Bauman, Zygmunt

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.

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