Zygmunt Bauman: Mapping modernity?

Introduction

How do we make sense of the work of Zygmunt Bauman? At least 60 books in English from 1972, 16 in Polish before then. Too much to read, or to make sense of.

We could choose two or three major works to focus upon, classics such as Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) or Liquid Modernity (2000). Or, we could focus on themes, such as globalisation, culture or socialism; or death, or love, or the art of living. This would mean to condense, or to reduce: to pull out a single thread from the tapestry. Alternatively, we could even try to map out the whole of the project, though the size of the map may duplicate the extent of the books – too many, too big.

For the purposes of this paper, I will suggest a different approach. This approach represents a thought experiment. What is Bauman's work? Bauman's is certainly a sociology of modernity – but that is to say little, as modernity is the proper object of sociology in general. I suggest we take a step back, and view it as a contribution to general sociology.

This might mean that it operates on three different levels of so to say geographical abstraction – macro, meso, and micro – as befits the task of mapping; and that it adds in theory, at a higher level of abstraction, and different methods. These vary across Bauman's life and times – closer to the standard Western model in beginning, though with affiliations in Poland to both anthropology and philosophy; then emerging into the global period of cosmopolitan social theory as general and working through a kind of hub and spoke approach, where each instance illustrates the general theory, as for example with Liquid Love and Liquid Modernity. The micro level is thicker early on, but is constant in terms of the animating interest in everyday life. The input of new data becomes thinner as Bauman develops the general approach, leading to the work on liquid modernity. The interest in the meso or middle level becomes thinner as he grows older and more established; reference to nation-states in the manner of historical sociology also becomes illustrative of the more general or macro model. Viewed in this light, approaching Bauman's work as a map of modernity may be useful both figuratively and metaphorically. It is partial, and leaves things and levels out in order to throw light onto other levels. It works from an accumulation of wisdom as it proceeds, and so takes some things for granted. It may be useful to view this as a general sociology, but it cannot be universal or comprehensive. Its strongest impulses are symbolic and general, this accelerating across the path of his work. This is consistent with what in Simmel was characterised as sociological impressionism.

Mapping Bauman

How are we to understand the work of Zygmunt Bauman? As we have observed, there are more than 60 books in English after 16 in Polish, and a burgeoning global secondary literature, a Bauman boom or a Bauman industry after his own massive output. So we can either attempt to survey the project in its entirety or reduce, condense, centre on particular important books or big hits. There are too many books easily to summarise; and while the secondary literature is now impressive, it may also function as white noise. Today it is all but impossible to keep up with all the articles that might now be gathered together as Bauman studies. There are 5,650,000 results if you hit Google for Bauman – 23 million for Habermas, 65 million for Foucault (Beilharz, 287,000!). Too many to read, in any case. There is so much primary and now secondary material related to Bauman that it is apparently impossible to know where to start. There are at least 30 books alone on his work in English – a generation ago, there were none, or least no monographs (earliest in 2000 by me, as Dialectic of Modernity and independently by Dennis Smith, as Prophet of Postmodernity). Then there are the journals and journal articles, more than you could reasonably expect to read or absorb and keep down a day job. Bauman used to observe that we are overwhelmed by the volume of data and intelligence that is now available to us; this is, of course, manifest in the field of Bauman Studies too. Bauman is also part of the story he sets out to interpret. De te fabula narratur!

Broadly speaking, we can differentiate between thematic and historical approaches to Bauman's work. There are works on Bauman that identify his contribution with, say, the work on the Holocaust or the postmodern; and those that seek to map out its own contours from his first English monograph on British Labour, Between Class and Elite in 1972 (Bauman, 1972) to his last, on Retrotopia, in 2017 (Bauman, 2017).

There are elements of both thematic and historical approaches here in this paper and in my previous writing from Dialectic of Modernity (Beilharz, 2000) on, but I also want to work with a larger optic which is also at the same time more focused. This is the optic of general sociology. My suggestion is that Bauman continues to attract because his is a general sociology, but note well general, not universal or comprehensive. He is interested in what we conversationally call the Big Picture, though this necessarily involves some selectivity.

