Emotions and Society • vol 1 • no 1 • 99–116

© Bristol University Press 2019 • Print ISSN 2631-6897 • Online ISSN 2631-6900
https://doi.org/10.1332/263168919X15580836411878

ARTICLE

Liquid-modern emotions: exploring

Zygmunt Bauman’s contribution to the
sociology of emotions
Michael Hviid Jacobsen, [email protected]
Aalborg University, Denmark

This article argues, by way of example, that the work of Zygmunt Bauman may provide an
important source of inspiration for the so-called ‘sociology of emotions’, even though his
extensive work on emotions so far has remained largely unacknowledged within the sociology
of emotions as well as within ‘Bauman studies’. In the article, the author first presents Bauman’s
main ideas on the emotions of suffering, ambivalence, freedom, compassion/morality, love,
fear and retrotopia/nostalgia, before engaging in a critical discussion of the problems and
potentials of his work.

Key words Zygmunt Bauman • sociology of emotions • suffering • ambivalence • freedom •

compassion/morality • love • fear • retrotopia/nostalgia

To cite this article: Jacobsen, M. (2019) Liquid-modern emotions: exploring Zygmunt

Bauman’s contribution to the sociology of emotions, Emotions and Society, vol 1 no 1,
99–116, DOI: 10.1332/263168919X15580836411878

Introduction
Zygmunt Bauman is widely regarded as one of the key sociologists and social thinkers
of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. His writings – especially on the Holocaust,
the changing role of intellectuals, postmodernity, globalisation and liquid modernity –
are already now standard references within a number of social science disciplines. By
the time of his death in 2017, Bauman was recognised as one of the most prolific and
original sociologists, and several books have been published in past decades testifying
to, honouring and critically acclaiming the importance of his contribution (see,
for example, Smith, 1999; Beilharz, 2000; Tester, 2004; Jacobsen and Poder, 2008;
Davis and Tester, 2010; Best, 2013; Jacobsen, 2016a; Rattansi, 2017). In Bauman’s
work, spanning almost six decades of writing and more than 40 books published
in English as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters, one will find
incisive analyses of a number of different topics such as the working class, culture,
critique, socialism, strangers, politics, consumerism, education, management, the

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welfare state, inequality, globalisation, individualisation, identity, community, death,

modernity, religion, immortality, postmodernity, liquid modernity, morality, utopia
and last but not least numerous emotions. Despite this, the writings of Bauman are
generally not counted among the main contributions to the so-called sub-discipline
of ‘the sociology of emotions’. In fact, Bauman’s work is most often regarded as a
contribution to the field of general social theory or to the development of a critical
diagnosis of the times. His work is particularly regarded as that of a staunch critic of
the solid-modern totalitarian tendency (as exemplified by the Holocaust) and later
also of the anti-social consequences of liquid-modern consumerism. However, if
one looks more targeted at specific parts of Bauman’s work, one will discover that
the topic of emotions – and much more so than in the writings of many other key
contemporary social thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, Niklas
Luhmann, Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck – has in fact been a recurring concern
for Bauman at least since the late 1980s and perhaps particularly since his ‘liquid-
modern turn’ (Bauman, 2000) in the new millennium. Despite this fact, within
so-called ‘Bauman studies’ – devoted to dissecting and critically discussing Bauman’s
writings – there has only been a limited interest in his specific contribution to the
study of emotions in itself. So neither within the sociology of emotions nor within
Bauman studies has his contribution to a sociological understanding of emotions so
far been sufficiently recognised. This article will seek to rectify this by exploring and
critically discussing Bauman’s work on emotions and particularly on some of the
social pathologies of emotional life in liquid-modern society.
Surprisingly, it is not often that scholars working with the field of emotions actually
refer to the work of Bauman as a key source of inspiration. One reason for this neglect
may be that for most incarnated sociologists of emotions, Bauman is simply not the
most obvious place to start out when theorising or researching emotions. This may
in turn be due to the fact that’the sociology of emotions for a long time was a very
Americanised field of research (with key contributors such as Arlie R. Hochschild,
Theodore D. Kemper, Norman K. Denzin, Peggy Thoits, David R. Heise, Lynn
Smith-Lovin, Randall Collins and Candace Clark), and since the reception and
recognition of Bauman’s work has been somewhat belated in the US as compared
to the European continent, many US sociologists working on emotions have not yet
discovered the full potential of his work. One US sociologist put the reason for this
poignantly in an obituary on Bauman, stating that ‘American social science doesn’t
have much room for thinkers like Mr. Bauman. Our leading researchers prefer the
concrete to the abstract, the causal claim you can rigorously test to the flowery
theoretical description you can’t’ (Gross, 2017). Adding to this situation, as mentioned,
it is not often that scholars who concentrate on analysing and interpreting Bauman’s
work will focus on the emotions as a specific aspect of his writings. There are some
recent exceptions; however, they neither cover the bountiful variety nor dig very
deep into the layers of Bauman’s interest in emotions. For example, by following
Bauman’s lead some have critically discussed the role of consumer freedom as an
integration mechanism in liquid-modern society (see Poder, 2008); others have
dwelled on the emotional and sensitive dimensions in Bauman’s innovative use of
scientific metaphors (see Cosmovici, 2016); yet others have engaged in a comparison
of Bauman’s notion of happiness with that of Sigmund Freud’s (McKenzie, 2016);
and finally others – by drawing on Sara Ahmed and Charles Taylor – have criticized
Bauman’s sociology of morality (and the figure of the ‘moral saint’) for lacking an

