State Of Fear In A Liquid World
Download State Of Fear In A Liquid World PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get State Of Fear In A Liquid World book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
Liquid Fear
Modernity was supposed to be the period in human history when the fears that pervaded social life in the past could be left behind and human beings could at last take control of their lives and tame the uncontrolled forces of the social and natural worlds. And yet, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we live again in a time of fear. Whether its the fear of natural disasters, the fear of environmental catastrophes or the fear of indiscriminate terrorist attacks, we live today in a state of constant anxiety about the dangers that could strike unannounced and at any moment. Fear is the name we give to our uncertainty in the face of the dangers that characterize our liquid modern age, to our ignorance of what the threat is and our incapacity to determine what can and can't be done to counter it. This new book by Zygmunt Bauman one of the foremost social thinkers of our time is an inventory of liquid modern fears. It is also an attempt to uncover their common sources, to analyse the obstacles that pile up on the road to their discovery and to examine the ways of putting them out of action or rendering them harmless. Through his brilliant account of the fears and anxieties that weigh on us today, Bauman alerts us to the scale of the task which we shall have to confront through most of the current century if we wish our fellow humans to emerge at its end feeling more secure and self-confident than we feel at its beginning.
Hubris and Progress
This book explores the ancient question of why man seeks to go beyond his limits. A presumptuous tendency known by the ancient Greeks as hubris and believed to be punished by the gods, it developed from a need for our survival to a habit, as humanity has subdued animals, dominated nature, increased knowledge and sought even to overcome death. It also lies behind the crisis of our time, as the values of democracy, freedom, equality and progress have been weakened – sacrificed to excess, as we live in an eternal present, dominated by greed and indifference regarding the future. Addressing this crisis of our interregnum period, in which faith has been lost in the former certainties of modernity, such as science, progress and the idea of a better world, the author considers whether redemption for humanity might lie in our hubristic tendencies, as these give us scope to deviate from the existing path and find new ways forward.
State of Fear in a Liquid World
This book examines the insecurity that besets our lives in the contemporary world, whether as a result of natural disasters, human negligence or, more recently, threats to security in the form of terrorist activity, which itself gives rise to new fears: fear of travel, agoraphobia, distrust of others and existential anxieties. Revealing the connection between the two components of our insecurity, as reflecting on and conditioning human existence, and producing social problems, the author brings this to bear on the notion of security that modernity had sought to guarantee to its citizens – a notion that has slowly crumbled with the crisis of modernity and with the emergence of the "liquid" world. Now insecurity is endemic and has so firmly become part of us as to be accepted as an unpleasant aspect of normality that we must live with. However, the necessity of living in a risk society in which security has emerged as important does nothing to dispel the fear that accompanies us at all times. An engagement with the thought of Bauman that explores fear as an accompaniment to the end of modernity and its assurances, State of Fear in a Liquid World offers developments of the thesis of liquid modernity and will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, social theory and politics with interests in individualisation, social change and (in)security.