Liquid Identities, Solid Critiques: Review of Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘Culture in a Liquid Modern World’

A Book Review of Culture in a Liquid Modern World by Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman (d. 2017) was, and remains, one of Europe’s notable sociologists and critic of modernity. A Polish Jew who survived war and displacement, later teaching for decades at the University of Leeds, he wrote across ethics, consumerism, identity, and power. He also was a critic of the Israeli state and zionism, condemning military assaults in Gaza and the use of the Holocaust to legitimize war crimes.¹

His best-known theory ‘liquid modernity’ names the shift from the ‘solid’ modern world of heavy institutions and stability to a ‘liquid’ world of dissolving borders and ambivalence. In the solid phase, institutions promised security in exchange for obedience, whereas in the liquid phase, institutions offload risk onto atomized individuals who must constantly choose and re-choose who they are. Culture in a Liquid Modern World (2011) is a compact statement of that thesis applied to culture. Its six chapters are a synopsis of Bauman’s wider body of work, Liquid Modernity (2000), Consuming Life (2007), Liquid Times (2007), Wasted Lives (2003), Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). For readers reading him for the first time, he gathers the themes about globalization’s power/politics split, the consumer turn, diasporas and borders, art’s uneasy dependence on patrons, into a short book.

I found that several chapters land with particular force: Bauman’s treatment of fashion and identity, his analysis of diasporas and multiculturalism, and his final chapter on culture between state and market.

From Solid to Liquid

Bauman’s starting move is straightforward. Culture once functioned as a homeostat, a stabilizer defining ‘high’ and ‘low,’ disciplining taste, and reproducing class distinctions (he reads Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction as the late sunset snapshot of that era). This was the ‘solid’ phase of modernity, a time when institutions and social roles and cultural hierarchies were relatively stable and long-lasting. Highbrow culture served as a framework for identity, guiding life trajectories and reinforcing a sense of order. But as modernity accelerated through globalization and technological change, those solid structures began to dissolve.

For Bauman, liquid modernity is not postmodernism, nor the end of modernity, but modernity extending into a new, more volatile phase without solid modernity’s promises of stability or coherence. While postmodernism declares the end of grand narratives and embraces fragmentation as liberation, he insists that liquid modernity retains modernity’s compulsive dynamism (its drive to dismantle and reinvent) but without solid structures to hold it in check. The result is a world in which the institutions and social bonds that once anchored modern existence dissolve into transient networks and short-term arrangements, leaving individuals to navigate perpetual uncertainty without the collective guarantees that solid modernity once, however imperfectly, supplied.

Fashion, Liquid Identity, and the Hunter’s Utopia

The second chapter, one of my favorites, incorporates German sociologist Georg Simmel’s essay on fashion with Bauman’s liquid identity. Two opposed tensions, belonging and distinctiveness, keep the pendulum of fashion in motion in stratified societies. Fashion promises both, then undermines both; as soon as a marker of distinction spreads, it loses distinctiveness and compels the next turn. For Bauman, the modern ‘gardener’s’ utopia (design a better order, arrive, rest) gives way to a hunter’s utopia wherein the road itself is the destination, so the chase does not (and must not) end.

This diagnosis travels well to faith-inflected debates over identity. The temptation to perform a pious brand (the “modest-fashion” cart, the perfectly curated bookshelf, the Islamic conference photo) is the religious face of the same treadmill, the anxiety that one is never up-to-date in practice or reading or the choice of influencers and their podcasts and events echoes hunter logic. A marketized culture converts even sincere ethical striving into consumable tokens, then accelerates the replacement cycle. The very act of repositioning oneself becomes more about maintaining visibility within a crowded symbolic marketplace, where the metrics of belonging and distinctiveness are continuously recalibrated by external observers.

Diasporas and Multiculturalism

Now, moving from an easier-to-digest analysis to a more political one, in the middle chapters, Bauman argues that globalization has moved us into an age of diasporas. There is no longer a one-way flow to imperial metropoles, but multi-directional, multi-citizenship archipelagos. In this world, multiculturalism can mean very different things. One is a pluralist ethic that protects individuals in the contexts where identities form, for example, German philosopher Jürgen Habermas’ “constitutional regime,” a framework of laws and rights that secures equal participation for all, or Charles Taylor’s dialogical recognition, holding that people form their identities through mutual exchange and must have their distinctiveness affirmed in public life. The other is French sociologist Alain Touraine’s “multicommunitarianism,” which Bauman treats as a more troubling trajectory. Instead of safeguarding individuals’ rights across plural contexts, it moves collective identities into self-enclosed blocs, emphasizing boundaries over exchanges.

