Hidden Paths in Zygmunt Bauman’s Sociology: Editorial Introduction

From Poznan to Leeds …

Bauman lived a long life, intimately entwined with many of the world-historical events of the 20th century. Born on 19 November 1925 in Poznan, Poland, he was first a victim of the Nazis, then the Communists. In 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, he fled along with his family to the Soviet Union, where he would fight for the Red Army against the Nazis. Given Bauman’s well-known criticisms of the more positivistic forms of social science, it is interesting to learn that the first academic passion of the adolescent Bauman was for physics, initially enrolling on a two-year course in that subject: ‘I did not think much of sociology then – nor was there much of a sociology to think of – in Stalin’s Russia’ (Bauman and Tester, 2001: 17). World events took over, however, and on his return to Poland suddenly there were other more important matters than physics as the re-creation of a nation devastated by war seemed a much more exhilarating and rewarding task.

Bauman lectured in sociology at the University of Warsaw in the 1950s and 1960s, gaining his first full academic post in 1954. Guided by his teachers Julian Hochfeld and Stanislaw Ossowski, Bauman was introduced to a particular form of sociology that openly embraced philosophy, economics, history and politics as a ‘human science’ seeking different ways of understanding the human condition (Satterwhite, 1992). Bauman’s own work began by espousing a deep concern for a growing conservative inertia among Polish youth at that time. Growing injustices and inequities were apparently tolerated because of a perceived minor stake in a corrupt social system that operated only in the interest of elites, with the nightmarish alternative of a life among the excluded helping to keep young people ‘in the game' (plus ça change …). The controversy his work started to cause barely got going before he was exiled from Poland along with his family in 1968, this time as a consequence of an anti-Semitic campaign by the communist regime. It is impossible here to recount this stage of Bauman’s life in anything close to the depth and sensitivity that it deserves, and in any case one cannot get a more vividly human account of this period than by reading A Dream of Belonging: My Years in Post-war Poland (1988) by Janina Bauman.

Temporary posts followed at universities in Tel Aviv and then more briefly in Haifa, but, as Janina explained in a Guardian interview back in 2003, Israel was too nationalistic a country and so was not to prove a congenial place for the family to live; they did not ‘want to go from being the victims of one kind of nationalism to being the perpetrators of another’ (Bunting, 2003). It was a life in which Bauman twice experienced an all too common plight of today’s global humanity: that of being forced to migrate and to become a refugee. These experiences stirred a deep moral commitment that was expressed constantly through his choice to write an explicitly moral sociology, infused with his own biographical experiences of poverty, marginalization and exile. Indeed, these experiences would seem to have shaped his belief that a ‘morally neutral’ form of sociology is an impossibility, as we shall consider later.

After a brief stay in Melbourne, it was in 1971 that Bauman and his family accepted an invitation to settle in the UK and into that home on the edge of Leeds. He then headed and helped to reshape the Department of Sociology, which had existed in various forms at the University of Leeds since its formal foundation as the Department of Social Studies in 1946. In his inaugural lecture at Leeds, Bauman (1972) began by noting that the most intimate and private biographical details of the professional sociologist cannot help but be entwined with the biography of the discipline itself. Later, in Hermeneutics and Social Science (1978), Bauman pondered the importance of the setting within which a text is conceived on both the intentions of the author at the time of writing and the subsequent meaning that the text comes to acquire once it is encountered by its reader. Never shy, especially in his later writing, of blending sociological reflection with biographical experience (see the opening entry to his 2012 book, This is Not A Diary, where he writes directly to Janina only days after her passing), it is odd that at a time where the ‘authenticity of lived experience’ is so fervently privileged by sociologists, Bauman’s own insights can often appear to be so hastily disregarded. A victim of the Nazis; then the Communists. A refugee. A migrant. A socialist. Bauman lived the 20th century. Would his testimony not provide the most fascinating interview transcript? That transcript exists, of course, but it is laid out across nearly seven decades of work and requires the reader to dedicate some time to all of it before pronouncing on its sociological merits.

Indeed, we struggle to think of another sociologist for whom the link between biography and sociology has stimulated such intense interest, or that has been deemed to have such relevance to their way of ‘being a sociologist’ as a way of life, rather than simply ‘doing sociology’ by dint of professional practice (Davis, 2013; Jacobsen and Tester, 2006). For Bauman, a day in which he had not written was a day wasted, and his daily routine of beginning to write before sunrise and continuing into the late afternoon became his modus vivendi. Terry Wassall, a student of Bauman’s at Leeds during the 1980s, recalled to us trying to clear up at around 4.30 a.m. after a typically raucous staff-student party held in the department, only to see Bauman stride purposefully into the building, straight past the assembled detritus, and into his office to start work. This would be a testing timetable even for a doctoral student labouring tirelessly on a thesis, but when it is embraced as a way of being to be sustained into one’s 91st year, it may count as proof of a conviction that social change truly can be effected through writing.

