There is little sign of the sound and fury of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's work in his quiet suburban life in Leeds. Married for 55 years and in retirement from the University of Leeds, he cooks, walks and keeps a low media profile. In fact, for a man who has been called 'the greatest sociologist writing in English today', he is pleasantly self–effacing. "I'm not a celebrity," he tells me. He may prefer to stay out of the limelight, but his ideas don't. Since the early 1990s, Bauman has produced one pioneering book after another on subjects as diverse as the Holocaust, television soaps and love (the subject of his latest work, Liquid Love, which came out last summer). And while the originality of his thought has won him respect around the world he has also managed to retain a position as one of the few radical thinkers revered both inside and outside the establishment.

Bauman is an intellectual dissenter of the first order. In past works (such as The Individualised Society; Globalisation: the Human Consequences; and Liquid Modernity) he has condemned liberal capitalism, globalisation and consumerism which, as he tells me, are being "efficiently deployed in the service of the growing planet–wide polarization of human conditions and prospects." Criticising them for what he sees as their individualising and thus antagonistic effects on societies and cultures, he adds: "The flow of products and messages around the world has been employed to wall up the hostile camps and tighten the ranks of opposing armies."

In Liquid Love he applies these perspectives to the modern relationship — and the picture that emerges is not pretty. Just as consumerism, technology and economic thinking are changing the way we work and live, he argues, they have also begotten a new kind of love: love–as–commodity.

Bauman first observed in the early 1990s that people were beginning to treat the process of courtship like shopping: inspect, weigh up the pros and cons and then jump into bed (buy) — with the included clause that one may withdraw affection (take the product back) if things begin to get a bit rough.

The growing use of mobile phones and the Internet to conduct relationships, Bauman noted, was making the creation and breaking of bonds all the more easy. Bauman gives the example of a man who, interviewed in connection with the rapidly growing popularity of computer dating at the expense of singles bars and lonely hearts columns, pointed to one decisive advantage of e–relationships: "you can always press 'delete'." The result? The most common kind of love today, Bauman insists, is fragile and emaciated, haunted by the ambivalence that there might be someone better to 'invest' your time in just around the corner.

So what model of human bonding does Bauman propose instead? In Liquid Love his answer is: the pre–modern sort. This is the kind of love that means abandoning oneself to another, taking a hostage to fate, "that eerie and mysterious future, impossible to be told in advance, to be pre–empted or staved off, to be speeded up or arrested." But isn't such a love just as much a product of pre–modern socio–economic conditions — such as lower social mobility and early death — as the liquid kind is a product of our market–driven environment today? I put the question to him.

"What is changing and 'historically contingent' is the emphasis," Bauman replies. He adds that liquid loving was identified long ago as something resembling a sickness: "Søren Kierkegaard rightly saw Mozart's Don Giovanni, notorious for his inclination to 'finish quickly and start from the beginning,' as a deviant and pathological case."

Sensitivity to social malaise undoubtedly has some of its origins in Bauman's turbulent past. Born into a low–income, Polish–Jewish family, a survivor of the Holocaust and twice exiled, his personal experiences have left him with a sharp feel for our humanity, and by the same token, an eye for when it is lacking. And it is on the basis of such sensitivity that Bauman has challenged the world. If we want to see ourselves as superior to animals, he says, we must learn to love our neighbours as we love ourselves (as well as learning to love ourselves, if necessary): "Without the extension and/or transcendence of self–love, survival is not the kind of survival that sets humans apart from the beasts (and — never forget it — the angels)."

You get the impression that Bauman has no trouble loving his neighbours, and he talks of his surrogate home city with great affection. When he thinks of Leeds he thinks of hospitality, he says, and the welcome it gave him and his family when they came to Britain thirty years ago.

But away from the garden fence and in the intellectual ring, Bauman — as you might expect — gives the accommodating instinct shorter shrift. He has little mercy on flawed arguments, wherever they originate — "When lecturing, I notice holes in my argument" — but even so, when others feed him lines of thinking that "prompt banalities" he tends to stop rather than dissect.

One of those banalities is without doubt the tedious ins and outs of being famous.

Bauman patently sees no place for himself in a media world that insists on drumming the tedious rhythms of consumerism into the public psyche. "I am far from blaming the messenger for the message and equally far from blaming the recipients for absorbing it; but to preclude the effects of the dull, monotonous repetitiousness of unison messages would also be foolish."

But, do television and other media really bind people in unreflective consumerism? I wonder if Bauman is overstating the case: academics researching in the field of audience studies have plied their trade in that very gap between message and receiver.

"What is there to choose from?" he asks by way of rhetorical reply. The interpretation of life offered by the media for most people, he says, is "but one of quite a few possible, and it derives a better part of the force of persuasion from being almost alone in the field."

For Bauman, our most common cultural reference points — take, as he does in Liquid Love, the examples of EastEnders, the Observer and the dating game as it is described in the Guardian's 'Weekend' magazine — are joint–culprits in the everyday squeeze on our humanity. That is, whether we're watching relationships continuously start, go through agony and die (EastEnders), reading about the benefits of being a 'semi–detached couple' (Observer) or getting the latest tips on how to break up a relationship without leaving too much damage in your wake (Guardian), it's the same ideological narrative: your relationship is bound to be unstable, so be prepared to discard and shop around for another.

Bauman's analyses may seem dark, but what else are we to make of social phenomena outside the media such as the current relationships counselling boom, speed dating, online love, the growing use of mobile phones to manage our affairs with others?

I ask Bauman if he can see any solutions on the horizon. Not naturally disposed to intellectual optimism, he says: "Liquid love is the product of people's earnest attempts to adapt and adjust to a society of excess and waste, run by consumer markets. Finding effective 'antidotes', not to mention applying them with palpable effects, is a tall order and a daunting task. Life conditions and life strategies are as tightly entwined as the Gordian knot." The difficulties multiply when you realise that people are barking up the wrong tree when they search for remedies to their problems; they "no longer believe in collective solutions to individual troubles."

In fact it is a concern with the common, average experience that drives Bauman. As he says, he founds his politics on three principles: "A good society is a society which believes that it is not good enough; that it is the task of the collectivity to insure individuals against individually suffered misfortune; and that the quality of society is measured by the quality of life of its weakest, just like the carrying power of a bridge is measured by its weakest pillar. Indeed, the other side of loving others as you love yourself is taking responsibility for your responsibility." Is that why he writes? "I write because I believe an alternative world is possible. One needs to start somewhere to bring it closer, and writing, sharing thought, is not the worst of starts."