Retrotopia by Zygmunt Bauman (review)

Throughout the career of the renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who passed away on January 9, 2017, a strand of the utopian impulse continued to manifest itself in his work. From his early socialist orientation to his later, more humanistic expressions and his analysis and critique of the liquid modern society, a development poignantly described by Michael Jacobsen in an article in this journal in 2004,¹ Bauman's sociology was driven by seeking possibilities and alternatives to the society that he described and explained, a quest for hope in the long term in a situation that justified pessimism in the short and middle term. His utopianism was not an attempt to sketch a blueprint of another society but an impulse to develop an antidote of human dignity and dialogue in a world that was growing more violent, more unjust, and increasingly fragmented and divided.

In Retrotopia, which was published just weeks after his death, Bauman has taken the opportunity of the five hundredth anniversary of Thomas More's Utopia to give central attention to this subtle but continuous utopian strand in his previous work on liquid modern society. After the assertive, positive, and self-confident utopias of "solid" modernity, Bauman observes a present-day defeatist "retrotopia." In the liquid modern condition, individualized utopias of life politics were confronted with a Hobbesian world of violence, and battered in the present by waves of growing insecurities and anxieties, the fragile hopes of constructing a good and just society in a better future easily gave way to a return to an idealized past. Bauman dramatically introduces this change by stating that Walter Benjamin's "Angel of History" has taken a U-turn and is now blown by the Hell of the future toward the presumed Paradise of the past.

Bauman's work has possibly found greater interest outside the walls of academia than within. It has offered an opportunity for discussion and reflection for countless people throughout the world, not only through his written work but also through his many public lectures and participation in public discussions and other events. The goal of his books was likewise never simply to understand and inform but to inspire, energize, and motivate as well. He always sought to translate his insights into new possibilities for dialogue, justice, and social equality and to reinvigorate a lost sense of politics and participative citizenship coupled with a more social economy. Retrotopia is no different. In the face of the social inequality to which the retrotopian mentality answers with the logic of walls and a new wave of tribalism, Bauman proposes the idea of a universal basic income (also called "utopia for realists" by the Dutch journalist and writer Rutger Bregman, who is cited and discussed extensively in this book). Confronted with the politics of anger, which includes that of Donald Trump, Bauman seeks to grind their expansion to a halt by stemming the source from which they flow: the fear of the future embedded in the uncertain present. Or as Bauman also states using Walter Benjamin's imagery: enticing or forcing the Angel of History to turn around toward the future once more.

Bauman's own utopian efforts consist in raising and encouraging the required cosmopolitan consciousness to supplement the present cosmopolitan condition of humanity. He describes this task as unprecedentedly arduous and troublesome, as the demagogues, with their shared distaste "of all things tolerant and democratic" (162), are gathering an expanding congregation and may even be shaping the forthcoming hegemonic philosophy (this description deserves to be taken up by future research as an example of the dystopian image of the present in Bauman's thought and the function it might have as a warning implying that there is still the possibility of a choice—and thus hope). Another interesting point is that in the last years of his life, the secular Bauman increasingly pointed to the voice of Pope Francis as a moral point of reference in this risky situation. After earlier having quoted passages from Pope Francis's pastoral letter Evangelii...