We are fortunate to have our own personal memories of him. One that we share is taking a train journey between Leeds and Sheffield back in 2012, having been invited to see together the premiere screening of the documentary film about his life and works, The Trouble with Being Human These Days. ¹ On that short 50-minute journey to Sheffield, we watched as an entire carriage of passengers were held in quiet awe as Bauman delivered an impromptu lecture to anyone who wished to listen on the latest news of the day, namely the UK government’s decision effectively to triple overnight the costs of accessing a higher education. His sharp observations and even sharper wit just drew people towards him. He cut quite a figure in his later life, his many moments of hearty enthusiasm expressed fully through the movement of both his words and his waves – all long, angular limbs and wisps of wild, white hair. If Quentin Blake drew sociologists. It is also true that, having graciously accepted the pre-screening dinner and with his obligation to attend apparently satisfied, Bauman would mischievously sneak away as soon as the lights went down. We learned later that, never watching the film, he had caught the next available train straight back to Leeds in order to commence writing into the early hours.

European Modernity and the Crisis of Humanity

While today Bauman is perhaps best known for his metaphor of ‘liquidity’ (Davis, 2013; Jacobsen and Marshman, 2006), to an earlier generation of scholars he will forever be identified with the ‘modern trilogy’ (Smith, 1999) of Legislators and Interpreters (1987a), Modernity and Ambivalence (1991a) and, in between, his 1989 masterpiece, Modernity and the Holocaust, which rightly saw him established as a giant of European sociology and a public intellectual on a global scale. Shaped by the memoir of his deeply beloved wife Janina (Bauman, 1986), the book gave us a stark warning of the genocidal possibilities latent within every modern bureaucratic society that would privilege process, order and efficiency over morals, responsibility and care for the other.

Always wary of offering any alternative blueprint for the future, Bauman declined to profess any concrete solution to our common plight. Oscillating between moments of pessimism, optimism, and that ‘third camp’ of hope that he considered so important (Bauman, 2004b; Davis, 2011; Dawson, 2012), he retained a passionate commitment to a form of socialism – and also to a form of ‘sociological hermeneutics’ (Dawson, 2016) – that was founded on the principle of being forever counter-cultural, even when an avowed socialist government was moving the levers of power. As Neal Lawson (2017) reminded us in the days immediately following Bauman’s death, here was a sociologist who believed that a truly ‘good society’ was one that could never be satisfied that it was ‘good enough'. Today such counter-cultural instincts seem as important as ever. As processes of ‘liquid modernity’ continue to dissolve collective ideas of citizenship and leave individuals increasingly with only the market to manage their increasingly individualized concerns as consumers, hoping to find solutions to their private troubles by shopping, sociology is still crucial to translating apparently private troubles into commonly shared public issues. Without sociology, Bauman (2010) suggests, notions of equality, democracy and self-determination will not survive if society is seen less and less as a product of shared labour and common values and far more as a mere container of goods and services to be grabbed by competing individual hands.

As sharp as ever, in his last years Bauman analysed the refugee crisis and the rise of right-wing populism across Europe and the United States as a ‘crisis of humanity’ (Bauman, 2017a). A key feature of Bauman’s analysis of ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000a) is an apparent divorce of power from politics, leading to the leaking away of trust from political leaders on all sides. With this loss of trust would come a loss a faith and a demand to ‘take back control’. From someone who had lived through two forms of totalitarianism, Bauman's warning was that – despite our protestations that we had surely learned lessons from the previous century – the change demanded would be authoritarian in character.

The promise of a socially progressive Europe therefore meant a great deal to him. Although he could be highly-critical of Europe at times (Bauman 2004a), he believed ardently that the European Union stood as a safeguard for hard-won rights and for shared protection against war and insecurity (Smith, 2016). In his final lecture at the University of Leeds, on 5 October 2016, he drew subtle but knowing comparisons between his analysis of the Holocaust and the capacity of today’s populism to ‘other’ everyone, without compassion or remorse. ² He recalled receiving the Theodor W. Adorno Prize in 1998 (one of many honours he received) and the problem he encountered when asked to choose a national anthem to be played at his ceremony. Neither the Polish nor British versions seeming appropriate to him, feeling a stranger in both lands, it was his wife Janina who solved the problem by suggesting Ode to Joy, the anthem of Europe.

