Zygmunt Bauman’s Retrotopia is a work of social and political criticism, written in the last years of the author’s life and published in Spanish in the Paidós “Estado y Sociedad” series. Its chapters take the form of essays that move between philosophy, cultural history, and contemporary politics, and its dedication names Aleksandra, “companion of my thought and of my life.” Bauman’s subject is the mood of the present: a widespread loss of faith in the future and a turn toward idealized pictures of the past.
The book’s organizing image comes from Walter Benjamin’s reading of Klee’s Angelus Novus. Where Benjamin’s angel is blown into the future by the storm of progress, his face turned to the rubble of the past, Bauman’s angel faces the other way. The storm now blows from the future—imagined, foreseen, and feared in advance as a kind of hell—back toward the paradise of the past, which we picture as it might have been only after it has been lost. Past and future have swapped places in our accounting: the future sits in the debit column, the past in the credit column. From this reversal Bauman draws the book’s central claim, that we live in the age of retrotopia—a nostalgia that has become a political force.
The Angel of History, Reversed
The book opens with Walter Benjamin’s reading of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus. In Benjamin’s telling, the angel of history faces the past, sees a single catastrophe piling rubble at his feet, and would stay to awaken the dead and reassemble what has been shattered—but a storm blowing from paradise drives him irresistibly into the future, his back turned to the growing wreckage. That storm, Benjamin wrote, is what we call progress. Bauman asks us to look at the painting again, nearly a century on, and finds the angel has spun 180 degrees. His face now turns toward the future, while a wind blows from the imagined hell of things to come, pushing him backward toward the paradise of the past—a past recollected after its loss and reduced to ruins. Past and future have swapped their virtues and defects: the future, once mocked as unreliable, now sits in the debit column, while the past is credited with freedom of choice and hopes not yet discredited.
Boym’s Diagnosis of Nostalgia
Svetlana Boym supplies the vocabulary. Nostalgia, she writes, is a feeling of loss and displacement, but also a romantic idyll with our own private fantasy. Once a curable ailment—Swiss doctors prescribed opium, leeches, and a mountain excursion—it hardened in the twentieth century into an incurable disorder: the century began with a futurist utopia and ended sunk in nostalgia. Boym calls it a global epidemic, an affective longing for a community with collective memory, a hunger for continuity in a fragmented world, and reads it as a defense mechanism against accelerated rhythms and historical convulsion. The defense works by promising to rebuild the ideal home, tempting us to surrender critical thought for emotional attachment. Her warning is precise: nostalgia tends to confuse the real home with the imaginary one, and its “restorative” strain fuels nationalist rebirths that manufacture antimodern myths, resurrect national symbols, and sometimes recycle conspiracy theories. Bauman places nostalgia within a much older family of attachments to “another place,” an ingredient of the human condition since people discovered that conduct is a matter of free choice.
The Leviathan on the Wane
The hope of engineering human happiness through a better society has gone nebulous for want of an agency to do the job. Peter Drucker doubted any future society would unite individual and social perfection; Ulrich Beck argued that people must now solve socially produced problems with private ingenuity. The goal shrinks from a better society to a better position within an incorrigible one—spoils of competition rather than rewards of reform. Hence the question the first chapter poses: back to Hobbes? Confidence is fading that the Leviathan, which supposedly repressed innate cruelty so life would not be nasty, brutal, and short, can still do its work. Norbert Elias’s civilizing process, Bauman notes, reformed manners, not human impulses. Violence was swept from sight but not from nature: externalized to professional violence-makers, or subcontracted to “impure” inferiors—slaves, serfs, scapegoats—much as India’s caste system pushed degrading work onto the untouchables, a fifth caste placed outside the four varnas in a social void. The same logic reappears in the marginalized “underclass,” outside the class system and therefore outside class-divided society. Public executions and pillories vanished, butchery retreated to the kitchen, and mastery over animals was celebrated in the annual fox hunt. Erving Goffman’s “civil inattention”—the averted gaze on the sidewalk or in the waiting room—signals the wish to avoid contact lest the caged animal show itself.
