Zygmunt Bauman

Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out, when skating on thin ice your salvation is in speed

What is wrong with the society we live in, said Cornelius Castoriadis, is that it stopped questioning itself.

point is, however, that contemporary society has given to the ‘hospitality to critique’ an entirely new sense and has invented a way to accommodate critical thought and action while remaining immune to the consequences of that accommodation, and so emerging unaffected and unscathed – reinforced rather than weakened – from the tests and trials of the open-house policy.

Fulfilment is always in the future, and achievements lose their attraction and satisfying potential at the moment of their attainment, if not before.

the emphasis (together with, importantly, the burden of responsibility) has shifted decisively towards the self-assertion of the individual.

This fateful departure has been reflected in the relocation of ethical/political discourse from the frame of the ‘just society’ to that of ‘human rights’, that is refocusing that discourse on the right of individuals

Risks and contradictions go on being socially produced; it is just the duty and the necessity to cope with them which are being individualized.

The individual is the citizen’s worst enemy, de Tocqueville suggested. The ‘citizen’ is a person inclined to seek her or his own welfare through the well-being of the city – while the individual tends to be lukewarm, sceptical or wary about ‘common cause’, ‘common good’, ‘good society’ or ‘just society’.

The only two useful things one would expect, and wish, ‘public power’ to deliver are to observe ‘human rights’,

there are, simply, no effective ‘biographic solutions to systemic contradictions’,