The term ‘collateral damage’ has recently been added to the
vocabulary of military forces to refer to the unintended
consequences of armed interventions, consequences that are
unplanned but nevertheless damaging and often very costly in human
and personal terms. But collateral damage is not unique to the
world of armed intervention – it is also one of the most salient
and striking dimensions of contemporary social inequality. The
inflammable mixture of growing social inequality and the rising
volume of human suffering marginalized as ‘collateral’ is
becoming one of most cataclysmic problems of our time.
For the political class, poverty is commonly seen as a problem
of law and order – a matter of how to deal with individuals, such
as unemployed youths, who fall foul of the law. But treating
poverty as a criminal problem obscures the social roots of
inequality, which lie in the combination of a consumerist life
philosophy propagated and instilled by a consumer-oriented economy,
on the one hand, and the rapid shrinking of life chances available
to the poor, on the other. In our contemporary, liquid-modern
world, the poor are the collateral damage of a profit-driven,
consumer-oriented society – ‘aliens inside’ who are deprived
of the rights enjoyed by other members of the social order.
In this new book Zygmunt Bauman – one of the most original and
influential social thinkers of our time – examines the selective
affinity between the growth of social inequality and the rise in
the volume of ‘collateral damage’ and considers its
implications and its costs.
表中的内容
Introduction: Collateral damage of social inequality 1
1 From the agora to the marketplace 10
2 Requiem for communism 27
3 The fate of social inequality in liquid modern times 40
4 Strangers are dangers . . . Are they indeed? 52
5 Consumerism and morality 72
6 Privacy, secrecy, intimacy, human bonds – and other
collateral casualties of liquid modernity 83
7 Luck and the individualization of remedies 94
8 Seeking in modern Athens an answer to the ancient Jerusalem
question 104
9 A natural history of evil 128
10 Wir arme Leut’ . . . 150
11 Sociology: whence and whither? 160
Notes 173
Index 180
关于作者
Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) was Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leeds, UK.
He is the author of many books that have become international
bestsellers and have been translated into more than thirty
languages, including 44 Letters on the Liquid Modern World,
Liquid Times, The Art of Life and Living on
Borrowed Time.
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