The twentieth century saw many attempts at social engineering in order to change the face of humanity, just as industrialization and progress in the natural sciences had proven to change the face of the earth in the nineteenth century. For Bauman, the idea of ‘adjusting the “is” of the world to the human-made “ought”’ (Living 150) is not a new endeavor; indeed, creating a ‘new man’ (or ‘new woman’) has been on the agenda since the beginning of modernity – witness the origins of science fiction in Shelley's Frankenstein and the literary musings on automata, homunculi, and posthuman races in many a well-known story, from E.T.A. Hoffmann's ‘The Sandman’ (1816) to Goethe's Faust (1808).

For lack of scientific knowledge about the animating principles of life, though, most human engineering of the twentieth century (in contrast to its fictional mirror) had to content itself with experiments on the social scale, attempting to engineer better social bodies by ‘cultivation’ of specific traits and the ‘elimination’ of other, less desirable aspects: Atrocities such as ethnic cleansings, eugenics, or some of the inhuman machineries of concentration camps and gulags were the results. In the solid modern stage, these attempts at ‘mastery over fate,’ at shaping humanity according to specific plans, were representative of governments, ‘with their powers of coercion institutionalized in the state, that stood for the “human species” capable of accomplishing collectively what humans individually went on trying to do with little prospect of succeeding’ (Living 150). But as state power waned and a liquid modern society came to be, social engineering and ‘adjusting the “is”’ became the responsibility of the private sector and the individual: ‘Like so many other aspects of human life in our kind of society, the creation of a “new man” (or woman) has been deregulated, individualized, and subsidiarized to individuals, counterfactually presumed to be the sole legislators, executors and judges allowed inside their individual “life politics”’ (Bauman, Living 148).