Zygmunt Bauman’s Sociology of Freedom: Freedom as a Differential, Ambivalent and Moral Blessing (chapter 10)
How free are we – and at whose expense? In a new chapter in The Routledge International Handbook on Zygmunt Bauman (eds. Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Dariusz Brzeziński, Mark Davis and Jack Palmer), Poul Poder examines how one of the most widely read sociologists of our time rethought the concept of freedom.
Modern sociology has largely been a ‘science of unfreedom’: it has been assumed that people are free by nature, and it thus explained social forces that constrain them. Bauman turned this around. He argued that freedom must itself be understood sociologically – as something that arises from, and is distributed through, social relations.
Method
The chapter is a theoretical analysis. It reconstructs Bauman’s thinking on freedom and morality across his work – from Freedom (1988) and Modernity and the Holocaust to Postmodern Ethics and Liquid Modernity – and discusses it in relation to contemporary theories of freedom (Axel Honneth, Frederick Neuhouser, Gunnar C. Aakvaag) and recent sociology of morality.
Results
The chapter shows that Bauman understands freedom in three ways:
- Freedom is differential. Practical freedom – being able to realise one’s intentions – requires resources: economic, cultural and symbolic, but also emotional ones such as confidence and security. Because resources are unequally distributed, so is freedom. Freedom and inequality therefore cannot be discussed separately.
- Freedom is ambivalent. Since we live in chains of mutual dependence, one person’s freedom can reduce someone else’s – as when a company freely relocates and its employees lose their jobs, or when frequent flying in the Global North accelerates climate change that narrows life chances in the Global South. In today’s ‘liquid’ consumer society, freedom of choice is abundant for those with resources, while insecurity erodes it for many others.
- Freedom is a moral blessing. Drawing on the Holocaust rescuers, who came from all walks of life, Bauman insists that moral responsibility cannot simply be explained by society. It is in taking responsibility for another person that we become irreplaceable individuals rather than role-performers.
The chapter argues that this makes Bauman’s theory distinctive: it challenges both liberal-individualist and collectivist ideas of freedom, and it offers sociologists concrete research questions. Instead of asking only whether people are formally free to choose (de jure), we should ask whether they had the resources to choose otherwise (de facto) – and whose freedom is reduced when others exercise theirs.