The Interaction Between Liberty And Certainty

This paper try to understand Bauman's political thought through the contradictory relation between liberty and certainty. Liberty and certainty are unfairly distributed in society. On the level of individuality, one man's liberty is his certainty, and is the other man's uncertainty who is not free. On the level of entirety, partial liberty requires the price of integral certainty, and the integral certainty requires the price of individual liberty. That is the Politics which seeks balance on two levels: the distribution between individuality and the distribution between individuality and the entirety. The modern politics and the postmodern politics have different strategy to face this question. The modern politics can be seemed as "social projects", in order to seek perfect social system, the individual liberty is lost. And the postmodern politics can be seemed as "life politics", the individual person seek self-construction because of the lure of the consumer market, but they are incompetent to solve the systemic uncertainty.