Home > Work > Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty
1 " No longer can democracy and freedom be fully and truly secure in one country, or even in a group of countries; their defence in a world saturated with injustice and inhabited by billions of humans denied human dignity will inevitably corrupt the very values they are meant to defend. "
― Zygmunt Bauman , Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty
2 " Utopia’ used to denote a coveted, dreamt-of distant goal to which progress should, could and would eventually bring the seekers after a world better serving human needs. In contemporary dreams, however, the image of ‘progress’ seems to have moved from the discourse of shared improvement to that of individual survival. Progress is no longer thought about in the context of an urge to rush ahead, but in connection with a desperate effort to stay in the race. "
3 " Each extra lock on the entry door in response to successive rumours of foreign-looking criminals in cloaks full of daggers and each next revision of the diet in response to a successive ‘food panic’ makes the world look more treacherous and fearsome, and prompts more defensive actions – that will, alas, add more vigour to the self-propagating capacity of fear. "
4 " The retreat of the state from the function on which its claims to legitimation were founded for the better part of the past century throws the issue of legitimation wide open again. A new citizenship consensus (‘constitutional patriotism’, to deploy Jürgen Habermas’s term) cannot be presently built in the way it used to be built not so long ago: through the assurance of constitutional protection against the vagaries of the market, notorious for playing havoc with social standings and for sapping rights to social esteem and personal dignity. The integrity of the political body in its currently most common form of a nation-state is in trouble, and so an alternative legitimation is urgently needed and sought. In "
