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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
A victim of the Nazis, then the communists. Twice a refugee, yet always remaining a committed socialist. In countless ways, Zygmunt Bauman lived the political upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He was an actor within them. Bauman's own lived history informed his politics, which found expression in varying degrees in his sociology, as he wrote extensively on socialism, democracy, bureaucracy, morality, Europe and the Jewish experience. This volume brings together hitherto unknown or rare pieces by Bauman on the themes of history and politics by drawing upon previously unpublished material from the Bauman Archive at the University of Leeds. A substantial introduction by the editors provides readers with a lucid guide through this material and develops connections to Bauman's other works. The second volume in a series of books that will make available the lesser-known writings of one of the most influential social thinkers of our time, History and Politics will be of interest to students and scholars across the arts, humanities and social sciences, and to a wider readership.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Series Introduction
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Translator’s Note
Editors’ Introduction: History and Politics in the Sociological Imagination of Zygmunt Bauman
THE SOLITARY HORSEMAN
COMMUNISM CONTRA FASCISM
SOCIALISM CONTRA NATIONALISM
WHENCE REVOLUTION? WEST ENCOUNTERS EAST
PARVENU AND PARIAH: PARADOXES OF ASSIMILATION
IS THERE A FUTURE LEFT?
CONCLUSION
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 Tractate on Bureaucracy (1957)
WHENCE BUREAUCRACY?
GIVING ORDERS OR TAKING THEM?
THE WILL OF BUREAUCRACY
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BUREAUCRACY
PRO DOMO SUA
ENEMY OR ALLY?
Notes
2 On the Political Mechanisms of Bourgeois Democracy (1961)
THE FUNCTIONING OF DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL MECHANISMS
GOVERNMENT BY OPINION, OR THE PRODUCTION OF OPINIONS?
‘BOURGEOIS-NESS’ OF DEMOCRACY AND CAPITALIST SOCIAL RELATIONS
Notes
3 The Limitations of ‘Perfect Planning’ (1966)
A. FUNCTIONAL REQUISITES OF ‘PERFECT PLANNING’
1. Resource self-sufficiency
2. Perfect information
3. Perfect rationality by planners
4. Social homogeneity
5. Perfect hierarchic control
B. INITIAL LIMITATIONS OF SOCIALIST PLANNING
1. Foreign trade
2. The household frame of reference
C. HETEROGENEITY OF INTERESTS IN GOAL FORMULATION
1. Investment vs consumption
2. Collective vs individual consumption
3. Income levelling vs income differentiation
4. Goal formulation vs goal attainment
D. THE PROCESS OF GOAL ATTAINMENT
3. The qualitative heterogeneity of human needs
3. The special problem of the present
E. SUMMARY: INHERENT CONTRADICTIONS AS LIMITATIONS
1. Institutional
2. Political
3. Instrumental
4. Technical
Notes
4 The End of Polish Jewry: A Sociological Review (1969)
I FINAL SOLUTION 1968
II SOCIAL COMPOSITION OF THE JEWS IN COMMUNIST POLAND
III WHO WILL LEAVE AND WHO WILL STAY?
Notes
5 At the Crossroads in a World at the Crossroads (
c
.1970)
Notes
6 Between State and Society (1973)
Notes
7 On the Maturation of Socialism (1981)
Notes
8 Exit Visas and Entry Tickets: Paradoxes of Jewish Assimilation (1988)
THE PENT-UP REVOLUTION
ANTINOMIES OF EMANCIPATION
THE ALLUREMENTS AND TRAPS OF ASSIMILATION
ASSIMILATION’S INNER DEMONS
EMANCIPATORY LIMITS OF ASSIMILATION
ASSIMILATION THROUGH REVOLUTION
JEWISH ROADS TO REVOLUTION
Notes
9 The Holocaust: Fifty Years Later (1994)
Notes
10 Names of Suffering, Names of Shame (2001)
AFTER ONE CRIME, ANOTHER
WILL IT BE DIFFERENT?
GLOBAL RESPONSIBILITY
THREE SYMBOLS
AMERICA AND EGOISM
FOR SUFFICIENT STRENGTH
Notes
11 Britain after Blair, or Thatcherism Consolidated (2007)
ERODED HUMAN BONDS, WILTED SOLIDARITY
DISMANTLING THE SOCIAL STATE
RETREAT OF AND FROM POLITICS
DEMOCRACY IN TROUBLE
FROM SOCIAL STATE TO PERSONAL SAFETY STATE?
AFTER ALL THAT – WHERE TO START?
Notes
12 Panic among the Parasites, or For Whom the Bell Tolls (2010)
Notes
13 The Haunting Spectre of ‘Westphalian Sovereignty’ (2012)
Notes
14 Europe’s Adventure: Still Unfinished? (2016)
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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History and Politics
Selected Writings, Volume 2
Zygmunt Bauman
Edited and with an Introduction by Mark Davis, Jack Palmer, Dariusz Brzeziński and Tom Campbell
Translated by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Zygmunt Bauman 2023
Editors’ Introduction © Mark Davis, Jack Palmer, Dariusz Brzeziński and Tom Campbell 2023
English translations of pieces translated from Polish © Polity Press 2023
Dariusz Brzeziński’s research was funded by the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Science with the grant based on decision No. POR/2017/S/08.
The article ‘The Holocaust: Fifty Years Later’ was originally published in The Holocaust: Fifty Years Later, ed. Daniel Grinberg, The Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw, 1994.
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5074-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5075-3 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022940847
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
For Anna, Irena and Lydia
Series IntroductionMark Davis, Dariusz Brzeziński, Jack Palmer, Tom Campbell
The author of over seventy books and several hundred articles across a career spanning sixty-three years, Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) was one of the world’s most original and influential sociologists. In both his native Poland and his adopted home of England, Bauman produced an astonishing body of work that continues to inspire generations of students and scholars, as well as an engaged and global public. Their encounter with Bauman is shaped above all by two books that have acquired the status of modern classics: Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) and Liquid Modernity (2000). While this is understandable, it also means that many readers will be unfamiliar with the great range and diversity of Bauman’s work and with the course of its development over time. Moreover, as Keith Tester argued, an in-depth understanding of Bauman’s contribution must engage seriously with his foundational work of the 1970s, which builds upon his earlier writings in Poland, before his enforced exile in 1968. The importance of this broader and longer-term perspective on Bauman’s work has shaped the thinking behind this series, which makes available for the first time some of Bauman’s previously unpublished or lesser-known papers from the full range of his career.