The Veneer of Decorum
The Hobbesian animal emerged from all this intact, merely veneered, waiting for its moment. Timothy Snyder’s rereading of the Holocaust is invoked: imagine ourselves as rescuers, but destroy the states, corrupt local institutions, point economic incentives toward murder, and few would behave properly. There is little reason to feel ethically superior to Europeans of the 1930s and 1940s. What looked like extirpating Mr. Hyde from Dr. Jekyll now resembles plastic surgery—more Dorian Gray, presentation substituted for reality, effects short-lived and needing repetition. Instead of a decisive battle between courtesy and violence, we face an endless succession of neutralizing actions: an exhausting, never-decisive war between good violence in the name of law and order and bad violence, which tempts its enemy to adopt its own instruments. A world without violence joins the most beautiful and most unattainable utopias. Why the turn? Perhaps ubiquitous media serving news like Hearst’s hot coffee; perhaps borders turned porous under globalization; perhaps states quietly abandoning the monopoly on coercion, or the line between legitimate and illegitimate force joining the “essentially contested” concepts. Contemporary states sit between Weber’s ideal-typical state and Snyder’s failed one—a territory without a state. The right to draw and redraw that line is the main trophy of power struggles; since the Leviathan it was politics’ private domain, and Weber gave its monopoly near-canonical status. Leo Strauss, at the threshold of liquid modernity, warned that historicism leaves no view of human life with final validity, every doctrine superseded.
The Rifle on the Wall
Absent arms controls, some profit from others’ suffering. While attention fixes on weapons of mass destruction, the conventional arms trade proceeds in a legal and moral vacuum; the five permanent Security Council members dominate it, and national controls are riddled with loopholes. In March 2013 The Guardian reported that, despite economic collapse, the big arms companies’ sales had topped 400,000 million dollars; two years later Amnesty International counted some 875 million small and light weapons in circulation, with 700,000 to 900,000 produced each year. Chekhov’s rule applies: a rifle hung on the wall in act one will be fired by act three. Pragmatism rules—”I can do it, therefore I want to do it”—and Weber’s instrumental rationality is inverted: means now hunt for ends, as consumer products must create the demand they answer.
The Hobbesian Minefield
The argument opens with David Brooks on Americans—citizens of the richest and most powerful country—beset by complex, inextricable problems with no defined villain: technological change displacing workers, globalization destabilizing local communities, dissolving family structures, tottering political orders, rising inequality, an unraveling global order. The temptation is to envy Palestinians, who can attribute every suffering to a single denominator, the Israeli occupation; inhabitants of other countries, equally bereft of prospects and dignity, scarcely know whom to stab and strike at random. Life in the updated Hobbesian world resembles walking through a minefield whose maps were never drawn or have been lost—so full of explosives that explosions occur repeatedly, with no one knowing where or when.
We are certainly back in Hobbes’s world, or well on the road. This time the war of all against all arises not from the absence of an all-powerful Leviathan but from the presence of too many Leviathans—large, small, and tiny—that gravely fail the tasks for which ancestors invited the Leviathan to govern them. The proper Leviathan, one able to remedy the defects of these lesser ones, chief among them our mode of coexistence lagging far behind the conditions in which it must occur, has vanished from the panorama entirely.
The Return to Tribes
Michael Walzer’s retrospective conclusion from over thirty years earlier predicted that if States ever became like large neighborhoods, normal neighborhoods would become small States, organizing to defend their local politics and culture against outsiders; historically, neighborhoods have closed into localist communities whenever the State has opened. That future, now present, confirmed his diagnosis. Thanks to globalization and the resulting divorce between power and politics, States are transforming into little more than large neighborhoods within porous, ineffectively fortified borders, while former neighborhoods struggle to assume the role of small States, exploiting what remains of quasi-local politics and the State’s once jealously guarded prerogative of separating “us” from “them.”
