Utopia and retrotopia

contingency and liquidity in Rorty and Bauman’s narratives

Abstract

Zygmund Bauman and Richard Rorty, two bright contemporaries of political thinking, each on their own way, describe society, diagnose it, and point ways. Both are concerned with relevant aspects of social life, like moral sensibility, democracy, and justice. Their ways become separate and crossed throughout their careers, in which they utilize different taxonomies, like contingency and liquidity, to describe, a lot of times, similar phenomena and create complementary arguments. This paper does not mean to close into the polish sociologist's thoughts, nor on the American philosopher’s, exhausting the fundamental concepts by one and another, but only to do a record of relevant aspects in the dialogue between them established. The rhetoric of Bauman and Rorty, thus, are like tools available – and exceedingly effective – for the observation of actual society and on the glimpse of those that we can build for the future.