The ambivalences of modernity

Zygmunt Bauman published Modernity and Ambivalence a mere two years after Modernity and the Holocaust. The book Modernity and Ambivalence reveals all too clearly Bauman's own deeply ambivalent perception of modernity. Bauman identifies modernity with the modern nation-state, and states that its origins lie in the period beginning with the seventeenth century, followed by the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. In Modernity and Ambivalence Bauman argues that the uncertainty and contingency which Jewish intellectuals experienced foreshadowed an existential condition and experience that was to be the lot of large sections of the population in a later, postmodern period. Discourses of liberalism are central to understanding the formation of the West and its governing institutions, although Bauman, despite borrowing extensively from Foucault, fails to incorporate Foucault's more acute understanding of liberalism into his own analysis.

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Existentialism · Liberalism · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Postmodernism · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · State (computer science) · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Gender Studies · Globalization and Cultural Identity · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Psychology