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

lurry, encompassing and treacherous to allow for generalisations about the actual state of
American sociological work (cf. Bauman & Tester 2001:28-29).
13 Bauman from his critical postmodernist perspective, just as Jacoby (1999) from his critical
theoretical perspective, is worried about the apparent lack of interest in substantial issues in
contemporary society where superficial or shallow agendas advanced under such headings as
communitarianism, multiculturalism, feminism and environmentalism appear to reject the
universal aspect in their bitter struggles against other utopian visions. Exclusion, as a consequence,
takes precedence over inclusion. Universalism and inclusion are inherent in, indeed
integral to, Bauman’s own plea for more visionary utopian ideas of a better world.
14 Bauman’s sociological vision of contemporary society has often been described as explicitly
pessimistic and sinister. There is some truth in such a characterisation but it also misses
out on the point that he never entirely gives in to this passive pessimism and sinister defeatism.
Bauman’s sinister yet hopeful vision of a world devoid of utopias echoes that expressed
by Mannheim when he stated the sombre premonitions of a reality entirely deprived of the
utopian spirit: “The complete disappearance of the utopian element from human thought and
action would mean that human nature and human development would take on a totally new
character. The disappearance of utopia brings about a static state of affairs in which man
himself becomes nothing more than a thing […] Thus, after a long tortuous, but heroic development,
just at the highest stage of awareness, when history is ceasing to be blind fate,
and is becoming more and more man’s own creation, with the relinquishment of utopias, man
would lose his will to shape history and therewith his ability to understand it” (Mannheim
1936/1976:236). This, one of the most central of quotations and observations on utopia, also
embellishes the end of the most comprehensive and monumental delineation of and introduction
to utopian and anti-utopian thought (cf. Kumar 1987).
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