They say generals usually fight the last war. Intellectuals usually fight the latest threats. I don’t think we are moving towards a totalitarian state.” Zygmunt Bauman makes short work of the fears that modern technology in combination with the fight against terrorism, might lead to a Big Brother state that controls its citizens. The individual who fears that has not realised that power and techniques of dominance have radically altered their character.

– The contemporary powers are no longer interested in control. They want to get rid of the duty of control. Once upon a time, when there was a war or a battle, who was the winner? The side which was occupying the battle field at the end. Now it is the other way round. Because the Americans have to stay in Iraq, they are considered to have been defeated. No one wants to administer; no one wants to control. That is a costly and very outdated way of dominating. Managers don’t want to manage. They gladly cede powers to their subordinates. Let them take care of themselves; let them produce the results. It is much cheaper and more satisfying to be a manager under those conditions. Above all, you have a clear conscience – your subordinates are responsible, not you.

There are several reasons for taking one’s reflections on the transformations and redefinition of democracy to the Polish-Jewish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, for many years active in the University of Leeds. He was born in 1925 in Poland, succeeded in escaping from the National Socialists to the Soviet occupied zone, and as a soldier in the Polish First Army took part in, for example, the Battle for Berlin in 1945. After growing friction with the communist regime Bauman left Poland in 1968. He therefore has first-hand experience of both the totalitarian movements of the last century, and few people should have better prerequisites for knowing whether it is possible to learn from history.

But Bauman also has a special position as a reference in the history of ideas. His work is something of a logbook of the intellectual and political development in the latter part of the 20th century. In it we can follow the intellectual reckoning with Marxism’s historical faith in development – a distrust of all great narratives, of rationalism and the striving for order. Bauman first became well known to an international audience with Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), in which he maintained that the murder of the Jews was an extreme variant of the art of social engineering, and therefore essentially a modern phenomenon. The Holocaust had more to do with the destructive potential of modern society than with a relapse into archaic barbarism.

The thesis helped to corrode the moralpolitical equation of the post-war period: National Socialism was reactionary therefore = criticism of development is suspect or worse. But this does not mean that Bauman is a prophet of post-modernism, applauding its dissolution of systems as liberation. Power does not disappear with it, but rather is upgraded to Power 2.0 or the like. The central theme in his production from the 1990s is that capitalism has become liquid, disembedded, mobile, light and transient. It is mostly to this reason that I travel to Leeds: to ask how democracy is influenced by this lightness and mobility. Does liquid democracy exist, or does democracy need limits?

Bauman is no classical empirical sociologist, but the kind of pattern recogniser, who allows his nimble intellect to register and interact with new conditions. More traditional sociologists probably think that his work is a methodological thriller, because his argumentation is sometimes rather close to fiction. It offers a vision which one can be inspired by or be indifferent to. Repeatedly during our conversation late one Friday afternoon in January it becomes clear that we do not agree about the description of reality. On one level I agree with him that there is a great danger of building intellectual Maginot Lines and believing that the enemy of tomorrow has to look like, and take the same route, as the enemy of yesterday. The image of the exercise of power that he outlines also gives rise to a badly needed purge among the critical tools. A great deal of what has been applauded as liberating – anti-hierarchical, anti-normative – is merely another form of the exercise of power, and should be recognised and evaluated as such.

But what happens to democracy when everything fixed evaporates? When Bauman has lit his pipe and served coffee in the library, he begins a historical exposé of how the idea of democracy has changed – because democracy is not fixed either, but is rather constantly redefined. First there were personal rights, the right to one’s own body and by extension property. Political rights developed first as a means of guaranteeing personal rights and for a long time it was a matter of course that they would only cover people who possessed property. Political rights are only meaningful if you have something to defend.

When the franchise is extended to cover those people without property, democracy is redefined. Instead of protecting the privileged, it becomes a weapon in the struggle for equality. Democracy in Europe changes direction.We associate it not only with personal and political rights, but also with social rights: every individual has a right to basic material security. The social state was a Project which, during the post-war years, was embraced both by Right and Left. The idea of social rights has become central to our understanding of democracy. Through this even the poorest of the poor gained an interest in democracy.

But this sequence – personal, political and social rights – becomes increasingly difficult to maintain in the fluid society. The redefinition of democracy is redefined. Power has crossed boundaries, has evaded control, and itself exercises control by falling back. Above all in the 1990s onwards the social state is undermined. Bauman sees primarily two causes for this. When social rights were introduced, the underprivileged formed the majority. In large part thanks to the social state they have now become a minority. The prosperous middle class which now dominates does not consider that it needs the social state. The revolution eats its own children, it is said; in this case it seems rather to be the social state which is being eaten by its own children.