What is general sociology? The classical precedents would include Weber, Durkheim and Simmel, these more so than Marx, whose claim was to map out the critique of political economy, and whose work preceded the emergence of sociology as a social science discipline. A parallel to the idea of general sociology would be de Saussure's project of General Linguistics, of which semiology would be part. The classics took everything into purview, or at least a lot, and drew attention to local and national with the world system, empire or other nation-states often in the background. Often a reliance on the nation-state as a unit of analysis went together with a reliance on the data of the state: statistics, though argument also looked large, addressing suicide, or division of labour, bureaucracy or religion, metropolis and the stranger. Sociology and modernity arrived at the same time, and even with the more recent controversy regarding the postmodern, it is important to remember that Bauman was a sociologist as well as a hero of cultural studies, social philosophy, an enthusiast for literature, and so on. Sociology was his chosen vocation.

Most recently, when it comes to the project of sociology, we could look to the work of Bourdieu, itself now presented as a five volume General Sociology; in between, we could look to the substantial legacy of the Chicago School, with idea of a General Sociology itself mooted by Albion Small in 1905. To begin, it is important to remember that Bauman's sociology was European, but East as well as West European; and that his professional formation was also much influenced by American Sociology, which itself was inflected by European as well as national or new world influences. By the 1980s, general sociology could be said to focus on the axes of class, race and gender. This complex was itself later to be designated by the term “intersectionality”, even if we could reasonably expect that in this trio some axes would receive more attention than others.Under the influence of historical sociology and comparative public policy analysis, it also became more common to differentiate between different regional levels of analysis: macro, meso and micro, that is, local, national and global, these crossed over by smaller regions and transnational regions as well.

In Bauman's case, we can see the influence of the formative US discipline, in the case of the Chicago School, Small, Ogburn, later Sorokin and Znaniecki, even Parsons. Later American influences include Reinhard Bendix and C Wright Mills, both of whom could also be viewed as Weberians if not necessarily Weberian Marxists. The influence of Barrington Moore's historical sociology was constant. American Anthropology was also a standard reference for the early Bauman, as in Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1951), and later the French, especially with reference to Levi Strauss, but also Boas, Malinowski, Nadel, and all the rest.

There is a clue, for the lazy or too-busy reader of Bauman. If you want to get a quick sense of the transitions across his work from 1972 to the present in English, first, read the footnotes – observe the choice of authorities, how their provenance changes, and how they reduce in number – you get some clue of what he is reading, and what he values; and second, likewise, read across the texts for style, at first earnestly academic and grim, professorial even, becoming more free as he changes his public and audience, and by this token speaks for himself without the reliance on a phalanx of previous big books.

There are other dimensions to the transition as well. As I will try to suggest, Bauman was allowed to leave, or expelled from socialist Poland, in 1968. Poland was where it all began, for Bauman. Yet Bauman also learned his sociology in that central European culture where sociology, anthropology and philosophy were connecting doors, and social psychology was never far away. In the West, later, this position was sometimes referred to as social philosophy, philosophy here understood as continental rather than analytic. This signified a sociology where ethics and ontology would be central, ‘is’ and ‘ought’ always connected. It meant what Bauman was later to advocate to his English colleagues as a critical, rather than a managerial sociology, or a sociology of or by the state.

Elsewhere I have referred to this phenomenon as Bauman's iceberg. There are evident peaks, and a great mass that remains out of vision, including until recently his Polish language work. There is a transition in Bauman's work from data to argument across his career, of a shift in levels of abstraction from the particular to the general. As an academic if engaged sociologist in Poland he writes conventional monographs, essays and papers, within the conventional social science tradition, as well as political tracts in the tradition of Marxism–Leninism, for example on the theory and practice of democratic centralism published in Polish in 1957.

In the early work, the local and national are the critical horizons of his research and writing. He works, that is to say, mainly at micro and meso levels. Consider, for example, his 1964 UNESCO International Social Science Journal publication, ‘Economic Growth, Social Structure, Elite Formation: The case of Poland’; all the keywords come out of mainstream or general sociology, but the research base consists of data from ‘ten small towns in Poland’ (Bauman, 1964). At the same time, Poland here is taken as a case study of sociology or modernity. Or see ‘The End of Polish Jewry’ (1969). Here the focus is on local or national, even though the broader frame is also always global: Polish, Jewish, Global. Here there is a miscellaneous and dutiful use of references to authorities long gone from our frame of reference; there are even mainstream social sciences devices such as mathematical formulae and diagrams to illustrate the argument. Good examples may be found for instance in the supressed and now available Sketches in the Theory of Culture.

