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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
The breadth and depth of Zygmunt Bauman’s engagement with social theory and the history of social thought has perhaps been underestimated, in part because many of his early writings were in Polish and never translated into English, and in part because many important pieces appeared in edited volumes and journals that are not readily available. This volume brings together hitherto unknown or rare pieces by Bauman on the theme of theory and society and also makes available previously unpublished material from the Bauman Archive at the University of Leeds.
A consistent theme of Bauman’s work was his sustained engagement with humanism, and this provides a unifying thread in the pieces brought together in this volume. Here Bauman reflects on some of the core concepts of sociology, examines the work of a wide range of social theorists, from Durkheim and Gramsci to Agnes Heller and C. Wright Mills, and addresses an array of key ideas and issues including inequality, identity and social change. A substantial introduction by the editors provides readers with a lucid guide through this material and develops connections to Bauman’s other works.
This is the third and final volume in a series of books that make available the lesser-known writings of one of the most influential social thinkers of our time. It 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: Theory and Society in the Sociological Imagination of Zygmunt Bauman
BECOMING A HUMANIST
THE STRUCTURALIST PROMISE AND THE LEGACIES OF BAUMAN’S ’68
WHAT REMAINS OF THE STRUCTURALIST PROMISE? THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS
BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM: THE BROKEN MIDDLE
HOW TO BE A HUMANIST IN LIQUID MODERN TIMES
CONCLUSION
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 Mills: The Issue of Sociological Imagination (1961)
Notes
2 Antonio Gramsci: or Sociology in Action (1963)
PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICE
THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE
GRAMSCI’S CONCEPT OF SOCIOLOGY: AN EFFORT AT INTERPRETATION
Notes
3 Creative Personality and Adaptive Personality (1965)
Notes
4 Uses of Information: When Social Information Becomes Desired (1971)
THE ORGANIC ANALOGY
THE DYNAMIC MODEL
ORGANIZATIONAL WARFARE AND ITS STRATEGY
STRATEGIC PRINCIPLES INSTITUTIONALIZED
CONDITIONS TO ABSORB INFORMATION
Notes
5 Is the Science of the Possible Possible? (
c
.1974)
Notes
6 The Importance of Being Marxist (1987)
Notes
7 Athens and Jerusalem: Variations on the Theme (
c
.1990)
ARNOLD
NIETZSCHE
SHESTOV
THE MEANING OF POSTMODERNITY
Notes
8 Narrating Modernity (1994)
DESPERATELY SEEKING STRUCTURE
FILLING THE VOID
MODERN SOCIAL SCIENCE AS A MONOLOGUE
POSTMODERNITY AND TOLERANCE
Notes
9 Do We Need the Theory of Change? (1999)
Notes
10 Repairing the Broken Middle (2001)
Notes
11 How to Be a Sociologist and a Humanist? Sociology as a Vocation in Liquid-Modern Times (2006)
Notes
12 The Legacy of Cultural Studies of Birmingham (2012)
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Theory and Society
Selected Writings, Volume 3
Zygmunt Bauman
Edited and with an Introduction by Tom Campbell, Dariusz Brzeziński, Mark Davis and Jack Palmer
With translations by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Zygmunt Bauman 2024
Editors’ Introduction © Tom Campbell, Dariusz Brzeziński, Mark Davis and Jack Palmer 2024
English translations of pieces translated from Polish © 2024 by Polity Press
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.
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: 978-1-5095-5077-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5078-4 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023950840
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Dedication
To our students, who carry us forward
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. The endnotes are Bauman’s own, unless otherwise stated. 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
An extremely observant reader might notice a difference between my translations in this volume and those in the previous two. I have allowed myself a little more space, this time around – I have moved, even if only infinitesimally, away from a strict fidelity to sentence structure and towards a (very) slightly more free translation that is, I think, closer to the intentions underlying the original words. This came about, in part, because of my experiences, in between finishing the work on the previous volume and starting this one, translating parts of A Life in Fragments, Zygmunt Bauman’s memoirs, which was the first time I have translated his writing in collaboration with other people, rather than alone (though I have always been fortunate enough to benefit from the fantastic help of our brilliant and sensitive copy-editor, Leigh Mueller). The significant challenges of that book gave me the opportunity to re-evaluate and recalibrate my sense of where to find the balance between strict accuracy and accessibility, and I hope it has been to the reader’s benefit.