The series has been made possible thanks to the generosity of the Bauman family, especially his three daughters Anna, Irena and Lydia. Following Bauman’s death on 9 January 2017, they kindly donated 156 large boxes of papers and almost 500 digital storage devices as a gift to the University of Leeds. Anyone privileged enough to have visited Bauman at his home in Leeds, perhaps arguing with him long into the night whilst surrounded by looming towers of dusty books and folders, will appreciate the magnitude of their task. With the support of the University of Leeds, the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Polity, and the Bauman Estate, we have studied this material and selected texts with a view to making them available to a wide readership through the volumes of this series. In partnership with professional archivists and data management experts, we have read, collated and indexed this vast and unique body of material written in both Polish and English since the 1950s. Through this research, we discovered many unpublished or lesser-known articles and essays, lecture notes and module summaries, contributions to obscure publications no longer in print, and partially completed drafts of papers. It quickly became clear that no commentary on Bauman’s life or work to date has been able to grasp fully the multi-faceted and multi-lingual character of his writings.
This series begins to correct that. As well as including many of his lesser-known English-language papers, we have started to tackle the multi-lingual dimension of Bauman’s sociology by working with the translator Katarzyna Bartoszyńska to ensure each of the volumes in this series includes Polish-language material previously unknown to English-speaking readers. This includes more contemporary Polish-language material, with a view to emphasizing Bauman’s continued engagement in European intellectual life following exile.
Each volume in the series is organized thematically, in order to provide some necessary structure for the reader. In seeking to respect both the form and content of Bauman’s documents, we have kept editorial changes to a minimum, only making grammatical or typographical corrections where necessary to make the meaning of his words clear. A substantial introduction by the editors offers a guide through the material, developing connections to Bauman’s other works, and helping to paint a picture of the entanglement between his biographical and intellectual trajectories. This series will facilitate a far richer understanding of the breadth and depth of Bauman’s legacy and provide a vital reference point for students and scholars across the arts, humanities and social sciences, and for his wider global readership.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Mark Davis is Professor of Economic Sociology and Founding Director of the Bauman Institute in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds, UK.
Dariusz Brzeziński is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theoretical Sociology at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland.
Jack Palmer is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Leeds Trinity University, UK, and Visiting Fellow at the Bauman Institute in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds, UK.
Tom Campbell is Associate Professor in Social Theory in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds, UK.
Translator’s NoteKatarzyna Bartoszyńska
As I have once again found myself translating the work of Zygmunt Bauman, having already translated two shorter works (Of God and Man and Bauman/Bałka) during his lifetime, and one earlier book (Sketches in the Theory of Culture) after his death, I thought I might, at last, allow myself to say something about the way I have approached my task.
Translators’ introductions are relatively uncommon in academic writing, and when they do exist, it is usually to clarify a particular term that is not quite translatable – Heidegger’s Dasein, or Freud’s unheimlich – rather than to defend stylistic choices. But, like so many of the great theorists of culture, Zygmunt Bauman cared deeply about the style of his prose. Although a prolific writer, he was also a careful one, who devoted a lot of attention to crafting his sentences in a particular way. Thus, the work of rendering some texts of his into English is an intimidating prospect, no less so because he wrote the majority of his work in English, and had developed his own approach to the language. I have attempted, in my translation, to cleave as closely to this style as possible – even, occasionally, at the cost of clarity, and thus, some explanation is in order (and a big thank-you to Leigh Mueller, our copy-editor, for helping me to find the right balance).
One of the curious features of the Polish language is that it is grammatically structured in such a way that word order does not determine meaning. Because nouns and verbs are both marked, you can move the words around without creating confusion: pies zjadł kota, kota zjadł pies, zjadł pies kota, zjadł kota pies, kota pies zjadł, pies kota zjadł – though some of these sentences sound distinctly odd, they all clearly state that a dog ate a cat. English is not so permissive, and convention restricts the choices even further, rendering the passive voice, for instance, less common. One of the distinctive features of Bauman’s writing, even in English, is a word order that may seem slightly unfamiliar to English-language readers. Often, this is a consequence of his proclivity for lengthy sentences with multiple subordinate clauses. I have tried to keep these sentences as they are, breaking them into smaller ones only when it seemed absolutely necessary to avoid confusion. I believe that he felt that readers should expend some effort in making their way through longer sentences – that to do so was to participate in a process of unfolding meaning that contributed to understanding it.
I have also chosen to make sentences mostly gender-neutral, using ‘they’ instead of the more cumbersome ‘she or he’. In Polish, human, person and similar such words are gendered masculine, which leads to a de facto use of male pronouns. In his later, English-language writings, Bauman tended to use gender-neutral terms, and I believe he would appreciate that I did the same in my translations. Occasionally, however, the sentence was simply too convoluted without a singular pronoun, so I flipped a coin. And I did preserve some moments when he specifically used female pronouns – a sign that gender inclusivity was on his mind even in the 1960s.
Editors’ Introduction: History and Politics in the Sociological Imagination of Zygmunt BaumanMark Davis, Jack Palmer, Dariusz Brzeziński, Tom Campbell
Invited to reflect upon whether or not the future was hospitable to the political left, Zygmunt Bauman (2007b) remarked that a self-assertive left – namely, one that refuses to be ‘updated’ by a centre-right ‘third way’ vision such as those animating the New Democrat and New Labour movements in Australia, the UK and USA during the 1980s and 1990s – needed to embrace two basic, yet non-negotiable, principles. First, that the duty of the community is to insure its individual members against individual misfortune. And, second, that just as the carrying capacity of a bridge is measured only by the strength of its weakest supporting point, so too the quality of a society ought to be measured in terms of the quality of life of its weakest members.
