What remains of the idea of liquid modernity? Is Bauman's thought still relevant? This volume aims to answer these questions, offering an analysis of his work, starting from the theorization of liquid society. Without forgetting the vastness and complexity of his work, where the idea of liquidity remains fundamental, but not unique, before and after the central turning point of the year 2000.

There are two cornerstones that must be adhered to in order to understand the development of critical thought in our time: Max Weber and Bauman himself. He can only be compared to Weber in terms of the originality and social impact of his work in the identical field of the analysis of modern society: the one opens up the discourse on modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century, with his deep analysis of religions and their socioeconomic impact, while the other closes the century, with his attempt to safeguard what remains of the Neuzeit in a sustainable, albeit liquefied condition. All this in the aftermath of the tragedies and upheavals that have in the meantime swept through the Western world and that seem to give reason to what Oswald Spengler, just a century ago, predicted about the inevitable decline of our civilization.

More likely, unlike Spengler's pessimistic vision, it is modernity, and not Western civilization, that has entered into an acute crisis of values. The spirit in which the great proponents of the “new time”—from Jean Bodin to Thomas Hobbes, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Montesquieu—were born has been misrepresented and even neglected, allowing the great expectations and promises of the origins to be dropped.