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Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World, by Zygmunt Bauman. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001. 168 pp. $57.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-7456-2634-3. $17.00 paper. ISBN: 07456-2635-1.
Zygmunt Bauman offers this credo for intellectual work: "To stand up against the status quo takes courage ... and courage is a quality which intellectuals once famous for their obstreperous radicalism have lost on the way to their new roles and 'niches' as experts, academic boffins or media celebrities" (p. 125). This is a courageous book in which Bauman confirms that he puts the time honored qualities of intellectual work-the holding of a knife against the accepted wisdoms of the age-above the vanities of seats at presidential tables or celebrity. In particular, what Bauman does in this book is ask a question that is deceptive in its simplicity and, indeed, so fundamental that most of the lauded visionaries of "community" never seek to ask it: Why is "community" so sought after in the contemporary present?
That question shapes the strategy and style of Bauman's book. He is not concerned to inquire into what community was, or is, and neither is he at all interested in policy questions of how communities might be made. Rather, what interests Bauman is the hermeneutic question of the stakes of this particular...