Once the work of drawing borders, digging moats, and erecting barbed wire begins, every difference people can point to justifies one group’s superiority over another: gun lovers feel superior to gun detractors because they love guns, and detractors feel superior precisely because they detest them. The motive is tribalism, and the tribe’s purpose is to determine whom to support and whom to kill. Terms chosen to keep discussion balanced on a knife’s edge turn crude and intransigent; conciliation and hybridization occur rarely and are seldom intended. The either/or disjunctive becomes self-evident and obligatory, excluding “this and that” and near-inconceivable abstention. No one listens to anyone: information contradicting either side’s position is systematically ignored, while information supporting their beliefs carries emotional significance and is processed, all else discarded. In territory populated by tribes, conflicting sides obstinately refuse to persuade or convert one another; the inferiority of any member of an alien tribe is a predestined, eternal, incurable burden—an indelible stigma meant to resist all rehabilitation. Members caught in a superiority/inferiority loop do not address each other but speak to themselves.
Luc Boltanski describes the emerging hegemonic philosophy—the current “return to tribes” tendency—focusing on its French version, a “new dominant ideology” characterized simultaneously by anticapitalism, moralism, and xenophobia, obsessively centered on national identity, opposing authentic French to immigrants of the banlieues: amoral, violent, dangerous, and above all bent on exploiting the goodness of the welfare State. After condemning official tolerance as mere laxity, this ideology demands strengthened police powers. If the motive is tribalism, why tribalism? Celia de Anca blames the resurgence of “emotionality” after its long twentieth-century exile, aided by corporate managerial policy eager to exploit diversity’s forces: the main paradigm shift is the transition from yearning for independence from a society of communities to yearning for belonging to a society of individuals.
Heritage as Faith, Not Facts
Lowenthal warns that ignorance, like distance, prevents us from examining our inheritance critically, and that the past is “more admirable as a terrain of faith than of facts.” Narrow rivalry is inherent to inheritance itself: insisting we were first or best, exalting what is ours and excluding others’. Heritage builds collective pride but magnifies distinctions between the good (us) and the bad (them); this myopia fosters conflict while ignorance inhibits reciprocity. A neighborhood full of strangers signals the evaporation of certainties; strangers embody all that is evasive, weak, unstable and unpredictable. Against strangers above all—especially the most blatantly odd, permanent residents, foreigners and immigrants—residents of such an “infested” neighborhood organize to defend their local culture, seeking to turn it into a “small State.” Since a genuinely purified State is practically ruled out, the guiding image is drawn from the past—as it was, but more often as it was imagined it could have been: unambiguously “ours,” uncontaminated by “them.”
Stripped of power to shape the future, politics transfers to the space of collective memory, far more susceptible to manipulation and thus more promising for materializing lost omnipotence. We no longer control the present from which the future will germinate, so we seem condemned to be pawns in others’ chess game; hence the relief of returning to the familiar world of memory—our memory, my memory, which only we can possess, use and abuse. In theory the future is territory of freedom and the past of immutable inevitability, but in the practice of memory politics the two have exchanged attitudes; the past’s malleability is the sine qua non of memory politics.
Nationalism and the Malleable Past
The main aim of historical memory politics is justifying the nation’s right to territorially delineated sovereignty. Ernest Gellner holds that nationalism is a political principle requiring congruence between national and political units, emerging only where the territorially sovereign State is presupposed; the State-nation marriage is historical contingency, not natural law, though nationalism denies the first and affirms the second, embedding the idea that a man must have a nationality as he has a nose and two ears.
Relative Deprivation and the Logic of Discontent
Bauman distinguishes two ways hardship is lived. Habitual poverty hardens into normality and stops registering as injustice; a sudden new deprivation, however small beside routine suffering, reads as clear injustice and summons people to arms. The sociology of relative deprivation—Merton, Runciman, Barrington Moore—settled the point that grievance is comparative: it arises against a “normality” that is neither absolute nor universal, varying by era and place. What ignites revolt is not the objective harshness of conditions but their deviation from the distribution tacitly accepted as legitimate. Medieval serfs rose not against servitude itself but against demands raised above the customary; modern workers struck when a raise granted in one factory was refused in another; today the comfortably raised young rebel when the fabulous jobs they expected fail to materialize. Victims are moved not by an abstract criterion of justice but by comparison with contemporaries visible in real time—their reference groups, the census from which the aggrieved pick targets for compensation or vengeance. Runciman, quoted at length, insists relative deprivation is always a feeling, and need not correspond to objective lack; he cites Tocqueville on France, where discontent peaked in the regions improving fastest, where feudalism was hated most on the eve of its eclipse. Reissman adds that success itself raises aspirations, so past ascent, once blocked, converts desire for repair into animosity. Hence the revolutions of rising expectations, and from 1969 Davies’s J-curve: when satisfaction falls while expectations keep climbing, the widening gap becomes intolerable and drives rebellion against a system that fails its promises.
