Liquid Evil

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• Zygmunt Bauman, Leonidas Donskis

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There is nothing new about evil; it has been with us since a very long time ago. But there is something new about the kind of evil that characterizes our contemporary liquid-modern world. The evil that characterized earlier forms of solid modernity was concentrated in the hands of states claiming monopolies on the means of coercion and using the means at their disposal to pursue their ends ends that were at times horrifically brutal and barbaric. In our contemporary liquid-modern societies, by contrast, evil has become altogether more pervasive and at the same time less visible. Liquid evil hides in the seams of the canvass woven daily by the liquid-modern mode of human interaction and commerce, conceals itself in the very tissue of human cohabitation and in the course of its routine and day-to-day reproduction. Evil lurks in the countless black holes of a thoroughly deregulated and privatized social space in which cutthroat competition and mutual estrangement have replaced cooperation and solidarity, while forceful individualization erodes the adhesive power of inter-human bonds. In its present form evil is hard to spot, unmask and resist. It seduces us by its ordinariness and then jumps out without warning, striking seemingly at random. The result is a social world that is comparable to a minefield: we know it is full of explosives and that explosions will happen sooner or later but we have no idea when and where they will occur.

In this new book Liquid Evil, the sequel to their acclaimed work Moral Blindness, Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis guide the reader through this new terrain in which evil has become both more ordinary and more insidious, threatening to strip humanity of its dreams, alternative projects and powers of dissent at the very time when they are needed most.

Zygmunt Bauman was born in 1925 in Poznan, Poland and was one of the most important and influential sociologists and philosophers of today. In his works he was particularly concerned with the problems of globalization, modernism, postmodernism, consumerism and ethics. He has published more than sixty books, most of which can be categorised as classics of sociological literature. His most famous books are Modernity and Holocaust, Liquid Modernity, Postmodern Ethics, Liquid Life, Liquid Evil, Globalization: The Human Consequences, and The Individualized Society. Bauman died in 2017.

Leonidas Donskis (1962 - 2016) is a prominent Lithuanian philosopher, political theorist and historian of ideas. He was a professor of history at Vytautas Magnus University and known defender of human rights and civic freedoms, for which he received numerous awards. Donskis is the author of several books on modernity, search for identity and problems of contemporary Eastern Europe. Some of his most acclaimed titles are Modernity in Crisis: A Dialogue on the Culture of Belonging (2011), Troubled Identity and the Modern World (2009) and Power and Imagination: Studies in Politics and Literature (2008).

• ISBN: 978-953-8075-37-7
• Dimensions: 145x205 mm
• Number of pages: 208
• Cover: paperback
• Year of the edition: 2017
• Original title: Liquid Evil
• Original language: English
• Translation: Tijana Trako Poljak