Peter Beilharz. Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Editor: George Ritzer. Volume 1, Sage Reference, 2005.

Zygmunt Bauman (b. 1925) is an East European critical theorist and sociologist of the postmodern. Bauman grew up in Poznan, Poland, and moved as a youth to Russia with his family to escape the Nazi invasion. He fought in the Polish army during the Second World War and rose to the level of major, only to be sacked in the anti-Semitic wave of 1953. Bauman turned to social sciences, in the European tradition, where sociology is aligned with continental philosophy. In 1968, having risen to the rank of professor of sociology at Warsaw University, he was again sacked and persecuted, along with other Jewish radical professors, in a subsequent anti-Semitic wave. Together with his family, Bauman left Poland for Leeds, in the United Kingdom, via Tel Aviv and Canberra.

Over the last 30 years, Bauman has become known as one of the most influential of European and especially of British sociologists, for his work is marked by the capacity to negotiate new social problems and forms while radiating these back into the sociological classics of modernism, not least Marx, Weber, and Simmel. The location of his writing is British, but its inflexion is “continental.”

Bauman’s recent work is best known for two things: the sociology of the Holocaust and the scrutiny of the postmodern. In 1989, he published the award-winning Modernity and the Holocaust. This book is a passionate yet sober and systematic assessment of the irony in which the Holocaust was so central to modern, organized routines, developing genocide as industrialized killing, and yet so peripheral to sociology, where the Nazi experience was and is still widely viewed as exceptional to its time and place. Bauman’s argument is that the Holocaust is expressive either of the modern project as such or at least of its social engineering logic and conformist imperatives. Bauman aligns the Holocaust with the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments conducted in the United States, in order to follow the question, “We too could have done this,” rather than the more typical response, “This too could have been done to us.”

The Holocaust is universal in its significance, as well as being the exclusive property of Germans, Nazis, and Jews. More generally, it speaks to us not only of ethics but also of modern possibilities. We cannot imagine the Holocaust before the twentieth century. Its conditions of possibility include the mobilized race ideology of Nazism, the murderous will-to-power of the Nazis and the party-state form, the industrial mode of killing or the technology of the camps, and the bureaucratic means of delivering its victims to the death camps. Bauman’s scrutiny of the modern includes all this, for his concern is that the twentieth century makes a great deal more possible, in terms of human destruction, than before. Before the Holocaust, there was the pogrom. What the Holocaust makes apparent is the limited space available to ethical behaviour, not least because the extent of modern bureaucratic division of labour reduces the proximity of human subjects to each other. It is easier to harm others when we cannot see their faces, when we merely press the button. This also helps explain the extraordinary moral process in which, as in the Eichmann trial, nobody is responsible for anything anymore; all of us are merely busy following orders. Bauman’s sociology is a critique of this conformism then or now, whether Nazi and brutal or British and benign.

Bauman’s work on the Holocaust has been widely misrecognized as antimodern, antitechnology, as following the romantic tradition of denying the modern, from Rousseau to Heidegger. More generally, Bauman’s work has been taken as a continuation of the anti-modernism of the Frankfurt school, exemplified in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1948). Bauman is critical of that particular Enlightenment sense, embodied in the spirit of Goethe’s Faust, for which everything is possible and the world and human will are without limits. The logic of his particular critique of technology is Weberian. Technology, like rationalization or reason, needs to be driven by values that we have to choose. Modernity becomes increasingly difficult because the political or public space within which to deliberate socially shrinks before our eyes. We do more and more technology simply because we can; there is no rational argument against the endless extension of technology.

