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

style nightmares” (Bauman 2000a:15). We have gone almost in a straight line
from utopia in the solid and singular to the present day lack of ability to think
differently and alternatively altogether. In short, Bauman’s sociology deals with
how to turn current social dystopias into utopias without turning into coercion,
heteronomy and estrangement and how sociologists may play a significant role
in this transformative task.
Utopia Lost and Found
Upon visiting the United States a couple of years ago, I was struck be the ap-
parent lack of interest in the work of Bauman. Although everybody appeared to
know about him, very few had in fact read any of his works, let alone were fa-
miliar with his central position within contemporary sociology. The few col-
leagues who had attempted to come to grips with what many of them saw as a
strange European flavoured philosophical type of social thinking, that to many
appeared at best redundant and at worst irrelevant, quickly discovered the depth
and the unavoidable and invaluable source of wisdom embedded in his work.
Thus, in many ways the general reception of Bauman’s utopian-oriented work
was similar to that of another central thinker on utopianism, Karl Mannheim,
when his Ideology and Utopia was first published in the mid-1930’s (cf. Kettler
& Meja 1994). This masterpiece was also labelled as an almost obscure kind of
philosophical theorising unsuited for practical application or utility. One of the
exceptions to this rule of neglect though is, for example, the work of respec-
tively George Ritzer (1997) and Steven Seidman (1998) who have been instru-
mental in making Bauman’s reception in the United States anything but negli-
gible. Most scholars I encountered during my extended stay being acquainted
with his ideas, however, admitted turning their back on Bauman and his social
theorising due to its abstract almost philosophical character. A colleague even
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