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understanding of embodied emotional relations and for overlooking the importance

of authenticity (see Hookway, 2017). Despite these noteworthy and mostly recent
exceptions, the bulk of Bauman’s emotionally oriented work has remained largely
unrecognised and thus unanalysed as a potentially important treasure trove for our
sociological understanding of emotions and society. In this article, we shall not look
at how Bauman’s ideas on emotions can be used for specific empirical or analytical
purposes, but rather explore and assess his overall contribution to the sociological
study of emotions.
Looking through Bauman’s extraordinarily extensive list of published work, one
will come across many pieces – entire books, books chapters or journal articles – that
directly deal with a variety of emotions, and which are coupled to his concern with
more encompassing sociological topics such as modernity, inequality, morality and
social transformation. Sometimes, a specific emotion is at the centre of attention as in
his book on freedom (1988), the book on ambivalence (1991), a book on love (2003),
another book devoted to fear (2006) and one of his last pieces of work concerned with
the rise of retrotopia/nostalgia (2017). These are indeed some of the published pieces
that should warrant our recognition of Bauman as a social thinker who provides a
well-developed and interesting perspective on emotions in social life. At other times,
emotions such as suffering and compassion seem to run as ubiquitous undercurrents
throughout the overall authorship. In either case, it is evident that Bauman in his
work treats emotions seriously as important thematic concerns and analytical tools
for understanding and interpreting contemporary society.
In this article, we shall, one by one, briefly delve into some of the emotions dealt
with by Zygmunt Bauman in his writings such as suffering, freedom, ambivalence,
compassion/morality, love, fear and retrotopia/nostalgia. Through this presentation,
we will try to tease out the quite unique way in which he looks at these emotions and
then, towards the end, critically discuss and assess what the purpose and potential of
his analysis of these particular emotions seems to be within the broader framework
of his sociology and not least for the sociology of emotions.

Suffering
One preoccupation of Bauman’s, which can be traced both directly and indirectly
through his writings, is the topic of suffering. Throughout his work, Bauman has
remained a champion of the weak, the poor, the marginalised and those who are
treated inhumanely. Bauman’s specific focus on suffering, however, has also changed
over the years. As he revealed in an interview, in his early years – in books such
as Between Class and Elite (1972) and Memories of Class (1982) – he was concerned
with studying ‘the working class, standing for the downtrodden or the underdog,
for suffering in general. For a long time there was the sign of identity between the
two: the working class as the embodiment of suffering’ (Bauman in Kilminster and
Varcoe, 1992: 206). Because Bauman was trained in Marxist social theory during his
formative years in Polish sociology, his early thematic concerns were very much in
line with conventional Marxist theorising: class, elite, exploitation, alienation, the
critique of capitalism and so on. Later on, his interest in suffering gradually shifted as
he began to look at the suffering experienced by other specific groups and particularly
as he came to rely on the work of Emmanuel Lévinas (Bauman, 1993), who provided
him with an ethical framework for understanding suffering as a much more generic

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and less class-based experience. So suffering as a trademark theme has been there all
along, at times conspicuously present, at others hiding somewhere between the lines.
In Bauman’s books one will therefore find many different depictions of man’s
inhumanity to man whether in concentration camps or as part of neoliberal politics.
Sometimes this suffering has an identifiable social sender, at other times seemingly
more anonymous and amorphous social forces seem to be at work such as globalisation
and individualisation. There are thus many specific as well as general faces of suffering
appearing throughout his work: the working class in capitalist society, the Jews in
concentration camps, strangers, refugees, the ‘new poor’ and ‘flawed consumers’
and all the ‘vagabonds’ and the human ‘waste’ of contemporary liquid-modern life
( Jacobsen and Marshman, 2008b). Although Bauman most often treats suffering as
a social or collective phenomenon (and thus depicts different groups of sufferers),
he nevertheless still quotes Ludwig Wittgenstein’s insistence that ‘no torment can be
greater than what a single human being may suffer … The whole planet can suffer
no greater torment than a single soul’ (Wittgenstein in Bauman, 2001a: 210, original
italics).
Although suffering is thus a recurring and important theme in Bauman’s writings,
it is seldom that he specifies how it actually feels to suffer or what the experience of
suffering does to people. Suffering often seems like an abstract normative notion
(calling for moral indignation and action) rather than an embodied emotion. Instead,
in his portrayal of suffering Bauman describes the many social processes leading to
experiences of suffering such as, for example, ‘adiaphorization’ that refers to the
emptying of action of their moral implications and thus to the cutting of the chain
leading from causes to actions to consequences (Bauman, 1989, 1995). In this way,
Bauman’s focus on suffering provides food for thought for those who remain happily
unaware or unconcerned with the actual state of the world. His work is concerned
with showing us – all of us, but perhaps sociologists most of all – that we need to
orient ourselves to the reality and to the alleviation of suffering. As he once stated:

The price of silence is paid in the hard currency of human suffering. Asking
the right questions makes, after all, all the difference between fate and
destination, drifting and travelling. Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable
premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of the services we
owe our fellow humans and ourselves. (Bauman, 1998a: 5)

In this way, the topic of human suffering runs throughout Bauman’s work as a
thick stream of moral and sociological indignation triggering questions of how we
want to live with each other. He uses human suffering in all its different shapes and
guises as a mirror to hold up to his readers in order to make them realise that there
is something wrong in the world and that they can act in order to make it a better
place if they want. We shall return to this point later when discussing the emotion
of compassion/morality.

Freedom
By the late 1980s, the topic of freedom loomed large within political discourse
with the eyes of politicians and everyone else firmly fixed on the emerging cracks
in the Berlin Wall and hoping that the Cold War was coming to an imminent end.

