liquid Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (2005) The Unwinnable War: An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman [with Lukasz Galecki]. http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-vision_ reflections/modernity_3082.jsp. Bauman, Z. (2006) Liquid Fear. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (2006) Liquid Times. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (2007) Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity. Berman, M. (1982) All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin. Blumenberg, H. (1997) Prospect for a Theory of Nonceptuality, in Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. S. Rendall. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993) Is the Structure of Sentimental Education an Instance of Social Self-Analysis? in R. Johnson (ed.) The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press. Boyarin, D. (1994) E pater lEmbourgeoisement: Freud, Gender and the (De)colonized Psyche, Diacritics 24(1). vi-Strauss and the Cuddihy, J.M. (1987) The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Le Jewish Struggle with Modernity. Boston: Beacon Press.

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Deutscher, I. (1981) Who Is a Jew? in T. Deutscher (ed.) The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays. London: Oxford University Press. Flaubert, G. (1989) A Sentimental Education, trans. Douglas Parme e. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Friedman, T. (2010) Is China an Enron?, New York Times (19 January). Gilman, N. (2003) Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lee, R.L.M. (2005) Bauman, Liquid Modernity and Dilemmas of Development, Thesis Eleven 83: 61^77. Marotta, V. (2002) Zygmunt Bauman: Order, Strangerhood and Freedom, Thesis Eleven 70: 36^54. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1977) The Communist Manifesto, in D. McLellan (ed.) Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pels, D. (2000) The Intellectual as Stranger: Studies in Spokespersonship. London: Routledge. Rand, A. (1964) The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: Signet. Shore, M. (2006) Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generations Life and Death in Marxism, l918^1968. New Haven: Yale University Press. Slezkine, Y. (2004) The Jewish Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Therborn, G. (2008) From Marxism to Post-Marxism. London: Verso.

Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his works are The Dialectical Imagination (l973 and l996), Marxism and Totality (l984), Adorno (l984), ' cle Socialism (l989), Force Fields Permanent Exiles (l985), Fin-de-Sie (l993), Downcast Eyes (l993), Cultural Semantics (l998), Refractions of Violence (2003), Songs of Experience (2004) and The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics (2010). [email: martjay@berkeley.edu]

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