These two principles, seemingly on a collision course with the increasingly harsh daily realities of ‘actually existing capitalism’, were necessary prerequisites if any politics worthy of the label ‘left’ was to stand a chance of overcoming the injustice and immorality of the capitalist system. Describing the left as ‘a stance of permanent criticism of the realities of social life’ that ‘cannot be anything but democratic’, Bauman (2007b: 10) rebels against acquiescence to the notion that the capitalist order cannot be overcome, in the following way: ‘If an optimist is someone who believes that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist is someone who suspects that the optimist may be right, the left places itself instead in the third camp: that of hope. Refusing to pre-empt the shape of the good society, it can’t but question, listen and seek.’
Around the same time, Bauman (2006: 160) was reflecting on the contributions made to the political left by his friend and once colleague at the University of Leeds, Ralph Miliband, who he described as possessing a mind that ‘refused to accept that no further improvement was conceivable. [Miliband’s] own, unique and inimitable world was a world of undying hope.’ Bauman’s tribute to Miliband was framed by their shared endeavour to confront the intellectual challenge for all those on the political left generated by the slow yet relentless decomposition of the ‘historical agent’ presumed to be capable of ushering in a better world for all, a world that would refuse to be diverted into capitalist and communist cul-de-sacs and finally reach its socialist destination. Noting that intellectuals, especially on the left, never fully trusted in their capacity to make the word flesh, and thus needed ‘someone else’ to perform the job they urged to be undertaken, Bauman (2006: 161) asks: ‘Are words able to change the world? Is telling the truth enough to assure its victory over the lie? Is reason capable of standing its own against prejudice and superstition? Is evil likely ever to surrender to the shining glory of goodness, or ugliness to the blinding splendours of beauty?’
These questions inform this introduction to the selected writings on history and politics by Bauman contained within this volume. Our story helps to reveal how Bauman’s own biography shaped his particular form of ‘morally committed’ sociology into a publicly and politically engaged project, providing a conceptual language that helped to inspire anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movements around the world, especially among progressive young activists in Spain, Italy and across Central and South America. He was a victim of the Nazis, then the Communists. He was twice a refugee. Yet he remained a committed socialist, deep in his heart. In countless ways, Bauman lived the political upheavals of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. He was an actor within them. His own lived history informed his politics, which found expression to varying degrees in his sociology.
Through including the unknown, or lesser-known, pieces of his writing contained in this volume – and discovered as part of the archival Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman project that we led at the University of Leeds1 – as editors, we begin the process of integrating them into a story of Bauman’s life and work, with the twin hope of guiding the reader through this material and of encouraging others to assist us in this task.
THE SOLITARY HORSEMAN
‘However hard did I try to push and kick the American political establishment and spit in its face, no one paid attention.’2 If words really were able to change the world, then the American sociologist Charles Wright Mills was going to need some persuading. Mills was in Warsaw shortly after the events of the Polish October in 1956 (Kemp-Welch 2006), accompanied by Ralph Miliband. Miliband had embarked upon a project of internationalization for the nascent New Left movement and decided upon a tour of east-central Europe to encounter those intellectuals and activists living political change (Geary 2009). Both wanted to hear first-hand the experiences of scholars who had sparked, and then helped to contain, a genuine revolution.
During their visit to Warsaw, Miliband and Mills heard Polish political leaders being vitriolic in their public condemnation of intellectuals and universities for their role in fomenting an atmosphere of revolution. In particular, the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski – a contemporary of Bauman – was singled out by Władysław Gomułka, leader of the Polish People’s Republic, as a target for the establishment’s outrage.3 Mills found the situation in Poland remarkable and a cause for considerable hope, rather than despair. ‘In your country’, Mills remarked, ‘the word counts. And so the word can change things. What you, intellectuals, do matters.’4 Sixty years later, as we will see, Bauman remained unsure.
Mills was encouraged by his time in Warsaw. A leading figure of the American New Left, Mills would visit Cuba in 1960 and travel the country with Fidel Castro at the height of the revolution. Mills’s (1960) pamphlet Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba brought the voices of Cuban revolutionaries to over 400,000 readers in the USA, for which he later received death threats and was named in a US$25 million lawsuit against its publisher for alleged ‘libellous comments’ (Treviño 2017; Gane and Back 2012: 402). Despite the chaos, in a later conversation with Kołakowski, Mills conceded that he never felt his words had changed anything. The victim of a heart attack in 1962, just a few years after his visit to Warsaw, Mills died far too young to see how wrong he had been. Dismissed by Edward Shils (1960: 78) as a ‘cowboy sociologist’ – ‘in part a prophet, in part a scholar, and in part a rough-tongued brawler’ – Mills was the subject of intense animosity from his contemporaries in American sociology. Indeed, so cut off was he from the sociology fraternity that Mills earned the sobriquet ‘the solitary horseman’. Not only have his words mattered to countless future generations of sociologists, but politically his words had also resonated to such an extent that by 1968 the CIA had identified him (along with Herbert Marcuse and Frantz Fanon) ‘as one of the three principle [sic] leaders of the international Left’ (Summers 2000: 10; quoted in Gane and Back 2012: 403). The year 1968 would also prove to be a defining one for Zygmunt Bauman.
Bauman first met Mills in 1957, while the former was a lecturer in the Department of General Sociology at the University of Warsaw. In a revealing quote, Bauman recalls the mixed reception Mills received amongst the Polish intelligentsia and, at the same time, signals a shared belief that, to be truly critical of society, one had to operate beyond the reach of a professionalized sociology:
Mills’s reception in Warsaw was mixed. Many sought his company and found him addressing their thoughts and cravings. Others, dazzled and enamoured by whatever stood for ‘American sociology’, were nonplussed and embarrassed. Mills did not represent that sociology … Mills, after all, was a thorn in the flesh of the thoroughly conformist sociological establishment, having assaulted, one by one, every single one of its sacred cows. He was deviance incarnate, the critic of the American creed among its preachers and admirers. No wonder that to some of my colleagues, about to embark on a Rockefeller or Ford Foundation fellowship, Mills was a sort of Typhoid Mary. (Bauman and Tester 2001: 27)
Not so for Bauman (2008: 234–5), who has admitted that this solitary horseman made quite an impression on him. Despite many differences between Bauman and Mills in terms of their attitude towards those in power in their home countries during the 1950s, Bauman shared with Mills (1959) the view that sociology was a vocation rather than a profession. That is, one does not simply ‘do’ professional sociology but, rather, has to ‘be’ a sociologist, embracing the discipline as a mode of human being-in-the-world, rather than simply a means to obtain a monthly pay-cheque (Jacobsen and Tester 2006; Blackshaw 2005). Both distrusted an encroaching bureaucratic ethos within the Academy, which appeared to celebrate ‘intellectual administrators’, ‘research promoters’ and ‘research technicians’. Both distanced themselves from a form of professional sociology they saw represented by figures such as Talcott Parsons – excoriated for his ‘grand theory’ by Mills (1959) in chapter 2 of The Sociological Imagination, and dismissed later by Bauman (1976b) as part of the ‘Durksonian Consensus’ in his critique of the discipline’s functionalist folly in Towards a Critical Sociology.