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However, within sociology, freedom in itself was not a topic of particular interest.
It was rather something mostly left to philosophers or political scientists. Bauman,
however, published a small book in 1988 devoted to the theme of freedom. The
book teases out the contours of a theory on how we can understand the concern (or
obsession) with freedom in the West as the culmination of a development spanning
several centuries. One can obviously ask the following two questions: is freedom an
emotion at all? And is freedom simply, as suggested in a well-known song by Janis
Joplin, just another word for nothing left to lose?
To answer the first question: the experience of freedom (or unfreedom for that
matter) most certainly is an emotion – even though we, according to Bauman, only
start to contemplate it when we feel that our experience of freedom is somehow being
threatened. As he sees it, freedom is nowadays like the air we breathe and thus by
default take for granted ‘unless we are in a crowded, stuffy room and find breathing
difficult’ (Bauman, 1988: 1). Unfreedom is what we feel when our options are
blocked or when our actions are limited. Freedom has in a historically unprecedented
manner, at least in contemporary Western society, become an experience, a right
and a must-have privilege that most people expect of life. In the book, Bauman
conducts a historical and conceptual analysis of the sociogenesis of freedom in the
West by documenting how our current understanding of freedom is closely linked
to the rise and consolidation of institutions such as modern capitalism and liberal
democracy (and the concomitant decline in the power of the church and the feudal
system). In this way, Bauman shows that far from being a universal human experience
or one that is taken for granted, freedom as we know it is in fact a relatively recent
invention and the outcome of many historical struggles and social transformations.
Answering the second question is a bit more difficult. Bauman states that freedom,
rather than being the prize possession or property of an individual, is in fact the
expression of a social relation between two or more parties. Conventionally within
political philosophy an important distinction has been made between ‘negative’
and ‘positive’ conceptions of freedom, in which the former spells out one’s freedom
from external constraint and the latter one’s freedom to realise one’s potential (see,
for example, Berlin, 1969). Bauman’s book appears to bridge the traditional chasm
between these two seemingly oppositional positions by proposing a third stance:
a relational theory of freedom in which one person’s freedom is dependent on
another’s relative unfreedom. As he observes, freedom ‘is a quality pertaining to a
certain difference between individuals … it makes sense only as an opposition to
some other condition, past or present’ (Bauman, 1988: 7). From this follows that the
experience of freedom is closely linked to one’s position in a given social hierarchy
and that freedom expresses a differentiation of statuses. Bauman evoke the image
of the panopticon of Jeremy Bentham/Michel Foucault in order to explain how
freedom is in fact a structural relationship existing between different and asymmetrical
yet interdependent groups/positions (such as inmates, inspectors, head keepers and
contractors) within a given social figuration (such as a prison). For one to be free, as
he states, there needs to be at least two, and thus ‘the unfreedom of one part makes
the freedom of another possible’ (Bauman, 1988: 19).
Whether one is convinced by Bauman’s ‘relational theory of freedom’ or not is
obviously a matter of conviction, but he uses his analysis of the rise of freedom in
the modern era as a platform for showing how freedom is always a differentiated
and contested experience. He also points out how freedom increasingly has been

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confused with ‘consumer freedom’ as most people nowadays regard themselves and
are interpellated by society as consumers. His book also critically discusses how the
strong grip of disciplinary social control, at least for most groups, can now be loosened
as long as the machine of consumer freedom runs unobstructed. This also means,
however, that some – the so-called ‘flawed consumers’ – needs to be kept on a short
leash. As was also the case with suffering, as we saw earlier, Bauman does not really
describe what freedom actually feels like as an embodied emotional experience. Even
though Bauman in the book insists that freedom is about ‘feeling free’ (or ‘feeling
unfree’ for that matter), he does not provide the reader with empirical examples of
how this feeling (or emotion) is subjectively felt in everyday situations. Throughout
his book, freedom thus remains a rather abstract phenomenon, but at least he tries
to tease our the social aspects of what has too often been regarded primarily as a
research concern for political scientists and he insists that sociologists have something
important to say about freedom that cannot only be reduced simply to questions of
formal rights or democratic institutions. De jure and de facto are rarely the same. In
this way, Bauman’s book can be seen as a battering ram for breaking down the barriers
to a sociological appreciation of freedom, even though freedom as an emotion – here
three decades after its publication – empirically is still a relatively unexplored topic
even within the sociology of emotions, perhaps because we, as Bauman already back
then insisted, seem to take it for granted?

Ambivalence
According to Bauman, the modern mind was haunted by an incessant fear of
ambivalence – the fact that most phenomena are inherently ambiguous and can
thus be placed into many different boxes and categories. This fear of ambivalence,
in many ways quite similar to Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s ([1944]
2002) insistence that modern society feared ‘the outside’, constitutes an important
cornerstone in Bauman’s critique of the ordering mentality and ordering obsession of
what he later came to call ‘solid modernity’. Ambivalence is not a much-researched
emotion in sociology, and even though some theoretical and empirical studies do
exist (see, for example, Weigert, 1991; Wegar, 1992), the feeling of ambivalence is
still a somewhat overlooked topic. Ambivalence is often defined as a ‘mixed emotion’
that contains mutually conflicting feelings (Weigert, 1991). However, this is not the
way Bauman seems to use the term. Even though ambivalence is indeed an emotion,
Bauman in his early 1990s writings treats it in a quite unemotional manner. In
Bauman’s work, ambivalence is not described as an emotion that someone actually
feels, but rather it is an abstract kind of ‘meta-emotion’, a structural and political
attribution around which modern society as such was organised (together with the
concomitant notion of ‘order’) and a label attached to all that which did not fit the
predefined binary categories and clear-cut taxonomies around which this society
revolved.
In Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), Bauman shows how the fight against
ambivalence has been an important leitmotif in the modern ‘gardening state’s’
determination to design an artificial order by wiping out all the weed and, in Mary
Douglas’s memorable words (Douglas, 1966), doing away with the ‘dirt’ and ‘matter
out of place’. Everything that seems different, strange, residual or otherwise defying
existing categories becomes the target of such ordering and structuring activities