Zygmunt Bauman passed away on 9 January 2017, aged 91. Reflecting on his work as a whole, we see it as a series of postcards from an inhabitant of the 20th century to the inhabitants of the 21st. When there seems to be no alternative, as the present is clouded by a creeping ‘moral blindness' (Bauman and Donskis, 2013) in the face of multiple crises, his sociology provides that vital Gramscian reminder that the world we inhabit has been made by human hands and so it can be remade by them too. For all his ‘passion and pessimism’ (Bunting, 2003), he wrote in such quantity and with such quality because he believed in the possibility that we could – and should – face that awesome challenge together.

Bauman Before Liquid Modernity?

In the immediate aftermath of his death, a number of excellent articles were written each of which provides a different door into the vast room of Bauman’s sociology. ³ In the past year or so, there have also been a number of books that have set about providing a more ‘critical analysis’ of his work while also considering how sociology might look anew and move creatively ‘beyond Bauman’ (Blackshaw, 2016; Jacobsen, 2016; Rattansi, 2017). In so doing, these welcome contributions take Bauman’s sociological imagination very seriously and provide useful reference points for both scholars and students seeking a more robust examination of his ideas. All these contributions deserve being read and studied as they provide new and considered insights into Bauman’s legacy for the social sciences and humanities. Throughout the sections that follow, we hope to make our own contribution to the curious reader’s deliberations on these debates by shining a light on those aspects of Bauman’s work that may have become somewhat hidden and possibly overlooked in what we see as a growing tendency to focus primarily upon his later writings on ‘liquid modernity’.

As is known, Bauman has always been an awkward presence in sociology, especially in the UK where he is often considered a ‘successful outsider’ in Dennis Smith’s words (Dawes, 2011; Smith, 1999). Schooled by Ossowski and Hochfeld in the ‘human sciences', Bauman paid a disciplinary price for being concerned with speaking for the whole of humanity and its shared concerns, rather than preoccupying himself with the latest ‘isms’ of academic twists and turns (Czapnik, 2017). For a public intellectual most fêted around the world for emphasizing the terror of modernity’s ‘will-to-order’ – understood as that restless desire to put all of life’s rich diversity into neatly labelled little boxes, a place for everything and everything in its place – the irony of never being regarded as ‘a proper sociologist’ nor ‘a true moral philosopher’ was never lost on him. Bauman was happy not to fit neatly. Indeed, it is one of the many curiosities of life at the Bauman Institute here in Leeds that the farther away we travel, the less justification we need to provide for why one should ‘bother with Bauman’. To many around the world, both inside and outside the global academy, it is simply self-evident.

For us, it was his passionate moral commitment to the outsiders, the strangers, the downtrodden and excluded, providing a very real and necessary moral check to all the apparent abundance of financialized capitalism, which stood out among the available sociological interpretations on offer. And yet, despite the generosity of a life lived in the service of sociology – the frequent books and articles he authored; the constant acceptance of invitations to lecture all over Europe and (when health permitted) the wider world; and the willingness to grant his precious time for numerous interviews – there are those who would always demand still more of him, who would hold him to a still higher standard. Why had he (yet again!) overlooked this topic, that community, this methodological problem? Why had he repeated this observation in this and that book? Why did everything, in the end, always have to be ‘liquid’?

Many simply gave up, seeing only repetition and a lack of novelty. Perhaps the consistency of our shared human plight demanded the consistency of his message in more than one place? But perhaps also something else is under way. Submerged beneath all the ‘liquid’ books, the hidden paths of Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology have become more obscure and so run the risk of being overlooked. We believe that those who would focus their reading primarily upon Bauman’s ‘liquid period’, from 2000 onwards, would benefit from time spent rediscovering and wandering those hidden paths, which, much like the garden of his long-time home in Leeds, have perhaps become overgrown with the passing of time and so too easily and too hastily walked by.

In the sections below, we seek to help the reader to navigate his voluminous work – evidenced by the number of articles collected together in this E-Special – by shining a torch beneath the surface and onto the roots of Bauman’s thinking. This is because in order to grasp fully the meaning of Bauman’s writing in the more popular post-2000 phase, we suggest it is vital that one understands these foundations of his thought. In this way, we hope to address the concerns of some contemporary critics. This would seem to be the best place to do this, since much of Bauman’s thinking on the foundational themes of culture, civilization and hermeneutic sociology was worked out in the pages of Theory, Culture & Society (TCS), a journal for which he held great affection.

