Society under Siege (PDF)

Society is under siege - under attack on two fronts: from the
global frontier-land where old structures and rules do not hold and
new ones are slow to take shape, and from the fluid, undefined
domain of life politics. The space between these two fronts, until
recently ruled by the sovereign nation-state and identified by
social scientists as 'society' is ever more difficult to
conceive of as a self-enclosed entity. And this confronts the
established wisdom of the social sciences with a new challenge:
sovereignty and power are becoming separated from the politics of
the territorial nation-state but are not becoming institutionalized
in a new space. What are the consequences of this profound
transformation of social life? What kind of world will it create
for the twenty-first century?

This remarkable book - by one of the most original social
thinkers writing today - attempts to trace this
transformation and to assess its consequences for the life
conditions of ordinary individuals. The first part of the book is
devoted to the new global arena in which, thanks to the powerful
forces of globalization, there is no 'outside', no secluded place
to which one can retreat and hide away, and where the territorial
wars of the past have given way to a new breed of 'reconnaissance
wars'. The second part deals with settings in which life politics
has taken hold and flourished. Bauman argues that the great
challenge facing us today is whether we can find new ways to
reforge the human diversity that is our fate into the vocation of
human solidarity.