Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Zygmunt Bauman (/ˈbaʊmən/; 19 November 1925 – 9 January 2017) was a Polish sociologist and philosopher. He was driven out of Poland by a political purge in 1968 engineered by the Communist government of the Polish People's Republic and forced to give up his Polish citizenship to move to Israel. Three years later he moved to the United Kingdom. He resided in England from 1971 and became Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, later Emeritus. Bauman was one of the world's most eminent social theorists, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity.

Career

Bauman was born to non-observant Polish Jewish family in Poznań, Poland, in 1925. When Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany and by the Soviet Union, in 1939, his family escaped eastwards into the USSR. Bauman then enlisted in the Soviet-controlled First Polish Army, working as a political instructor. He took part in the battles of Kolberg (now Kołobrzeg) and of Berlin. In May 1945 he was awarded the Military Cross of Valour. After World War II he became one of the Polish Army's youngest majors.

According to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, from 1945 to 1953 Bauman was a political officer in the Internal Security Corps (KBW), a military unit formed to combat Ukrainian nationalist insurgents and part of the remnants of the Polish Home Army.[2] Later Bauman worked for military intelligence from 1945 to 1948. However, the nature and extent of his collaboration remain unknown, as well as the exact circumstances under which it was terminated.[2]

In an interview with The Guardian, Bauman confirmed he had been a committed communist during and after World War II and had never made a secret of it. He admitted that joining the military intelligence service at age 19 was a mistake although he had a "dull" desk-job and did not remember informing on anyone.[3][4] While serving in the KBW, Bauman first studied sociology at the Warsaw Academy of Political and Social Science. In the KBW Bauman, already in the rank of major, was suddenly dishonourably discharged in 1953, after his father had approached the Israeli embassy in Warsaw with a view to emigrating to Israel. As Bauman did not share his father's Zionist tendencies and was indeed strongly anti-Zionist, his dismissal caused a severe, though temporary estrangement from his father. During the period of unemployment that followed, he completed his M.A. and in 1954 became a lecturer at the University of Warsaw, where he remained until 1968.

During a spell at the London School of Economics, where his supervisor was Robert McKenzie, he prepared a comprehensive study on the British socialist movement, his first major book. Published originally in Polish in 1959, a revised edition appeared in English in 1972. Bauman went on to publish other books, including Socjologia na co dzień ("Everyday Sociology", 1964), which reached a large popular audience in Poland and later formed the foundation for the English-language text-book Thinking Sociologically (1990). Initially, Bauman remained close to orthodox Marxist doctrine, but, influenced by Georg Simmel and Antonio Gramsci, he became increasingly critical of Poland's Communist government. Owing to this he was never awarded a professorship even after he completed his habilitation but, after his former teacher, Julian Hochfeld, was made vice-director of UNESCO's Department for Social Sciences in Paris in 1962, Bauman did in fact inherit Hochfeld's chair.[citation needed]

Faced with increasing political pressure connected with a political purge led by Mieczysław Moczar, the Chief of the Polish Communist Security Police, Bauman renounced his membership of the governing Polish United Workers' Party in January 1968. The March 1968 events culminated in a purge that drove many remaining Communist Poles of Jewish descent out of the country, including those intellectuals who had fallen from grace with the communist government.[citation needed] Bauman, who had lost his chair at the University of Warsaw, was among them. Having had to give up Polish citizenship to be allowed to leave the country, he first went to Israel to teach at Tel Aviv University, before accepting the chair of sociology at the University of Leeds, where he intermittently also served as head of department. After his appointment, he published almost exclusively in English, his third language, and his reputation grew. Indeed, from the late 1990s, Bauman exerted a considerable influence on the anti- or alter-globalization movement.[citation needed]

In a 2011 interview in the Polish weekly, "Polityka", Bauman criticised Zionism and Israel, saying Israel was not interested in peace and that it was "taking advantage of the Holocaust to legitimize unconscionable acts". He compared the Israeli West Bank barrier to the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto where hundreds of thousands of Jews had died in the Holocaust. The Israeli ambassador to Warsaw, Zvi Bar, called Bauman's comments "half truths" and "groundless generalizations."[5]

Bauman was a supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation which advocates for democratic reform in the United Nations, and the creation of a more accountable international political system.[6]

Family

Bauman was married to writer Janina Bauman, née Lewinson; 18 August 1926 – 29 December 2009.[7] They had three daughters, painter Lydia Bauman, architect Irena Bauman, and professor Anna Sfard, a leading theorist of education at the University of Haifa. His grandson Michael Sfard is a prominent civil rights lawyer and author in Israel. Zygmunt Bauman died in Leeds on 9 January 2017.[8]

