Edition: 2024
Pages: 208
Series: EL
ISBN: 9788842092278
Pages: 208
Series: EL
ISBN: 9788842092278
Consuming Life
We live in a ‘society of consumers’, whose supreme value is the right/duty to the ‘pursuit of happiness’ – an instantaneous and constant happiness that does not derive so much from the satisfaction of desires as from their quantity and intensity. Yet, says Bauman, compared with our ancestors we are not happier: rather we are more alienated, isolated, often oppressed, exhausted from frenetic and empty lives, forced to take part in a grotesque competition for visibility and status, in a society that lives for consumption and transforms everything into commodities. Still, we continue to play the game and fail to rebel, nor do we feel any impulse to do so. Penetrating, lucid, prophetic, Zygmunt Bauman calls on each one of us to rethink the sense of impotence that grips us.
The author
Zygmunt Bauman
Zygmunt Bauman is among the best known and most influential thinkers in the world. It is to him that we owe the dazzling definition of ‘liquid modernity’, of which he is one of the most acute observers. Professor emeritus of Sociology in the Universities of Leeds and Warsaw, Laterza has published almost all of his writing, including: Inside Globalization, Community. Seeking safety in an insecure world, Liquid Modernity, Interview on Identity (edited by Benedetto Vecchi), Society under Siege, Liquid Love, Wasted Lives. Modernity and its Outcasts, Liquid Life, Modus Vivendi. Hell and Utopia of the Liquid World, Liquid Fear, I Consume, Therefore I Am, The Art of Living, Parasitic Capitalism, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?, Living on Borrowed Time: Conversations with Citlali Rovirosa-Madrazo, ‘The Wealth of the few Benefits Most’. False!, Collateral Damage, The Sixth Power. Surveillance in liquid modernity (with D. Lyon), The Demon of Fear, Conversations on God and on Man (with S. Obirek).
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