The description fits our condition almost literally, and fits Lenin’s formula—rulers unable to govern as before, the governed unwilling to be governed as before. Yet the likeness is casual; the divergences overwhelm it. In a thoroughly individualized, deregulated society, alliances are ad hoc, volatile, prone to fission, with shrinking life expectancy; a society addicted to delegating social policy to privately administered life politics treats the hegemonic philosophy as a stratagem for devaluing solidarity beyond one’s nearest and dearest. The chance of converting a shared condition into shared purpose is minimal. Far from breeding solidarity, the current arrangement—aided by the new managerial philosophy—manufactures suspicion, rivalry, and conflict. Verhaeghe is quoted: solidarity becomes a costly luxury, yielding to provisional alliances obsessed with out-extracting competitors; workplace bullying, displaced aggression vented on the weak, becomes common; a subterranean fear of the threatening “other” spreads. Where the other is a threat, open or not yet revealed, sworn solidarity looks to the naive like a treacherous trap—pure doxa passed off as logic. Solidarity carries no value in current currency; it looks like a burden, a debt, not an asset. The stock markets of life politics devalue Putnam’s social capital while privileging self-concern and the antisocial edges of self-affirmation. Relative deprivation suffers the same fate: once bounded by time and place, triggered when a group “like us” gains what is denied “to us,” it now becomes permanent and mobile, dropping anchor at random in any port along life’s itinerary. With every habitat open to inspection, any group’s success is more likely to register as irritating confirmation of one’s own deprivation.
Basic Income Against the Means-Tested State
A glimpse of a shower or private bath on the way to a cramped tourist seat authenticates what a film showed as real, not fantasy—and only then is there a chance the bar of aspirations rises as intended. Daniel Raventós and a growing band of allies treat basic income as the cornerstone of any future house of equality: an income paid by the state to every full member or resident, even the unwilling to work, regardless of wealth, other income, or cohabitation. With the Basic Income Earth Network he insists on three principles—paid to individuals not families, independently of other income, without requiring work or willingness to accept a job. These depart sharply from welfare-state philosophy, which targets households, ties provisions to means, and has replaced welfare with workfare. Both look back past current designers to Beveridge’s 1942 report, approved almost unanimously in Britain—only Kingsley Wood dissenting as Chancellor, calling it financially impracticable. Beveridge was a liberal, not a socialist, who followed liberal ideology to its material conclusion: individual freedom could only be effective once the “material conditions of freedom” were secured against the five giant evils—misery, ignorance, need, idleness, disease. Until then freedom remains an empty slogan. Paul Mason adds that basic income answers a greater problem, the disappearance of work itself; the work-based utopia lost its ground when Oxford’s Martin School warned in 2013 that 47% of US jobs risk automation within two decades, McKinsey counted 140 million knowledge workers at risk, and this wave, unlike earlier ones, may cut labor needs in one sector without generating them in another.
