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

out of the desire to control, correct and constantly monitor the social world had
a bizarre tendency to end in totalitarianism.
The utopian component in Bauman’s work does not mean an idealist rejec-
tion of the world as an objective facticity – rather, it means an understanding of
the hard and solid realities of the present and the possibilities and potentials for
change embedded and immanent within them. Therefore, it is reminiscent of
Anthony Giddens’ (1990) ‘utopian realism’ where the real and recalcitrant facts
and the utopian and the desired outcomes are thoroughly mixed into a cocktail
of potentiality and political potency. 7 Even Sir Thomas More’s (1516/1965)
original definition of the island of Utopia contained a grain of realism – it was,
in Kumar’s words, ‘never simple dreaming’. 8 The same goes for Bauman – his
utopian vein goes well beyond dreamscapes and into the rock-solid realities of
the world – as a matter of historical fact in the case of modernist utopias and as
a matter of desirability in the case of the ability mentally as well as socially to
conjure up alternative realities. The utopian presence in his writings is implicit
and immanent just as the utopianism he expresses is never preached as an exis-
tence based on excess, extravagance or exuberance, as has often been the case
in classical utopian thought. It is a much more modest utopianism, yet if prac-
tised and not only preached would have extreme consequences for social struc-
ture as well as human life. One of the most fiercely contested ideas and which
infuriated Bauman the most was Hegel’s assertion that ‘the real is rational’ and
that rationality excluded all other kinds of reality. Bauman’s utopianism is, on
the contrary, a sociology stressing utopianism as a precondition for imagining
reality otherwise, a sociology of potentiality and possibilities in the face of the
solidified and sedimented self-appointed ‘rational’ social forms spelling out
‘there is no alternative’ which are still prevalent features even in a times of a
‘liquefied’ modernity. Utopia, in this sense, is and will remain part and parcel
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