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Mare BV's List: Zygmunt Bauman
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Nov 02, 09
"Previously, the distinctive mark of social democracy was the belief that it is the duty of a community to protect all its members against the powerful forces that they are unable to resist as individuals. And people's hopes were pinned on the modern state for the carrying out of this task - a state powerful enough to force economic interests to respect the political will of the nation and the ethical principles of the national community. But nation-states are no longer sovereign in any aspects of common life on their own territory. Genuine powers - the powers that decide the range of life options and life chances available for most of our contemporaries - have evaporated from the nation-state into the global space. Politics, however, has remained local, and is no longer able to reach the powerful, let alone constrain them. We now have power freed from political supervision in the global space, and politics without power in the local space."
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Jul 10, 09
Rad polazi od uvjerenja da se danas potvr|uje sugestija Franca Ferrarottija da bi se “sociologija
trebala prije zvati 'znanošću o socijalnoj krizi' negoli 'znanošću o društvu'”. Stoga ne
začuđuje što se u izrazito turbulentnim vremenima s karakteristikama -
Jul 30, 09
A question repeatedly raised and discussed in the past was the following: What can unite the world? The experimental answer was: An attack from Mars. This terrorism is an attack from an inner Mars. For the length of a historical moment, at least, the quarrelling camps are united against the common enemy.
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In the result of that seminal shift, the audience of sociology has changed. Less and less does it consist of integrated, organized and administered institutions eager to be enlightened on the best technology of management, but more and more with the "individuals" (de jure even if not de facto), keenly seeking wisdom they can use when struggling, alone and on their own, using their own skills and wits, with their life tasks, with relating to other people, with tying together the otherwise absent bonds and holding the partnerships they desire to last or breaking free from commitments they find constraining. To be of any use to its new potential audience, sociology needs to offer knowledge that chimes with their experience and corresponds to their problems and tasks. Hence the new emphasis on "the subjects", already cast in the centre of "the social".
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don’t understand socialism as a type of society or social formation. I don’t believe there is such thing as a socialist society. Socialism is postulating a point of view where you are looking at things – I very often use the metaphor of a knife pressed with its edge against the existing society. Socialism is believing that no society is just enough – that there is always some injustice which ought to be fought against. To give you another comparison: if you take a bridge and try to establish what is its carrying power, you don’t take the carrying power of every pillar add them together and then divide by the number of pillars – you don’t take the average carrying power of an average pillar. But you measure the carrying power of the bridge by the carrying power of the weakest pillar.
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Well, you see, I’m very suspicious when a society prides itself that “We are the democracy implemented”; “We are perfectly just”; “We are a socialist society”, or whatever. These terms in their nature postulate demands – when they are used as the names of existing reality then there is some fraud involved – always. My definition of just society is that society is just if it thinks of itself as not just enough. By definition democratic society is a society which thinks that it is not democratic enough. So if you consider these postulates as a instruction, injunction or command for the future, for doing something then it is OK. But once you say the job has been done and there is nothing to be and whoever didn’t get benefit out of it it’s his own fault, then there is something wrong with it.
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Jul 28, 09
Zygmunt Bauman has known the terror of war and the trauma of exile. These experiences have made him a champion of the underdog and a caustic critic of the status quo. Yet for all his international popularity - he is one of Europe's most influential sociologists - he remains a loner and a maverick
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