The Familiar Bauman: Industrialism, Consumerism and Power

Although Bauman contributes a book review on Sennett’s Authority (1982a: 128–30) in the second-ever issue of TCS, the first full article that he publishes there is ‘Industrialism, consumerism and power’ (Bauman, 1983). Its significance lay in establishing the key themes of freedom and surveillance in consumer societies that would come to characterize much of his writing in later years.

In the article Bauman highlights a shared affinity between Weber and Freud, in the sense that they share a common root in the 17th-century articulation of dichotomy: the basic conflict between passion and reason, ultimately between the natural and the social. This is the self-understanding of modernity as being constituted by dichotomous ‘characters’ with attitudes, motives, beliefs and expectations. Bauman notes a tendency to use dichotomous social positions, rendered as ‘ideal-types’, plotted along an imaginary spectrum in order to reveal something about the contemporary social world that would otherwise remain hidden. This ‘will to dualism’ (Davis, 2008; Rattansi, 2017) returns across Bauman’s own writing on consumer society, a world he sees variously as inhabited by tourists and vagabonds; the seduced and the repressed; the free and the flawed consumers.

Interestingly, the opening paragraphs see Bauman (1983: 33) adopting the language and terminology of an almost ‘functionalist’ paradigm, with reference to norms and values, internalization of beliefs, maintenance of the social order, consensus, social integration, the imposition of ‘a new motivational structure’ as the basis of integration, reproduction, legitimation of the social order, and so on. After lamenting the fact that ‘there was no room for the body in social science’, seen too often as the ‘barely spoken of fourth side of Parsons’ square; the suppressed and incapacitated half of Durkheim’s homo duplex’, Bauman (1983: 34) celebrates the work of both Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault as having successfully integrated the human body into their sociological theorizing. What follows is one of the most explicit engagements with Foucault ever written by Bauman, assessing his theory of power (this line of thinking will later inform his important 1988a book, Freedom). Bauman muses whether it can be known for certain that, long before the dawn of modernity, the same techniques of power described by Foucault were also the principal techniques of social control: does Foucault describe ‘modern power’, or power itself?

Demographic expansion that could not be absorbed by the existing modes of production saw the emergence of an economically redundant population – unattached, belonging nowhere, mobile, and so supervised by the norms, values and controlling mechanisms of no local community – that were quickly stigmatized as the ‘dangerous classes’, ‘dangerous because they were the first to live under conditions where probability of “being seen” was low’ (1983: 35). In short, the need for constant surveillance arises – a theme that will recur in Bauman’s analysis of the consumer society, not least in his deployment of Thomas Mathiesen’s concept of ‘synopticon’ (Bauman, 1999; Bauman and Lyon, 2012): ‘Universality of surveillance was reflected in the universality of enforced uniformity’ (1983: 34). Contra Foucault, Bauman suggests that the 17th century did not mark the birth of disciplinary power, but rather the ‘problematisation of power’ itself (cf. Gane, 2012).

Intriguingly, there is here a concise but perfectly formed articulation of Bauman’s later work on the ‘gardening state’ and the relationship between modernity and order. He states: ‘What used to be accomplished matter-of-factly without ever surfacing at the level of conscious political practice had now become a matter of conscious design, planning, and legislation. In its institutional re-deployment, the state had to play the decisive role’ (1983: 35). The reproduction of the social order at the grassroots level from the 17th century onwards becomes the concern of the dominant classes. ‘Being human’, Bauman says, ‘became now a skill to be learned’, and so what was understood by ‘human’ was a form of life and being that ensured the continuation of the existing hierarchy and so preserved the interests of the dominant class. This idea will dominate the ‘modern trilogy’ (Bauman, 1987a, 1989, 1991a) and later establish his understanding of ‘solid’ as opposed to ‘liquid’ modernity.

Noting affinities between Foucault’s (1977 [1975]) Discipline and Punish and his own (then recently published) book Memories of Class (1982b), Bauman draws a sharp distinction between the fates of unskilled and skilled workers when crowded together into large mills and subject to the same pernickety rules and disciplining techniques across the working day. A different level of income was not the most salient feature of the tension between them; rather, it was the relative freedom from intrusive and invasive surveillance and disciplinary procedures that set one group apart from another (1983: 38). Bauman lays bare a process that he calls the ‘economisation of power conflict’, and is one of the only places Bauman writes explicitly on money. The asymmetry of power relations within the factory setting – between unskilled and skilled workers, floor managers, and factory bosses – is accepted as part of the process of production, with conflict transferred outside of the factory setting and into the marketplace, where different groups reinterpret this conflict over production as the effort to satisfy consumer needs in the world of commodities.

