Abstract
Mark Davis et al.’s (2024) stated aim is to demonstrate that there is an Ariadne thread or underpinning narrative thread in Zygmunt Bauman’s work that takes its starting point from his early Polish work that guided his appreciation of other social theorists and shaped his intellectual trajectory in later life. Following Davis (2008), Tester (2004) and Beilharz (2000), Davis et al. (2024) argue that it is commonly assumed that Bauman’s work is broad, eclectic and divorced from wider intellectual debates, an assumption that cannot be sustained if the reader is familiar with Bauman’s largely unpublished early, foundational Polish writings. The editors argue that Bauman’s work was not shaped in isolation from wider intellectual debates. The volume presents an editor’s introduction followed by 12 pieces written by Bauman between 1961 and 2012, many of the pieces contain reflections on authors who have influenced Bauman’s intellectual development. The selected texts are previously unpublished manuscripts, texts published in English for the first time or pieces that are difficult to access. According to Davis et al. (2024), these texts demonstrate that Bauman was a significant commentator on theoretical debates and the texts selected for the volume should give the reader a greater insight into Bauman’s dialogue with mainstream social theory and how this influenced his intellectual development following his arrival in Leeds in 1971. Bauman’s humanism and broader Marxist revisionism are said by Davis et al. (2024) to have drawn inspiration from Georg Simmel, Albert Camus, Antonio Gramsci and C Wright Mills to identify the potential and creative forces of people often living through dark times.
In the opening chapter on C Wright Mills, Bauman (2024 [1961]) explains,
The primary task of Mills’s sociology is to illuminate the connections between biography and history, so that biographies could be understood as elements of historical processes, and so that the co-creation of historical processes could become the content of biography. (p. 4)
In the first three chapters, Bauman focuses on the links between individual human agency and the wider social structure.
Bauman explains that for Mills, people feel individual anxiety when they are unable to see personal problems as public issues. A position that generates political apathy. The essence of Mills’ sociological imagination is to understand the links between individual fate and history. An approach that allows a person to arrive at an adequate understanding of their fate. Bauman describes how Mills is critical of Parsons’ blandly technocratic and conformist grand theory with its emphasis on the assimilation of common values and the vital role of social equilibrium underpinning the social system. A position that leaves no room for history, social conflict, social change and the role of power in social life. Bauman accepts Mills’ argument that there are no perfectly conforming societies, all have conflict and disagreement. Parsons’ sociology is an approach stripped of historical content. The grand theory approach to sociology has ignored its role in furthering the sociological imagination. In contrast, Mills’ approach is that of a fighter and his sociology is rooted in passion.
This argument echoes or rather repeats what the editors said about the intellectual links between Bauman and Mills from Volume 2. In the earlier volume, the editors explain that although Bauman was to lose faith in actually existing Socialism in post-war Eastern Europe, his sociology attempts to salvage the moral value of socialism, by presenting a form of sociology rooted in a form of Marxist humanism to challenge inequality and moral indifference. For Bauman, a self-assertive left should be focused on overcoming the injustice and immorality of capitalism. Davis et al. (2023) argue that Bauman’s engagement with the work of C Wright Mills was central to his understanding of the role of sociologists as public intellectuals. Mills, accompanied by Ralph Miliband, visited Warsaw shortly after the events of the Polish October in 1956 and Bauman first met Mills in 1957. Davis et al. (2023) make clear that
Inspired by Mills, Bauman knew that, when confronted with the immediate private troubles in daily life, social processes and structures can appear to be ossified and intractable. Sociology’s task is to offer up new ways of ‘defamiliarizing the familiar’, relativizing social reality to reveal alternative, potential futures gestating in the here and now. This is how sociology gives birth to new forms of politics. (p. xxvii)
In the chapter on Gramsci, Bauman attempts to reconstruct Gramsci’s vision of praxis and knowledge and from this draws several parallels between Mills and Gramsci. Both men viewed the research function and the ideological function as the same in that they wanted: ‘to bring together unrecognised sufferings and the consciousness of the historical process, serving to transform history into a conscious process leading to the elimination of sufferings’. In contrast to vulgar, fatalistic Marxism and idealistic subjectivism and in a similar fashion to Bauman’s (2024 [1963]) reading of Marx, both Mills and Gramsci viewed ‘human deeds as the product of conscious human action’ (p. 14). Truth for Gramsci should be viewed as a ‘historical truth’ not based upon categories of true or false but on the ‘historicity’ of a statement, the success of a claim at an ideological level and its influence on the historical process. Social theory for Gramsci was then ‘a dialectical entanglement of the reflection and action of the masses joined in a process of an active practice’ (Bauman, 2024 [1963]: 19) and its value is to be seen in terms of the ability of the theory to initiate social change.
