Zygmunt Bauman and the Ethics of Convivence
The late Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) spent much of his life grappling with a simple yet troubling question: how can human beings live together in a world that no longer seems solid? He described our era as one of liquid modernity, a condition in which institutions, identities and relationships dissolve faster than we can reshape them. Everything we once believed to be permanent —work, family, nation, even truth— flows and changes like water.
In Bauman’s words, the great project of modernity was to create order; the project of our time is to learn to live with uncertainty. But uncertainty breeds anxiety, and anxiety often seeks relief in exclusion. When life seems unstable, the temptation is to draw boundaries, to build walls, physical, social or emotional.
And yet, Bauman rejected despair. He believed that the very fluidity of our age would also make room for new ways of living together, of learning to live together differently, consciously and ethically.
From “community” to “being-together”
Bauman was sceptical of nostalgia for lost communities.
He wrote that many people today long for community, but what they really seek is security without freedom, a refuge from difference. True community, he argued, cannot be built on equality. It must emerge from the fragile art of being with others who are not like us.
In this sense, Bauman anticipated the idea of Convivence, understood as a movement that goes beyond mere cohabitation or coexistence, leading to a shared civic ethic. Both thinkers reject the illusion that harmony requires homogeneity. For Bauman, living with others means accepting ambiguity as a constant companion; for Jacques Moreillon, living together well means turning that ambiguity into something creative.
Throughout his work, Bauman repeatedly returns to the figure of the stranger. Drawing on thinkers ranging from Georg Simmel to Emmanuel Levinas, he saw the stranger not as an enemy to be eliminated, but as a mirror that reveals who we are. In his book Postmodern Ethics, Bauman argued that morality does not begin with rules, but with the encounter with the Other.
When I encounter another person, I am confronted with a call: a call to responsibility that precedes any law or contract. This, he writes, is the foundation of ethics. Once again, we hear the resonance with Convivence.
Convivence is not merely a political arrangement, but a moral attitude. To practise convivence is to respond to the Other not with indifference or domination, but with responsibility.
Robert Lanquar