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aimed at creating nothing but purity, clarity and predictability. Every attempt to
classify, however, implies an excluded third category – those who fall outside the
schema of classification and are thus deemed ambivalent and dangerous. Cultivation,
classification and assimilation were some of the preferred strategies for imposing order
on an inherently disorderly world. Jews were, for example, seen as a prominent case of
such ambivalence, because they were neither Christians nor non-Christians, neither
friends nor enemies, and hence their fate – for many complex historical reasons – was
thus sealed in the Holocaust atrocities (Bauman, 1989). By annihilating ambivalence,
modern society thought it could control the course of human history and create a
human-made utopia on earth. There was, however, a snag to all of this. Just as the
Enlightenment project, in Horkheimer and Adorno’s ([1944] 2002) rendition, in its
fight against ancient superstitions and irrational myths, itself ended up as mythical,
in Bauman’s understanding modernity’s ceaseless fight against ambivalence also turns
out to be futile and self-defeating, because the very attempt to avoid or annihilate
ambivalence instead brings ever more ambivalent phenomena into the world.
Paradoxically, order thus creates the optimal conditions for the existence of disorder,
since ambivalence is itself the by-product of any order-production and order thus
simply cannot live without ambivalence (Bauman, 1991: 14–15).
The notion of ambivalence is clearly something positive to Bauman, something
that defies the predictability, necessity and transparency of modern social life with its
inherent totalitarian tendency. By the time he was writing Modernity and Ambivalence,
Bauman thus seemed hopeful that with the coming of postmodernity ambivalence
would no longer be seen as an adversary and that we would eventually learn to live
with and embrace ambivalence (Bauman, 1992a). However, as his subsequent writings
would show, this has not been the case.

Compassion/morality
Throughout his career, Bauman has been the champion or incarnation of what could
simultaneously be described as a ‘sociologist of morality’ and a ‘moral sociology’. In
his writings, he developed an alternative sociological account of morality than that
found, for example, in the work of Émile Durkheim or most deontological theories
(Bauman, 1989), and his texts ooze of a moral sentiment that clearly show how
humanism and compassion have remained signatures of his sociological theorising.
Even though Bauman seldom invokes the specific notion or emotion of ‘compassion’
in his writings, it is nevertheless always there – like suffering mentioned before –
somewhere between the lines or under the general name of ‘morality’.
Unfolding Bauman’s moral sociology here would require much more space, so here
we shall only look at some of its most significant features. Bauman’s ‘postmodern
turn’ (Bauman, 1992a) in the early 1990s inaugurated a specific interest in morality as
developed most comprehensively and systematically in Postmodern Ethics (1993). Here
he proposed a separation between ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’, the former referring to the
formal laws, procedural rules and regulations that govern people’s lives, whereas the
latter, to Bauman, is a socially pre-existing impulse in humans that cannot be reduced
to judicial paragraphs or iron-clad clauses. It is, for all practical intents and purposes,
unarticulated and non-formalised. Elsewhere in his work, based on a rereading of
the ancient Biblical stories, Bauman makes it clear that to him the actual origin of
such an understanding of morality should be located in the story of the expulsion

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of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden rather than in the story of God giving
to Moses the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. The latter story provides the
foundation for a ‘morality of conformity’ rather than the former story’s suggestion
for a ‘morality of choice’ (Bauman, 1998b). Bauman’s work, heavily inspired as it
was by the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas, thus sketches the foundation for
what is called a ‘morality of proximity’ that based on the ideal of the Good Samaritan
shows us how we are always unconditionally morally responsible for the well-being
of the Other (particularly the weak, powerless and voiceless Other), and so ‘being-
for-the-Other’ takes precedence over merely ‘being-with-the-Other’. His answer to
the question ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ has therefore always been a resounding
‘yes’. Contrary to Levinas’s Judaeo-Christian ethics, to Bauman this is rather seen
as a secular kind of saintliness that boils down to the willingness to sacrifice oneself
and ultimately to die for another human being (Bauman, 1992b: 210). In short,
compassion without commitment is useless. Although Bauman did also consider
the possibility of a transfer of responsibility from the realm of moral (and physical)
proximity to the abstract realm of politics (see, for example, Bauman, 1999b), his
morality of proximity remains a micro-emotion reserved merely for the, in his own
words, ‘transindividual universe of two’ rather than a macro-emotion that would
work on a large-scale scene.
Obviously, within the context of this article we should ask if Bauman’s idea of
compassion/morality really qualifies as an emotion. A lot has been written about
so-called ‘moral emotions’ such as guilt, anger, shame or sympathy, showing how
people commit themselves to moral codes, social structures or to others (see, for
example, Turner and Stets, 2006). As mentioned, Bauman’s understanding of
compassion/morality is neither codified nor institutionalised and thus it may seem
rather emotionally ethereal. However, in his description of how it actually feels to
be a moral person, he hits the nail on the head when insisting that ‘one recognizes
morality by its gnawing sense of unfulfilledness, by its endemic dissatisfaction with
itself. The moral self is a self always haunted by the suspicion that it is not moral enough’
(Bauman, 1993: 80, original italics). It is Bauman’s contention that in liquid-modern
society, the loss of sensitivity towards the plight and suffering of others has decreased
and that an unmistakable ‘moral blindness’ has spread throughout society (Bauman
and Donskis, 2013).