Bauman’s critique of modernity is therefore also misrecognized as a simple denial or rejection, as if its motivation were a yearning for return to the past. His argument concerning the postmodern is more complicated than this. It is consistent with the logic of Modernity and the Holocaust. Bauman’s is less a critical rejection of modernity than a cautionary tale about the limits and negative effects of high modernism, that project of social engineering, uniformity, and synthetic international architectural style that spread across the twentieth century. Modernism is based on the old Enlightenment maxim, to know the world in order to control it, this, put together with the new means of control developed into the twentieth century. Bauman initially greets the prospect of the postmodern with some enthusiasm, as it holds the possibility of new openings, not least because it also connects to the post-Marxist possibility of utopia after the collapse of the Soviet fantasy. The postmodern suggests pluralisation of life forms, whereas the modern often seems to be made in the image of a singular logic of control. Bauman’s enthusiasms for the possibilities of the postmodern coincides with the hopes of the revolutions of 1989. A decade later, Bauman’s optimism for the postmodern subsides, as it becomes more apparent that the postmodern has become consumerized and commodified.

In the longer run, the postmodern becomes a fashion item rather than a social alternative for art, life, or politics. By 2000, Bauman set out to replace the idea of the postmodern with that of “liquid modernity.” Here, the argument is that we are still modern and only the forms of modernity change. As Marx and Engels were translated to have said, “All that is solid melts into air.” Bauman’s claim is that modernism, or high modernity, institutionalises itself as a hard set of institutions, which are now increasingly replaced by sociological patterns where power flows and social relations are always provisional, up for grabs.

If the Holocaust and the postmodern are the themes with which Bauman is most widely identified, then there are other motifs as well. In his own Marxist origins, Bauman places a special emphasis on both sociology and socialism, in a way that connects his work to that of C. Wright Mills and Alvin Gouldner in American sociology. Bauman remains convinced that sociology has a mission; like critical theory, it has yet to deliver on its promise. The prospect of social engineering on a grand scale remains frightening, but we cannot avoid the responsibility of social reform. His work can be viewed as part of critical theory, in the particular sense that it follows the synthesis of Marxian and Weberian themes associated with Lukács in History and Class Consciousness (1971), and apparent in the more recent work of Agnes Heller and Castoriadis. The path of Bauman’s work since the 1970s might be seen as shifting from the Marxian to the Weberian themes in the critique of modernity. Yet Gramsci remains an ongoing influence as an indicator of what Marxism might be capable of as a sociology that takes culture seriously; and Bauman persists in following Simmel in the consistent curiosity as to what kinds of creatures or personality types modern social forms allow or encourage to develop.

Bauman’s work can also be viewed as a sociology of modernity as excess or as a critique of modernity as order. More generally, again, Bauman’s sociology can be seen as a dialectic of modernity where, as in Dialectic of Enlightenment, modernity turns against itself, the dark side of modernity overshadowing the bright side of its positive achievements. This affinity with the Frankfurt school does not, however, extend to embracing Adorno’s melancholy. Indeed, Bauman solidarises with the moderate optimism in the critical theory of the earlier Habermas, before Habermas turns away from critical theory to the impossible, because Enlightenment, project of reconstructing the social sciences. Bauman thus combines in temperament a sociologically informed pessimism with an anthropological optimism. Humans, here, are always viewed as endowed with natural intelligence, even as they are educated out of it. This is why culture, or second nature, remains so central.

Bauman has published more than 20 books since his first in English, a study of the British Labour movement published in 1972. These works cover all kinds of themes, from Socialism: The Active Utopia (1976) to Freedom (1988). For the last several years, Bauman has modified his choice of audience, writing pocketbooks for a wider audience in the European tradition (see especially Globalization, 1998, and Community, 2000). While the extent of his work can be reduced to the emblems of the Holocaust and the postmodern, as in its more generalized reception, it can more usefully be viewed as spreading across and responding to five main themes: the modern, and together with it, the postmodern, Marxism, Nazism, and capitalism.