Then, after exile and relocation in Leeds, and after the globalisation of the world and of social theory, his focus becomes more fully global, albeit with new national and regional constituencies: in Scandinavia, Latin America, Spanish and Latin cultures, South Africa, and places such as Australia. ‘Bauman global’ also meant Bauman ‘live’, touring these places and cities and listening to the audiences who flocked to hear him talk. He wanted to hear what they had to say, and would often wander into the crowd or audience with cupped deaf ear so that could hear. This was a methodological development of the model of hermeneutics into the field of conversation. As he said to Anna Sfard, his first-born daughter, he wanted less now to write about his subjects than for them, and to speak more directly to them, as his public addressees. These were his new people – no longer the Poles, now the global citizens spread in concentric circles in Europe and beyond.

We now know, from the splendid biography of Bauman by Izabela Wagner, more about the academic training and formation of Bauman (Wagner, 2020). As Wagner shows, in addition to what we have already known about his teachers, Ossowski, Hochfeld and Schaff, and the influence of colleagues such as Kolakowski, Wiatr, Baczko, Morawski and Hirszowicz, the dominant global or general sociology was powerfully influential on Bauman's formation. Global, in the 1950s, largely meant American. The American Empire dominated the world system and its knowledge production. Bauman was also formed by the influence of American Sociology, and its European currents; for American intellectual culture was also European. Bauman's biography also throws into relief the shifts in his work, and the context of the possible hiatus when he spent the 1980s in search of an alternative to sociology, which he almost found in photography.

Some of these issues are touched on in The Photographs of Zygmunt Bauman, edited by Janet Wolff and me (2023). This volume combines some of the photo archive of Bauman together with analyses and responses from colleagues and family. There I argue, among other things, that if Bauman chose Liquid Modernity, we might also suggest that it chose him. Into the 1990s Bauman became a leading social theorist, in the moment when first Telos, then Thesis Eleven and Theory Culture and Society and Polity Press flourished. These gave him an audience beyond Poland and outside of the England that was now his often indifferent home. Anna Sfard tells us that her father threatened to toss in sociology for his affair with photography (Thesis Eleven webpage). Photography momentarily offered an alternative to the sociology which had run dry as he settled into Leeds, where he was between audiences, after the Poles, stuck with the English, who with a few honourable exceptions around Leeds did not know how to place him or his work.

Bauman's exile was involuntary. He did not want to leave his homeland but it was impossible to stay, to provide safety and a modicum of comfort for his family. The state of Israel could offer nothing more than a roof until he was able to find a home. He was a Polish patriot, whose loyalty was cast into doubt by state anti-Semitism in Poland – as though he could not be two things, Polish and Jewish at the same time. Yet Bauman could not be Polish without also being Jewish, and he was not prepared to be Jewish alone. This opened the line of argument that led later to Modernity and Ambivalence (1991).

The point is worth dwelling on. Bauman lost his livelihood, his chair, and his people. He was obliged to sacrifice his personal and social identity. This meant that he also lost his conversation partners, his colleagues, his subjects, and his networks and data. He lost his life world, to find only shallow roots in a declining north English industrial city called Leeds, where the colleagues could not understand him, nor know what to do with him. Intellectually, or in writerly terms, this meant that he lost his audience, or his addressee, and it was not easy to find a new audience until he wrote on universal themes, as in Modernity and the Holocaust, and the emerging world of social theory took its global and postmodern turn. Bauman lost his identity, as a leading Polish and East European intellectual. He had to start over in the UK, in a setting where he was an anomaly; an East European Marxist exile, not the anti-Communist that some of his potential allies wanted him to be, or to become. He did not reinvent himself as an expert on the meso, or the national of British society. Instead he maintained focus on the problems of everyday life, at the micro level, and their global expression, at the height of the macro. So he was out of place, an alien, until the terms of discourse in social theory realigned in this way, privileging the struggles and challenges of everyday life and their global expression.