Love
We normally and almost intuitively associate love with something positive – something
good, desirable and genuine. However, everybody who studies emotions is also fairly
familiar with the many trials and tribulations of love in contemporary society. Just
think of Eva Illouz’s (2007) critical work on the cool and calculated intimacy of
contemporary ‘emotional capitalism’ or Emma Engdahl’s (2018) more recent rendition
of ‘depressive love’. Love is also an emotion dealt with in some detail by Bauman. In
Liquid Love (2003), he examined some of the many problems confronting love life
that were triggered by, for instance, the availability and popularity of internet portals
for ‘quick-and-dirty’ yet emotionally inconsequential dating encounters. Contrary
to such ‘virtual relationships’, ‘real relationships’ of the old-fashioned kind are time-
consuming, tedious and potentially dangerous – they require effort and engagement.
In Bauman’s view, the reality of love in liquid modernity thus seems to be as light

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and liquid as everything else – no strings attached, only until further notice, always
on the move. He speaks of the rise of so-called ‘top pocket relationships’, which –
contrary to the essential positivity of the ‘pure relationship’ of Anthony Giddens –
are more seen as a kind of utilitarian use-and-throw-away experience aimed only
at instant satisfaction but no lasting or binding commitment. In such relationships,
other people are seen merely as ‘objects of consumption’ and evaluated solely in ‘value
for money’ terms. ‘Like Ribena’, Bauman thus sarcastically warns, liquid-modern
‘relations should be diluted when consumed’ (Bauman, 2003: x), or otherwise the
emotional elixir simply becomes too strong to take.
Bauman’s critical analysis thus points out how also love has now become intricately
interwoven with consumer culture and the demands for quickly digestible and
superficial experiences. Any understanding of romantic love as a lasting ‘till death
do us part’ engagement is increasingly unimaginable and statistically destined to be
proven wrong in liquid-modern society. All the main qualities of ‘genuine’ love,
such as commitment, transcendence, humility, courage, uncertainty, dependency and
sacrifice, have lost most of their allure in contemporary society. Any engagement in
the game of love that is not seen as personally (and preferably immediately) profitable
is deemed a bad investment. Then better to seek the safety in numbers (of partners)
than being sorry for what was perhaps never found anyway. As Bauman observes:

Rather than more people rising to the high standards of love on more
occasions, the standards have been lowered; as a result the set of experiences
referred to by the love word has expanded enormously. One-night stands
are talked about under the name of ‘making love’. (Bauman, 2003: 5)

This short-term and deeply diluted character of love in contemporary society, and
the substitution of romantic love ideals (flawed as they perhaps were) with quick-fix
consumerist ideas, also has negative consequences for the larger scale kinds of love
called solidarity and charity – the care, compassion and moral concern for the millions
of anonymous others, as mentioned above. The liquid-modern world’s preoccupation
with consumption and instant gratification conspires against our genuine concern
with the suffering Other, which is now as short-lived and shallow as our one-night
stands. Bauman decries this development and concludes that ‘human solidarity is
the first casualty of the triumphs of the consumer market’ (Bauman, 2003: 76). His
book on love is thus a critical commentary on the actual state of affairs of perhaps
one of the most important emotions in human life.

Fear
Bauman’s contribution to the analysis of the emotion of fear (and with it also
emotions such as uncertainty and anxiety) is very much located within what can
be called the ‘culture of fear thesis’ expounded by, for example, Barry Glassner,
Frank Furedi, Dan Gardner, Iain Wilkinson and others. The main concern of this
thesis – which has gained widespread support in sociology circles, particularly from
the late 1990s and onwards – is to show how fear has become a central feeling in
contemporary society, to locate the causes behind this development and to sketch
out some of the (primarily negative) consequences. Bauman’s contribution, like that
of the aforementioned scholars, is thus to provide a critical analysis of the spreading,

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the political manipulation and the anti-social consequences of fear in liquid-modern

society. As he once observed on the roots of this culture of fear:

We are frightened and confused: confused because frightened and frightened

because confused. Just below the ground we walk upon, there seems to be
a thick seam of boiling fears which burst, with growing frequency, through
the thin crust of daily routine to smother or incinerate everything in the
vincinity. There is no telling where and when the next eruption will occur.
(Bauman, 1996: 21)

As Bauman suggests, fear is almost in and by itself a social force that seems to be feeding
on widespread feelings of confusion and erupting with ever smaller intervals, in its
wake drawing a stream of social discomfort, unease and antagonism. Even though
he stresses the unpredictability of the eruptions of fear (or what might also be called
‘moral panics’), it is obvious that fear is here to stay and is now an endemic feature of
liquid-modern life. In his work, Bauman never ventures into describing the emotion
of fear more specifically, but he tries to specify fear by using the German notion of
Unsicherheit and thus shows how there are many different components involved in the
rise of the culture of fear. The reason why Bauman invokes the notion of Unsicherheit
is that it embodies three different yet closely interrelated experiences characteristic of
liquid modernity. First, it refers to ‘insecurity’, which captures the fear of bodily harm
and pain as for example through disease, violent crime or terrorism. Bauman insists
that politics today transforms all social problems into issues of insecurity. Second, it
relates to feelings of ‘uncertainty’ and the general sense of apprehension that underpins
a society in which the loss of grand teleological narratives makes life devoid of any
direction and purpose. Third, it links to ‘unpredictability’ and the fact that liquid-
modern society, contrary to its solid-modern predecessor, seems to be uncontrollable,
unplannable and without any identifiable captain on the bridge to steer the vessel
clear of the uncharted reefs ahead. So Unsicherheit is a kind of three-headed spectre
of fearfulness that is spreading in contemporary society, which is further fuelled by
the lack of political responsibility for social development (Bauman, 1999a).
Bauman’s most solid and comprehensive contribution to understanding fear is
found in the monograph Liquid Fear (2006). Here he provides an in-depth analysis
of fear in contemporary society and suggests ways of how to potentially tame this
all-pervasive fearfulness. As Bauman shows, fear nowadays has a strong grip on us,
primarily because we are constantly told to be fearful: the fear of crime, of natural
disasters, of environmental collapse, of cancer and other deadly diseases, of strangers,
of immigrants, of life itself. As Bauman states: ‘A whole life is now a long and probably
unwinnable struggle against the potentially incapacitating impact of fears, and against
the genuine or putative dangers that make us fearful’ (Bauman, 2006: 8, original
italics). Moreover, playing on fear seems to permeate political discourses as well as
commercial strategies in an unprecedented manner in order to scare voters and to
seduce consumers. In general, Bauman’s work on fear can be regarded as a macro-
perspective that first and foremost focus on the complex set of social causes, processes
and outcomes that each in their turn serve to make fear an almost self-fulfilling and
self-propelling phenomenon (see, for example, Tudor, 2003). However, even though
Bauman primarily remains on the macro-social level in his analysis of fear, in other
parts of his work he is also prying into how this liquid-modern culture of fear affects

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the personal and individual feelings of meaningless, existential anxiety and the deep-
seated fear of death that is so characteristic of contemporary society (see, for example,
Bauman, 1992b, 2006: 22–53).