As time passed, the similarities between the works of Bauman and Mills intensified. This is most clearly evidenced in an early article by Bauman (1964: 289–334), published in Polish, entitled ‘C. Wright Mills, or the Ideal of Engaged Sociology’.5 There, Bauman juxtaposes what he calls the ‘clerk’ and the ‘Promethean’ visions of sociology. While the former suffers from ‘paresis of social ambitions’, the latter is capable of awakening people’s consciences and so activating civil society.6 Unlike ‘professional’ sociologists, who were out to measure and count their way to selling more goods or fine-tuning policy interventions, by knowing that sociology as a vocation fails to follow the tick of the industrial clock, so both Mills and Bauman knew then that the audience for their work was ‘out there’ in civil society amongst an engaged and politicized public, and not ‘in here’ amongst the Academy where claims to apolitical neutrality were taken by the majority of intellectuals as the only pure hallmark of reason. Sociology had to be for the public, or it was not sociology at all. As Gregor McLennan (1999: 566) remarked, sociologists have to embrace their critical role as public intellectuals and ‘actually say something about the structure and direction of the world we inhabit, and about the values which will guide a better human future’.
Bauman and Mills would have agreed. Of significance for our interpretation here, both also appreciated the importance of the connection between biography and history – what Mills (1959: 14) called ‘the personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues of social structure’ – in order to develop a publicly and politically engaged sociology. After all, this was the promise of sociology, to act as a compass by which people might better navigate a world that has shredded public issues that could be resolved collectively into the tatters of so many private troubles now to be restitched individually (Davis 2011). This promise of sociology clearly also animates the political ambitions of Bauman’s later writings. This point is captured in Tony Blackshaw’s (2005: 60) excellent study of Bauman’s work, which he characterizes as ‘another rendition of C. Wright Mills’s “sociological imagination”: both a meeting place between public issues and private troubles and a veritable remedy to awaken the sleeping sociologist in all of us’. Linking biography with history, situating the individual within wider social processes and structures, was for both Mills and Bauman a deeply political act.
And it is for reasons of biography and history that Bauman’s analysis shifted from first seeing totalitarianism – in both its fascist and communist expressions – as the principal threat to human freedom, to later regarding individualization and consumerism as the primary danger (Brzeziński 2018; Bauman and Bordoni 2014; Davis 2008; Bauman 2001). As private troubles overrun the public sphere in the age of noise, it is now the market rather than the state that over-reaches into people’s lives in order steadily to dismantle the remaining social safety nets once offered by the more benevolent wings of politics, with devastating consequences for the idea of democracy. Indeed, for Bauman (2010: 57), it is an open question as to whether such notions as equality, democracy and self-determination can survive when society is seen less and less as the product of shared labour and common values, and instead far more as merely a container of goods and services to be grabbed by competing individual hands.
How Bauman came to hold the view that both socialism and sociology were key to their survival will in part be explained by what follows. In contrast to his frequent claim that he was an intensely private man who sought out the public only through his ideas – that he was biographically private and sociologically public – we suggest that Bauman’s biography offers vital insight into both his sociological imagination and his politics. What is now known about the life of Zygmunt Bauman owes much to the remarkable achievements of Izabela Wagner (2020), upon whom we draw throughout what follows. We share with Wagner the belief that knowing something of Bauman’s life will aid the reader in situating into a wider context his writings on history and politics that are contained within this volume, helping to reveal their urgency. After all, as he remarked in his inaugural address to the University of Leeds in 1972: ‘in the professional life of a sociologist his most intimate, private biography is inextricably intertangled with the biography of his discipline; one thing the sociologist cannot transcend in his quest for objectivity is his own, intimate and subjective encounter-with-the-world’ (Bauman 1972b: 185).7
COMMUNISM CONTRA FASCISM
Born on 19 November 1925 in Poznań, Poland, Bauman was the son of Jewish parents. His father Maurycy was a Zionist, a rebel against the anti-Semitism already widespread in Poland in the 1920s; his mother Zofia was an atheist living as an ‘assimilated Jew’ in the local community. From a young age, Bauman experienced the pullulating menace of fascist anti-Semitism and the forces that led to the outbreak of war on 1 September 1939. As he recounts in an extraordinary memoir originally written for family members in 1987: ‘We read of the mounting physical violence – of the beatings of Jewish students in the universities, of mini-pogroms in the rising number of rural areas and small provincial towns, of self-styled fascist troopers marching through the Jewish shtetls while watched rather apathetically by the police not particularly eager to be involved’ (Bauman 1987b: 14).8 When war erupted in Poland, Poznań was the target of heavy bombing. The Bauman family escaped by taking the last train leaving the city, heading east under cover of darkness to stay with Zofia’s family in Włocławek. While there, the 14-year-old Bauman witnessed German soldiers humiliating his father, a traumatic event that pushed the family immediately to leave, setting out on foot for the Soviet Union. Hunger, cold and sleep deprivation were daily experiences. The family spent all their savings and money borrowed from family on modest meals and the right to sleep in peasants’ houses. After being registered at a German ‘pre-camp’ on the Soviet border, the family risked everything by taking advantage of lapsed security to escape by crossing a nearby river into Soviet-controlled territory.