Bauman’s critique of the modern commences with his first book on the postmodern; the terms are mutually constitutive, a fact lost on various enthusiasts for the postmodern, which can properly be understood and located only in the modern itself. The modern is the larger category, this not least because Bauman remains conventionally sociological in understanding culture as a subcategory of society. Inasmuch as the postmodern is preeminently a cultural category, referring to art, architecture, writing, or performance, it belongs within the broader project of sociology, alongside economy, state, and civil society. Capitalist economy or commodification drives postmodern culture, at least in the long run. Bauman’s initial enthusiasm for the idea of the postmodern is rather that it opens or opens again the possibility of critique or interpretation without making an intellectual claim to power. In the longer run, again, postmodern intellectuals may have made claims to celebrity or influence; but in the beginning of postmodern times, in the middle 1980s, the hope was rather that they would behave like older hermeneuts. For Bauman in 1987, the choice is exactly that for intellectuals, between the tasks of legislation and those of interpretation, or mediation between communities of speech. The full title of the book spells it out: Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity and Intellectuals. Intellectuals have to choose, here, between state power and ambition, and criticism. The frame of consideration is modern, postmodern—the fusion into postmodern has yet to occur, and this is an exercise in the sociology of intellectuals as such. Bauman here castigates the Enlightenment for the immodesty of its claims, where knowledge was to become not only power but also the claim to state power. At this point, Bauman’s critique of modernity intersects with the critique of Marxism, for the real object of his charge against the ambitions of the Enlightenment is less Diderot than Lenin. Legislators and Interpreters is a shadow critique of bolshevism, high modernity par excellence. Bauman’s ethical critique of bolshevism, like Nazism here, is that it dichotomises populations into worthy citizens and strangers, and sets out to eliminate these internal enemies, whether Kulaks or middle peasants in the USSR or Jews in Germany.

Bauman’s critique of modernity comes to fruition in Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), the text that continues the logic of the earlier Modernity and the Holocaust. The core of Modernity and Ambivalence is a critique of classification and classificatory reason, or what Adorno would call “identity-thinking.” Modernity and Enlightenment come unstuck on their own intellectual axes, where any particular thing or phenomenon cannot be viewed as “A” and “B” at the same time. Bauman’s case is that humans must learn, rather, to deal with ambivalence, uncertainty, difference, debate, and endless dialogue. Conflict, on this understanding, is normal; the pursuit of social harmony is unachievable. Utopia matters, but only as a goal or goals that can never be reached or realized. Modernity, in this context, rests on an analytical attempt to expunge ambivalence. The end of this road is the point at which sociology meets eugenics. The idea of the postmodern appeals semantically to Bauman, in this setting, as it offers the hope of a world that might embrace ambivalence. Yet the resulting commercialisation of postmodern culture results in indifference rather than in the recognition of difference.

It is for this reason that Bauman finally develops the distinction between what he calls a “postmodern sociology” and “sociology of postmodernism.” Bauman indicates his own residual modernity in this distinction, this not least because of his refusal to let go of sociology, itself the paradigmatic modern intellectual discipline. More than any other discipline, sociology is bound into modernity and modernism, from Simmel in Berlin through the Chicago School. Indeed, the closest thing there is to a postmodern sociology in the substantive sense is cultural studies, a field that Bauman backs onto but does not embrace. The ultimate secret to Bauman’s taking in of the postmodern is precisely modern, and sociological. For Bauman insists that it is the task of sociology to interpret the forms or cultures that present themselves to us, historically and experientially. The postmodern is a real cultural phenomenon, even if it is not a new social formation. There is no more point in turning our backs on it than on television, rock and roll, or pornography. Bauman therefore advises that we have a choice, between engaging a sociology of the postmodern and a postmodern sociology. A postmodern sociology is part of the culture that it sets out to explain. A sociology of the postmodern, in contrast, sets out from the modern present to take on the problem of interpreting postmodern culture, viewing the postmodern as the problem to be addressed rather than as the interpretative means of explaining it.