Work

Bauman's published work extends to 57 books and well over a hundred articles.[9] Most of these address a number of common themes, among which are globalisation, modernity and postmodernity, consumerism, and morality.[citation needed]

Early work

Bauman's earliest publication in English is a study of the British labour movement and its relationship to class and social stratification, originally published in Poland in 1960.[10] He continued to publish on the subject of class and social conflict until the early 1980s. His last book was on the subject of Memories of Class.[11] Whilst his later books do not address issues of class directly, he continued to describe himself as a socialist, and he never rejected Marxism entirely.[12] The Neo-Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci in particular remained one of his most profound influences, along with Neo-Kantian sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel.[13]

Modernity and rationality

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In the late 1980s and early 1990s Bauman published a number of books that dealt with the relationship between modernity, bureaucracy, rationality and social exclusion.[14] Bauman, following Freud, came to view European modernity as a trade off: European society, he argued, had agreed to forego a level of freedom to receive the benefits of increased individual security. Bauman argued that modernity, in what he later came to term its 'solid' form, involved removing unknowns and uncertainties. It involved control over nature, hierarchical bureaucracy, rules and regulations, control and categorisation — all of which attempted to remove gradually personal insecurities, making the chaotic aspects of human life appear well-ordered and familiar.

Bauman in 2011

Later in a number of books Bauman began to develop the position that such order-making never manages to achieve the desired results. When life becomes organised into familiar and manageable categories, he argued, there are always social groups who cannot be administered, who cannot be separated out and controlled. In his book Modernity and Ambivalence Bauman began to theorise about such indeterminate persons in terms of an allegorical figure he called, 'the stranger.' Drawing upon Georg Simmel's sociology and the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, Bauman came to write of the stranger as the person who is present yet unfamiliar, society's undecidable. In Modernity and Ambivalence Bauman attempted to give an account of the different approaches modern society adopts toward the stranger. He argued that, on the one hand, in a consumer-oriented economy the strange and the unfamiliar is always enticing; in different styles of food, different fashions and in tourism it is possible to experience the allure of what is unfamiliar. Yet this strange-ness also has a more negative side. The stranger, because he cannot be controlled or ordered, is always the object of fear; he is the potential mugger, the person outside of society's borders who is a constant threat.

Bauman's most famous book, Modernity and the Holocaust, is an attempt to give a full account of the dangers of those kinds of fears. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno's books on totalitarianism and the Enlightenment, Bauman developed the argument that the Holocaust should not simply be considered to be an event in Jewish history, nor a regression to pre-modern barbarism. Rather, he argued, the Holocaust should be seen as deeply connected to modernity and its order-making efforts. Procedural rationality, the division of labour into smaller and smaller tasks, the taxonomic categorisation of different species, and the tendency to view obedience to rules as morally good, all played their role in the Holocaust coming to pass. He argued that for this reason modern societies have not fully grasped the lessons of the Holocaust; it tends to be viewed—to use Bauman's metaphor—like a picture hanging on the wall, offering few lessons. In Bauman's analysis the Jews became 'strangers' par excellence in Europe.[15] The Final Solution was pictured by him as an extreme example of the attempt made by society to excise the uncomfortable and indeterminate elements that exist within it. Bauman, like the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, contended that the same processes of exclusion that were at work in the Holocaust could, and to an extent do, still come into play today.

Postmodernity and consumerism

In the mid-to-late 1990s, Bauman began to explore postmodernity and consumerism.[16] He posited that a shift had taken place in modern society in the latter half of the 20th century. It had changed from a society of producers into a society of consumers. According to Bauman, this change reversed Freud's "modern" tradeoff—i.e., security was given up in exchange for more freedom, freedom to purchase, consume, and enjoy life. In his books in the 1990s Bauman wrote of this as being a shift from "modernity" to "post-modernity".

Since the turn of the millennium, his books have tried to avoid the confusion surrounding the term "postmodernity" by using the metaphors of "liquid" and "solid" modernity. In his books on modern consumerism, Bauman still writes of the same uncertainties that he portrayed in his writings on "solid" modernity; but in these books he writes of fears becoming more diffuse and harder to pin down. Indeed, they are, to use the title of one of his books, "liquid fears" – fears about paedophilia, for instance, which are amorphous and have no easily identifiable reference.[17]

Bauman is credited with coining the term allosemitism to encompass both philo-Semitic and anti-Semitic attitudes towards Jews as the other.[18][19] Bauman reportedly predicted the negative political effect that social media have on voter's choice by denouncing them as 'trap' where people only 'see reflections of their own face'.[20]

Awards and honours

Bauman was awarded the European Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Sciences in 1992 and the Theodor W. Adorno Award of the city of Frankfurt in 1998. He was awarded in 2010, jointly with Alain Touraine, the Príncipe de Asturias Prize for Communication and the Humanities.[21]

