AB IMPERIO: We would like to begin our discussion with a question about the genealogy of the notion of the “gardening state.” Most historians working in the field of Russian and Soviet history use this concept as a metaphor which successfully eliminates the dichotomy between the totalitarian and the revisionist visions of Soviet history. This concept focuses on the goal rather than the result, and suggests a vision of the ever-increasing pace of rationalization, but does not necessarily point to a successful outcome (from the point of view of those who garden, of course). Could you comment on your own vision of the genealogy of that concept?

Zygmunt BAUMAN: When coining the concept of the “gardening state,” I took inspiration from the idea of “garden culture” suggested by Ernest Gellner as a metaphor for the kind of culture specific for modern times: a culture conscious of being culture (that is, of being an activity of cultivating, like breeding or farming; a sort of cultura animi – similar to agricultura, though aimed at humans instead of plants or cattle), aware of being a deliberate effort, and aware of that effort to be the indispensable condition of things developing (or rather being done) in an intended and pre-designed way. In pre-modern context, as Gellner pointed out, the forms of human togetherness which we now know to have been products of “normative regulation” reproduced themselves, so to speak, matter-of-factly, by inertia – in opposition to the purposeful effort typical of modern society with its dense network of educational, indoctrinating, character-forming, needs-forming-and-limiting institutions, and its models of ideal personalities and ideal patterns of human interaction.
Inspired by that metaphor, I suggested that the difference between the pre-modern and modern state could be best grasped with the help of the opposition between a “gamekeeper” and “gardener” attitude (world-view, cognitive perspective, and above all strategy). If the gamekeeper’s strategy was to prevent all human interference with the preordained and inscrutable wisdom of nature as divine creation, the strategy of the gardener is to impose a design on formlessness, order and structure on chaos and randomness. If the gamekeeper defends the intrinsic order of reality, the gardener designs order and enforces it on reality. For a gamekeeper, all creatures, whether pleasurable and likeable or not, have their rightful place in the divine chain of beings – even if the logic of divine creation is impenetrable to human scrutiny and incomprehensible to the human mind. The gardener focuses instead on dividing extant creatures into proper and improper, useful and harmful, desirable and unwelcome, deserving protection or earmarked for annihilation. Once the design-drawing of a garden starts, beings are divided into “useful plants” and “weeds.” The passage from gamekeeper to gardener boils down to taking over the responsibility for the state of affairs, and the assumption of control over its continuation and/or reform, which in turn boils down to the control over inclusion and exclusion. The crime for which “weeds” are sentenced to destruction is their tendency to escape and defy that control: weeds arrive into a purported garden uninvited – they self-seed, take root and grow in a place reserved for other plants, and thereby interfere with the gardener’s intentions and violate his vision of order.
The passage from “gamekeeper” to “gardener” was intimately related to the emergence of the modern state – a state bent on “modernization,” that is, on the perpetual replacement of social arrangements deemed to ill-suit their purpose or to have outlived their usefulness, by other arrangements – designed according to a more reasonable judgment and intended to serve the tasks better; a state bent on the production and perpetual improvement of “order,” understood as successful manipulation of probabilities (that is, making certain departures and occurrences highly likely to take place, while rendering the occurrence of certain others maximally improbable, or downright impossible to happen; “order” differing from “chaos” as pattern differs from randomness). The modern state was envisioned as an executive arm of the intended take-over under human management of the endemically capricious, wayward, unruly and for those reasons unpredictable nature (non-human and human alike). It is because of such ambitions and practices that the modern state can be characterized as a “gardening state”: a state that governs society the way gardens are designed, tended and controlled.
You are right to suppose that this metaphor applies to the goal rather than the result. A “fully controlled” garden is never attained, and the struggle for full control never ends – it needs to recommence every morning following the day of victories; this is true even more if it is human society that is treated as the gardens are. “Modernization” is not a preliminary effort ending in “modernity” – modernity is never ending, obsessive and compulsive modernization. “Modernity” that stops “modernizing” is an incongruity, like wind that does not blow or a river that does not flow.