The point is that Bauman was not only the analyst of globalisation, or Liquid Modernity: he was also their creature. Sociology and social theory became globalised, and its intellectual workers were globalised together with it. Along with Bauman, here the exemplary cases would be thinkers such as Ulrich Beck: macro rules (though there is also an evidently Bavarian or regional inflection in Beck's work). Global becomes discursively determinant; the global rules. Bauman is part of the problem complex that he theorises – globalisation, and Liquid Modernity after the long book of Western capitalism and its solid, national modernities of Pax Americana.

If we return, then, to the map of General Sociology, we face there the hierarchy of dimensions: macro, meso, micro. What we witness in the unfolding of Bauman's life work is that the micro remains present as everyday life. Neil Gross infamously described Bauman on the occasion of his death as a social scientist without data. According to Gross in this obituary, itself entitled ‘Social Sciences Without Data’, Bauman ‘collected no data and had no methodology to speak of’ (New York Times 9/2/17). And yet! Like Gross’ own earlier subject, Richard Rorty, Bauman changed the way we thought. His was an autobiographical shift from data, conventionally understood, to argument. The Americans, or at least those in mainstream sociology, like the English before them, did not know what to do with Bauman either (except for those who already had some openness to the traditions of critical theory and the Frankfurt School or Foucault). The division between philosophy and sociology there was too strong and professionally policed, and the general power of empirical culture too strong to be able positively to recognise or place projects such as Bauman's. As for Bauman, he shifted likely in a common life path from data-driven to theory-driven practices. As we have seen earlier, there was of course data, including that drawn from for example ‘ten small Polish towns’. In more general terms, his data was the data of life, of experience mediated by theory and analysis, this gathered across Poland, the USSR, UK and across the world. It was a life of data, and he employed the data of life, a long life of experience and wisdom wrought under fascism, communism and then consumer capitalism together with all that he had read and discussed and shared. His was a general theory of modernity, briefly the postmodern and then what he called Liquid Modernity. That in turn served as a new general sociology or frame for the emerging present.

The literature after Bauman

Let me close not with reference to the broader project of Bauman but with its reception, in the newer emerging literature in English. The first period of Bauman scholarship, work on Bauman, was necessarily exploratory in character. Its purpose, as Raymond Williams put it, was to establish something of what he had come to say. This was already a serious challenge at the turn of the century, as Bauman had already said a great deal. Even a generation ago there was a significant portion of Bauman’s oeuvre available in English, but the big bang then came, for example, after the publication of Dialectic of Modernity – which is thus limited in this way – together with the publication of Liquid Modernity. Liquid Modernity also marks Bauman's change of orientation, after his ambivalent encounter with the discourse of the postmodern. We can say that in terms of his own lifepath, the earlier Polish and then early English period belonged in his own terms to the solid modern or Fordist phase, the second, liquid modern, to the period of globalisation, including the globalisation of his own work and interests, and his influence.

It may be that there is now a biographical, or archival turn in Bauman studies dependent on new availability of the Bauman papers at the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds. There was no such archive available to the first generation of Bauman studies; the Bauman Archive has only become available since his death. It may also be that there is a long overdue Polish turn or recovery. There are more skilled Polish language workers such as Wagner and Brzezinski using Polish accumulating, building on what has now come before, in earlier stages of Bauman reception. The first generation of Bauman scholars had little Polish; Keith Tester had some via the assistance of a third party, and he and I constantly discussed this aspect of the Bauman iceberg; the enormity of what we did not know. There is a Jewish and Polish turn in the second generation, which clearly establishes the rich diversity of his work. Brzezinski calls this early, or foundational work of the first generation descriptive, which is I think to diminish its significance. The extent of the work of Bauman itself had first to be mapped, as though on a chalk board, before the labyrinth of the arguments could be entered. This work was less descriptive than hermeneutical, seeking interpretation and what I then, in 2000, called conceptual clustering as a way to make the edifice of Bauman's work at all intelligible.

