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Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Themes for the 21st Century Series)

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In this book, Zygmunt Bauman successfully transcends the schematic dichotomy of Communitarianism vs Libertarianism which is still haunting many scholars. He refocuses our understanding of community onto the current social conditions characterized by globalization and localization or in Bauman's words, ghettoization.

Although Bauman borrows researches and theories from others and his own former works to discuss this issue, he shows his originality by linking up the classical debate of community with his analysis of (post)modernity and the current social condition. He convincingly argues that modernization does not only dissolve all kinds of traditional communities, but also attempts to re-integrate all people into a wide variety of rational systems, such as industrial organization, school, urban society, etc.. The experience of modernity is a great transformation as well as a "great engagement". However, the failure of this modernity project leads to further intensification of the dilemma of security and freedom. The contemporary ghettoization, the massive obsession with local communities is a symptom or an aftereffect of this failure.

For Bauman, a "ghetto" is not a "community" at all; instead, it signifies the impossibility of community, i.e. another example of the failure of modernity project. It is evident that his analysis of contemporary community echoes his former discussions on postmodernity.

Bauman, although criticizes severely the notion of "multiculturalism" and communitarianism, he encourages us to have a new reflection upon community and hold the faith in cross-cultural dialogues. Readers might feel disappointed by the lack of a clear solution but Bauman still provides some directions for us to go beyond the current predicament.