Turning the Familiar into the Strange: A Conversation with Zygmunt Bauman

Introduction

“The old ways of doing things are all broken, and new ways of doing things have not been invented. That’s where we are today.”

◎ Won the 2023 One-Way Street·Literature Award, New Weekly 2023 Blade Book, Beijing News 2023 Good Book·Social Science and Economics, Interface News 2023 Recommended, Phoenix Reading 2023 Good Book (68 books), China Reading News 2023 Academic·New Knowledge Good Book, Duozhaoyu 2023 Good Book, Ten Points Reading 2023 Selected Books, Humanities and Social Sciences Joint Book List 2023 Good Book

◎ The last interview with Bauman, author of "Work, Consumerism and the New Poor".

◎ One of the most influential sociologists of our time × A well-known and sharp journalist, an intellectual confrontation, a thought-provoking book dedicated to our generation.

◎ A wise survival guide for contemporary people: about the situation of people today and about our current life.

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【Content Introduction】

◎Why are we losing the ability to love? Why are our desires never satisfied after crazy consumption? Why does everyone become everyone else's enemy?

Before his death, Zygmunt Bauman spent several days talking to Swiss journalist Peter Haffner, having four long conversations about his life's work at his home in Leeds, England.

In this conversation, he continued to describe our era as "fluid modernity", involving all aspects of current life: love and intimacy, identity, work and leisure, family, Jewishness, morality, happiness, society, religion, and politics. From economic crisis to the new poor, from social responsibility to civil rights, from the shadow of war to daily happiness, from idol writers to personality types... He also thought deeply about these topics, providing a new understanding of our situation for our generation suspended in insecurity, and changing the way we think about the modern world.

This final conversation gave us a new understanding of Bauman, one of the greatest sociologists and thinkers of the 21st century: he never shied away from the major issues of our time, always striving to question accepted wisdom and common sense and to make the familiar unfamiliar.