AI: Your work has focused largely on the threatening and dangerous aspects of modernity, and as such it creatively elaborates on the tradition that is exemplified by Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno. This tradition – for better or worse – does not pay much attention to concepts such as “national state.” What, in your opinion, is the role of the nation state in the coming of modernity? Is the modern nation the only possible, natural form of human collective organization in the age of capitalism and democracy, or is it a passing phenomenon? To what extent is the nation state just a specific vision of the social world, as Bourdieu and Brubaker have argued? And if so, to what extent did this vision of the social world define how social sciences and humanities operate?

ZB: “National state” is an ideological notion, aimed primarily against “internal aliens” – ethnic minorities keen on retaining their separate identity and reluctant or disallowed to “assimilate”; a notion signaling the ownership claim, an intention to render the state a collective property of “us” though not of “them,” and “them” being treated at best as guests and at worst as undesirable foreigners marked for deportation or destruction. “Nation-state,” on the other hand, is a descriptive category: a simultaneous shorthand representation of an empirical generalization and a theoretical statement asserting that “both the nation and the state lead a full life only in tight symbiosis; without each other they would be incomplete; each of them needs the other for its own fulfillment.”
The processes of nation-building and modern-state building ran in parallel, or rather intertwined; they propelled and supported each other. The state’s power of enforcement within its territorial boundaries, armed with the standard-setting academies of language, obligatory school curricula and unified calendar of national holidays, and above all with the sovereign’s right of exception, was indispensable for replacing a mosaic of ethnicities, religious denominations, dialects, traditions, historical memories or calendars into a more or less uniform social body, claiming to be a nation unified by common past and shared destiny (a process still unfinished in many lands, for instance Italy or Spain). On the other hand, the claim to represent the interests and protect the secure future of a national community was the modern state’s most essential legitimation: the prime justification of its demand of discipline, and of the sacrifice of individual or sectional interest for the sake of the common (national) cause. The model towards which modern states strove (never fully reaching it) was the trinity of one territory, one state, one nation.
Such an objective becomes today increasingly unrealistic. Ongoing globalization erodes all three elements of the trinity and weakens their mutual bonds. No state can now claim a truly undivided sovereignty over its territory and population, while the project of “assimilation” (now, in the “politically correct” vein, renamed “integration”), which used to recast the presence of “minorities” as a temporary irritant soon to be overcome, cannot be seriously, let alone successfully, pursued in view of the increasingly diasporic composition of population mixes. First and foremost, the outcome of globalization is the ever-more-evident divorce of power and politics, previously united and settled in a tight wedlock at the level of nation-states. Much of the power held previously by the state governments evaporates into the global space, heretofore free from political supervision and uncontested authority; while increasingly powerless (since, as before, local) governments are pressed, but also eager, to abandon much of their past ambition and shift many of their past functions sideways, to the mostly global and uncontrolled political market forces, or “subsidiarize” them to individual initiative and stamina: to the sphere of the so-called “life politics,” where individual men and women are expected to use their individually commanded resources to seek and find individual solutions to socially produced problems. Many a nation-state may be best described today as an expanded and ennobled police precinct charged primarily with the maintenance of law and order in its locality – on behalf of powers by which it is controlled, but on which it has little if any influence.
In this sense one may agree with Habermas that we are entering (or have already entered without noticing it) the “post-national constellation.” Only it is happening (or has happened) before a “second line of trenches” has been dug; no site has been prepared to accommodate a reunion and re-marriage of power and politics, no longer feasible in the offices of the nation-state. One can also agree that the nation-state phenomenon looks increasingly less like a “universal rule,” and more like the transient historic solution to the issues of social integration and systemic reproduction (in a nutshell, the issue of the coordination of politics, economy and culture). Only that we are far, very far, from a plausible model of its eventual replacement, and further yet from designing viable agencies capable of acquiting themselves from that task (I keep repeating that the most haunting question today is not “what to do,” but “who is able to do it”).
Indeed, we have not even started as yet to match the continuously local stretches of political action with the already global dimensions of power. Capital, finances, trade, information, crime, drug and arms traffic, terrorism – all those forces that undermine and ignore local defenses – are now planet-wide, while agencies purportedly controlling, taming, and keeping them on track and away from mischief are all local. There are no global (as distinct from, and in many ways opposite to, international) legislative and executive organs, and no law, jurisdiction, or procedural code in sight. At the global level, presently, the principal domain of powers that truly matter is “might makes right”; whereas global righteousness is measured by the current contents of locally administered military warehouses.

AI: You have largely defined a theoretical model that is used by sociologists and historians to study the modern state, its essence and practices. In fact, in this research tradition modernity came to be associated with a new type of systematizing, regulating, manipulating and limiting state. Such a state creates society and defines social politics and politics as a whole. In parallel to this, a different research conception developed that viewed modernity as the era of nations and nationalism. This presupposed a focus upon mass movements, elite cultures, on the role of ideologies, education, mass media, etc. in mass mobilization. Can these two approaches be combined in some common model, in other words, is there a clear hierarchy of subjects and agents of modernity? If the global market appropriated these functions that used to belong to the national state, then where in the past can we find the roots of the market’s power, the preconditions for the rise of this form of control over and distribution of resources? Today, in the post-national and post-state era, is your understanding of modernity – which arguably emerged in the era of almost victorious totalitarian states – altered?

ZB: In my view “modernity” is a complex, but comprehensive (all-inclusive) mode of human cohabitation, and it ought to be viewed in its totality; searching for the “decisive link in the chain of factors” or a single “determining feature” and then evaluating the “degree of modernity” by the volume of that factor’s or feature’s presence or the scale of their salience may only lead to redundant, infertile questions not essentially different from the infamous preoccupation of medieval theologians with the number of angels able to sit together on the tip of a needle. The aforementioned compulsive/obsessive modernization, the universal, inalienable trait of all varieties of the modern mode of life, affects in similar, if not identical measure all aspects of the human condition, inter-human bonds and human interactions, keeping all of them, perpetually, in statu nascendi – in a state of “not yet.” And this definition of the modern condition belongs to both discourses that you have spotted in present-day thinking and writing on the nature of modernity.
The emancipation of business and its market-style logic from communal, political and ethical control is not a novelty; only its scale is novel. The scale apart, such emancipation, with similar “collateral damages,” already happened once in modern history – in the times of the “separation of business from household,” as Max Weber called it, or the “Great Transformation,” as Karl Polanyi did. In both periods – that of early-modern nation-and-state building and the present period of post-national and post-nation-state globalization – the “chaos” resulted from the same cause: the emancipation of business from all, or most, political and ethical control. The first “business emancipation” was traced by Max Weber to the separation of business from household, because the communal rule-setting and ethical supervision focused at that time on (and operated through) the family workshop, rural or urban. In our time, it is the liberation of business from the normative and ethical authority of the nation-state, that principal instrument of collective will formation and execution; following the current divorce between power and politics, nation-states are gradually transformed into local police stations on behalf of global forces on which they have little mitigating influence, let alone control. In both cases, something like the “Wild West” as portrayed in Hollywood Westerns was created, ruled by the “right of might,” actively resisting impositions of law and jurisdiction, and seldom visited by authoritative judges. Then and now, the outcomes are deepening social divisions, pauperizing large swathes of population and wilting communal solidarity. Social dislocations of the first period were put on record in, for instance, Friedrich Engels’ description of the misery and humiliation of Manchester factory hands – yesterday proud and independent craftsmen. In our time, as recently pointed out by Jacques Attali in La voie humaine, half of the world’s trade and more than a half of global investment benefit just 22 countries accommodating a mere 14 percent of the world’s population; whereas the 49 poorest countries inhabited by 11 percent of the world’s population receive between themselves but a half of 1 percent share of the global product – just about the same as the combined income of the three wealthiest men on the planet. Tanzania earns 2.2 billion dollars a year which it divides among 25 million inhabitants. The Goldman Sachs Bank earns 2.6 billion dollars a year, which is then divided between 161 stockholders. We in Europe and the US spend each year 17 billion dollars on animal food, while according to experts it would only take 19 billion dollars to save the world population from hunger. According to careful calculations made by Branko Milanovic,^[1] the top 5 percent of individuals in the world receive about one-third of total world income, while the bottom 5 percent receive 0.2 percent. That means that the richest 5 percent earn in about two days as much as the poorest 5 percent earn (and are expected to live on) in a year. And there are no breakwaters in sight able to stem the global tide of income polarization. In Milan Kundera’s succinct summary, the “unity of mankind” as brought about by globalization means that “there is nowhere one can escape to.”
Though I would say as well that the same globalization (complete with the divorce between power and politics), and for much the same reasons, renders local totalitarian regimes increasingly unviable and unsustainable.

AI: The new imperial history promoted by the journal Ab Imperio takes empire to be not so much a structure of power relations as a space of uneven and unsystematic social developments. In empires – in the Russian Empire for instance – ethnic and national divisions often overlapped or clashed with social ones. Where should historians search for a suitable language to describe these phenomena? How can such societies – in which people were fundamentally not equal to each other – be described? How does this situation contrast with the “liquid” modernity of which you have spoken?

ZB: An overlap of class and ethnic divisions in multi-ethnic political totalities (you call them “empires,” I would rather reserve that name for imperialist metropolises, calling the multi-ethnic polities “states of nations” in distinction from nation-states; some multi-ethnic polities may also happen to be empires, but this is not a necessary connection) renders the internecine strife “over-determined.” For the socially under-privileged, it magnifies, simultaneously, the temptations of nationalistic (or religious, in case of that additional overlap) fundamentalism, and class enmity. The absence of overlap renders the internal conflict, on the contrary, “under-determined” – and eruptions of strife less plausible: class and ethnic (or religious) identities may well neutralize each other or at least blunt their edges. Drawing clear-cut battle-lines and unconditional mobilization of the inimical camps tends to be then all but impossible. Inequality may be resented, but would remain diffuse and manifested in scattered small-scale, single-issue skirmishes, lacking a focus on which its many manifestations could be (rightly or wrongly, but credibly) condensed.
All that of course would hold were not the nation-state principle of political organization a ruling standard of the planet, as it currently remains. One needs to consider the overwhelming outside pressures that may override the bases of internal cohabitation and supply the explosives that those bases fail to produce. The lingering dominance of the nation-state as the well-nigh universal standard of political organization and allocation of sovereignty (however reduced that sovereignty might be at the present stage of globalization) recasts the remaining multi-ethnic polities as relics of a bygone era – no longer viable entities, temporary arrangements doomed to extinction, bound to implode and fall apart; their persistence is presented as an abnormality that needs a reactionary, dictatorial regime to survive (and to be made sense of by political science). Without police and secret police, a huge collection of peoples not minding living together in peace would be (from this perspective, that is) an incongruity; supposing otherwise would be bad tidings for all established and budding nationalisms, and for that reason the incomprehension of social scientists may easily find an ally for itself in the resentments of national elites, and particularly the aspiring and insecure among them.
And yet in the court where multi-ethnic polities are on trial the jury is still out. A case for an opposite verdict still has much going for it. How correct are the arguments raised by all sides will not be, in all probability, decided by the prosecutors and the defenders, but by events outside the courthouse. As long as the historic victory of nation-states is believed to be irrevocable, the proposition that multi-ethnic polities have outlived their use and live on borrowed time sounds credible. The point is, though, that the victory of nations-states no longer looks irrevocable, and above all it does not look sustainable in the long term. Their sovereignty continues to erode; it is simultaneously tapered by powerful external forces and willingly or reluctantly, but with little resistance, contracted away, sometimes in small bits and some other times in large chunks, by nation-state agencies once presumed to be their lawful, and monopolistic holders. In view of the present tendency, the multi-ethnic polities without prospects and intentions to homogenize in any of the many aspects of differentiation do not look like curious leftovers of the bygone past; they look more like bridgeheads of the future. As a matter of fact, “federations” of different degrees of sovereignty-sharing emerge in fits and starts all over the planet. The European Union is one of them. It seems to be going “forward to the past”: to the model once pursued, before its time, by Austro-Hungary, with its ethnic principle of cultural autonomy unconnected with territorial ascription.
To avoid misunderstanding: I am not prophesizing, having none of the skills the risky business of prophesizing requires. I am just recording the tendency that may be spotted in the present global constellation, but it is not for me to say whether it will eventually prevail (even less am I able to foresee in what form and at what cost).

