La formazione dell’intellettuale. Zygmunt Bauman e il declino della modernità

Abstract

"The formation of intellectuals. Zygmunt Bauman and the decline of modernity". Zygmunt Bauman is considered one of the keenest and sharpest living intellectuals. He owes this reputation to his wide production, started in the Sixties, and, especially, to his thought methodologies, which go beyond “adepts” specialism. For this reason, often described as “inconvenient” figure, he always claimed the independence of his research, by studying, in some of his most representative works, such as Culture as Praxis, Legislators and Interpreters, Modernity and the Holocaust, the transformation of some fundamental cultural concepts, which form the basis of our modernity. Starting from these premises, and in particular from Legislators and Interpreters, this essay – inspired by Nietzsche, Weber, Simmel, Adorno, Foucault and Starobinski – intends to propose a transversal reading of the historical and genealogical process, through which the formation of intellectuals has become the backbone of the foundation of modern social and political western systems.

Keywords

• intellectuals
• philosophes
• order
• modernity
• progress
• civilisation