Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts

I haven't had time to catch up with all of the amazing number of books that Bauman has been writing in his 70s, but the others aren't likely to be any better than this one. Here is a great scholar, a passionate critic, and a deeply committed humanist--someone with lots of now-possibly-outmoded virtues--writing with the freedom of an old man and the fire of a youth, tackling the character of life in the last stages of its transformation by the universal market. It is a dark picture of fragmentation and the collapse of meaning, and of the hubris of a drive towards order that suffocates on the disorder it manufactures. Bauman's argument passes seamlessly from the plunder of globalized capitalism through international refugees, urban ghettos and banlieus, and closes with some surprising connections with the world of speed dating and "Survivor." Some of the keenest bits of insight and social criticism are tossed in as parentheticals, and along the way there are extended excurses addressing even larger considerations. It is a visionary text rather than a piece of social science; Bauman's citations are more commonly to Cavino or Borges than they are to Durkheim or Parsons. (His picture of a contemporary world aestheticized by commodities is quite close to my own account in chapter 7 of "The fiction of a thinkable world," a book nobody would call sociology.) It's all the better for that. One comes away from this book with a book of one's own taking shape in thought.