So what is this new work? First of all, the work of Izabela Wagner. The major achievement here is Bauman – A Biography (2020). This is such an important work as to defy summary. I recommend it unconditionally; and I know the text very well, as I helped to edit it. Suffice to say that it sets the interpretation of Bauman for the first time on a solid biographical and historical footing. It enables us to track his life from childhood in Poznan to youth in the Soviet Union, soldiering in World War Two, reconstruction of nation and self, and Marxism–Leninism, dissent, expulsion and all that follows in his several lives. This is followed by My Life in Fragments (2024), a patchwork of fascinating intimacy and details including the hitherto private family history document written by Bauman, which Wagner also draws on extensively in her biography.

Jack Palmer has made a major contribution to the new wave of Bauman studies. There is his work with Brzezinski and collaboration with the Bauman Institute in Leeds. Now there is Bauman and the West (2023), a fascinating series of linked essays which connect Bauman to the East, to his others not least through eastern Europe through exile and decolonization, empires, the ‘Jewish turn’ signalled earlier by Bryan Cheyette, which can be traced back in latent form to Modernity and the Holocaust and question of late style earlier flagged by Keith Tester. Issues of style and genre become more interesting as we contemplate the possibility that there were good reasons why Bauman should have been given to repetition; repetition also adds, it allows creative mimesis to come into play. Thus, as we have observed, there is a serious shift from across Bauman's work from the earlier academic monographs to a half dozen more little books, and many more of conversation, shared dialogue with various conversation partners in his later life.

Palmer is a worthy successor to Keith Tester, who died too early, in 2019. Palmer offers a contemporary engagement which brings Bauman into present debates, which some critics imagined him to be innocent of, and pluralises his response to different modernities, so that Bauman may truly be said to have been mapping modernities, even if with uneven focus on the different levels of micro and meso.

The Bauman Institute remains a dynamo for our field of interest. Most recent here is the three volume Polity series of Selected Writings, many of which are newly translated from the Polish or from the archives or obscure publications. This is a treasure trove for Bauman scholars, as for those with any interest in East European Marxism and its transitions and travails. The vital contribution of Mark Davis as Bauman Institute Founding Director and leading Bauman scholar demands acknowledgement here, and that of his team at Leeds. These books are bound to become a standard reference, these volumes covering Culture and Art, History and Politics, and a third volume on Theory and Society.

The contribution of Dariusz Brzezinski is shared with Palmer, in their fine edited collection Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust (2022). Brzezinski is also responsible for bringing into print the lost 1968 book Sketches in the Theory of Culture, itself a major act of theoretical and historical recovery (Bauman, 2018). It shows Bauman at work in his own theoretical laboratory. Brzezinski's own leading monograph is Zygmunt Bauman and the Theory of Culture (2022), which reads Bauman back into Polish intellectual history and is another major gesture to making Bauman Polish again. The emerging generation of Bauman scholars stand to make enduring contributions to the field.

Looking further back, an overlooked source book is my four-volume edited collection Zygmunt Bauman (Sage Masters of Modern Thought series, 2002), which brings together around 1,400 pages of views on Bauman and supporting documents. This has clearly been influential in China; see, for example, Zheng Li, Understanding Zygmunt Bauman, published in China in 2007. The literature around Bauman offers a rich culture, a storehouse of possibilities. Readers may also find my memoir, Intimacy in Postmodern Times – A Friendship with Zygmunt Bauman (2020), useful with reference to issues of ethics, the personal and the scholarly. We are still mapping: mapping Bauman and mapping modernity.

Which is the more significant legacy? I have always argued that one of the reasons to read Bauman was to meet the wide and broad cast of his interlocutors. To read Bauman is to enter a conversation with many interesting thinkers. His was a house with many windows and doors.

If, however, we take at all seriously the idea of General Sociology, then the pressing task is less to study Bauman or to cultivate Bauman Studies than to think with and after him. What this means in the Chinese context is apparent. If Chinese scholars may benefit from the engagement with Bauman's work (Qin and Beilharz, 2022) the more fruitful avenues of conversation may rather involve what Bauman scholars have to learn from China and the Chinese, from Chinese tradition and its own multiple modernities.