The influence of the Frankfurt School on Zygmunt Bauman and Richard Rorty: from critical theory to liquid modernity and American pragmatism

Abstract

Liquid modernity—as sociological category—is a figure of the change and the transitorily, of the deregulation and liberalization of the markets. The metaphor of the liquidity—propose by Bauman—it also tries to give account of the precarity of the human bonds in an individualistic and privatized society, marked by the transitory and volatile character of his relations. The love becomes floating, without responsibility towards the other, is reduced to the bond without face that offers the Web. Surfing in the waves of a liquid society always money changer—uncertain and more and more unforseeable, it is the decay of the State of the well-being. Liquid modernity is a time without certainties, where the men who fought during the Illustration to be able to obtain civil liberties and to undo of the tradition, are with the obligation of being free assuming the existenciales fears and anguishes that now such freedom tolerates; the labor culture of the flexibility ruins the future forecast.