Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman was a Polish-British sociologist best known for his theory of liquid modernity, which described the contemporary social world as characterized by constant flux, instability, and the erosion of the stable structures, such as class, community, and lifelong employment, that had earlier given people fixed reference points for identity and life planning. In Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) he argued that the Holocaust was not an aberration from modern civilization but a possibility rooted in modernity's own bureaucratic rationality and capacity for instrumental, morally detached administration. His later work extended the liquid modernity framework to consumer culture, love, fear, and globalization.