‘Money becomes a makeshift power substituted for the one surrendered in the sphere of production; while the experience of unfreedom generated by the conditions in the workplace is re-projected upon the universe of commodities’ (1983: 38). What we might now call ‘consumer freedom’ is only a surrogate form of power, Bauman suggests, a substitute for the emancipatory urge triggered by the conflicts of the factory setting. Not only do ever-greater rates of consumption fail to alleviate the stress of working life, but they also cannot target the real source of our dissatisfaction: the power asymmetry of the capitalist mode of production. Bauman calls this work-induced stress ‘a virtual time-bomb lodged in industrial society from its very inception’ (1983: 39).

This move into political economy becomes more explicit via a focus on familiar tropes of Bauman’s analysis of consumerism. None of the great modern minds of economics ever considered ‘economic growth’ among the favourable attributes of an industrial society, but only the ability of capitalism to improve the ‘general welfare of society’ (1983: 39). Without this – and in focusing upon the stimulation of surplus-production rather than its distribution – the state faces an ongoing ‘legitimation crisis’ (Habermas, 1988 [1973]). In shifting power struggles to the sphere of consumption and away from asymmetries in the production process, the state becomes more concerned with the economy (‘growth’) than with society (‘welfare’). Put another way, we may say that the state pledges its loyalty to capitalism rather than to democracy. And, as a consequence, the ambitions of life are also redirected away from the state and towards the market, now assumed (quite wrongly?) to be the best mechanism for securing liberation from domination.

Revisiting the closing section holds a notable surprise. More and more people are being produced in the role of consumers while being denied the (economic) access to the producer role – they are required to perform as consumers, but deprived of the means to do so. And then it comes:

Against this background, the 1981 British inner-city riots could be seen as the modern equivalent of the machine-breaking of the early industrial era. The desperate adolescent unemployed played the role of the Luddites of consumer society. Their rage was turned against consumerist instruments of oppression: the goodies displayed in the windows of the inner-city department stores. (1983: 41)

Defamiliarizing the Familiar Bauman: Civilization and Difference

As with his first article (Bauman, 1983), some of the paths that Bauman paved through his contributions to TCS are well trodden and so very familiar. By way of example, the speech that Bauman gave after receiving the European Amalfi Prize for the book Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman, 1989) is published in TCS as ‘The social manipulation of morality: Moralizing actors, adiaphorizing action’ (Bauman, 1991b). His subsequent book Modernity and Ambivalence (Bauman, 1991a) also appears in circumscribed form as an article with the same title (Bauman, 1990). A series of pieces on ethics, morality and postmodernity then follow (Bauman, 1988b, 1994, 1998) alongside his seminal books of the 1990s, in which Bauman mapped out a sociology of postmodernity. Our point here is that TCS was clearly something of a testing ground for these ideas – and we hope a reason to (re)discover those articles collected together in this E-special.

In some of his shorter pieces published in the journal – such as the review essays and book reviews also included in this special collection – it is possible to observe Bauman’s thought travelling along paths less well trodden. Since we have evoked explicitly his favourite Jorge Luis Borges (2000 [1941]) story for the title of our paper, we may say that in the pages of TCS these familiar and unfamiliar paths diverge and converge, approach each other, fork and break-off at distinct points. One of the most interesting of these ‘forking paths’, especially in the light of recent criticisms of Bauman’s ‘Eurocentrism’ (Mayblin, 2017; Rattansi, 2014, 2016) and preoccupation only with the fate of ‘generalized others’ (Best, 2016), pertains to the concept of civilization.

This is engaged directly in a short essay entitled ‘On the origins of civilization’ (Bauman, 1985) and, less directly in a later review essay, ‘The philosopher in the age of noise: A reading of Richard J. Bernstein’s Philosophical Profiles’ (Bauman, 1987b). In the former, across just seven pages, Bauman discusses the emergence of the concept of civilization and the French verb, civiliser, specifically in terms of its educative role in the formation of a people, and the subsequent fragmentation of the concept in our contemporary ‘polyversal’ world. As would appear more fully in Legislators and Interpreters (1987a), he discusses here the emergence and proliferation in the times of les lumières and les philosophes of a type of ethnographic knowledge pertaining to specifically ‘non-western’ cultures. This knowledge of these cultures was exemplary, Bauman suggests, only because of the ‘variety of human folly and superstition’ rather than because of the plurality of different ways of being in the world. It was then assumed there was no variety in the moral commandments and indictments of Reason, which were considered ‘the same for mankind as a whole' (1985: 8). He then moves on to a critique of the universal validity of the civilizing ideal on the basis that it was ‘intimately connected to the intellectualist bid for power’ (1985: 13). The ‘Western tip of the European peninsula’ (1987a: 159) defines its purported universal civilizational superiority against the difference it conquers militarily.