I started translating Bauman’s works in 2014, when he was still alive. My first project was a book of conversations between him and Stanisław Obirek, Of God and Man. This was an excellent place to begin, not only because the style of the book was conversational and approachable, but also because I could count on both Bauman and Obirek to go over the final product and make any changes or corrections they wished. The same was true of my next project, Bauman/Bałka. The confidence I gained from these early forays and Bauman’s seal of approval on them proved crucial in the more challenging projects that followed – more challenging both because he was no longer there to check my work, and because the texts were themselves more formidable, being academic writing, much of it from the 1960s and 1970s.
I approached the task very much in a spirit of humility, aiming to be as transparent a cipher as possible. I am not an expert in sociology, or in Bauman’s thought, or in translation. I’ve done this work largely by happenstance – it’s been a kind of long-running side project that I have performed as much out of a sense of duty and desire to bring these texts to an English-speaking audience as anything else. I was flattered to be asked to join the launch of the first volume, as if I might have some added insights into the texts alongside those of the four brilliant editors. And to my pleasure, I started to have the glimmers of a feeling that I might indeed know a thing or two about Bauman’s writing (and, it should be added, translating Dariusz Brzeziński’s excellent book, Zygmunt Bauman and the Theory of Culture, a few years ago also helped!). His style, and the ways it changed over the years, has become familiar to me, and I feel more comfortable, and confident, carrying it over into English. Though I still wish he were here to check my work, and, even more, to chat over drinks.
Though written many years ago, these essays by Bauman seem startlingly relevant to the present day. I am so glad that they will be able to find new readers – that the work may continue.
Editors’ Introduction: Theory and Society in the Sociological Imagination of Zygmunt BaumanTom Campbell, Dariusz Brzeziński, Mark Davis and Jack Palmer
Zygmunt Bauman’s contributions to social theory are renowned. Any reader of sociology is familiar with Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman 1989) and Liquid Modernity (Bauman 2000), but the breadth of Bauman’s work straddles a vast oeuvre that far exceeds these two well-known books. Peter Beilharz (2020: 122) once described Bauman as ‘famously eclectic, intellectually promiscuous even’. Indeed, the breadth of Bauman’s reading encourages such an interpretation. This has made situating Bauman in relation to broader intellectual currents challenging – a difficulty made harder still as his Polish writings remained (largely) untranslated, unknown to the English reader. We have important assessments of his work but the pictures these assessments provide remain partial – a partiality often due to a lack of access to important and foundational Polish texts (Davis 2008; Tester 2004; Beilharz 2000). The character of Bauman’s English-language monographs (at least since the 1980s) is weighted towards the doing of social theory – cultural sociology as praxis – rather than positioning his concepts in relation to the history of ideas. To echo his fondness for metaphor, and as he used to say, Bauman was a bird not an ornithologist (Bauman 2014).
By restoring the intellectual context of his interventions, we hope to make evident that Bauman’s social theory was not one crafted in isolation but, rather, developed from his dialogue with the work of other writers. Within this volume – the third in our series – a number of texts are reproduced in which Bauman is paying tribute to key interlocutors and influences. These texts on other thinkers matter, since they contain some of the most revealing passages about the principles underpinning Bauman’s own thinking. Having now completed work on three volumes that provide access to important but unknown and hard to find writings, including texts previously only available in Polish and previously unpublished manuscripts, we are better able to assess Bauman’s intellectual development vis-à-vis the main theoretical currents of his day.
Bauman was always a voracious reader, a reader of the sociological tradition, of its intersection with its neighbouring disciplines and, of course, with literature. Despite writing on the history of social thought throughout his life, Bauman is not well known as a major commentator on social theory’s intellectual history. The Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman at the University of Leeds, however, is full of correspondence with peers, and pages of personal reading notes on Social Theory’s great works. The archival material illustrates the centrality of dialogue throughout Bauman’s life.1 Bauman practised the art of dialogue through reading and writing. In This Is Not a Diary, Bauman (2012) refers to himself as a ‘graphomaniac’, confessing that a day when he had not written was a day wasted. Reading was entwined with his graphomania, as he recalls in My Life in Fragments (Bauman 2023b): writing and reading found a union in thinking.
Bauman’s standing as a thinker is largely derived from the books he published during the last thirty years of his life and devoted to analysing the contemporary perils of humanity. Throughout his career, there are important interventions dealing with individual thinkers – for example, ‘Antonio Gramsci: or Sociology in Action’, reproduced in English for the first time in this volume (pp. 13–31), and the essay ‘The Phenomenon of Norbert Elias’ (Bauman 1979). