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Alone Again
Ethics After Certainty
Zygmunt Bauman
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Contents
Foreword
vii
Introduction
1
The Rise of Reason: Bureaucracy and Business
3
Fragmentation and Discontinuity
12
The Privatisation of Common Fates
18
The Deficiencies of Community
24
Risk and Limits
28
New Ethics in Search of New Politics
32
Further Reading
38
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Foreword
Throughout Demos’ work, a continuing theme has been that as old ide-
ologies wane, ethics necessarily become more important. But whereas
in the past we could rest our ethics on solid foundations – such as the
Church, tradition or faith in a utopia – today ethics have become far
less certain and far more complex.
Zygmunt Bauman has now written for us a compelling account both
of why the old arguments won’t do and of how we should think about
the new ethical landscape in which we live. Part of his argument con-
cerns the changing nature of modern life: the spread of instrumental
organisations, and the fragmentary and episodic character of the times.
Its most notable feature, he argues, is that life has become privatised in
far-reaching ways. For him privatisation is not primarily about the sale
of old state industries. Instead he means a much more sweeping shift in
the character of everyday lives and concerns that has made people
more concerned with their own space and less willing to make commit-
ments. Privatisation has brought many liberations. But it has eroded
our capacity to think in terms of common interests and fates, contribut-
ing to the decay of an active culture of political argument and action.
Unfortunately, most of the conventional responses to this situation
do not stand up to scrutiny. One is the sometimes sophisticated, some-
times naive, attempt to resurrect the community as a foundation for
certainty and morality. As Bauman points out, the escape from the
constraints and impositions of community has been the dominant
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Alone Again: Ethics After Certainty
story of the last 200 years: reversing it is more likely to put morality
into a deep freeze than to resuscitate it. Much the same is true of the
attempt to make the family a home for pure morality in an unfriendly
world. Meanwhile the neutralization of morality by business and
bureaucracy, with their emphasis on rules rather than judgement, nec-
essarily makes them unlikely candidates for any rebirth of ethics.
Instead ours is an era in which morality rests with the individual, alone
again with his or her choices, and no longer able to depend on old cer-
tainties. Whether we like it or not there are no longer any convincing
external props or anchors.
Bauman’s argument suggests that rather than returning to old
beliefs we need to transcend the antimonies of traditional thought: of
state versus market, individual versus community, which have so dis-
torted much of our political culture. Only then can we better under-
stand the connection, rather than contradiction, between the health of
common institutions concerned for common fates and the active
engagement of millions of questioning, self-directed and often awk-
ward individuals.
Zygmunt Bauman is one of the world’s foremost philosophers, who
has written brilliantly on themes ranging from the Holocaust to mor-
tality, post-modernity to politics. He does not offer a simple blueprint.
Rather he offers a starting point for talking sense about an ethics fit for
our times.
Geoff Mulgan
viii Demos
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