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

suffering and daily degradation. With this privatisation and deregulation, that
we often proud ourselves of, follows political apathy and moral indifference:
We tend to be proud of what we perhaps should be ashamed of, of living in the
‘post-ideological’ or ‘post-utopian’ age, of not concerning ourselves with any co-
herent vision of the good society and of having traded off the worry about the
public good for the freedom to pursue private satisfactions (Bauman 1999:8).
In utopianism in general and in Bauman’s work in particular there is at refusal
to give up or give in to individualisation; a germination of optimism despite
hardships being present all around. Although Bauman blames the contemporary
social world for closing down alternatives by presenting it through the mes-
sages and ideologies of the romantic relationship between TINA (‘there is no
alternative’) and précarité, he keeps insisting that this is not the only option
open to us. Utopianism, in Bauman’s case, is a matter of presenting alterna-
tives, of opening up horizons instead of closing them down. His is an example
of what I would term ‘open-ended utopias’ instead of the hermetically ‘close-
ended utopias’ of many philosophers and political ideologists. It is not a matter
of agitating revolution or demanding subservience. Bauman rather wants peo-
ple to think for themselves, as Kant also proposed, instead of being told what to
do and blindly following the whims of others (Beilharz 2000:33). The horrors
of the Holocaust is but one extreme example of what happens when people stop
thinking for themselves and making their own moral judgements, when people
allow themselves to be allured into following the demands of superiors, as
Stanley Milgram’s studies indicated.
The price of individualisation is high and paid in hard human currency. As
Bauman reports and laments in his book, In Search of Politics, “we live
through a period of the privatization of utopia and of the models of the good
(with the models of the ‘good life’ elbowing out, and cut off from, the model of
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