The chances of basic income arriving through public pressure are scarce, especially regarding Raventós’s third condition. Resistance centers on the two postulates, mostly through confusion of values, and past conquests in this terrain prove temporary and easily suppressed. A 2009 Joseph Rowntree Foundation symposium with York’s politics department diagnosed three decades of retreat from universalism: selection of beneficiaries the norm, generality the exception, with a reform bill requiring the mentally ill and single parents of older children to be available for work. Nor is this British alone: the US Congress in 1996 passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, tightening eligibility, capping benefits at five years, and demanding employment or training. The difference is defining—between universalism, where basic income is an inalienable right and a confirmation of communal obligation, and a focus on the “most needy” that returns society to its natural home of Victorian hospices and poorhouses, where human dignity and the pursuit of happiness had no place. Their goal was biological survival, postponing death while preventing integration into the lives of the non-stigmatized; entry meant acquiring the marks of stigma, guilt and shame at living below the threshold of adult humanity. In a world taking work and military service as certificates of membership, the workless were irremediably marginalized.
Love, Security, and the Crumbling of the Couple
The argument narrows to the smallest unit of human union: the moral reunion of two. Paul Verhaeghe’s account of the couple’s crisis begins at the family home, still the usual setting of coupledom even as its numerical predominance crumbles. A world has vanished—one now representable only through generalized quotation marks, where the “lady of the house” invites her “best friend’s” husband up “for a drink.” Nothing means what it once meant. Old romantic declarations ring hollow; love is now “for a time” or “while it lasts,” and the young rarely say “my love” or “my husband”—it must be “my partner.” Yet the lifelong love relationship remains the dream of young and old alike, and failing it in practice only sharpens the dream. The decisive shift: where sex was once the main thing in a lasting relationship, security is now stressed—love as a remedy in an era of loneliness.
Love has become a pawn in the endless security-versus-freedom game. Clearly defined limits that left no room for doubt, tending toward security, were abolished in the second half of the twentieth century—an era of demolished walls and opened doors. Expectations soared during that brief, tumultuous period, then withered once it became manifest that beyond the walls lay merely empty space. Love, reticent to fill the vacant post of security provider for the growing legion of solitaries, offers no exit from the deadlock: what one favors the other disputes, and betting on either is like choosing between fire and embers.
Broder’s Nakedness and the Longing for the Womb
Melissa Broder’s exercise in physical and spiritual nakedness became an overnight bestseller across the online and offline universes between which we float. Readers found in her public confession words for their own Erlebnisse; Elle crowned her “the queen on Twitter of unease, insecurity, sexual obsession and existential terror,” someone who “doesn’t seem to try to impress anyone, only to survive.” Broder confronts the dilemma from the first pages: an external attribution makes you perceive everything positive as error and subjective, while negatives are objective truth and always your fault. Since being born places us in that world, her advance conclusion is that bringing a baby into the world without its consent seems unethical—the womb is nirvana, and she admits she has tried to return to it since, because from the first day she discovered how not to be enough.
Her womb is an example of nirvana: in Buddhism, the extinction of all cravings and torments, a “blowing out” of every stimulus, promising absence of ego—diametrically opposed to Broder’s perpetual insufficiency, a search never reaching its elusive moment of arrival. The longing to return is a version, adapted to the solitary individual, of nostalgia for the irreversible paradise lost. Dreams of a world purged of irritating factors signal the itinerary of our collective search.
Comfort Zones and the Return to Hobbes
We are pressured to adapt and crave that pressure; familiarity consoles. The comfort zone—echo chamber, hall of mirrors—is the fenced-off mini-universe where the individual hears only echoes of noises he himself makes, the closest thing to the maternal womb that gadgets can bring. David Bruni, citing Jonathan Haidt, notes we want more time with people who think like us; the Internet is “designed to give us more of the same, whatever the same is.” Cable TV and the Internet promised to expand our worlds; instead they accelerated our retreat into isolated enclaves. The “return to tribes” and the “return to the womb” both flow from the same source: fear of the future embedded in a capricious present—and both are tributary to the powerful current of “return to Hobbes.”
An Era of Instrumental Crisis
We inhabit an era where everything can happen but nothing can be undertaken with certainty of completion—an era of persistent instrumental crises. Atop the near-divorce between power and politics rises another: institutionalized incapacity and instrumental indolence. Ulrich Beck’s incongruity holds: we have been projected into an advanced cosmopolitan condition while cosmopolitan consciousness has barely advanced beyond initial parturition. Ogburn’s “cultural lag” and Marx’s observation that men make history under circumstances they have not created both apply. We breathe an atmosphere of unease and anxiety; consumer markets offer tranquilizers and antidepressants that blind humans to the real nature of their suffering rather than eradicating its roots.