Marxism has an especial significance for Bauman as it is also the source of the problem (or part of it) and of its solution. It is the historical source of the problem of communism, or bolshevism; and it is the intellectual source of critical theory, whose purpose is to criticise everything that exists, not least the travails of socialism in power. The critique of Marxism as bolshevism, or Marxist Enlightenment, is the core activity of Legislators and Interpreters. The defense of the practice of critical theory is central to works such as Culture as Praxis (1973) and Toward a Critical Sociology (1976), where the conjunction of critical theory and sociology works against critical theory’s risk of opacity and sociology’s residual positivism. The limits of bolshevism are more apparent; critical theory, in contrast, is open to the risk of self-righteousness, claiming its own emancipatory credentials too readily against the currents it claims to be merely traditional. The culture of critical Marxism on which Bauman draws is closer to Weberian Marxism, with the distinction that his relation to Weber’s texts is more elliptical. Bauman distances Durkheim, whose sociology he connects to structural functionalism and to the everyday problems of modern conformism, and keeps Weber at arm’s length. His first book published in English, Between Class and Elite (1972), nevertheless indicates even in its title the combination of Marxism and Weberian themes; and Weber’s ghost becomes a dominant spirit, not least as Bauman’s work proceeds into the 1980s.

If Legislators and Interpreters marks a point of break with Marxist and humanist illusion, Memories of Class (1982) confirms Bauman’s distance from classical Marxism. Like Postmodernity and Its Discontents, the title of Memories of Class evokes Freud, if less explicitly. The memories involved, memories of class, are both validated and placed in this way, recognised and yet shifted back in time. For Bauman’s classical sociological traditionalism is bound up with the concern about oppression and domination, not only to the Marxian concern for inequality, which is reduced emblematically to class. Bauman’s earlier Weberian Marxist sympathies leave him open to concerns about exclusion as well as exploitation, and it is precisely this issue that comes to the foreground in Memories of Class, where the risk of social exclusion is even more socially dangerous and primitive than the prospect of exploitation on the factory floor. Socialism, in this optic, may be the future horizon of utopia, but it is also the memory of struggles past, against the very introduction of industrialism and the factory system. The problem of socialist politics, to make the connection, lies in its incapacity democratically to mediate past images and future hopes.

Memories of Class is the text where Bauman frontally encounters Foucault, but with the historical sociology twist that one would associate as much with the work of E. P. Thompson. Socialism, for Bauman, emerges as the reaction against industrialism even more than capitalism. The factory system institutionalises a regime of bodily control of labour that exemplifies modern disciplinarity even more fully than Foucault’s stories about prisons and asylums. The result, in all these cases of institutionalisation, is that the new regime becomes naturalized. We love Big Brother, and the workers come to love or at least to depend upon capital. The result, for Bauman, is a kind of corporatism, where the needs of labour are translated into those of capital. Freedom is monetised. The structural consequence of this process is that the organised workers end up within the system, via the wage labour/capital relation. Bauman’s sociological focus then shifts to the outsiders, to those who are practically excluded from the wage labour/capital relation. This is a move consistent with his older sympathy with Simmel, and the idea of the stranger. It is also reminiscent of Weber’s observation that while capital and labor are assymetrical relations of domination, labour remains a form of property. In the long run, the language of class becomes limiting, for it brackets out those excluded from the working class who have no claim to property or to organization on its basis.

Bauman returns to these themes in Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (1998). Bauman endorses the sense that while the dominant image of earlier capitalism was production, the later capitalism after the postwar long boom is dominated by the image of consumption. If the dominant motif around the First World War is that of the factory, by the 1980s, it is that of the shopping mall. The point is not that we (or some of us) no longer produce, not least of all in developing countries in labour processes not too different from those captured by Marx in Capital (1867), or by Dickens in fiction. The point, rather, is that as less of us in Western developed countries are required to produce goods, thanks to the god technology, more of us are compelled to consume. Consumption becomes a matter of duty, thrift, or conservation, signs of a dying past. Postmodern culture is a culture of consumption, of display: Ours is the society of the spectacle. Social status is now reconfigured in terms of the capacity to consume. Success or failure is measured by consumption. To be excluded, for Bauman, is to be a flawed consumer. It is no longer sufficient to be a good worker or a courageous entrepreneur. These days, we all compete by the same standards of consumption, and we all know immediately, by sense-perception, who the losers are.

