Zygmunt Bauman's powerful and persuasive study of the postmodern perspective on ethics is particularly welcome. For Bauman the great issues of ethics have lost none of their topicality: they simply need to be seen, and dealt with, in a wholly new way. Our era, he suggests, may actually represent a dawning, rather than a twilight, for ethics.

Zygmunt Bauman is Emeritus Professor of Socilogy at the University of Leeds. He is known worldwide for his recent work in the social theory of medernity and postmodernity, in books such as Legislators and Interpreters, Modernity and the Holocaust, and Modernity and Ambivalence. He is also the author of Thinking Sociology (Blackwell, 1990).