AI: Speaking of the modern state, or of the crisis of modern statehood in the era of globalization, you always meant the national state. Can we take imperial statehood to be a version of the modern statehood you described? In the framework of the metaphor of “gardening state” that you created, scholars of western colonialism studied colonial policies as direct violence, as practices of indirect social segregation, as “scientific” politics of population control, etc. Yet, scholars of traditional, “pre-modern” empires were not attracted by either the problematic described above or by the very metaphor of the gardening state. These empires were thought of as archaic as opposed to modern, dynastic as opposed to the universal participatory citizenship of the nation state, and in general as lacking any interest in or need for modern techniques of governing a state.
If these empires – we can think of the Romanov, the Habsburg, the Hohenzollern and the Ottoman empires – were pre-modern, can we speak of them as “gardening states”? What is your attitude to the emerging view of these polities as capable of self-modernization, and therefore falling into the category of “gardening states”? Can we envision a situation in which the agent of gardening is not identifiable? Can we think of a society in which multiple agents – ethnic groups, political movements, social institutions – each seek a specific way of rationalizing a diverse space?
If “universalization” was one of the main tropes of modern statehood, empires tended to view themselves in terms of the uniqueness of their destiny, mission, etc. On the other hand, historians tend to see imperial statehood as part of a universal “pre-modern” form of the existence of Ancien Regime. Which metaphor would you suggest for empire as an opposition to the modern “gardening state”?

ZB: Let’s beware of pouring out the baby with the bathwater. “Pre-modern empires” had many features, some of them closely related to their pre-modernity (and bound to wilt and vanish), but some others related to their being a “state of nations” instead of a “nation-state” and therefore containing seeds that could sprout into healthy plants. In other words, they combined obsolete traits with embryos of the future.
Yes, their governance looks “primitive” when compared with modern states that “can (and strive to) reach the parts earlier states could not (and wished not to) reach” (I first described that difference in more detail in my 1987 book Legislators and Interpreters). They were, in Ernest Gellner’s apt metaphor, “dentistry states”: forces specializing in extraction (of surplus product) by torture. The “dynasty states,” whether or not fitting the category of “empires,” collected taxes, but in stark contrast to “nation-states” they were not concerned with the way the product that could be taxed had been produced. They were, in my terminology, not “gardening,” but “gamekeeper” states; like gamekeepers, they focused on fighting the poachers, those archetypal troublemakers and busybodies, tinkering with things and thing-spoilers – and they left “nature,” that divine creation, to its own (presumably preordained) course. No one, arguably, better expressed that state of the gamekeeper’s mind elevated to a philosophy of history than Lev Tolstoy, through the lips of Kutuzow on the eve of the Borodino battle.
This feature – the gamekeeper stance – is not an exclusive attribute of “empires” – but a universal trait of pre-modern polities (whether ethnically homogeneous or not), lacking as they were the elementary tools of “demographic rule”: censuses, statistics, filing systems, etc. Most importantly, it is not a product of an ethnically/religiously/linguistically variegated body of subjects. So to the question of whether present-day multi-ethnic polities are “capable of self-modernization,” the answer is “why not?!” Did not present-day nation-states (at least a great number of them) self-modernize (their modernization consisting in patching together and blending into a “nation” a mosaic of local dialects, traditions and customs, a target neither sufficient, nor necessary for modernization to happen). Putin’s Russia is today one of the most conspicuously “gardening” states, even if that state does not make ethnic homogeneity its target (Russia is much more of a “gardening state” than, say, Kosovo). And it is also one of the most modern – that is, marked by unstoppable, compulsive, obsessive modernization. And what about the Soviet Union? Was it not a (failed) experiment of bringing the “project of Enlightenment,” that ideological gloss over the modernization urge, into practice and to its logical conclusions? The Soviet Union was an on-going effort not just to “catch up with,” but to “overtake” competitors in the modernization race. As such, it revealed in full and unraveled (alongside the fascist regimes) the “totalitarian inclination” (as Hannah Arendt called it) endemic to the Enlightenment project – and to all modernity, particularly its “solid” phase.