The University of Leeds established 'The Bauman Institute' within its School of Sociology and Social Policy in his honour in September 2010.[22] The University of Lower Silesia, a small private higher education institution in Lower Silesia, Poland, planned to award Bauman an honorary doctorate in October 2013.[23] However, as a reaction to a major anti-communist and what Bauman supporters allege "anti-semitic" uproar against him, he eventually rejected the award.[24][25]

In 2015 the University of Salento awarded Bauman an honorary degree in Modern Languages, Literature and Literary Translation.[26]

Criticisms

In 2014, Peter Walsh, a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, accused Bauman of plagiarism from several websites, including Wikipedia, in his book Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? (2013). In this book Bauman is said to have copied verbatim paragraphs from Wikipedia articles on Slow Food and steady-state economy, along with their bibliography, without attributing sources, authors or the fact that they were copied from Wikipedia. He did use a paragraph from the article on the golden handshake, but this citation was properly attributed to Wikipedia.[27]

In a response Bauman suggested that "obedience" to "technical" rules was unnecessary, and that he "never once failed to acknowledge the authorship of the ideas or concepts that I deployed, or that inspired the ones I coined".[28] In a detailed critique of Walsh and co-author David Lehmann, cultural critics Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux concluded: "This charge against Bauman is truly despicable. It's a reactionary ideological critique dressed up as the celebration of method and a back-door defence of a sterile empiricism and culture of positivism. This is a discourse that enshrines data, correlations, and performance, while eschewing matters of substance, social problems, and power."[29]

Bibliography

Warsaw period

1957: Zagadnienia centralizmu demokratycznego w pracach Lenina [Questions of Democratic Centralism in Lenin's Works]. Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza.

1959: Socjalizm brytyjski: Źródła, filozofia, doktryna polityczna [British Socialism: Sources, Philosophy, Political Doctrine]. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe.

1960: Klasa, ruch, elita: Studium socjologiczne dziejów angielskiego ruchu robotniczego [Class, Movement, Elite: A Sociological Study on the History of the British Labour Movement]. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe.

1960: Z dziejów demokratycznego ideału [From the History of the Democratic Ideal]. Warszawa: Iskry.

1960: Kariera: cztery szkice socjologiczne [Career: Four Sociological Sketches]. Warszawa: Iskry.

1961: Z zagadnień współczesnej socjologii amerykańskiej [Questions of Modern American Sociology]. Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza.

1962 (with Szymon Chodak, Juliusz Strojnowski, Jakub Banaszkiewicz): Systemy partyjne współczesnego kapitalizmu [The Party Systems of Modern Capitalism]. Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza.

1962: Spoleczeństwo, w ktorym żyjemy [The Society we inhabit]. Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza.

1962: Zarys socjologii. Zagadnienia i pojęcia [Outline of Sociology. Questions and Concepts]. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe.

1963: Idee, ideały, ideologie [Ideas, Ideals, Ideologies]. Warszawa: Iskry.

1964: Zarys marksistowskiej teorii spoleczeństwa [ An Outline of the Marxist Theory of Society]. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe.

1964: Socjologia na co dzień [Everyday Sociology]. Warszawa: Iskry.

1965: Wizje ludzkiego świata. Studia nad społeczną genezą i funkcją socjologii [Visions of a Human World: Studies on the genesis of society and the function of sociology]. Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza.

1966: Kultura i społeczeństwo. Preliminaria [Culture and Society, Preliminaries]. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe.

2017: Szkice z teorii kultury [Essays in cultural theory]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar. ISBN 978-83-7383-878-9[30] [First edition of a manuscript originally completed in 1967]

Leeds period

1972: Between Class and Elite. The Evolution of the British Labour Movement. A Sociological Study. Manchester: Manchester University Press ISBN 0-7190-0502-7 (Polish original 1960)

1973: Culture as Praxis. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7619-5989-0

1976: Socialism: The Active Utopia. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers. ISBN 0-8419-0240-2

1976: Towards a Critical Sociology: An Essay on Common-Sense and Emancipation. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7100-8306-8

1978: Hermeneutics and Social Science: Approaches to Understanding. London: Hutchinson. ISBN 0-09-132531-5

1982: Memories of Class: The Pre-history and After-life of Class. London/Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7100-9196-6

c. 1985 Stalin and the peasant revolution: a case study in the dialectics of master and slave. Leeds: University of Leeds Department of Sociology. ISBN 0-907427-18-9

1987: Legislators and interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity, Intellectuals. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-2104-7

1988: Freedom. Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0-335-15592-8

1989: Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press 1989. ISBN 0-8014-2397-X

1990: Paradoxes of Assimilation. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

1990: Thinking Sociologically. An introduction for Everyone. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-16361-1

1991: Modernity and Ambivalence. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-2603-0

1992: Intimations of Postmodernity. London, New York: Routhledge. ISBN 0-415-06750-2

1992: Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 0-7456-1016-1

1993: Postmodern Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-18693-X

1994: Dwa szkice o moralności ponowoczesnej [Two sketches on postmodern morality]. Warszawa: IK.

