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In four previous books (Liquid Modernity, 2000; Liquid Love, 2003; Liquid Life, 2005; Liquid Fear, 2006), the term "liquid" has proved a useful and generative term for sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in seeking to describe the risk, fear, and uncertainty of current global actions and confrontations. While these books explore the detailed history of how "solid" Western social fabrics have unraveled and been remade into a liquid modernity, Bauman's new, slimmer, and engagingly polemical study distills those earlier contexts in order to reorganize his thesis along an arc that transitions from new fears of insecurity to new global migrations to new deregulating forces and finally to new and strange individual utopias.
For Bauman, liquid modernity is a new period of global development in which five "departures" are simultaneously at work: institutions and social...