Happiness
Happiness is an emotion that is seemingly difficult to say anything negative about,
because who can really have anything against happy people? In contemporary
society, we even measure happiness and publish annual happiness indexes and happy
planet indexes that seemingly makes it possible cumulatively to compare the level of
happiness across countries. In a time when happiness studies has become a scholarly
discipline, happiness is now measured, compared and used, often by way of survey
data, as an important indicator of quality of life (see, for example, Veenhoven, 1999).
Obviously, this is not Bauman’s take on happiness. He has even stated that ‘all attempts
to compare degrees of happiness experienced by people living in spatially or temporally
separate ways of life can only be misconceived and ultimately idle’ (Bauman, 2007:
43). Although Bauman admits that happiness is an individual and fleeting phenomenon
(and thus not a ‘social fact’), he still believes that sociology can study it as such a fact,
because the pursuit of happiness – the many different ways in which people through
their actions strive to obtain happiness and avoid unhappiness (in other words, ‘the
selection of objects on which that pursuit is targeted and whose appropriation/
consumption is expected to be and consequently experienced/described as the
moment of happiness’ – Jacobsen, 2014: 87–8) – indeed approximates a social fact
that can thus be described and analysed.
In his scattered writings and reflections on happiness, as for example found in
The Art of Life (2008), Bauman provides a critical reflection on how happiness – like
love – is now increasingly being circumscribed by a consumerist ideology luring
people into thinking or hoping that happiness can be achieved through the pursuit
of materialistic pleasures and sensations. Historically, this is in fact quite a relatively
recent invention. To ancient philosophers such as Seneca, happiness could not be
achieved by the pursuit of such short-lived earthly pleasures – a state of happiness
could be reached only by stoically contemplating the shortness of earthly life, by
believing in an eternal and immortal existence and thus living without the fear of
death. According to Bauman, this contemplative approach to a happy life (and to
death) is not in high demand these days. Rather, it seems as if there has been an
explosion in demands for living happy lives and that what was previously a privilege
reserved only for the chosen few (that is, contemplative philosophers) is now a right
expected by everybody – the very purpose of life now being happiness. Thus, the
roads leading to happiness are nowadays overcrowded with consumers believing that
by buying this or that item, by satisfying this or that need or by parading this or that
product, at least a momentary glimpse of happiness may be experienced. Building up
and satisfying desire is the name of the game. In liquid-modern society, happiness,
however, is not about ‘owning’ or ‘having’ things, but about ‘using’ and ‘consuming’
them and thereby ‘detaching’ ourselves from them again. All objects – non-human
as well as human – are now assessed only by their use-value in our constant quest
for however short-lived moments of happiness (Bauman, 2001b).
At the end of the day, the uncritical equation of happiness with increases in the
GNP (gross national product) index, economic growth, shopping opportunities and

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material acquisition – according to Bauman so prevalent in liquid-modern society

– is all but futile, as more always wants more, and thus achieving a ‘state of happiness’
has now been substituted for the endless ‘pursuit of happiness’ that may last a lifetime
(Bauman, 2008: 9). We thus need to keep the hope of, at some point in time, achieving
happiness constantly alive. The classic notion of the so-called ‘happy consciousness’,
that was described by many critical theorists writing in the previous centuries (in
fact, as far back as to Hegel), testified to the alienated hollowness of modern capitalist
society with its mass culture and conformist personality type. C. Wright Mills (1959)
famously called the people populating this society ‘cheerful robots’, because they
did not ask critical questions and remained happily unconcerned with the towering
problems facing society. In Bauman’s analysis of the pursuit for happiness in liquid
modernity, it seems as if not much has really changed since the mid-20th century.
According to Bauman, the quest for happiness becomes a loyal supporter of what
he calls the ‘TINA syndrome’ spelling out that There Is No Alternative and that the
status quo is preferable to change. In this way, the pursuit of happiness consumer-
style becomes an obstacle to contemplating and realising that the world might be
different from what it currently is.

Nostalgia/retrotopia
For many years a largely overlooked emotion, nostalgia, has throughout the past
few decades started to attract the attention of scholars working in sociology, political
science, history, psychology and business studies. Even though the sociological
literature is rather sparse (with Davis, 1979, still being one of the main references),
there seems to be a renewed interest in understanding the emotional pushes and pulls
of contemporary nostalgic sentiments. As interpreters of Bauman’s work have routinely
pointed out, the topic of utopia has been a continuous presence in his writings since
the early 1970s (see, for example, Jacobsen, 2004). In particular, Bauman’s book
Socialism: The Active Utopia (1976) bears witness to his strong commitment to utopian
ideas. Utopia is for Bauman a harbinger of hope – of the Blochian not-yet that may
come into being. Utopia looks to the future, which was also why modern society
with its ‘social engineering’ and ‘gardening culture’ rested on solid utopian pillars.
Contrary to this, nostalgia is backward-looking, searching for that which was
apparently lost on the way. In one of the last books prepared by Bauman before his
death – Retrotopia (2017) – he once again returns to utopia, but now looks at it in
a rather inverted way through the lens of the liquid-modern revival of nostalgia. In
the book, Bauman thus speaks of a ‘U-turn’ in contemporary utopian mentalities
that is specified as follows:

[F]rom investing public hopes of improvement in the uncertain and ever-

too-obviously un-trustworthy future, to re-reinvesting them in the vaguely
remembered past, valued for its assumed stability and so trustworthiness.With
such a U-turn happening, the future is transformed from the natural habitat of
hopes and rightful expectations into the site of nightmares. (Bauman, 2017: 6)

Due to many of the liquid-modern transformations mentioned above – the rise of

the culture of fear, the shallowness of happiness and the dying out of romantic love –
Bauman believes that many people increasingly seek solace in the security and

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predictability of the past with all its, real or imagined, ‘feel good’ qualities. Nostalgia
seems like a safe haven in a heartless liquid-modern world. This is also one of the
reasons why populist movements in recent years have gained a foothold many places
(think of Donald Trump’s ambition of ‘making America great again’) – due to the
spreading sense of Unsicherheit that makes people and politicians want to go back to
‘the good old days’ before it all went wrong. This characteristic and comforting ‘back
to’ aspect of nostalgia is analysed in particular by Bauman in connection to topics such
as community, identity, inequality and so on. His depiction of the retrotopian revival
with its nostalgic longings thus chimes well with a lot of the work done within social
and political science on the recent rise of right-wing populism (see, for example,
Hochschild, 2016) and the politics of resentment and identity that often relies on
sectarian as well as securitarian notions of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ and similar divisional
imagery. In Retrotopia Bauman also draws on Svetlana Boym’s (2001) useful distinction
between ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ nostalgias, and it is evident that his critique of
retrotopia is particularly directed towards the restorative version of nostalgia, because
it seems to believe that the past can in fact be revived in the present or future. But
just as Bauman has always been critical of any attempt at making utopia real, turning
it into flesh and blood, so he remains adamant that retrieving to the past is not a
solution to the problems confronted by the present.

Discussion
From this compact presentation of some of Bauman’s main texts dealing with the
topic of emotions, it is clear that he provides a very theoretically informed and critical
diagnosis of some the social and emotional pathologies of our liquid-modern times
when looking at how emotions such as happiness, love, fear or retrotopia/nostalgia
are being socially manipulated and commercially marketed in contemporary liquid-
modern society. It needs to be stressed that Bauman never ventures into theoretically
defining or outlining what an ‘emotion’ is as such (almost taking for granted that
this is obvious to his reader), which is otherwise a trademark of quite a lot of the
work done within ‘the sociology of emotions’ separating, for example, ‘feelings’
from ‘emotions’, ‘primary emotions’ from ‘secondary emotions’ and the like (see,
for example, Hochschild, 1990; Burkitt, 2014). Despite this lack of conceptual
clarification, his work nevertheless contains many important insights into emotions
as well as suffers from certain deficiencies. The positive contribution of Bauman’s
work on emotions to the sociology of emotions thus seems to overlap with some of
its main deficiencies. In the remainder of this discussion, we shall therefore briefly
touch on three central characteristics of and also potential problems with Bauman’s
work on emotions: its predominant macro-orientation, its critical/sombre outlook
and, finally, its lack of grounding in and engagement with the knowledge developed
by the sociology of emotions.
Peggy A. Thoits (1989) once explained how emotions can equally be studied at
the micro and macro levels and that each level of analysis seems to predicate its own
particular ‘take’ on emotions either as a dependent, intervening or independent
variable. Bauman’s sociology provides us with many insights into the world of
emotions at the different levels alike, with the majority of the weight being on the
macro level, however. Even though Bauman is definitely not a structuralist, most of
his work (including that on emotions) seems to rely on what could be regarded as a

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caricature ‘trickle down’ effect theory in which more comprehensive social processes
at the macro level are shaping what takes place on the meso or micro. Moreover, to
Bauman, emotional experiences are most often not treated as individual or personal
possessions, but rather, almost in a Durkheimian fashion, as collective experiences
brought about by changing social and cultural currents. Perhaps unsurprisingly then,
Bauman’s main concern when analysing society and social transformation through
emotions is not so much with what actual individuals feel or what their emotional
experiences are, as such, but rather he moves almost exclusively on the level of social,
structural and cultural forces that manipulate emotions under the reign of liquid
modernity. So, contrary to Bauman’s general humanistic agenda for sociology (that is,
‘no torment can be greater than what a single human being may suffer’), in most of his
work on emotions (perhaps with the notable exemption of compassion/morality), he
paradoxically seems to be expounding a rather passive or even over-socialised image
of human agency. This also means that we seldom get to know how it actually feels
to have emotions or to be emotional in Bauman’s work, since most of his emotions are
presented as ‘meta-emotions’ that are seemingly disembodied, normally distributed
and almost internalised by default by every member of solid-modern or liquid-modern
society. Those who feel otherwise than the prevailing emotional mood and social
norm are indeed few and far between (which is actually an important aspect of his
analytical-normative strategy; see, for example, Bauman, 1989: 207).
Following this, characteristically for Bauman’s work he focuses almost exclusively
on many of the sombre sides of the emotions included in his analyses, which is similar
to what one will also see in his general analysis of modernity (Carleheden, 2008),
while leaving out a more positive examination of what might also be happening
in our contemporary emotional landscape. Since Bauman is so concerned with
showing us how our emotions are increasingly manipulated and marketed in liquid
modernity (almost as in Stjepan G. Meštrović’s (1997) thesis on the ‘postemotional
society’), he may however be in danger of losing sight of the fact that love is perhaps
not simply reduced to or distorted into ‘top pocket relationships’, that compassion
and self-sacrifice are perhaps not between a rock and a hard place, that fear is maybe
not all-pervasive, or that the revival of nostalgia is not merely a matter of people
longing for some imagined or constructed past. It seems as if Bauman is almost
systematically painting an excessively and empirically undocumented bleak picture
of the contemporary world of emotions. However, if one looks at his more generic
work on compassion/morality, it is obvious that he believes that there is in fact always
a not yet fully realised positive potential in human cohabitation. So it seems as if there
might be an unresolved discrepancy or paradox between Bauman’s bleak images of
the world on the one hand and his more optimistic and hopeful spirit on behalf of
humanity on the other (Jacobsen, 2016b). There is, however, perhaps good reason
for this. Looked at from the helicopter perspective, large parts of Bauman’s work
consist of multiple metaphorical dichotomies that fundamentally frame the way his
arguments and analyses unfold: dichotomies between ‘solid modernity’ and ‘liquid
modernity’, intellectuals as either ‘legislators’ or ‘interpreters’, mobility as either
‘tourists’ or ‘vagabonds’, love as either genuine ‘solidarity’ or shallow ‘top pocket’,
morality as ‘conformity’ or ‘choice’ and so on (Jacobsen and Marshman, 2008a). This
oppositional (or negative dialectical) way of thinking provides Bauman with a critical
edge as his analytical ‘trick’ allows him to tease out the untapped potential for human
agency. So even though one may often not be persuaded by either empirical evidence

