The Individualized Society

by Bauman, Zygmunt

• ISBN13: 9780745625072
• ISBN10: 074562507X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-02-08
• Publisher: Polity

Summary

We are spurred into action by our troubles and fears; but all too often our action fails to address the true causes of our worries. When trying to make sense of our lives, we tend to blame our own failings and weaknesses for our discomforts and defeats. And in doing so, we make things worse rather than better. Reasonable beings that we are, how does this happen and why does it go on happening? These are the questions addressed in this new book by Zygmunt Bauman - one of the most original and perceptive social thinkers writing today. For Bauman, the task of sociology is not to censor or correct the stories we tell of our lives, but to show that there are more ways in which our life stories can be told. By bringing into view the many complex dependencies invisible from the vantage point of private experience, sociology can help us to link our individual decisions and actions to the deeper causes of our troubles and fears - to the ways we live, to the conditions under which we act, to the socially drawn limits of our imagination and ambition. Sociology can help us to understand the processes that have shaped the society in which we live today, a society in which individualization has become our fate. And sociology can also help us to see that if our individual but shared anxieties are to be effectively tackled, they need to be addressed collectively, true to their social, not individual, nature. The Individualized Society will be of great interest to students of sociology, politics and the social sciences and humanities generally. It will also appeal to a broader range of readers who are interested in the changing nature of our social and political life today.

Author Biography

Zygmunt Bauman is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Universities of Leeds and Warwick.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
Lives told and stories lived: an overture	1	(16)
The Way We Are
The rise and fall of labour	17	(14)
Local orders, global chaos	31	(10)
Freedom and security: the unfinished story of a tempestuous union	41	(16)
Modernity and clarity: the story of a failed romance	57	(14)
Am I my brother's keeper?	71	(12)
United in difference	83	(16)
The Way We Think
Critique - privatized and disarmed	99	(10)
Progress: the same and different	109	(5)
Uses of poverty	114	(9)
Education: under, for and in spite of postmodernity	123	(17)
Identity in the globalizing world	140	(13)
Faith and instant gratification	153	(10)
The Way We Act
Does love need reason?	163	(12)
Private morality, immoral world	175	(26)
Democracy on two battlefronts	201	(5)
Violence, old and new	206	(14)
On postmodern uses of sex	220	(18)
Is there life after immortality?	238	(13)
Notes	251