AI: Your own experience brought you in close contact with one of the states – the Soviet regime – which exemplifies the extreme of the rationalization horror of the twentieth century. How much did your personal experience influence your thinking about the outcomes of modernity? On the other hand, how did your Polish background influence your perception of empire, and of Russian Empire in particular? What does “imperial experience” mean for you? Is this experience something of interest to you?

ZB: I suspect that authors are the last (even, arguably, the least competent) persons to be asked about the influences that shaped their works. Logic discovered by outside observers and the “subjective logic” reconstructed retrospectively by aging authors seldom overlap, and it is awfully difficult to decide which one is truer (or more authoritative, or more trustworthy).
With that proviso, I take the risk of asserting that the two influences on my work you mention must have been enormous (after all, thinking means recycling experience, and not necessarily a conscious, purposeful effort of recycling); though not necessarily in the way many an interpreter would deduce from the twists of my biography. Coming to the Soviet Union from pre-war Poland, not a paragon of democracy and a country struggling hard to make the Polish State into a State of Poles (and Poles only), I was struck not so much by the sharply un-democratic nature of the country of arrival (not a complete novelty to me), but by the multitude of ethnicities that lived and worked side by side paying little attention to ethnic differences between them (a novelty by all standards). It brought me to understand that appropriation of a state by one nation is not the only formula for political integration; and that none of the two formulae is guaranteed to save the population from the horrors of authoritarianism – nor is it the only, exclusive cause of such horrors.
That discovery has been recycled, I suspect, or perhaps it “recycled itself,” into a number of convictions to which I have held ever since. For instance, that social systems are far from being as monolithic as the dominant sociological theories (whether Marxists or Parsonian) and official ideologies (whether communist or capitalist) make them appear. Or that there is no such thing as a perfect society – that each kind of society has its virtues and its vices, and that each form it takes stands in need of further improvement. Or that trying to strike a balance between values indispensable for decent human life is and will remain a matter of trade-off; and that therefore the flow of historical time, instead of bearing character of linear progress, is more reminiscent of a pendulum.

AI: You seem to argue that the multinational polities of Central and Eastern Europe – the empires of the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs – belonged to the “gamekeeping” type of state. While their option of diversity as a norm rather than a deviation to be corrected might be confirmed by historians, we think that these empires also took the responsibility of defining inclusion and exclusion, and managed populations in ways that were strikingly modern, as you so aptly pointed out. Given that the space of these empires was so heterogeneous, that ethnic and social identities often overlapped, and that their efforts at modernization were uneven, do you think you can speak of a separate culture of modernity in these polities? A gardening state, perhaps, moderated by objective limits to the application of its gardening drive? If there was a specific, “exceptional” culture of modernization in these empires, what would you identify as its characteristics?