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or systematic theoretical refinement that the world is really as (bad as) Bauman
depicts it, one cannot help being intrigued and provoked by it. At the end of the
day, Bauman is taking the liberty of the intellectual as ‘interpreter’ (Bauman, 1987),
who is involved in the business of creating awareness as a basis for human action.
Finally, contrary to a lot of the existing research done on emotions – concerned
as it often is, as mentioned, with analytically separating ‘emotions’ from ‘feelings’,
with specifying the intricate differences between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ emotions,
with developing often rather complex models and flow charts of emotional input
and output or with studying very isolated empirical settings – Bauman’s approach
remains (perhaps refreshingly, perhaps annoyingly) relaxed regarding such academic
sophistries. Nowhere in his work does he specify what an emotion is, and nowhere
will one find any suggestions about how or where to study emotions. In general,
whether writing on emotions or other themes, Bauman never explicates his ‘methods’
(besides claiming that his approach is that of a ‘sociological hermeneutics’), which
means that readers and critics are often unable to decipher how he came up with
his theories and diagnoses. Despite this, the reader is never in doubt about what his
perspective is – that of the critical interpreter, who relies more on snippets of insights,
an overall predefined analytical framework, general theoretical ideas and literary
sources of inspiration rather than on available data-based research done specifically
on emotions. This might, however, also be one of the main weaknesses of his work
on emotions: that he does not engage with the existing literature or rely on the
rich conceptual, theoretical or empirical work from the sociology of emotions.
Even though he has contributed generously to so many sociological sub-disciplines,
Bauman always wanted to avoid being linked to any specialty within the discipline
such as urban sociology, mobility studies, the sociology of death and dying or other
sub-field of research. He clearly regarded himself as a general social thinker with
an interest in aiding and abetting our understanding of the human condition, as it
were, ‘in the round’.

Conclusion
This article has teased out, explored and critically discussed Zygmunt Bauman’s
potential contribution to the sub-discipline of the sociology of emotions. The purpose
of the article has been to show how the work of Bauman provides the sociology of
emotions with many important theoretical insights into the way in which a number
of specific emotions – suffering, freedom, ambivalence, compassion/morality, love,
fear, happiness and retrotopia/nostalgia – are always shaped by social, structural and
cultural forces. In his work, Bauman hardly ever ventures into describing the way in
which emotions are felt individually, nor does he provide any explanatory model for
how the many external forces affect our individual emotional experiences. He rather
seems to suggest (although never explicitly states) – in almost conventional Marxist
or at least constructivist manner – that it is not the emotional life that determines
man’s [sic] social existence, but rather our social existence that shapes our emotions.
In this way, Bauman’s work may serve as a useful framework for, as well as supplement
and/or corrective to, the more micro-oriented, phenomenologically inspired and
narrative approaches to the study of emotions. With his firm focus on the macro-
social forces and influences on our emotional lives, with his critical diagnosis of
contemporary society and with his reluctance to become ‘sucked into’ the existing

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doxic terminology of any sociological sub-discipline, Bauman is perhaps not only

an outsider to sociology in general and specifically to the sociology of emotions,
but also – because he makes us look at the world with new and surprising eyes – a
‘successful outsider’ (Smith, 1998).
As was stated already at the beginning of this article, the existing literature on
Zygmunt Bauman (the so-called ‘Bauman studies’) has largely failed to recognise and
focus attention on his contribution to the sociological understanding of emotions. At
the same time, however, also scholars and researchers working within the ‘sociology
of emotions’ have mostly overlooked the importance of his work on emotions, despite
the fact that Bauman has written so extensively on emotions for more than three
decades. Even though a lot of theoretical refinement and empirical development
has taken place within the sociology of emotions in recent years (see, for example,
Bericat, 2016; Olson et al, 2017), Bauman is still not a frequent reference in the
studies published. If the sociology of emotions, as Arlie R. Hochschild (1998) would
once have it, is a ‘way of seeing’, it seems as if it, at least so far, has turned its blind
eye to Bauman’s perspective. Based on this article’s exploration of Bauman’s work
on a selected number of emotions, it should be evident that scholars within the
sociology of emotions would greatly benefit from consulting his ideas and analyses
as they – with their respective pitfalls and potentials as described above – provide us
with many useful angles and critical edges. With this article, an attempt has thus been
made to rectify this neglect and to propose some of the reasons why a discovery of
and engagement with Bauman’s work on emotions is much overdue.

Conflict of interest
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

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