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This thoughtful and illuminating book provides a major statement on the meaning and importance of postmodernity.

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• Introduction: Re-enchantment of the world, or how can one narrate postmodernity?
• 1 Legislators and interpreters: Culture as the ideology of intellectuals
• 2 Sociological Responses to Postmodernity
• 3 The Changing Discursive Formation of Sociology
• 4 Is there a Postmodern Sociology?
• 5 Philosophical Affinities of Postmodern Sociology
• 6 The World According to Jean Baudrillard
• 7 Communism: a Postmortem
• 8 Living Without Alternative?
• 9 A Sociological Theory of Postmodernity: Interview

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CHOICE Review

An important book, intended by Bauman to be read as the continuation of his already impressive trilogy, Legislators and Interpreters (CH, Apr'88), Modernity and the Holocaust (CH, Jun'90), and Modernity and Ambivalence (CH, Oct'91). This latest work aims to distinguish postmodernity from modernity, calls for the development of a sociology of postmodernism, and conjoins the dramatic fall of communism with postmodernity. Bauman drops a bombshell: ^D["People who celebrate the collapse of communism. . .celebrate the end of modernity actually, because what collapsed was the most decisive attempt to make modernity work; and it failed.^D]" Bauman argues that on this side of what used to be the Iron Curtain, modernity has not failed. Instead, it has emerged from its ^D["false consciousness^D]" and matured. He does not really explain why the liberal democratic version of modernity will succeed where the communist version failed, and he is not mindful of the culture of Gemeinschaft that was seemingly untouched by the communist experiment in modernity. Nevertheless, this is a stunning book that stands out head and shoulders above its competitors, including Anthony Giddens's The Consequences of Modernity (CH, Nov'90). References and documentation are less than adequate for a book that makes such significant arguments, and the index is barely adequate. Nevertheless, highly recommended for all collections.