Zygmunt Bauman and the Continental Divide in Social Theory
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IntroductionWe borrow the idea of continental divide from Seymour Martin Lipset's book, Continental Divide (1990), and Lipset borrowed it from a 1981 film with the same title starring John Belushi. In the film, the term referred to the real, geological divide caused by the Rocky Mountains in North America, and Lipset uses it as a metaphor to demonstrate profound cultural differences between Canada and the United States. Lipset uses massive amounts of empirical data to demonstrate what is not obvious, that despite sharing the same language, religions, historical origins, and continent, Canada is heir to the English colonies that decided not to break with the English empire and is far more European in its values, norms, and beliefs than the Americans who revolted and created the United States. Our use of the phrase, continental divide, is a metaphor that refers to the profound differences between the United States (quite apart from Canada, Mexico, and the rest of North America) and the continent of Europe in terms of social theory. We locate Zygmunt Bauman's social theories and perspectives as being on the European part of this divide not just geographically but in terms of attitudes, origins, values, and even prejudices. Bauman, along with other European postmodernists, is disdainful of American sociologists such as Talcott Parsons, American philosophy such as pragmatism, the American penchant for empiricism, and American optimism and can-do attitude. He is firmly entrenched in the writings of Karl Marx, the critical theorists, and European existentialists and philosophers. He never mentions William James, the founder of pragmatism as a distinct American philosophy and grandfather of symbolic interactionism (he was George Herbert Mead's teacher). Bauman's dismissal of functionalism, structuralism, and empiricism is typical of scores of European social theorists, especially the postmodernists.If one examines the trajectory of Zygmunt Bauman's many books from his earlier ones such as Legislators and Interpreters (1987), Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Intimations of Postmodernity (1991b), and Modernity and Ambivalence (1991a) to his later works such as Liquid Modernity (2000), it is clear that throughout his career he was pursuing the theme of liquification.
