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the Death of God modernity would now be able to resolve all the puzzles
of the world. At long last, with a fulfilled Enlightenment, the masses
would at last be freed from the shackles of the past.
The Enlightenment can be seen as an unprecedented political, social
and cultural transformation, sustained by an unwavering and rationally
charged intellectual energy which remade the world as modernity. This
Enlightenment modernity was imbued with a progressivism which was
concerned with unshackling the present and the future perfect from the
problematic certainties of the past, in order to identify where change for
the better was possible. The modern mindset was everything that the
irrational predecessor was not, with its demand to classify things that
hitherto had not been imagined as classifiable. And its central aim was to
transmute the living reality into something that could be quantified. This
led to the root-and-branch reform of all society s major institutions on
the basis of taxonomy, or in other words, modules for classifying,
recognizing and calculation. As Bauman points out, the modern taxonomy
sensibility is that of the relentless tidier, for whom
nothing in the human condition is given once and for all and is
imposed with no right of appeal or reform that everything needs
to be made first and once made can be changed endlessly
accompanied the modern era from its beginning; indeed, obsessive
and compulsive change (variously called modernizing , progress ,
improvement , development , updating ) is the hard core of the
modern mode of being.47
The shift to modernity must have felt like the greatest of all possible
differences in the world. What was taking place in the emerging modernity
was the experience of shift itself, the struggle of absolutists to put some
definition, some finality, on what seemed to be an irrational world. In
this sense, Bauman suggests that solid modernity was ambivalent from
its inception because it involved a search for a new kind of permanence
in a world that was destined to be the
age marked by constant change but an age aware of being so
marked; an age that views its own legal forms, its material and
40 Zygmunt Bauman
spiritual creations, its knowledge and convictions as temporary, to
be held until further notice and eventually disqualified and
replaced by new and better ones. In other words, modernity is an
era conscious of its own historicity. Human institutions are viewed
as self-created and amenable to improvement; they can be retained
only if they justify themselves in the face of stringent demands of
reason and if they fail the test, they are bound to be scrapped.
The substitution of new designs for old will be a progressive move,
a new step up the ascending line of human development.48
What was also apparent with modernity was that from its inception it
sparked other kinds of reactions, such as nostalgia for the idea of
traditional community, which could be understood as an accurate if not a
paradigmatic measure of the disdain for modernity found in some
intellectual movements. As the community studies literature shows, from
the publication of Tönnies classic book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft
(Community and Society)49 at least, this resistance to modernity was also
steadfastly located in the quotidian lives of ordinary individuals through
the re-emergence of modern community groupings and latter-day
involvement in social movements.
The solid modernist imagination
As one commentator has put it, during the early onset of modernity the
Enlightenment lost some of its impetus but it was to make a spectacular
comeback by transforming itself into an all conquering Modernity and
expanding to colonize the globe .50 Agnes Heller51 suggests that from
the middle of the 19th century onwards there had been established in
Europe and thereafter the New World what could be described as a high
modernist version of modernity or what Bauman in his work after Liquid
Modernity would refer to as the solid modernist imagination. What was
distinctive about the emergence of this solid modern imagination was its
curiosity about the individual, and the future perfect of the world outside
individuals, which came to be valued more than any renewed conversation
with the past. The onset of modernity was perceived not only as the cusp
of change, but the moment when history had at last begun and its
protagonists had their eyes firmly planted on the future in the search for
the state of perfection, a state that puts paid to all further change, having
first made change uncalled-for and undesirable. All further change would
be for the worse. 52
The solid modern imagination also looked for a reason for everything
and it was this dynamic that was the impetus behind the emergence of
His Theory of Modernity 41
science as the dominant discourse of modernity. Accordingly, solid
modernity was characterized by scientific projects which were to be
fulfilled in the future. The discourse underpinning such projects was itself
characterized by a calculative drive which drew on different forms of
classification in order to give the world a structure. Drawing on the work
of Cornelius Castoriadis, Bauman suggests that every society conjures
up its own imaginary through which it legitimizes its activities and
institutions, that when established follows a unifying logic53 through
which the society in question in Foucault s terminology effectively
discursively constitutes itself; that is establishes its autonomy through a
pattern of intuitional frameworks across a number of sites. As a number
of scholars have suggested, the foremost sites through which 19th-century
modern societies established their autonomy were industrialism,
capitalism and the nation-state. What is of substantive concern to Bauman
in this regard, and something he shares with a number of thinkers from
Weber to Foucault, is their preoccupation with the way in which the
institution of the autonomous realm of solid modernity saw it hastily
turning its impetus away from Enlightenment liberation to new and more
efficient means of social control.
Modernity and social control
As Bauman makes clear, the solid modernist imaginary was that of
unabashed system building, a world view after establishing first principles
and foundations, and its central organizing theme was social engineering.54
First, it assumed that the direction that the modern world would develop
would be motivated by human hands rather than natural processes and
that this direction would to a large extent be guided towards a society in
which work would be subject to ever-growing efficiency and would be
based on a detailed division of labour and increasing expertise. Second,
and related to these processes, there would be a growing harmonization
of needs which would arise from the efficient management of society as
a whole and the springs of individual action . Consequently, with this
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