In chapter 3, what Bauman (2024 [1965]) identifies and agrees with the work of Abraham Maslow is the idea that:
a psychology that is based around the problem of individual adjustment must, whether it wants to or not, be based on the premise that the ‘psychological norm’ is the model of personality decided upon and required by some group or organisation – that is, a model that is external to the individual – and thus ‘psychological health’ is the maximal resemblance between the actual personality and the external model. (p. 34)
Bauman (2024 [1965]) also quotes with approval Maslow’s claim that psychologically ‘sick people are made by a sick culture . . . . a culturally determined pathology’ (p. 41).)
In chapter 9, Do we need a theory of social change? Bauman (2004 [1999]) looked at the neglect of social change as a field of sociological enquiry until Wilbert E Moore accepted the challenge in the early 1960s. In addition, sociologists, particularly Talcott Parsons, also ignored the fact that individuals have free will, even though he was aware that people possessed it. Social action had to be structured and internalised by socialisation into a common culture that regulates choice in order to be stable. Voluntarism as expressed by individuals needed to be controlled in the interests of systematic stability. Parsons’ understanding of the central issues for sociology to address was influential for several decades. In contrast, the critique of Parsons found, for example, in Harold Garfinkel’s contribution to ethnomethodology appeared to ignore reality beyond individual action. It was Anthony Giddens who attempted to bring together agency and structure in his conception of structuration. However, for Bauman, Giddens’ understanding of structuration does not go beyond the traditional theory proposed by Parsons in that Giddens does not focus on the conditions within which individual social action takes place. In contrast, Norbert Elias brings together agency and structure via his concept of figuration, with its emphasis on intersubjectivity and the mutual interdependence that this implies. Change is a constant feature of figurations. Attempts to manage social change such as Parsons’ understanding of an imposed process of modernisation were found to be unsuccessful giving way to processes that generated fragmentation and the birth of postmodernity.
The closing chapter is an appreciation of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in which Bauman is incredibly positive about the work of Richard Hoggart, and Stuart Hall and the global influence of the research conducted by the Centre. Bauman explains how the Centre’s approach was rooted in a critique of Durkheim and Parsons’ social analysis – a critique that he shared and that underpinned Bauman’s understanding of liquid modernity. Bauman explains (p. 174) that Parsonian sociology should be classed as a sociology of unfreedom in that Parsons saw his role as attempting to ‘neutralize’ (p. 120) free will. Parsons is presented by Bauman (2014) as an advocate of solid modernity in that the purpose of sociology for Parsons was to resolve the Hobbesian question of why people with free will submit to orderly life, becoming ‘submissive and obedient to commands coming from outside’ (p. 174). In addition, ‘You just follow the pressures from outside. You were like a billiard ball, which goes where it is pushed’ (Bauman, 2014: 175).
Bauman is similarly critical of Durkheim’s contribution to sociology. Parsons and Durkheim expressed no academic interest in understanding self or agency. For Bauman (p. 113), Durkheim’s sociology is based upon the ‘sinister premonition’ that ‘if the normative grip of society slackens, the moral order will collapse. For whatever reason, we tend to believe that men and women can only be goaded or cajoled, by superior force or superior rhetoric into peaceful coexistence’. For Bauman, this view stands in stark contrast to that of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1967) who viewed social reality as something that was not imposed but constructed by individuals through their interaction, in a process of habitualisation:
All human activity is subject to habitualization. Any action that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be reproduced with an economy of effort and which, ipso facto, is apprehended by its performer as that pattern. Habitualization further implies that the action in question may be performed again in the future in the same manner and with the same economical effort. (pp. 70–71)
What Bauman chooses to ignore or is unaware of are the similarities between Berger and Luckmann’s conception of habitualisation and Parsons’ action frame of reference and Durkheim’s understanding of how the conscience collective is constructed through individual social action.
Matt Dawson (2023) rejects the view of Durkheim as a ‘staid sociologist of the functionalist tradition’ (p. 3) presenting Durkheim as ‘a historical sociologist attempting to understand processes of change’ (p. 121). Building on the argument presented by Mark Gane (1984), Dawson (2023) presents a picture of Durkheim’s contribution to cultural sociology as motivated by and promoted a form of libertarian socialism found in the work of the English thinker G D H Cole (1889–1959).
