Is there a decline of the West? The impression shared by many that we are going through a period of crisis of the values and fundamental principles on which our culture has long been based, has distant roots, which the most serious economic crisis of 2008 has only amplified and made tangible in the lives of millions of people. It started with the end of the “great narratives” and the collapse of ideologies that Jean-François Lyotard (1979) spoke of in relation to post-modernism. It was the 1970s and it was yet to manifest itself in the more drastic “liquefaction” of society indicated by Zygmunt Bauman, who admirably described the dissolution of a consolidated system, identifiable with modernity, and which involved economic relations, social relations, and the very legitimacy of the nation-states born from the Peace of Westphalia onward.

It is the latest “decline,” the one that concerns us directly, but which follows several moments of crisis that are dispersed in the distant past. Beginning with the controversial vision of Oswald Spengler, the author of The Decline of the West (1918): a “cursed” book, to which we owe the pessimistic definition of a world in ruins that awaits a vitalistic and, perhaps, authoritarian rebirth.

In the decade (2006–2016) during which I had the pleasure of meeting and frequenting Zygmunt Bauman, especially during his trips to Italy, where he used to come frequently, there were many occasions to be together at the table, but only once did the extraordinary case of having lunch at his home, in Leeds, and being “served” by him personally occur. It happened on May 2, 2014, on the occasion of the publication of State of Crisis, which we had written together.

That day was a memorable one: having arrived by bus on Otley Road, a four-lane boulevard that runs from the center of Leeds to the suburbs, I got off near the junction with Lawnswood Gardens, a very green residential area surrounded by a copse. Nice sunny day (which is rare for England).

I set out to find house number 1, his address. No sign, no plaque or doorbell, just a hedge surrounding a few two-storey houses and the first, hidden by a garden overgrown with vegetation. Puzzled, I don't know what to do, yet that is the right address where Bauman lives, no doubt about it. After pacing back and forth, futilely searching for some clue, I decided to resort to an ancient yet unorthodox method: calling out loud, “Zygmunt!” Immediately, I hear his voice from the house inviting me in. I pass through the gate and make my way through the foliage, following a barely noticeable passage through the grass, I see him appear at the door together with Alexandra Kania, his second wife.

“A man in a walk” is not a metaphor. Zygmunt Bauman liked to walk at a good pace. He often did so in the morning in the woods behind his house in Lawnswood Gardens, a residential suburb of Leeds.

One day, he told me that at the end of World War II, in which he had participated by serving in Berling's Army, the Polish section of the Soviet Army, he had walked home from Berlin to Warsaw.

Such was the desire to leave behind the hell of war and return to normalcy. All his life, he continued to give the idea of a man on the road. Advancing without hesitation, without compromise, without shortcuts. Above all, without the help of others, but “together” with others. And without climbing on the shoulders of giants, because giant he was himself.

The proof of having encountered a great personality who took giant steps without shirking contradictions, afterthoughts, and the tópos of consistency is found in the divergence between the Bauman before the liquidity turn and the one after.

The Bauman we know is inextricably linked to the idea of liquid modernity, but it is no less interesting and useful to know “Bauman before Bauman” (in The Bauman Reader, 2001), when the Polish sociologist, later transplanted to Leeds, comes into contact with postmodernity, senses its innovative potential, its intellectual stimuli, espousing its concepts.

Zygmunt Bauman was a shrewd observer of modernity and the mind behind the brilliant concept of “liquid society,” which is an accurate representation of the current condition of our world, in which insecurity, uncertainty, and individualism are the dominant players.

The depth of his sociological analysis has made him the most representative and heeded maître à penser of our time, whose constant critical presence has strengthened and spread since the early nineties, to become the most lucid witness to the crisis of transition between the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. The roots of this deep crisis can be traced back to the end of ideologies that characterized the seventies and eighties, and the economic crisis of 2008. Other major emergencies converge in this epochal change, including the transition from material to immaterial work, the reality of insecurity and the phenomenon of the great migrations, with the social consequences that are visible to everyone.

To this, we must add globalization, which began with the economic expansion and the acquisition of world markets by the large multinationals, and has turned out to be a powerful engine of the process of de-localization of power that can demolish the already fragile system of representative democracy. Moreover, we must not forget that the affirmation of new technologies determines the prevalence of immaterial labor, together with the development of communications at a worldwide level.