ABSTRACT
There are two ‘meta-values’ undersigning human pursuits: freedom and security. One without the other is hell – but no attempt to balance one against the other has been so far found to be made in paradise’s likeness. We go on trying …
How close can sociologists really get to quotidian lives of ordinary men and women in a world in which ‘our life struggles dissolve … in [an] unbearable lightness of being’ – a time ‘when we never know for sure when to laugh and when to cry. And there is hardly a moment in life to say without dark premonitions: “I have arrived”.’2 Can we really know what ordinary men and women reason, and think, and argue about when going through the course of daily lives which are fragmented, insecure and teeming with ambivalence? Is it possible for us to project onto the pages of our books their private worlds, their dreams and what goes on inside their heads? These are the kinds of questions that over the last ten years have increasingly come to concern Zygmunt Bauman, and during that time led him to produce a kind of sociology that more intimately than any other has the ability to take us right there into the mish-mash of this present predicament, into the soft melt that is liquid modernity.
