Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Modern civilization, Bauman argues, promised to make our lives understandable and open to our control. This has not happened and today we no longer believe it ever will. In this book, now available in paperback, Bauman argues that our postmodern age is the time for reconciliation with ambivalence, we must learn how to live in an incurably ambiguous world.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction
• The Scandal of Ambivalence
• Social Construction of Ambivalence
• Self-Construction of Ambivalence
• A Case Study in the Sociology of Assimilation (I):rapped in Ambivalence
• A Case Study in the Sociology of Assimilation (II):evenge of Ambivalence
• Privatization of Ambivalence
• Postmodernity, or Living with Ambivalence

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Every library should own this book. It follows in the wake of Bauman's other, brilliant investigations into modernity and postmodernity in his Legislators and Interpreters (CH, Apr'88) and Modernity and the Holocaust (CH, Jun'90). Bauman argues convincingly that modernity, not barbarism, is responsible for genocide and other atrocities committed in this century. Modernity aims at establishing universality, control, and management, a well-ordered "garden." Ambivalence is a scandal in the eyes of the gardening state and in the spirit of modernity. Bauman devotes many chapters to the theme of assimilation as a technique that the modern state uses to absorb unruly elements, particularly in relation to German Jews. He analyzes how leading German Jewish intellectuals at the turn of the previous century eventually saw through the benign facade of assimilation policies, and became social critics: his treatments of Freud, Kafka, and Simmel are first-rate. Bauman concludes by defending postmodernism as a philosophy that tolerates ambivalence and indeterminacy. Many books have been published on postmodernity, but Bauman's stands out in several respects: he keeps returning to the Holocaust, a topic that is neglected in the postmodern discourse. The index is extremely comprehensive, and the footnoting is extensive. -S. G. Mestrovic, Texas A & M University

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) was Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the Universities of Leeds and Warsaw. He was the winner of the prestigious European Amalfi Prize for Sociology and the Social Sciences, 1989, he was also awarded the Theodor W. Adorno Prize for 1998.