Exploitation does not cease, in this portrayal of modernity, any more than production does. The shift of emphasis in Bauman’s work into the 1990s reflects rather the powerful phenomenological sense that the front stage of capitalism has become even more enchanted than it was in Marx’s Capital, where the fetishism of commodities reigned. Marx understood that the Dante’s inferno of the factory floor lay backstage and that the miracle of capitalist culture was to be located in its remarkable capacity to behave as though this world made us, and not the other way around. The dramaturgy of the Holocaust and the image of Nazism is better known to us, at least via Hollywood and the now apparently endless documentaries about Hitler. If the couple modernity-postmodernity is as persistent in Bauman’s work as the categories capitalism-Marxism, then the Holocaust has a special place, with reference to the idea of a field of modernity itself. Bauman’s personal political choice as a youth was simple: communism or fascism. He chose communism, not least because the Nazis were invading Poland, killing Jews, and as they proceeded; and because communism later, after 1945, promised the hope of reconstruction, if not utopia. Warsaw had been levelled by the war; Poland had become the playground, or rather, then, laboratory of the Nazis. Until the writing of Modernity and the Holocaust, Bauman had remained closer in his attraction and ethical orientation to the universalism of the left. In 1986, his wife, Janina, published her memoirs of girlhood in the Warsaw ghetto, Winter in the Morning. It was the trigger for Bauman’s new project, to seek to insinuate the Holocaust in the centre of ordinary sociology. Why? Because for Bauman, the Holocaust was less immediately a German disaster waiting to happen than a modern disaster whose occurrence depended on modern will-to-power, a reactionary modernist ideology, and modern political organizational and technological forms. The Nazis developed a repertoire that relied not only on gas and a reliable railway system but also on cinema and broadcasting; all they lacked was television.

The Holocaust is expressive of modernity for Bauman because it not only indicates the extent of its murderous possibilities but also expresses the modern or Enlightenment drive toward the achievement of the perfect order. The Nazi experience also reflects Enlightenment logic, even if the Nazis publically opposed the principles of the French Revolution, of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The final solution was a rational attempt, using rationalized means of organization, to solve the problem that the Nazis set themselves: to rid their world of the Jews. More, Nazism reflects and extends the social engineering mania that earlier philosophers merely dreamed of; only they defined the problem differently as the end not of poverty or oppression, but of a people. In the framework of Bauman’s thinking, Western civilization becomes obsessed with what he calls a “gardening culture,” motivated by the desire finally to set things straight, help nature along, and remove all weeds. This gardening imperative, first indicated in Legislators and Interpreters, becomes an attitude of all high-modernist strategies, which seek to set the world straight. Bauman contrasts the mania for gardening with the earlier attitude of the gamekeeper. If the final solution involves industrialized killing, then the gardening state pursues industrialized nature with a will to control that only nature can defy. By the time he publishes Modernity and the Holocaust, it is the image of the Jews as weeds (or more infamously, for Goebbels, as rats) that becomes central. Perfection, for the Nazis, meant purity, the absence of especially of Jews and others. If this is Bauman’s most Weberian work, emphasising bureaucratic rationality and its indifference to the face of the other, the suffering subject, it is also the book most connected to the legacy of Simmel. Modernity and the Holocaust addresses the figure of the Jew as the exemplary stranger in bad times, those who came and stayed and imagined, innocently, that they were Germans, until the Nazis discovered that they were Jews.

