Introduction

How do we make theory? What are the criteria for judging the power of ideas and concepts in the practice of social theory? The work of theory does not always involve building, or the construction of systems, though this may have been the dominant model in postwar sociology from Talcott Parsons to Anthony Giddens. Sometimes it involves something more modest or experimental, a matter of successive approximations, circling, following hunches and leaving hints (Beilharz 2020a). Sometimes it may be more like tracking a snail trail than attempting to capture every detail of the world in a corresponding concept. Even some of the more ambitious of classical precedents, like Karl Marx's Capital, may be said to contain as much in their hints as in their broad architecture. The section on the fetishism of commodities is elusive at only a few pages; the image of the architect and bee is less than that, but highly suggestive. The last chapter of Capital, on colonization, is indicative of a theory of surplus population and colonization as part thereof. Primitive accumulation is a global process; it represents the modernization part of modernity. Then there is the book's own structural undergirding, indebted to Dante's inferno. In the sprawling text of Marx's Grundrisse, some of the most interesting legacies again are mere fragments: on method, on automation, and on time–space compression. And in Max Weber, the image of the iron cage is a throwaway that has yet become highly generative for critical thinking about modernity, along with various other chilling anticipations as to what the new century would bring.

Karl Marx and iMax Weber come into play here as central sources for Bauman's thinking. In this chapter, I indicate their influences on Bauman, separately and together in the amalgam called “Weberian Marxism.” This junction is one key source for the tradition we call Critical Theory. From Marx to Zygmunt Bauman is a long way—from 1867, for Capital, to 2000, for Liquid Modernity, from the Crystal Place to IM Pei's glass pyramids, from Marx's coat to the costumes of Vivienne Westwood. Liquid Modernity may also be said to be a hint, rather than a theory, though the book by that title is methodical enough: its chapters lead with “Emancipation” and “Individuality,” and follow on to “Time/Space,” “Work,” and “Community” (Bauman 2000).