Utopianism in the Work of Zygmunt Bauman - Sociologi - Aalborg ...

where duties and obligations go hand in hand with rights and the fair distribu-
tion of material wealth. Bauman, though, is in no way whatsoever an advocate
for the aristocratic underpinnings of the ancient republican practice - excluding
women, slaves and the indolent from participation - but nor is he opting for
planned economy understood in its communist guise, although the welfare
state’s redistribution of wealth in his view is a prerequisite for a truly democ-
ratic society. He is rather concerned with the creation of the self-constituted
society where autonomous citizens actively engage in public and political life
instead of retreating into their private fortresses constructed out of fear like the
moth, as Marx noted, which as the universal sun starts setting seeks out the
comfort and warmth of the domestic lamp.
However, in his earlier years, before arriving in the UK in the early
1970’s, Bauman’s vision of utopia was markedly different than it is today ac-
cording to his friend and colleague Stefan Morawski who claimed that he at
that time embraced a “Marxist worldview in the light of the utopian belief and
hope that the Soviet Union was genuinely a country of justice, equality, free-
dom; that an ethnic pedigree really did not matter” (Morawski 1998:30). Em-
bittered by the experience of the Stalinist and anti-Semitic purges in the Polish
academia first in the middle of the 1950’s and later throughout the late 1960’s,
the belief in such a communist utopia was upon arrival in the UK ultimately
disowned. Despite having dissolved his relatively orthodox roots to Marxist
thinking many years ago, there is as mentioned little doubt that his early train-
ing within this tradition has directed his attention to aspects fertile for utopian
theorising. The utopian vein in his writings from the early years onwards can be
seen in the fact that the two major tenets in his thinking, he claims, are respec-
tively suffering and culture (Bauman in Kilminster & Varcoe 1992). Utopia is
central to both of these aspects – utopia as relief from suffering and as the reali-
sation of culture as a human and actively created domain. As Bauman is well
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