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

aware, we are not all endowed with the same possibilities and chances in the
world for avoiding suffering and creating culture. The life chances experienced
by a ‘vagabond’ are by definition extremely different and incomparable from
that of a ‘tourist’ (cf. Bauman 1993:240-242). The former is the metaphor util-
ised by Bauman characterising the miserable plight of the underprivileged,
downtrodden and marginalised, whereas the latter signifies the possibilities and
potentials available to those at the top of the human hierarchy. Bauman is
throughout all of his books persistently and categorically taking the side of the
weak. According to him, the quality and standards of any society can only be
measured and evaluated by looking at the condition of the weakest members.
Thus, for a considerable period of time he hung his utopian hopes exclu-
sively on the ideological coat hanger, as it were, provided by socialism, and
later on a humanistic variant of this ideology to be sure. Especially the ‘softer’
kinds of socialism that opened up the world instead of closing it down into new
modernist iron-cages appeared to appeal to him after his arrival in the UK in
1971. As Keith Tester (2002a) has illustrated, the majority of the sources
Bauman draws upon in his own eclectic work is concerned with utopian visions
ranging from, amongst others, the work of Antonio Gramsci via Albert Camus
to Emmanuel Levinas (cf. Tester 2002a). These writers are not socialists in the
traditional paradigmatic sense of the term, apart perhaps from Gramsci, but
nevertheless contain seeds of the notions of a just and morally responsible soci-
ety that socialism has been able to monopolise throughout most parts of the
19th and 20th centuries. We must also not forget the inspirational contribution
of Leszek Kolakowski here or the equally important contributions made by
members of the Budapest School. Like Kolakowski, with whom Bauman had to
flee the forced utopia of the socialist regime in Poland in the late 1960’s, utopia
as a way of thinking is in principle a good thing, although fully-fledged utopias
forged after some authoritarian blueprints or master plans often appear to turn
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