Critical Thinking and Human Possibility

Abstract

Zygmunt Bauman is one of the most deliberate of sociological stylists. For him language and prose are not simply functional tools. Certainly, a sentence, paragraph, essay or book is a means of communication and therefore of conversation between the reader and the writer. It is a means of the translation of interpretations into practices. But the conventions of academic language can be an obstacle to this end. Bauman has said that: ‘the problem with writing is the linear nature of the writing … you have to express your ideas in a linear form’ (Welzer 2002: 109). Perhaps it is a deepening appreciation of this limitation that explains why Bauman has moved from the long book to the short, from the chapter to the essay and thence to the fragment (Beilharz 2001: 1).