This momentary relief was quickly forgotten as the border town was overrun with forced refugees living in very harsh conditions, with drastic food shortages and no possibility of employment. The family moved again, further on into the Soviet Union, stopping at Mołodeczna in Belarus, where Bauman was permitted to attend a local school. Both parents found work and, as refugees, they could stay legally and enjoy modest living conditions for the first time since the outbreak of war. Bauman was a dedicated student. Having to study in a foreign language (Russian) and integrate into a completely new culture somehow did not prevent him from obtaining the highest school grades.
Chaos returned in June 1941, however, as the Nazis began their bombing campaign in Russia. Despite being refugees, with no legal entitlement to evacuation, the family somehow managed to find a train heading farther east, away from the falling bombs. With no legal right to remain in eastern cities, the family were left to their own wits to survive, and frequently suffered from hunger. To help, Maurycy worked as an accountant, Zofia as a cook in a canteen, paying to rent a room so the young Bauman could continue his education. Completing high school with a gold medal for achievement, Bauman enrolled in the department of physics at Gorki University, but was evicted from the campus by a decree forbidding refugees from residing in the city. Devastated, he returned to his parents’ home in Vakhtan, a small forest town in central Russia. On his eighteenth birthday, Bauman was drafted for military service and sent to Moscow. He joined the Polish fourth division in Sumy in April 1944, where he became the deputy political officer in the sixth section of the infantry. He was engaged in notable military victories, receiving the War Cross for his courage at the battle of Kołobrzeg.
At the end of the war, Bauman was one of several young officers to be selected for the new KBW (Internal Security Corps). Torn apart by brutal conflict, Poland was vital geo-politically for Stalin’s ambitions, and so was controlled from Moscow via a complex network of security institutions, such as the KBW. In December 1946, Bauman was promoted to captain due to his abilities in educating young soldiers in Soviet communist ideology. In May 1947, he transferred to Warsaw and, a month later, became deputy chief of the propaganda section of the KBW. Being in Warsaw opened countless possibilities and, for the first time, the opportunity to live a ‘normal’ life. It was there, in 1948, that Bauman met, and very soon after married, the journalist and writer Janina Lewinson (1926–2009). Unlike the Bauman family, Janina had been imprisoned by the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto, an experience that she captured in her memoir Winter in the Morning (1986), the inspiration three years later for Bauman’s (1989) own reflections on the Holocaust (Pollock 2022; Wagner 2022).
Bauman saw the Communist Party as providing the best solutions for postwar reconstruction. In June 1952, however, he became disillusioned with the army following the departure of a respected colleague. In October, he was accepted to study for a master’s degree in philosophy at the Ministry of Higher Education. His life of working for the KBW in the morning and studying in the afternoon did not last long, however, as the notorious ‘Doctors’ Plot’ finally broke out publicly in Moscow on 13 January 1953.9 Bauman was targeted during another anti-Semitic campaign as one of many Jewish intellectuals in the army. Dismissed in early 1953, the family was plunged into crisis once again. His parents, who had joined him in Warsaw in October 1949, decided to leave his flat following an argument with him. Rejected by the system, and in conflict with his parents, Bauman wrote a declaration in January 1953, stating that he had failed to change his father’s sympathies with Zionism and was thus denouncing him and breaking off all contact with him. The first phase of Bauman’s life in the cauldron of twentieth-century politics was ending, as a second phase was emerging.
Bauman embarked upon an intensive study of Marxism as the only accepted social science doctrine in Warsaw at that time. Inspired by the communist ideals of universal inclusivity through socialism, which appealed to many young Jewish scholars who felt ‘outside’ of the dominant culture, Bauman became interested in the reconstruction of Poland as a specifically sociological project. Bauman’s position was like that of many Polish Jews at the time who believed liberal institutions to be unravelling in the face of challenging interpretations of modernity’s cultural and political programmes – namely, fascism and communism (Judt 2005; Diner 2004). Asked years later by Peter Haffner about his relationship with Kołakowski, and their postwar investment in the communist project in Poland, Bauman said:
When in retrospect we tried to recall our feelings at the time, first in Poland, then in exile, and finally after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, we agreed on one point: we had both believed that the programme of the Polish communists in 1944/45 was the only one that gave us some reason to hope that our country could escape from the backwardness of the pre-war era and the cataclysm of the war; that it was the only programme that could solve the nation’s problems of moral degeneration, illiteracy, poverty and social injustice. (Bauman 2020: 9–12)
In 1954, Bauman joined Warsaw University as a junior lecturer. Sociology in Warsaw embraced philosophy, economics, history and politics as one multi-disciplinary enterprise, and openly discussed theoretical alternatives as complementary perspectives on the human condition (Satterwhite 1992). Bauman (1972b) acknowledged that he learned a great deal from his teachers, Julian Hochfeld and Stanisław Ossowski (Wagner 2020: 171–90; Tester 2004: 34–43), including a vital lesson that sociology has no other mission than to offer a constant critical commentary on human life as it is experienced, and that, because human experience is enduring and ever-changing, so too the task of sociological interpretation must continue as a journey without end. As Bauman explains elsewhere, both Hochfeld and Ossowski were convinced of the tremendous political importance of their academic work, believing totally in sociology’s intrinsic capacity to influence the lives of other people for the better (Kilminster and Varcoe 1992: 208). It was they who first inoculated him against a professionalized form of sociology, which they regarded as offering only comfortable acquiescence to the status quo and tolerance for the suffering of the marginalized and excluded.
The aforementioned lesson was confirmed by Bauman’s encounter with Mills in 1957 when, following the failed Polish October, his disillusionment with the policies of the Polish United Workers’ Party emerged and intensified. At that time, Bauman became one of a group of revisionist intellectuals labouring under the banner of Hochfeld’s ‘Open Marxism’ (just one version of this movement in Poland), which embraced many different traditions of thought, including bourgeois ones (Wiatr 2017; Hochfeld 1982 [1957], 1958). Bauman’s views on this matter are reflected, inter alia, in two Polish articles from 1957, ‘Tractate on Bureaucracy’ (pp. 1–20 in this volume) and ‘Marxism and Contemporary Sociology’ (Bauman and Wiatr, 1957), the first of which is published in English for the first time in this volume. ‘By its very nature’, we learn from Wagner (2020: 181), Hochfeld believed that ‘Marxism had to be open to analyses of a changing world and non-Marxist social theories. This idea inescapably favors a democratic and pluralist culture.’ In striving to ‘rescue’ Marx’s ideas from their Soviet distortion as the ‘Will of the Party’, the group were exposed to the charge of bringing ‘Western’ ideas into the East.