But perhaps the most important cause is that power has evaporated from the nation state up to the global sphere, which implies that it to a considerable degree has been emancipated from politics. National political power influences our belief to a diminishing degree. Bauman considers that globalisation so far has been negative, a liberation from contexts, and has as yet not found a new level for political action. Wealth is mobile and can evade political control. At the same time we have acquired an underclass lacking any interest in politics, because it does not feel it can influence its own situation.

– People are less interested in politics because they don’t expect much. So much less depends on who is in power, so much less depends on what the state is doing. People feel thrown one way or another by the waves, tides that come from nowhere in particular. The very rich and the very poor have Little stake in democracy. The middle class is probably the only political class today, but they are the contented majority. Looking at the provisions of the welfare state and comparing them with what is on offer in the shopping malls, they prefer the malls – more choice, more amusement, more fun, more temptation, more excitement. What they really wish from the state is that it provides them with an undisturbed ability to accumulate Resources and use them according to their desires.

Under conditions of globalisation, I don’t believe that the social state is possible any longer in one country taken separately. Everyone remembers how Clinton lied about his sexual relations, but very few remember what he did to the social state in the US. He declared that social provisions, social care, welfare care, is not a federal matter. He transferred it to the individual states, and then a negative competition started among the states. If one state was very lavish and generous, then the poor people from all over the United States would come to them and they would go bankrupt. If, on the other hand, they were very inhospitable, then their poor would go to other states. You can transfer this to the European context. Where there is very high social provision, a very lavish social state, migrants will use all possible means to get there. Every market liberal will tell you this is rationale. You may not discuss this in public, but it is very much in the mind of the legislator. It is quite a serious problem, I’m not inclined to underestimate it.

No one can criticise Bauman for speaking in sound-bites. He exhales in 10 minute verbal sequences and during the considerably shorter inhalations I attempt to get in some of the many objections and reflections which have built up during the conversation. Do you really see an attack of this kind on the Welfare state? Is it not the other way round, that we see a coalition in the middle defending the welfare state? And if the middle class turns away from it, can this possibly be because the welfare state is not living up to its promise? I also doubt that anyone is contented today and feels secure. On the contrary it appears we are living in an Age of Anxiety, in which almost no-one dares to assume that prosperity or position is something lasting. My empirical objections rather seem to arouse an amiable irritation on Bauman’s part, and I feel a little like a pupil who has not done their homework properly. But in any case we drift into a discussion on security and freedom, and on whether one can find a balance between them. My conviction is that this is a delicate issue for democracy. If we experience individual freedom as trying, it is easy for this to acquire for political implications. New research into National Socialism emphasises that it was not a reactionary movement, but an alternative modernity, which accepted technical and economic development but wanted to remove pluralism and overwhelming opportunities for choice in modern society.

Even religious fundamentalism today has features of an alternative modernity of this kind, and attempts to draw on the feeling of unhappiness in post-modern society. Is this not what we begin to see the outlines of, the stress and melancholy of freedom of choice, which quite easily can set off ideological reveries about a simpler existence?

There are two fundamental values without which decent life is not possible, says Bauman. One is security, the other is freedom; security without freedom is slavery; freedom without security is chaos and constant fear. Both are necessary, but find themselves in conflict, and it is incredibly difficult to find a balance between them.

– In the history of political democracy we don’t have a straight line of progress; we have a pendulum. We are not going forward, we are going sideways. In his famous book Civilisation and Its Discontents Sigmund Freud pointed out that civilized life is a product of trade-offs. You give up a lot of your individual freedom in order to get more security. And that is, says Freud, the major cause of all psychological troubles from which people suffer. But, if he were sitting here today he would probably say: Now in 2007 the major cause of the psychological trouble of Contemporary men and women is the fact that they gave up a good deal of their security for the sake of more freedom. With freedom comes risk, so there is less and less security. We are moving towards the other end of the pendulum. And I expect that sooner or later people will cry for more control, for more organization, for more transparency in social life. Whatever choice you make, you are always poisoned by the thought that perhaps there were other choices that are even better than this one, and so you are never really satisfied. The middle class today does not suffer from too many constraints, but from the proliferation of possibilities. People are tired of this pressure of constant choosing and failing, and want the world to be a little bit simpler.

It is only when I get home to Stockholm and listen to the tape of the conversation in Zygmunt Bauman’s library that I discover how often cars with sirens sounding passed by on the road into Leeds. Police cars or ambulances? Leeds seems, nevertheless, to manage quite well today, has bounced back from a typical industrial urban crisis and has become a rather lively town. The centre, of course, consists of shopping malls; I am warned about getting lost there. Before I leave Leeds, I speak to another Polish immigrant, a Young woman working in the hotel reception. So far there has not been so much of the feared “social tourism” in Europe. Those Eastern Europeans who have been on the move have come to Britain to work, not to exploit the social security system. The young Polish woman has settled well but nevertheless wants to return to Poland. For us Poles Culture and belonging are important, she says; it is sad when a country is drained of its young, enterprising people.