In the early 1990s, Bauman was also preoccupied with questions of mortality and immortality, questions that are explicitly foregrounded in this journal in his ‘Survival as a Social Construct’ (1992b). His most elaborated treatise on these themes appeared more fully in Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (1992a), a book that he would often have to explain as having ‘nothing to do with death’ and which he saw as being one of his most significant contributions to sociology (and all the more curious for being little read in comparison with his other books). There, Bauman revisits the conceptual history of civilization – a word that he argues is fundamentally connected with the idea of immortality, a march in historical time towards an eternal, perfect order. As he puts it: ‘a most prominent feature of the West-European-born modern civilization was temporalization of cultural difference […] The different stood for the transient; the superior civilization, from which it differed, stood by the same token for all that is durable and potentially timeless’ (Bauman, 1992a: 124). The self-understanding of Western European civilizations, Bauman recognized, was based on a ‘denial of coevalness’ (Fabian, 1983) with its external Others. But – and this is the crucial point in a powerful section (Bauman, 1992a: 120) – if the West had won ‘the right to tell history’ as a movement away from the barbarism, it had confused the ‘superior killing potential of guns’ with ‘the superiority of Western reason and form of life’.

Bauman and Eurocentrism

All of which brings us back to Bauman and Europe. It is clear from reviewing his contributions to TCS, that one of the ‘deaths’ that Bauman associated with postmodernity was the death of any kind of philosophical legitimation for this universal civilizing mission conducted at gunpoint. Though it is not explicitly confronted, it is also clear that the greatest expression of this ‘death’ was the period of decolonization inaugurated after the Second World War. In his discussion of Bernstein – which, like the other review essays and book reviews that he contributed to TCS, is far more than just a learned summary – Bauman discusses the effect on philosophy of the world ceasing to be, as it was mistakenly assumed a hundred years before, ‘Europe’s playground’ (1987a: 159).

As Europe’s military and political power were significantly challenged by anti-colonial movements, Bauman states that the assumed ‘superiority’, universality and singularity of the European philosophical tradition became less and less tenable. The ‘single voice' of universal civilization, shouted over gunfire, would gradually come to be replaced by polyvocality in an age of noise. This was, Bauman claims, appreciated by thinkers of the late 20th century, like Rorty, Gadamer and Habermas. Their challenges to the ‘unquestioned certainties about the mission of philosophy’ did not result from them being wiser than earlier philosophers. Neither were they simply following ‘philosophical changes of fashion’. It was instead simply ‘because the world in which philosophy operates has changed’ (1987a: 161). As he argued powerfully in Legislators and Interpreters (1987a) and revisited more recently through interviews published by TCS (Dawes, 2011; Tabet, 2017), the role of the intellectual thus also undergoes a transformation. The intellectual no longer ‘legislates’ in an uneasy alliance with the educative, order-building rationality of the state. The intellectual in the polycentric social situation of postmodernity interprets, their role now consisting in interpreting and translating across these civilizations.

There may well be a lack of a sustained historical sociology of colonial-imperialism in Bauman’s analysis, and it would certainly be a stretch to place him among the company of postcolonial theorists. Nevertheless, in tracking the historical movement from civilization to civilizations, Bauman is also seemingly a long way away from a narrow form of ‘Eurocentrism’ (Mayblin, 2017; Rattansi, 2016). In his refusal to see Europe as a ‘single voice', let alone the only voice, Bauman was, from a very early stage, wary of the dangerous possibility that the reflexive awareness of polyversalism might lead to an unassailable relativism or a ‘clash’ of incommensurable civilizations. He argued that sociologists should never lose sight of the task of interpreting ‘action in terms of systems, or meanings in terms of social structures’ (1985: 14). Indeed, turning away from these perennial concerns of sociologists ‘does not serve well the cause of individual autonomy’ (1985: 14). Instead, it allies with the commodification of ‘authentic’ individuality, a systemic manipulation of genuine autonomy. The legislative, universalizing metanarratives of progress and civilization are revealed as products of power struggles, but he refuses to fall into the trap of relativism, one that is packaged and sold in commercial form. Herein lies the depth of Bauman’s attempt to grasp the condition of postmodernity.