With the death of Stalin in 1953, Bauman made the most of new opportunities to work in a transnational intellectual space across the Iron Curtain (Wagner 2020: 205), leaving Poland temporarily for England, having secured a fellowship at the London School of Economics (LSE) to work with the Canadian philosopher Robert McKenzie (Czernecki 2013: 289). This was a formative period in the development of those ideas that would be contained in Between Class and Elite (Bauman 1972a [1960]), first published in Polish in 1960 but later translated as his first English-language book. At the LSE, Bauman analysed the British labour movement, reflecting anew on the ‘humanist’ tradition of Marx’s early writings that preoccupied east-central European thinkers throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including a cluster of schools and networks in Poland, Hungary (especially the Budapest school), Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia (especially the Praxis group). This work was politically significant, striving to rescue socialism as a form of social organization from its association with the horrors of totalitarian dictatorships (Satterwhite 1992). Drawing upon the work of György Lukács (1971 [1923]) and Antonio Gramsci (1971), focusing upon the humanistic ideas of the ‘young Marx’ impacted Bauman’s intellectual development and the subsequent direction of his own thinking on Marxism (Bauman, 1967, 1976a, 1982, 1987c). This deviation from Soviet Marxism, however, led to drastic consequences for those engaged in such revisionism.
Bauman’s interest in the politics of Western societies is also reflected in the 1961 article ‘On the Political Mechanisms of Bourgeois Democracy’, published here for the first time in English (pp. 21–37 in this volume). Here, Bauman analyses the various ways in which democracy was implemented in Western countries, and how each falls short of the ideal model. Bauman defined ‘bourgeois democracy’ as a form of government characterized by: (i) unrestricted freedom to express opinions about politics; (ii) equal influence of citizens on the decisions made by the government; and (iii) universal suffrage. As far as he was concerned, none of these characteristics was yet fully realized in democratic countries. First, decisions taken by government depend far more on economic factors than on public opinion. Second, as Walter Lippmann (2018 [1922]) long ago argued, public opinion is too often subject to manipulation. And, third, the existence of a multi-party system does not automatically lead to the realization of democratic values. Written in 1961, when Bauman supported the socialist system, this article contains reflections on the weaknesses of democracy, to which Bauman often returned in his later works (Bauman 1999), as well as some remarkably prescient reflections on both the merging of political and financial interests and the danger of mass communications technologies distorting public opinion to serve that new power elite.
Before his interests turned more to developing a theory of culture in the early 1960s (Brzeziński 2022), Bauman’s work was explicitly political (Wiatr 2010). In his writings at the end of this period, he argued, first, that the Polish youth were retreating from the public realm into their own private lives (Bauman 1962a: 77–90). Second, he also analysed how the working class became politically passive and devoid of a sense of collective identity via the monopolization of political decision making by abstract bureaucratic elites (Bauman 1962b: 50–64). Both arguments were extensions of ideas first developed in ‘Tractate on Bureaucracy’ (Bauman 1957), mentioned previously. Drawing on a diverse cast of characters – from Weber and Veblen to Hayek and von Mises – Bauman argues that bureaucracy is indispensable to the continuity of power in all modern societies, as vital to the operation of free market capitalism as it is to socialism. On the other hand, however, he indicated that the alienation of the bureaucratic layer posed a great danger to the condition of a socialist society. It was this process that he observed with increasing intensity in Poland.
As time passed, Bauman had less and less confidence in the Party, and so also in the doctrine of Marxism–Leninism. His sociology remained aligned with Marxism primarily through his interest in the writings of Gramsci (Brzeziński 2017; Bauman 1963). In a conversation with Keith Tester, Bauman remembered that time as follows:
In a paradoxical way Gramsci saved me from turning into an anti-Marxist, as so many other disenchanted thinkers did, throwing out on their way everything that was, and remained, precious and topical in Marx’s legacy. I read good tidings in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks: there was a way of saving the ethical core, and the analytical potential I saw no reason to discard from the stiff carapace in which it had been enclosed and stifled. (Bauman and Tester 2001: 26)
Like Gramsci, Bauman continued to hope that words were able to change the world, that they could instigate social change in Poland and beyond. In particular, in striving to improve the relationship between sociology and Marxism, Bauman hoped that the greater democratization and humanization of society was possible (Bauman 1967).10 That hope came crashing down in 1968 (Stola 2006; Eisler 1998).
Following several international upheavals, including the Six Day War between Israel and Egypt in 1967, Bauman’s world darkened considerably via a wave of anti-Zionist campaigns across east-central Europe, and throughout Poland in particular (Wagner 2020; Smith 1999). Increasingly weary of the ‘grave mistakes’ committed in the name of the Party, in January of 1968 Bauman resigned from the Communist Party. It is impossible for us to recount what happened next in anything close to the depth and sensitivity it deserves. Janina’s brilliant memoir, A Dream of Belonging: My Years in Post-war Poland (J. Bauman 1988), offers a vividly human account of the events leading to Bauman’s expulsion from Warsaw University on 25 March 1968 and the family’s subsequent exile. Along with other prominent scholars regarded by the officials as ‘revisionists’, Bauman was targeted as the source of political unrest among the Polish youth and faced open persecution, as the media heaped scorn on Bauman’s name for being a dangerous influence. To offer just a sense of its ferocity, Janina writes:
Five bulky strangers chose a bench in our courtyard and sat there for hours, keeping an eye on the entrance to our staircase and staring up into our windows. [Lydia] came running home, frightened to death: a gang of hooligans had attacked her in the park. The TV screen was choking with hatred and spat out [Zygmunt’s] name time after time. A scholarly article appeared in a respectable magazine. It attacked [Zygmunt] and others for their dangerous influence on Polish youth. It was signed by a close friend. (J. Bauman 1988: 195)
Masked thinly by the label of ‘anti-Zionism’, with Gomułka’s approval General Mieczysław Moczar led a campaign of cleansing that resulted in a mass emigration of Jewish intellectuals, professionals and Party officials. Between 1968 and 1972, more than 13,000 Jews would emigrate from Poland after being dismissed from their professions (Stola 2017). Although Bauman’s expulsion from the University convinced the family they would be denied authorization to leave, their emigration permit was finally approved and arrived on 7 June 1968, with the instruction to depart before the end of the month (J. Bauman 1988: 198). Faced with such open anti-Semitism, the family headed for Israel.
