The production of 'human waste' - or more precisely, wasted lives, the 'superfluous' populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts - is an inevitable outcome of modernization. It is an unavoidable side-effect of economic progress and the quest for order which is characteristic of modernity.

As long as large parts of the world remained wholly or partly unaffected by modernization, they were treated by modernizing societies as lands that were able to absorb the excess of population in the 'developed countries'. Global solutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally produced overpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached the furthest lands of the planet, 'redundant population' is produced everywhere and all localities have to bear the consequences of modernity's global triumph. They are now confronted with the need to seek - in vain, it seems - local solutions to globally produced problems. The global spread of the modernity has given rise to growing quantities of human beings who are deprived of adequate means of survival, but the planet is fast running out of places to put them. Hence the new anxieties about 'immigrants' and 'asylum seekers' and the growing role played by diffuse 'security fears' on the contemporary political agenda.

With characteristic brilliance, this new book by Zygmunt Bauman unravels the impact of this transformation on our contemporary culture and politics and shows that the problem of coping with 'human waste' provides a key for understanding some otherwise baffling features of our shared life, from the strategies of global domination to the most intimate aspects of human relationships.

齊格濛·鮑曼（1926-）當代世界最著名的社會傢與哲學傢之一，是“後現代主義”概念的主要創造者，齣生於波蘭，曾任華沙大學社會係教授，1968年離開波蘭，1969-1971年在特拉維夫和海法大學任教，後前往英國，任利茲大學終身教授，同時也在柏剋利、耶魯、堪培拉等大學任客座教授。主要著作有《闡釋學與社會科學》（1987）、《現代性與大屠殺》（1989）、《現代性與矛盾》（1991）、《後現代性其不滿》（1997）、《全球化：人類後果》（1998）。