From Sociological Enlightenment …

As he says in one of his last interviews published in TCS, it is important to remember that his was a ‘sociology of postmodernity’ and not a ‘postmodern sociology’ (Tabet, 2017: 122). This key distinction has often been overlooked. Bauman argued that sociology possessed (and so still possesses) the analytical and conceptual tools required to understand ‘postmodernity’ and did not (and still does not) need fundamentally to reconstitute itself at the postmodern moment. This reflects a consistent thread across all of Bauman’s sociology: his reflections on the nature and purpose of the sociological discipline itself.

As we noted above, Bauman was introduced by Hochfeld and Ossowski to sociology as a human science, an elaboration of all the social sciences and humanities. As such, he refused to see sociology as the immature younger brother or sister of a more mature (‘better equipped’, ‘better established’?) natural science. Instead, he repeatedly insisted that they are an entirely different activity altogether. Bluntly, the humanities will never be ‘like the natural sciences’ unless they succumb to the will of totalitarian states, whereby the voice of the story-telling human subject has been all but eliminated. Drawing upon all of his biographical and sociological experience, he reminds us that in such societies there is often seen to be little need for human sciences in the first place.

In ‘Sociological Enlightenment – For Whom? About What?’ (2000b), Bauman presents one of the most forthright defences of the need for polyvocality and differences of dialogue. Sociology, he suggests, has throughout its history mistakenly sought to deny or to eliminate the diversity of voices telling stories in order to produce the one single story that cancels out all the rest. Sociology, that thoroughly modern discipline, opted to make the study and promotion of order, regularity and predictability the horizon of its ambition. But in a democratic society, it is precisely those wills and feelings that rebel against the ‘grand design’ that must be acknowledged and honoured. If despotism is imposition of will ‘from the top’, Bauman states, then democracy is the imposition of will ‘from below’. Bauman is clear: Any sociology worthy of our intellect, wit and energy, must be in the service of democracy. It must respect the wishes of those freely choosing individuals, and ought to be judged by the degree to which it can enhance and reinforce a genuine freedom of choice, in the pursuit of fairness, justice and rationality (2000b: 81).

Again, as we noted earlier, Bauman is often rather lazily labelled as a pessimist, seen as offering only bleak and dark forebodings of the life that we have created for ourselves, and providing no solutions to our enduring troubles. We do not recognize this description of Bauman. Somewhat glibly, would a pessimist write so much for, speak at such length with, and willingly listen to a world that they had concluded was beyond salvation? More analytically, we know from Bauman’s writings on modernity of the dangers of any ‘blueprint’ for society that promises quick and simple solutions from charismatic leaders of their times – from Nazi Germany through to the re-emergence of right-wing authoritarian characters on today’s political stage. Bauman – informed here by Castoriadis’ vision of an ‘autonomous society’ – states that a truly democratic society is a ‘chaos seeking form’ (2000b: 80). It is precisely the absence of absolute truths, guaranteed meanings, clear rules of action and consequence that he believes are the conditions sine qua non of the truly autonomous individual and the truly democratic society.

The human condition that sociology needs to serve is marked not by the absence of values and valid norms, but precisely by its opposite – by the plurality of norms and values, and awareness that this plurality is an indispensable condition of autonomous society and free individuality (2000b: 80) Bauman says the point is that, without taking the risks which polyvocality necessarily entails, without allowing for freedom of choice which always includes the possibility of wrong and damaging ones, there will be no chance at all for democracy and freedom (2000b: 81).

… to Sociology in the Age of Noise

And so the idea of moral progress for humanity does not dissipate. It is instead reconfigured to mean ‘mutually enriching cultural exchange’ (1985: 14). Progress is a product of ‘cross-cultural hermeneutics’ (1985: 14). This perhaps unfamiliar path stretches back to some of Bauman’s foundational reflections on sociological method. As he put it in Hermeneutics and Social Science (Bauman, 1978: 218):

one can achieve understanding of alien forms of life not by immersing oneself in their specific uniqueness or re-living them as if ‘from inside’, but by following an exactly opposite strategy: by spotting the general in the particular, by enlarging both the alien and one’s own experience so as to construct a larger system in which each ‘makes sense’ to the other.

These themes are further elaborated in a short review for Theory, Culture & Society of some books by Jean Baudrillard (Bauman, 1988c). This is a fascinating piece of writing for two reasons. First, Bauman explicitly opposes the ‘despondent’ pessimism of Baudrillard and as such pre-emptively responds to some later criticisms of his own apparently bleak worldview. Second, in just the opening few lines, Bauman makes one of the most forceful epistemological declarations of his career: ‘It has been said that our perception of the world is incurably anthropomorphic. Wrong. It is praxeomorphic. It has been said that our perception of the world is adamantly ethnocentric. Wrong again. It is intellectual-centred’ (1988c: 738). Rarely has Bauman elaborated the epistemological position underlying his work in such succinct and technical terms. Perhaps this is because the cross-cultural hermeneutics, which for Bauman will underlie a sociology fit for the polyvocal age of noise, takes Baudrillard as its counter-image.