Bauman treats the ‘age of diasporas’ as an unavoidable reality of globalization rather than as a utopia. His tone is neither celebratory nor nostalgic for a pre-diasporic order as he values its potential but is aware of the political and economic risks. Diasporas can be a basis for civic pluralism if tied to shared constitutional protections and redistribution. His counsel, which draws from American philosopher Nancy Fraser, is that the recognition of cultural difference must be linked to the redistribution of economic resources. I.e., only when symbolic affirmation and material measures advance in tandem can diasporic formations avoid ossifying into insular enclaves or clientelist blocs, and instead become foundations for a functioning public sphere. His typology illuminates familiar patterns in places like the U.S. and the U.K. Migrant Muslim communities are often pushed into fortress postures by security logics. Meanwhile, identity-forward policies (e.g. heritage months) substitute for material footholds like housing security and work would actually enable civic equality.

Culture, Borders, and Europe

In the chapter “Culture in a Uniting Europe,” Bauman looks at the European Union as a project for living with proximity in a globalized age. He argues that in the face of globalization’s asymmetries, the European Union (EU) has functioned as a partial protective shield, however imperfect, pooling resources to mitigate the market’s shocks and to maintain a degree of collective self-determination. Its deeper promise, however, lies in fostering what German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer called the ‘fusion of horizons’: a slow, dialogical enlargement of understanding between diverse publics. Bauman’s call for a “Library of European Culture” is practical: fund translation so neighbors can actually read one another. This exemplifies his belief that integration is sustained through reciprocity and institutional commitment rather than through mere coexistence in one region.

Bauman’s call for transnational culture exchange sits in tension with his long-standing skepticism toward the nation-state as both a moral project and a practical mechanism in today’s world. He reads the 19th–20th century nation-building bargain (liberal rights in exchange for loyalty to a territorial state) as always having depended on drawing hard borders, i.e. defining who counted as “us,” and whose culture merited protection and whose language was “official.” In liquid modernity, nationalism is both too rigid for global flows and too brittle to shelter against them, leaving migrants, diasporas exposed to the market’s churn without the buffers older welfare-nationalisms provided. He views the EU’s legal-cultural apparatus as one of the few postwar experiments in decoupling cultural rights from exclusive national membership, in that it offers protection and funding without demanding assimilation into a singular identity. Extending that beyond Europe would mean resisting the reflex to rebuild cultural policy around the flag, and instead building it around the shared vulnerability and reciprocity Bauman sees as the only workable foundation in an interconnected world:

“Castoriadis’s viewpoint demands that culture be defended on two fronts; on one side from Kulturkampf – cultural crusades and oppressive homogenization – and on the other, from the high- handed and soulless indifference of non-engagement.”

State and the Market

The final chapter “Culture between state and market” is a short discussion on art’s structural impasse. On the one hand, art resists administration, but it also cannot live without it. Without patrons, once the state, now more private foundations and platforms, art loses visibility and resources. Hannah Arendt’s useful counterpoint that culture’s value lies in permanence, not mere function, gives Bauman a standard for critique: the event-ification of culture erodes what endures.

Bauman’s discussion of culture between state and market views artistic production as caught in a persistent and irresolvable paradox. Meaning, the need for public institutions to shelter art from the reductive demands of commerce while simultaneously acknowledging that those same institutions inevitably shape and instrumentalize it. Drawing on examples from French art theorist Georges André Malraux’s national cultural policies and Minister of Culture Jack Lang’s democratizing initiatives, he shows how state patronage can expand access yet also impose political and bureaucratic logics alien to art’s autonomy. The rise of blockbuster museum exhibitions, for example, demonstrate how state-backed culture increasingly borrows the logics of the market, prioritizing crowd-drawing spectacles and tourist revenue. Bauman warns that commodification (manifest in the “event-ification” and spectacle-driven programming of market culture) risks reducing art to ephemeral novelty. The chapter reads as both diagnosis and caution, insisting that neither the state nor the market alone can guarantee art’s survival as a sphere of enduring human significance.

Conclusion

Culture in a Liquid Modern World crystallizes Bauman’s lifelong concern with the fragility of cultural forms under conditions of liquid modernity, while offering a conceptual vocabulary through which to parse contemporary transformations. For readers not yet familiar with Bauman’s “liquid” theory, this book is an excellent on-ramp. He analyzes cultural practice within broader structures of power and risk, refusing nostalgic calls for a return to “solid” certainties and celebratory accounts of fragmentation. What emerges instead is a sober recognition that culture, like identity and politics, must now be understood as precarious.

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Words Cited:

1. Domosławski, Artur. “Zygmunt Bauman mówił Polityce: Nic Izraela nie uniewinnia. Źle się dzieje w świecie.” Polityka, 16 Aug. 2011, www.polityka.pl/tygodnikpolityka/klasykipolityki/1518590,1,zygmunt-bauman-mowil-polityce-nic-izraela-nie-uniewinnia-zle-sie-dzieje-w-swiecie.read. Accessed 17 Aug. 2025. [↩]