Collateral Damage

His starting point is the microcosm of Bradford, where four out of 10 young people live in families where nobody has a regular job and one in 10 has a criminal record.

Those statistics, Bauman says, could be multiplied a million-fold globally.

He contrasts this with the Aristotelean city-state, where negotiations between the public and private sections of society were held at frequent gatherings in the the town square.

There the laws governing society would be established, amended or abolished by popular consent.

Yet there's a toxic separation between the two in today's "democracies."

The universal rights of citizens in law is but a joke when you take the average citizen's ability to make good use of them when necessary.

As Bauman emphasises, the disassociation is not accidental.

We are only witnessing, magnified a hundred-fold, the 19th-century process described by Max Weber as the "emancipation of business interests from institutions of ethically inspired supervision and control."

To substantiate his thesis, Bauman points to the fact that 99 per cent of the total wealth of the planet remains in the hands of one per cent of its inhabitants.

Where Tanzania earns about £1.5 billion per year, divided between its 25 million inhabitants, Goldman Sachs earns a little more, shared between 161 stockholders.

It's a sobering pictur and a disquietingly large proportion of that 99 per cent are the "collateral damage" of the book's title.

It catalogues the almost irreparable damage and corruption visited on the fabric of humanity and its collective values of solidarity, as well as shared interests, by the practices of modern capitalism.

In the 20th century the "solid" phase of modernity established a model for addressing human need structurally, communism being its most lucid and loyal embodiment.

That promise faded as, by the mid-1970s, modernity entered its "liquid" phase where "social networking and the marketing opportunities it offered replaced social structuring."

Consumerism and instant gratification of every new manufactured fad or whim became the new mantra - those excluded were left globally in near-cataclysmic poverty and fear, isolated and increasingly pissed-off.

Bauman sees the way out of the impasse as one of a comprehensive and complex dialogue to re-establish the equitable and balanced relationship of the Athenian city state.

Bauman's vision would appear worryingly utopian, yet recent political upheavals in Greece, Egypt and now Spain would seem to bear him out.