The praxis from which Baudrillard’s sociology draws ‘its tropes and imagery is one of yesterday’s and today’s television news’. It is a sociology ‘made to the measure of television’ (1988c: 740). A connection is made between François Rabelais’ vision of the Abbey of Thélème and Baudrillard’s vision of the ‘obscene’ televised society. In Thélème, residents were required to uphold a single law: ‘to listen carefully to the desires of their bodies, and to act upon them’ (1988c: 743). Suffering is outlawed. We learn that Rabelais saw the construction of the walls of Thélème in his lifetime, and thus could remember a world outside. Baudrillard’s vision of ‘the brave new world of consumer bliss’ (1988c: 743) is elaborated firmly inside the walls. His is a despondent analysis that follows from the lack of desire among the inhabitants of Thélème for leaders or prophets, social roles that Bauman suggests Baudrillard desires for himself in the consumer society.

The safe, sanitized world of the contemporary, screen-mediated ‘Thélèmian society’ is for Bauman just a small portion of the world that humanity shares. The rest of this shared world is, he argues, very often only encountered through two types of screens: our TV screens and the window screens of our air-conditioned cars. Today, with a quick tech-update, we would no doubt add the multitude of screens that we carry in our pockets, bags and briefcases, those of smartphones, tablets and personal computers. Bauman tells us as early in the technological revolution as 1988 that we do not have to remain enraptured or embittered within this apparent ‘ecstasy of communication’ (Baudrillard, 1988). We retain a choice to walk outside of the walls of this Thélème, to experience and to engage with a wider world of difference. Doing so requires us to leave and to ‘re-learn how to use our legs’ (1988c: 743). The forking paths that Bauman’s work illuminates, the counter-cultural and the cross-cultural, can perhaps enable us to travel out of our contemporary, screen-realized Thélème and instead engage in the difficult task of encountering the Other in all their difference and – shock, horror – speaking with, listening to, and learning from them. It was how he did sociology. And sociology has to engage in a continuous dialogue with human experience in its plurality of forms.

Concluding Remarks

Given all of this, it is perhaps unremarkable that many of Bauman’s latest publications tended to take the form of dialogue. It was, had always been, his preferred sociological method. Fittingly, some of his final contributions to TCS also take this form, in particular enlightening conversations with Simon Dawes (2011), Slawomir Czapnik (2017) and Simon Tabet (2017). To read them now is to be reminded precisely of his ‘dialogical’ approach to sociology, and in more ways than one. They are marked by generosity, as well as insight. Entailed in the ‘art of dialogue’ is the need ‘to jointly pursue understanding instead of aiming at the others’ defeat’ and ‘by the wish to keep the conversation going, rather than by the desire to grind it to a halt’ (Bauman, 2011: 143). Bauman never engaged in the kind of macho ‘monological’ posturing – that is, my theory and my method, as the one and only true path to follow – that aims at the destruction of the arguments and credibility of adversaries. Not for him a form of dialogue that tries to reduce the capacity of an interlocutor to engage in conversation. As revealed in the discussion with Czapnik (2017), Bauman’s approach was also marked by the avoidance of ‘isms’ and was antithetical to the tendency to create disciplinary ‘enclaves with tightly barricaded doors’ (2017: 120). Bauman’s work brings diverse strands into dialogue with one another to explore alternatives, an idea central to his conception of sociological hermeneutics (Dawson, 2016).

These interview pieces showcase another aspect of Bauman’s character and work that is also often overlooked, especially in those charges of pessimism: his impish wit. In his conversation with Simon Dawes, Bauman is invited to explain why he left his role as a much valued referee for articles submitted to TCS. On the one hand, he fears that peer-review has negative implications for the ‘daring of thought’ (Dawes, 2011: 147). On the other, that the ‘peer-review system carries a good part of blame for the fact that something like 60 percent or more of journal articles are never quoted’, and furthermore that – with the notable exception of a small number of examples like TCS – the ‘learned journals … ooze monumental boredom’ (Dawes, 2011: 147).

Apparently with his ‘tongue in one cheek only’, he suggests that ‘were our Palaeolithic ancestors to discover the peer-review dredger, we would still be sitting in caves …’ (Dawes, 2011: 147).

Zygmunt Bauman. What does the name mean to you?