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

tious not to dictate how people should live their lives. Utopia is about the good
life – and there are many varieties of the ‘good life’ (Kateb 1973) - but just as
Marx never actually depicted the content of the anticipated post-revolutionary
social order, Bauman does not want either to spell out in so many details what
this utopian good life exactly means. He hints at the classical Greek and repub-
lican model of citizenship, the democratic agora and the equally responsible
and interrelated oikos and ecclesia. His utopia is thus a vision of the autono-
mous and self-constituted society, as he has adopted it from Castoriadis (1993),
where ambivalence and difference is allowed to exist and even are valorised
and where adiaphorisation and heteronomy are annihilated. In Bauman’s uto-
pia, individuals become individuals de facto and not only remain individuals de
jure, their freedom is not coined in negative terms but in positive ones – free-
dom to act instead of freedom from want, fear or otherwise (Bauman 2000a).
This utopian model of the good society and the common good embedded in
democracy is perhaps not in the offing at the moment but as Kolakowski re-
marked with clarity but also remarkable subtlety: “It may well be that the im-
possible at a given moment can become possible only by being stated at a time
when it is impossible” (Kolakowski 1969:92). When all apparently is said and
done, something important might have been found missing or something could
have been done otherwise. In his classical critique of modernist utopias, A
False Utopia, William Henry Chamberlain also stated that “it often happens
that the absence of something is the best means of teaching a sense of its
value” (Chamberlain 1937:v) and this is indeed what Bauman does when he
pinpoints the problems involved in the demise of utopian thinking.
Thus, in the dispute between those arguing for ‘endings’ (cf. Bell 1960;
Fukuyama 1992) and against them (cf. Jacoby 1999), Bauman clearly takes the
side of the latter. 13 Instead of speaking apocalyptically of ‘endings’, the end of
democracy, of the welfare state, of collective politics, and of community, etc.,
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