Integration Through Separation
The story of Homo sapiens is one of successive elevations of social integration. The hunter-gatherer horde capped at about 150 members, limited by food within a day’s walk; agriculture and storage enabled larger groups, and size grew over millennia. With each enlargement the “we” grew, always juxtaposed to “they”—strangers, outsiders, often stereotyped as enemies. Until recently all stable associations shared one mechanism: the dialectic of association and dissociation, unification and separation. Integrating units first had to separate from their “we.”
Huntington’s Question and Francis’s Answer
Huntington’s claim that dividing people into “us” and “them” is more than passing contingency has been largely confirmed by post-Cold War trends. The great question is whether we can resist that temptation—whether a cosmopolitically integrated humanity can be born and survive intact. The most convincing answer comes from Pope Francis, the only major public figure with planetary authority bold enough to pose such questions, in his speech receiving the Charlemagne Prize on 6 May 2016: the answer is the capacity for dialogue. If there is one word we must repeat until weary, it is “dialogue”—promoting a culture of dialogue, an ascesis letting us recognize the other as a valid interlocutor, regarding the foreigner and the emigrant as worthy of being heard. Peace lasts insofar as we arm our children with the weapons of dialogue, bequeathing strategies of life, not death; integration, not exclusion. This culture should cut across all school programs and create coalitions—not only military or economic but cultural, educational, philosophical and religious. No one can be a mere spectator; everyone has an active role.
Nostalgia as a Political Force
Bauman leans on Svetlana Boym’s account of nostalgia as a longing for a lost home that is also a romance with our own fantasy. What began in the sixteenth century as a curable ailment—Swiss doctors prescribed opium, leeches, and a mountain excursion—became, by the twentieth century, an incurable condition. Boym’s diagnosis is an epidemic: a defensive reaction to accelerated life and historical upheaval, and a temptation to surrender critical thought for emotional attachment. Its danger, she warns, is that it confuses the real home with the imagined one, and it flourishes in the restorative nostalgia of nationalist revivals that manufacture antimodern myths and recycle conspiracy theories.
Bauman widens the frame. Nostalgia belongs to a large family of attachments to “another place,” and it has been endemic to the human condition since people discovered that conduct is a matter of free choice. What is new is not the feeling but its scale and its political use. Once politics loses the power to shape the future, it migrates into collective memory, which is far more malleable and therefore more promising for anyone who wants to recover a lost sense of omnipotence. The past’s very obscurity—its multiple interpretations, the impossibility of settling historical quarrels—becomes an advantage for those seeking a defensible trench for their faith.
The Leviathan That No Longer Protects
The book’s first movement asks whether we are returning to Hobbes. Bauman’s answer is yes, but not for the usual reason. The war of all against all has not returned because the Leviathan is absent; it has returned because too many Leviathans—large, small, and tiny—are present and failing at the tasks they were summoned to perform. The modern state’s civilizing mission, in Norbert Elias’s sense, reformed manners rather than impulses. Violence was swept from view and subcontracted to professionals or displaced onto the “impure” below—slaves, serfs, scapegoats, the “untouchables” outside the caste order, the marginalized underclass outside the class system. Erving Goffman’s “civil inattention,” the averted gaze on a sidewalk, keeps the caged animal within from showing itself.
The veneer is thin. Bauman follows Timothy Snyder’s rereading of the Holocaust to insist that few of us would behave well if states collapsed, institutions were corrupted, and incentives pointed toward murder. The extirpation of Mr. Hyde from Dr. Jekyll turns out to be cosmetic surgery, more Dorian Gray than moral reform, needing constant repetition. The right to draw the line between legitimate and illegitimate coercion—the trophy of all power struggles, the prerogative Max Weber made canonical—has become an essentially contested question, and states now sit somewhere between Weber’s ideal type and Snyder’s “failed” state.
