Zygmunt Bauman

# Key points in biography

Bauman was born in Poland in 1925 and moved to the UdSSR at the age of 14 and fought in the Red Army against Germany at the age of 18. From the 1940s to 50s he was an army general in Poland. During an anti-Jewish purge in 1953 he lost his position and became a professor at the university in Warsaw. In 1968 with anti Jewish sentiments again on the rise, Bauman decided to emigrate to the West and built a third career there, he became a professor at Leeds University in 1971.

# Contributions to Sociology

Bauman's main intellectual influences were "French structuralist anthropology, the Frankfurt school of critical theory from Adorno to Habermas, the revisionist Marxism of Gramsci and Lukács, and the
frontier radicalism of American sociologists such as C. Wright Mills"

Before he would later become the postmodern scholar he is now known as Bauman became famous as a leading advocate of how to make modernity work in more positive ways, in his view to make it more democratic and socialist, more equal and freer. This he believed would only be possible through an open form of dialogue in which also sociological scholars had to actively engage. In fact, the arguments that have made Bauman famous were developed already in the 1960s while he was still teaching in Poland. He made essentially three claims about modernity

1. Ideology (reinforced by bureaucracy) contributes to eliminating a sense of personal moral responsibility and promotes conformity among individuals
2. Planning of society becomes increasingly jeopardized when a former cultural homogeneity is replaced by subcultural heterogeneity
3. Everyone is responsible for their own moral choices

"some of the elements of Bauman’s sociology of postmodernity were already present in the work he carried out in his earlier manifestation as a sociologist who did not look beyond modernity but, instead, sought his utopia within its bounds."

He made his turn towards postmodernism in the 80s, since then his main concern has been to explore the characteristic of the postmodern world. He asserts that it is composed of a group of strangers, full of ambivalence and groups fighting over ultimate truths. The three claims about modernity that he had made already in 1960 now played a completely different and much more pessimistic role in his works. While he had regarded them as questions of simple practical matters that could be solved by effective planning back in the 60s, he now saw them as fundamental flaws of modernity that made it inherently unacceptable as such. The oppression of morality, the ambivalence of cultural heterogeneity and the inability of modern men and women to assume their own moral responsibility since that was a task much too daunting for them. His turn towards such a pessimistic view of modernity was mainly caused by the fact that he came to believe that the socialist utopia he had envisioned was impossible to be reached. Bauman had believed that as societies became more democratic, the central state would take less and less responsibility and political discourse and decision-making would be taken over by local assemblies. The encouragement of consumerism and the ready acceptance with which most people adopted it jeopardized this view on the politicization of societies and thus Bauman's strategy towards socialism. Bauman saw repression of the people everywhere, in the East in the communist or by then semi-communist countries a repression from the state and in the West a repression through their seduction by consumerism. There was a multitude of disconntected unfinished utopian projects but the potential of such creative socialist projects seemed to be extremely limited by either of the two forms of repression.

Now, Bauman believes governments have been forced to retreat into the background and give way to transnational and multinational corporation who exercise the real power in society. In this highly dissatisfying situation consumerism offers consumers short-term satisfaction and thus lulls people into an acceptance of the deeply disturbing circumstances of postmodernity.

## Modernity and the Holocaust

Bauman has won the Amalfi price for this work, showing how modern bureaucracies tend to have a neutralizing effect on those working in them, resulting in a repression of their moral sensitivity.

# References

1. ↑  Scott, John, 2007, *Fifty Key Sociologists: The Contemporary Theorists*, p. 18
2. ↑  Scott, John, 2007, *Fifty Key Sociologists: The Contemporary Theorists*, p. 18
3. ↑  Scott, John, 2007, *Fifty Key Sociologists: The Contemporary Theorists*, p. 19
4. ↑  Scott, John, 2007, *Fifty Key Sociologists: The Contemporary Theorists*, pp. 18-24