SOCIALISM CONTRA NATIONALISM
The trauma of this biographical event was sure to become entangled with Bauman’s sociological imagination, with his work seeking to interpret the immediate experience of the family’s exile. While some of the material from his time in Israel has been published previously, today it is very difficult to access. What we do know through our research in the archive at Leeds is that, between 1968 and 1971, across two teaching posts at Tel Aviv University and the University of Haifa, Bauman wrestled with their expulsion from Poland and his own identity as a Jew (Cheyette 2020). The severity of his analysis in the 1969 article ‘The End of Polish Jewry: A Sociological Review’, reprinted here (pp. 63–74 in this volume), cannot be mistaken. Bauman argued that the events of March 1968 were nothing less than a ‘final solution’ for Polish Jewry, switching language in the original Polish manuscript – now housed within the Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman at the University of Leeds – to title his article simply ‘Endlösung, 1968’. Many years later, in conversation with the Italian writer Benedetto Vecchi, Bauman (2004a: 11–12) explained:
I do not remember paying much attention to the question of ‘my identity’, at least the national part of it, before the brutal awakening of March 1968 when my Polishness was publicly cast in doubt … It so happened that in the bunch of problems called ‘my identity’, nationality has been given particular prominence; I share that lot with millions of refugees and migrants, whom our fast globalizing world turn out on a fast accelerating scale.
‘The End of Polish Jewry’ makes fascinating reading, as such a candid autobiographical expression. The trauma Bauman explores is that, unlike the experiences of culturally and spatially separated Jewish peoples in pre-war Germany, the Polish Jews of the 1960s believed themselves to be wholly integrated, barely conscious of a latent ‘Jewishness’ buried deep beneath their manifest identity as Polish citizens. Not for the last time, the concept of ‘Jew’ was forced through a series of mutations to accommodate political expediencies.
Written sometime around 1970, we also discovered in the archive a previously unpublished article titled ‘At the Crossroads in a World at the Crossroads’, which we include here (pp. 75–9 in this volume). In this essayistic exercise in the tradition of ‘left-melancholia’ (Traverso 2016), Bauman attempts to rescue the ideals of socialism through the lens of Marxist humanism, having just borne witness to the barbarism of its state-led Soviet variant. In this context, the essay’s final sentence is all the more astonishing: ‘Despite all forms of social oppression throughout the world today, against all forms of capitalist reaction and degenerate offshoots of communism – the future world will be socialist. Or it will not be at all.’ The essay also evinces a concern for the politics of Israel, which he maintained throughout his life, even writing in the pages of the daily newspaper Haaretz (Bauman 1971a). In such a public format, he questioned the desire for a life without war, and wondered over the appetite for peace among a ruling elite who didn’t yet know how to maintain power in peaceful conditions. This was, Bauman later held, the only prediction he’d ever made that had come true.
Indeed, in his more overtly political interventions, Bauman steadfastly refused the role of soothsayer or prophet. Dennis Smith chose to subtitle his 1999 intellectual biography of Bauman Prophet of Postmodernity, somewhat to his subject’s distaste. In a letter to Smith, reprinted in the book – much to the author’s credit – Bauman repeated a well-known riposte to anyone asking for his predictions for the future and, therefore, what we the public should do about it. Recounting advice from a former teacher, Bauman wrote: ‘[He] told me once: Zygmunt, never predict, and particularly never predict the future.’ After all, he concluded, ‘[h]istorical precedents are notoriously misleading as tools of predicting the future’ (Smith 1999: 203).
Bauman was only too aware of the temptation within ‘solid modern’ societies to set a blueprint for the future, to be guided by a scientific utopianism that was more or less well hidden within totalitarian tales of the ‘good society’ still to come (Beilharz 2002, 2000). Bauman pursued a form of sociology intending to disrupt and disturb lazy acquiescence to the status quo and moral indifference – to deploy his concept, adiaphorization (Jacobsen 2021; Tuleikytė 2016; Bauman 1995) – when confronted with the inequities and injustices of a world turned inward towards care of the self, rather than outward towards care for the other. Bauman thus embraced a ‘morally committed’ sociology, driven by the belief in the world-changing potential of words. Cutting through the apparent ‘second nature’ of the extant social world, he wrote to remind people that, together, they each day anew collectively build and sustain their world, and so with effort can also rebuild it. This is what Bauman believed sociology was for. 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.
To elaborate, Bauman (1976a: 13–15) understood socialism as an ‘active utopia’ that was represented by four characteristics. First, active utopias serve to relativize the present by pointing to both historical contingencies and future possibilities, giving socialism its transformative dimension. Second, active utopias are aspects of culture in which possible extrapolations of the present in relation to future possibilities can be explored through the full range of human imagination. This gives socialism its creative dimension. Third, active utopias pluralize by generating competing visions of how to interpret, and so best solve, present problems, questioning society’s history and politics through an engaged analysis of the status quo. This gives socialism its critical dimension. Finally, active utopias exercise an activating presence on the course of historical events by changing the direction of human societies through new forms of political action, giving socialism its practical dimension. Each characteristic demonstrates that Bauman’s lifelong faith in socialism was never about proclaiming it as an accomplished set of concrete social structures, but as a modus vivendi, as a living critique of the present ad infinitum:
Socialism shares with all other utopias the unpleasant quality of retaining its fertility only in so far as it resides in the realm of the possible. The moment it is proclaimed as accomplished, as empirical reality, it loses its creative power; far from inflaming human imagination, it puts on the agenda in turn an acute demand for a new horizon, distant enough to transcend and relativize its own limitations. (Bauman 1976a: 36)
For Bauman, sociology is also a moral and political project, the intellectual companion to socialism as an ‘active utopia’. His reconceptualization of the political and of historicity presents a serious challenge to the preventative or causal aspirations of an apparently predictive social science, providing one clue to the reason for his enduring rejection of empiricism in favour of hermeneutics as sociological method (Davis 2020; Dawson 2015, 2017).