1995: Life in Fragments. Essays in Postmodern Morality. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19267-0[31]

1996: Alone Again – Ethics After Certainty. London: Demos. ISBN 1-898309-40-X

1997: Postmodernity and its Discontents. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0-7456-1791-3

1995: Ciało i przemoc w obliczu ponowoczesności [Body and Violence in the Face of Postmodernity]. Toruń: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika. ISBN 83-231-0654-1

1997: (with Roman Kubicki, Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska) Humanista w ponowoczesnym świecie – rozmowy o sztuce życia, nauce, życiu sztuki i innych sprawach [A Humanist in the Postmodern World – Conversations on the Art of Life, Science, the Life of Art and Other Matters]. Warszawa: Zysk i S-ka. ISBN 83-7150-313-X

1998: Work, consumerism and the new poor. Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0-335-20155-5

1998: Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-7456-2012-4

1999: In Search of Politics. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 0-7456-2172-4

2000: Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity ISBN 0-7456-2409-X

(2000 [ed. by Peter Beilharz]: The Bauman Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-631-21492-5)

2001: Community. Seeking Safety in an Insecure World. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 0-7456-2634-3

2001: The Individualized Society. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 0-7456-2506-1

2001 (with Keith Tester): Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 0-7456-2664-5

2001 (with Tim May): Thinking Sociologically, 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-631-21929-3

2002: Society Under Siege. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 0-7456-2984-9

2003: Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds, Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 0-7456-2489-8

2003: City of fears, city of hopes. London: Goldsmith's College. ISBN 1-904158-37-4

2004: Wasted Lives. Modernity and its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 0-7456-3164-9

2004: Europe: An Unfinished Adventure. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 0-7456-3403-6

2004: Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 0-7456-3308-0

2005: Liquid Life. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 0-7456-3514-8

2006: Liquid Fear. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 0-7456-3680-2

2006: Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 0-7456-3987-9

2006: Moralność w niestabilnym świecie [Morality in an instable World]. Poznań: Księgarnia św. Wojciecha. ISBN 83-7015-863-3

2007: Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 0-7456-4002-8

2008: Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-02780-9

2008: The Art of Life. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 0-7456-4326-4

2009: Living on Borrowed Time: Conversations with Citlali Rovirosa-Madrazo. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-4738-8

2009: (with Roman Kubicki, Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska) Życie w kontekstach. Rozmowy o tym, co za nami i o tym, co przed nami. [Life in contexts. Conversations about what lies behind us and what lies ahead of us.] Warszawa: WAiP. ISBN 978-83-61408-77-2

2010: 44 Letters from the Liquid Modern World. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-5056-2

2011: Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-5294-8

2011: Culture in a Liquid Modern World. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-5355-6

2012: This is Not a Diary. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-5570-3

2012: (with David Lyon) Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-6282-4

2013: (with Leonidas Donskis) Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-6274-9

2013: (with Stanisław Obirek) O bogu i człowieku. Rozmowy. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie. ISBN 978-83-08-05089-7

translated as Of God and Man. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-9568-6

2013: (with Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Keith Tester) What use is sociology? Conversations with Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Keith Tester. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 9780745671246

2013: Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 978-0745671093

2014: (with Carlo Bordoni) State of Crisis. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-8095-8

2015: (with Rein Raud) Practices of Selfhood. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 9780745690179

2015: (with Irena Bauman, Jerzy Kociatkiewicz, and Monika Kostera) Management in a Liquid Modern World. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 9781509502226

2015: (with Stanisław Obirek) Of God and Man, Cambridge: Polity Press.ISBN 9780745695686.

2015: (with Stanisław Obirek)On the World and Ourselves, Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 9780745687117.

2016: (with Leonidas Donskis) Liquid Evil. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 978-1509508129

2016: (with Ezio Mauro) Babel. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 978-1509507603

2016: Strangers at Our Door. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 978-1509512171

2017: Retrotopia. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 978-1509515318

2017: (with Thomas Leoncini) Nati Liquidi. Sperling & Kupfler. ISBN 978-8820062668

2017: Zygmunt Bauman. Das Vertraute unvertraut machen. Ein Gespräch mit Peter Haffner, Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg 2017, ISBN 978-3-455-00153-2

2017: A Chronicle of Crisis: 2011—2016. Social Europe Editions. ISBN 1999715101

See also