ZB: Let me make it clear that all the notions used in the above discussion, “pre-modern,” and “modern” as well as “postmodern” (or “liquid modern,” as I prefer to call them) states, or “‘game-keeping”’ and “‘gardening”’ states, are “‘ideal” or “pure” “types” (as Max Weber would have called them): analytical, but not descriptive notions. It would be very difficult, perhaps even utterly impossible, to point to a single polity that might be viewed as an exact copy or incarnation of any one of them. In every empirical entity we are likely to find a mix of somewhat different proportions. Pre-modern, modern and liquid-modern forms of life may succeed each other – but they also all too often, perhaps all along the way, coincide, coexist, clash or cooperate. I deploy all those notions because they are helpful in pinpointing the tensions likely to influence the development of the forms of human cohabitation; but the outcomes of those crisscrossing influences and tensions are in no way predetermined. The sole task which a researcher can, in my view, responsibly perform, is to enumerate current tendencies and their clashes that clarify the stakes of the game, variable scenarios and their prospects.
To clarify the epistemological status of “ideal types” a bit further, I reproduce below a fragment from my book Consuming Life (Polity Press, 2007):

EXCURSUS: ON THE METHOD OF “IDEAL TYPES”

Before we proceed, a warning is called for, in order to pre-empt the inevitably unresolvable disputes regarding the uniqueness or generality, or for that matter particularity or commonality of the analysed phenomena. It is beyond dispute that nothing or almost nothing in human history is totally novel in the sense of having no antecedents in the past; chains of causality may be always stretched infinitely into the past. But it is also beyond dispute that in various forms of life even the phenomena that can be shown to be universally present enter a somewhat different configuration – and it is the particularity of the configuration, much more than the specificity of its ingredients, that “makes the difference”. The models of “consumerism”, as well as those of the “society of consumers” and “consumer culture”, proposed here, are what Max Weber named “ideal types”: abstractions trying to grasp the uniqueness of a configuration composed of by no means unique ingredients, and which separate the patterns defining that figuration from the multitude of aspects that the configuration in question shares with others. Most if not all concepts routinely used in social sciences – like “capitalism”, “feudalism”, “free market”, “democracy”, or indeed “society”, “community”, “locality”, “organization” or “family” – have the status of ideal types. As suggested by Weber, “ideal types” (if properly constructed) are useful, and also indispensable cognitive tools even if (or perhaps because) they deliberately throw light on certain aspects of described social reality while leaving in the shade some other aspects considered to be of lesser or random only relevance to the essential, necessary traits of a particular form of life. “Ideal types” are not descriptions of reality: they are the tools used to analyze it. They are good for thinking; or, arguably though paradoxically, despite their abstract nature they make empirical social reality, as available in experience, describable. These tools are irreplaceable in any effort to render thoughts intelligible and to enable a coherent narrative of abominably messy evidence of human experience. But let us recall Max Weber’s own most elegant and convincing case justifying their construction and use – an argument that lost nothing of its topicality and relevance to sociological practice^[2]:

“(S)ociological analysis both abstracts from reality and at the same time helps us to understand it, in that it shows with what degree of approximation a concrete historical phenomenon may be in one aspect “feudal”. In another “bureaucratic”, and in still another “charismatic”. In order to give a precise meaning to these terms, it is necessary for the sociologist to formulate pure ideal types of the corresponding forms of action which in each case involve the highest possible degree of logical integration by virtue of their complete adequacy on the level of meaning. But precisely because this is true, it is probably seldom if ever that a real phenomenon can be found which corresponds exactly to any one of these ideally constructed ideal types.”

As long as we remember Weber’s words, we may safely (if cautiously) continue to use “pure constructs” in our struggle to make intelligible and understand the admittedly “impure” reality, while simultaneously avoiding the traps awaiting the unwary prone to confuse “pure ideal types” with “real phenomena”. We can proceed therefore to construct the models of consumerism, society of consumers and consumerist culture, which in the author’s view are precisely the tools fit for the job of understanding a crucially important aspect of the society we currently inhabit and therefore for also the job of constructing a coherent narrative of our shared experience of that habitation.