Collateral damage
Subtitle: social inequalities in a global age
By: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: Polity; Wiley-Interscience
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 182
ISBN-13: 9780745652948; 9780745652955
Subjects: Social aspects; Equality; Poverty
Description: The term 'collateral damage' has recently been added to the vocabulary of military forces to refer to the unintended consequences of armed interventions, consequences that are unplanned but nevertheless damaging and often very costly in human and personal terms. But collateral damage is not unique to the world of armed intervention - it is also one of the most salient and striking dimensions of contemporary social inequality. The inflammable mixture of growing social inequality and the rising volume of human suffering marginalized as 'collateral' is becoming one of the most cataclysmic problems of our time. For the political class, poverty is commonly seen as a problem of law and order - a matter of how to deal with individuals, such as unemployed youths, who fall foul of the law. But treating poverty as a criminal problem obscures the social roots of inequality, which lie in the combination of a consumerist life philosophy propagated and instilled by a consumer-oriented economy, on the one hand, and the rapid shrinking of life chances available to the poor, on the other. In our contemporary, liquid-modern world, the poor are the collateral damage of a profit-driven, consumer-oriented society - 'aliens inside' who are deprived of the rights enjoyed by other members of the social order. In this new book Zygmunt Bauman - one of the most original and influential social thinkers of our time - examines the selective affinity between the growth of social inequality and the rise in the volume of 'collateral damage' and considers its implications and its costs. -- Product Description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [173]-179) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: collateral damage of social inequality; title: From the agora to the marketplace; title: Requiem for communism; title: The fate of social inequality in liquid modern times; title: Strangers are dangers ... are they indeed?; title: Consumerism and morality; title: Privacy, secrecy, intimacy, human bonds and other collateral casualties of liquid modernity; title: Luck and the individualization of remedies; title: Seeking in modern Athens an answer to the ancient Jerusalem question; title: A natural history of evil; title: Wir arme Leut' ...; title: Sociology: whence and whither?