From Minefields to Tribes
Violence, in Bauman’s account, is fed by the arms trade and by a reversed instrumental rationality: “I can do it, therefore I want to do it and I do it.” Yuri Lotman’s minefield is the governing metaphor—explosions are certain, their timing and location unknown. Chekhov’s rifle on the wall will be fired; nearly a million light weapons leave factories each year. The media amplify each shot into a global event, and imitation spreads through the dialectic of fashion that Gabriel Tarde and Georg Simmel described, now accelerated by a communication revolution that Elihu Katz and his collaborators re-examined a century after Tarde. Much of the aggression Bauman describes is disinterested—”nothing personal”—born of humiliation and the terror of social degradation, its victims random. Willem Schinkel’s “violence for violence’s sake” releases steam without restoring self-respect, and so tends to amplify itself. The paranoid worldview Umberto Eco gave to Simone Simonini in The Cemetery of Prague—”a fill-in-the-blank form, to each his own plot”—supplies the ready-made enemies.
The return to tribes follows. Michael Walzer predicted that if states became large neighborhoods, neighborhoods would become small states, and Bauman finds the prediction confirmed. Globalization has divorced power from politics; states shrink into porous neighborhoods while former neighborhoods organize to draw borders and separate “us” from “them.” Every difference becomes a claim to superiority, and the either/or excludes compromise. Luc Boltanski’s French neoconservatism—anticapitalist, moralist, xenophobic, obsessed with national identity—is one local variant. Celia de Anca attributes the resurgence to a shift from yearning for independence to yearning for belonging. Anthony D. Smith, Fredrik Barth, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, and Benedict Anderson’s terrain all pass through the argument: nations are not natural kinds but products of boundary-drawing and political choice, and Gellner’s observation that most potential nationalisms never bark is the dog that did not bark.
Inequality and the Broken Promise
The book’s third return is to inequality. Disraeli’s Sybil gave the nineteenth century its “two nations”; John Edwards revived the phrase at the 2004 Democratic convention. The postwar decades made full employment and the war on poverty seem axiomatic across the political spectrum, with the state subsidizing the reproduction of labor so that capital and labor could keep their bargain. That armistice ended when employers unilaterally rescinded the reciprocity, aided by globalization and by the state’s dismantling of restraints on capital.
Bauman’s analysis of grievance here is subtle. Relative deprivation, as Robert Merton, Walter Runciman, and Barrington Moore studied it, is a feeling, not an objective measure; Tocqueville noticed that discontent peaked where conditions improved most. James Davies’s J-curve explains revolutions of rising expectations. Yet Bauman doubts that our condition is revolutionary in Lenin’s sense. In a deregulated, individualized society, alliances are ad hoc and fleeting, and solidarity—Paul Verhaeghe’s costly luxury—has been devalued. Displaced aggression and a diffuse fear of the “other” replace collective action.
What Remains of the Welfare Promise
Against this, Bauman sets the debate over basic income. Daniel Raventós and the Basic Income Earth Network defend an unconditional payment to individuals, independent of other income and of willingness to work—principles that break with means-tested welfare and workfare. The lineage runs back to William Beveridge’s 1942 report and its five giant evils: misery, ignorance, need, idleness, and disease. Freedom, Beveridge understood, needs material conditions. Paul Mason adds that automation may make work itself disappear; Oxford’s Martin School and the McKinsey Global Institute supply the numbers. Bauman contrasts the philosophy of universalism, which treats income as an inalienable right, with the targeting of the “most needy,” which returns society to the Victorian poorhouse and its stigma. Rutger Bregman’s evidence that unconditional money pays for itself is noted, though Bauman treats the prospect of its adoption as remote.
The Angel’s Choice
The book closes with an epilogue whose title, “Looking Forward, for a Change,” states its wager. Bauman does not promise that the storm will reverse again. He asks instead whether the angel might choose to fold its wings. The past cannot be reassembled from rubble, and the retrotopian comfort zone is built on a home that never existed. What the book leaves its reader with is the recognition that the direction of the wind is not a law of nature but a consequence of human choices—and that choices, however constrained, remain choices.
