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This chapter focuses on Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust. Bauman first discusses how sociology saw and dismissed the Holocaust. Sociologists called it an example of ‘untamed innate human aggressiveness’; a ‘privatization’, the parochial experience of Jews alone; simply and callously a matter between Jews and antisemites. Bauman is troubled by these reductionist discussions. He sees the Holocaust as an ultimately human, not inhuman, act. As such, it is fundamentally social, not asocial. As an essentially human act, it is repeatable. The Holocaust set the stage for modern genocide in this century. Bauman then attempts to address the questions raised by the Holocaust. He describes the Holocaust as a system where rationality and ethics point in opposite directions, and humanity is the loser.

This chapter goes on to complicate the idea of thought further, as well as introducing the social element of thinking through discussion of affect and emotional regimes. It also examines the emotional regime instigated by consumer capitalism though the lens of Zygmunt Bauman's concept of unsicherheit.

For participants who imagined the amelioration of their predicament as the removal of an obstacle to their volition, the technical means is medication. In the relation between desired being and the objectivist means, the concern of this chapter, there was a close affinity. Establishing or restoring viable selfhood did not require any introspection or qualitative elaboration of self, any incorporating of past history, any questioning of social circumstances. Steps that would have once been considered crucial can now, apparently, be bypassed. That such a course is even plausible signals a background reorientation to self, inner experience, and lifeworld. What we have now, following on social, economic, and technological changes, is a far more fluid social order (what Zygmunt Bauman refers to as “liquid modernity”) that fosters a view of ourselves as “light” and psychologically transparent. It prizes a highly reflexive, other-directed, and present-oriented self-awareness. And it promotes an accommodating view of the social world as a (relatively) open space for self-designing. In this world of choice and autonomous selfhood, limitations seem irrational, arising from some alien place. The objectivist means “after psychology” address that alien presence, interpreting drug effects as a way to establish or restore favored being.

This chapter surveys the history of the emerging academic subfield of surveillance studies, noting key developments in surveillance theory that start with the invocation of Nineteen Eighty-Four and George Orwell by James Rule. Surveillance theory moves, in the 1970s and 1980s toward the rich and generative work of Michel Foucault, and his revision of Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the ‘panopticon’, and then beyond Foucault into new territory. The chapters argues that an often-neglected link between these ideas is that of the utopian genre, which provides a challenging and illuminating set of texts through which to explore some of these notions. The chapter shows how these texts have been used, or might be used profitably to explore concepts raised by such foundational surveillance studies scholars as Gary T. Marx and David Lyon. It shows that more recent and important scholarship by, amongst others, Kevin Haggerty and Zygmunt Bauman, continues to invoke (even if negatively) utopian texts, suggesting the challenge and enlightenment such works still offer to surveillance studies more generally.

This chapter provides a broad conceptual foundation and explores different (liberal, Marxist and other) perspectives on the nature of the relationship between state and civil society and introduces concepts and arguments from contemporary social theory (Zygmunt Bauman on modernity) and moral theory (Charles Taylor and Bernard Williams) that contribute to the understanding of ethical agency in ambiguous and contested contexts. It argues that governance in a socially diverse society exemplifies such ambiguous and contested territory. It notes that the framework offered by such contemporary theorists is compared with that provided guidance to earlier generations of development workers. It also reconnects with the earlier work of Michael Lipsky, and Peter Marris and Martin Rein and indicates how these writers are more in touch with the emotional dimension of the ethical challenges of this kind of work.