Returning to our timeline, the family’s short stay in Israel is explained in a remarkable interview with both Janina and Zygmunt by the journalist Madeleine Bunting (2003). For reasons expressed in his writings between 1968 and 1971, Israel had not proven to be a congenial home. While their eldest daughter, Anna, had settled there with her husband, given the family’s experiences of expulsion from Poland, Janina explained that Israel ‘was a nationalistic country, and we had just run away from nationalism. We didn’t want to go from being the victims of one nationalism to being the perpetrators of another.’
Fortunately, Bauman’s reputation had spread well beyond Poland so there was no shortage of job offers. He turned down a job offer in Canberra, Australia, on grounds that it was too far from Europe, and so he accepted the next offer. This was an invitation to become head of the Sociology Department at the University of Leeds, extended to Bauman by the then vice-chancellor, Edward Boyle, a former Conservative education minister. The family arrived in 1971 with little knowledge of Britain beyond Zygmunt’s research trips to London and Manchester, and certainly knew nothing of Leeds. And yet it would prove to be a very good decision, the final time they would move home. As Bauman’s international reputation soared, he received countless job offers from more glamorous locations – such as Yale in the USA – but he was not tempted to leave their 1930s home on the edge of Leeds to pursue more prestigious posts, either internationally or at better-known British sociology departments such as the LSE, Cambridge or Oxford. In conversation with Bunting, Janina stated simply but poignantly: ‘We moved enough in the past.’
WHENCE REVOLUTION? WEST ENCOUNTERS EAST
Despite arriving in what has been described as the ‘conflict phase’ of British sociology (Kilminster 2002: 155ff.) – in which competing theoretical positions were challenging for supremacy, rather than learning to coexist in a harmony of the humanities as they had in Warsaw (Kilminster and Varcoe 1996) – as with Mills’s America, Bauman (2004c: 207) found that little attention was paid to intellectuals in Britain, and least of all to sociologists:
To say that sociology had a ‘bad press’ [in Britain] would be to play down that mixture of hostility and ridicule in which it seemed to be held … Once more, I was shocked: how remarkably prestigious the public position of sociology was by comparison in France, Germany, or indeed my native Poland, where it settled in the public worldview on the tide of the late-nineteenth-century rising optimism and self-confidence.
Yet an unfamiliar sense of freedom inhered in this position too: ‘Neither spoiled by excessive public demands nor rushed by overblown and impossible-to-gratify public expectations, insured against the dangers awaiting the academics seduced into the corridors of power, sociology was free to select its own topics and could be guided by social and cultural criteria of relevance’ (Bauman 2004c: 207). Exiled in England, Bauman was suddenly free to write what he liked, on condition of accepting that his work would have little public ramification among the British political classes. Having encountered both the fascist and communist variations of totalitarianism – those Arendtian (1968: viii; see also Pollock and Davis 2020) ‘dark times’ of the twentieth century, when the public realm whose function is ‘to throw light on the affairs of men [sic]’ was practically extinguished – Bauman’s ‘exilic position’ (Palmer 2023) allowed him, in Britain, to become a ‘successful outsider’ (Smith 1998). Along with his own lived experiences, this ambivalent position allowed him to see through those sweeping statements of what it means to be a ‘European’, ‘international’ or ‘global’ thinker. Neither an idea nor an intellectual can be the same thing in one place as in another – culturally, spatially, or temporally. Publics too are multiple, a fact keenly felt by the intellectual in exile. Bauman, then as well as now, is not the same figure in Poland as he is in Britain, or in Israel, or for that matter in southern Europe, Latin America or China.
Perhaps the relative indifference to Bauman in Britain lay in that country’s differing experiences of the twentieth century, especially its undying memorialization of the Second World War as a triumphant moment of world-historical, yet also national, glory (Bauman 2006: 36–42), rather than through the lens of war atrocities and the enormity of destruction as in Poland. Britain’s politics, lest we forget, has also steered a course between the extremes of fascism and communism, at least since the 1920s. But since neither ideology was deemed a plausible popular future, Britain’s intellectual culture has been forever outside of those more blistering political debates in Continental Europe (Judt 2005: 205–6).
The clash between the experiences and expectations of Eastern and Western Europe shaped Bauman’s early encounter with the political left in Britain. A veteran of the British New Left movement since 1959, the historian E. P. Thompson used his review of the English translation of Between Class and Elite (Bauman 1972a) to express a wider disillusionment on the part of the ‘Western Left’ with what they had imagined the ‘Eastern Left’ would one day contribute to their socialist ambitions (Tester 2006). Thompson (1972: 12) wrote:
An intelligentsia which has experienced Stalinism and, more recently, the nationalism and anti-intellectualism (with authentic working-class support) which have surged through Poland and Czechoslovakia, are liable to view the creative potential of working people with a wary eye and with undiminished expectations. Coming to the West they are liable to see as their allies not any section of socialist intellectuals but … [Robert] McKenzie and the LSE … And a new, preposterous, pedagogic, pretentious, counter-empirical and plain boring ‘sociological methodology’ comes to birth. The British labour movement will probably survive this, but one pities the students.
Given the vitriol, Bauman suspected that the true villain in Thompson’s review was his better-known contemporary Leszek Kołakowski, then a research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Both Poles, however, were openly charged by Thompson with somehow ‘betraying the Western Left’s expectations’ (Bauman in Tester and Jacobsen 2005: 45). The allegation was both tactless and groundless, but perhaps not surprising to either target. After all, as explained by the Polish writer and winner of the Nobel Prize Czesław Miłosz (2001 [1953]: 29–30), the ‘eastern’ intellectual is conditioned by their lived experience ‘to think sociologically and historically’, and so often looks ‘west’ in perplexity at its denizens precisely ‘because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgements and thinking habits are’.