Bauman viewed Durkheim as a conservative and ignored Durkheim’s relation to socialism and his understanding of ‘democracy’ and ‘the state’. Socialism for Durkheim was a response to the lack of moral regulation of the economy. In a manner that resembles Bauman’s argument in Socialism: The Active Utopia, Dawson quotes Durkheim (1893) as stating that socialism is the ‘means to introduce a higher morality’ (p. 119) and that socialism is ‘above all moral’ (Durkheim, 1893: 116 cited in Dawson, 2023: 56). Also, in a similar fashion to Bauman, Dawson explains how ‘Durkheim castigates Marxist socialism’s aggressive character “for which it has often been justly reproached” (Durkheim 1899a:143)’ (Dawson, 2023: 58).
Dawson is critical of Bauman’s view of Durkheim. In contrast to Bauman’s (2005) view, Durkheim’s goal was:
not to create a situation in which social actors blindly follow the gospel of what has been, but rather to create the conditions under which they can pursue moral acts even if they go against existing forms of moral regulation. This notion is missing in the Baumanian politically inspired interpretation of Durkheim in which the latter was seen to advocate ‘an unswerving loyalty to the great and intelligent force of society’ (Bauman 2005:372). (Dawson, 2023: 140)
There is extremely limited evidence that Bauman read either Parsons or Durkheim in any detail. This is a major oversight in his work as Bauman’s understanding of solid modernity is built upon a critique and the identification of shortcomings in Parsons and Durkheim’s approaches. If we look at the citations of Durkheim across Bauman’s copious body of work, all but one or two of the citations are taken from Anthony Giddens’ edited volume Emile Durkheim: Selected Writings. I am not criticising Giddens’ book as it gives an undergraduate student, unfamiliar with Durkheim’s work, a flavour of his arguments. However, a critical appraisal of Durkheim requires a more detailed engagement with his work.
If there is an Ariadne thread or underpinning narrative thread in Zygmunt Bauman’s work to be found in these early works, it is that Bauman looked at human agency but chose in his later work to focus on the conditions which shape and determine individual social action. If a reader is searching for a ‘sociology of unfreedom’, then Bauman’s (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust and the processes of liquefaction that Bauman explores in his post-2000 work are excellent examples.
From Modernity and the Holocaust onwards, a central concept in Bauman’s social analysis was adiaphora. Bauman understands the adiaphoric process to be the imposition of an ‘alien will’ onto the individual human agent. The agentic state allows individuals to be conscious of their actions but place their actions outside of the moral–immoral axis, outside of moral evaluation, and, as such, prevent the individual from exercising moral judgement about those acts that individuals in whom themselves have engaged.
With his concept of adiaphora, Bauman presents an analytical framework that separates individuals from their conduct. Individual motives and intentions underpinning action are imposed from an external source either rationalisation in Bauman’s account of the Holocaust or consumerism in his liquid turn writings. Bauman rejects the common-sense concept of a sovereign self and the uniqueness of the individual and has no interest in the imaginative life of the individual. The individual self for Bauman is unique but is in essence selfless. Individual action is constituted and determined by external demands. While the individual is in an agentic state, the individual will always embrace conformity, and consequently, their actions will be conducted without shame and will have no significant or lasting moral or ethical consequences for the self. In the agentic state, the individual is without a moral compass, first-person perspective or self-awareness.
Bauman’s understanding of the interplay between agency and context is clearly expressed in his email conversations with Rein Raud where Bauman describes himself as
a sociologist first . . . interested primarily in social settings (rather than trying to fathom the essentially recondite, impenetrable/inscrutable as we’ve already agreed, depth of the ‘interiority’); the settings that enhance the likelihood of one rather than another of the alternative possibilities occurring. (Bauman and Raud, 2015: 28)
The real strength of the selected texts in this volume is the insight that they give into the ideas that Bauman engaged with in his early career, exploring possible links between agency and structure. Bauman appears to conclude that the intentionality of the individual within any given context is hidden, esoteric and mysterious. However, what is not ‘impenetrable’ and ‘inscrutable’ is the context in which a person finds themselves and the impact that the context has on the behaviours of the individual and this position was to shape his contribution to social analysis.
