State of Fear in a Liquid World (Routledge Focus) - Hardcover

Bordoni, Carlo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1138283665 ISBN 13: 9781138283664

Publisher: Routledge, 2016

Synopsis

This book examines the insecurity that besets our lives in the contemporary world, whether as a result of natural disasters, human negligence or, more recently, threats to security in the form of terrorist activity, which itself gives rise to new fears: fear of travel, agoraphobia, distrust of others and existential anxieties.

Revealing the connection between the two components of our insecurity, as reflecting on and conditioning human existence, and producing social problems, the author brings this to bear on the notion of security that modernity had sought to guarantee to its citizens – a notion that has slowly crumbled with the crisis of modernity and with the emergence of the "liquid" world.

Now insecurity is endemic and has so firmly become part of us as to be accepted as an unpleasant aspect of normality that we must live with. However, the necessity of living in a risk society in which security has emerged as important does nothing to dispel the fear that accompanies us at all times. An engagement with the thought of Bauman that explores fear as an accompaniment to the end of modernity and its assurances, State of Fear in a Liquid World offers developments of the thesis of liquid modernity and will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, social theory and politics with interests in individualisation, social change and (in)security.

About this title

About the Author

Carlo Bordoni is a sociologist, journalist, former lecturer at the University of Florence and Director of the Academy of Fine Arts, Carrara (Italy). He writes for the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera and its literary supplement, la Lettura, for the quarterly Prometeo, and the journal Social Europe online. He is the author of State of Crisis with Zygmunt Bauman, The End of Equality (Routledge, 2016) and Interregnum: Beyond Liquid Modernity.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1138283665
• ISBN 13: 9781138283664
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 134