The theoretical conclusion to which Modernity and the Holocaust reaches is as simple as it is powerful. Sociology in the West has an ethical hole in its heart. Sociology at the end of the twentieth century had still yet to begin to address questions of how we might live, how we might still be responsible for each other. Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) thus leads directly via Modernity and Ambivalence (1991) to Postmodern Ethics (1993), where the grandest gesture is simply to call this bluff. We have to confront the fact that sociology cannot respond to the problems of the world only with axioms concerning value-freedom or its ersatz, liberal moralising about the plight of the disadvantaged. Sociology has a social core, in the image of the party of two. Self is constituted only through the other. Ethics is the starting point for all social inquiry, or it should be. Sociology is the field of the social, but it must begin from the individual. To resort too readily to the social is to defer to the kind of conformism where sociology blames everybody but the actor and sidesteps the question of ethical responsibility. Sociology, like its subject, society, too easily reproduces the conformism it sets out to criticise. As Bauman argues, drawing on images from Lévi-Strauss, societies can either assimilate or follow anthropoemic strategies toward strangers, or expel them in anthropophagic manner. Dominant cultures consume the other or evacuate them. Bauman adds the cautionary note that in our own time, stronger states engage in both strategies at once. Assimilation is the safer of these two strategies, though multiculturalism is ethically sounder. Again, Bauman’s more general purpose here is to break the modernist conceit for which violence and corruption seem always to happen elsewhere, in less civilized places than our own. Bauman insists rather, in sympathy with Walter Benjamin, that civilization is based upon violence.

Bauman’s argument, as ever, is constructed in conversation with various interlocutors. Mary Douglas’s work is also central to this approach, not least in its distinction between purity and danger. The Nazi pursuit of the society of perfect order was based on the particular eugenics for which others defiled the purity of the Aryan race. As Bauman argues, in sympathy with this anthropological critique, however, the struggle against dirt is perpetual. Every day we sweep up, every day dirt, like disorder, returns: It is normal. There is an especially brutal kind of utopian impulse in the Nazi project of absolute imaginary hygiene. This modernising impulse comes together with the most bizarre imagined traditionalism, where peoples organized into races exist entirely separately of each other. It is as though no one moves. In Bauman’s view, this is not only counter-ethical, but counterfactual. Movement is central, and it accelerates, to the extent that it may now be the nature of the process of movement, rather than class or origin, that illustrates both problems of global inclusion and exclusion. Consistent with his interest in the idea that particular social forms bring out particular personality types, Bauman suggests that there are two new personalities encouraged by postmodern times. These are the tourist and the vagabond. Tourists have the means to move, to consume, to consume the other, to consume the services of the vagabonds, sexual and other. Vagabonds, in contrast, are compelled to move, to keep moving. This is a kind of global reflection of domination, where tourists and vagabonds inhabit mutually exclusive lifeworlds that are nevertheless connected by the dialectics of master and slave.

Capitalism remains the global context within which these practices are acted out. Bauman does not mean to say, therefore, that we are all tourists or vagabonds, let alone that we are all strangers or nomads. These are indicative categories expressing personality types, not analytical categories explaining structures of inequality. Those who stay at home engage in more conventional class relations, with the difference that new middle-class activities, like those of the symbolic analysts who work in information technology, are increasingly given to the patterns of geographical mobility characteristic of tourists. They are no longer citizens; they have no loyalty whatsoever to place or to those who are confined to particular places, towns, cities, or states that need tax revenue bases to supply public infrastructure, schools, housing, and hospitals. No one is responsible for anything anymore. This is not the world of the Holocaust, but the themes are recurrent. Bauman is a critic of communitarianism who is also critical of liberalism. Modern culture is problematic for Bauman because it corrodes traditional identities and loyalties and replaces them with do-it-yourself personality kits to be bought and sold at will, for those who have the capacity to consume. Human beings retain the capacity to do better and to look after each other, but have to struggle against the pressure to conform. The prospect of autonomy depends on the recognition of dependence. That prospect is dimmer now than it may have seemed before, but the margins of hope remain, and it is the task of critical sociologists to exercise and encourage expanded activity within them.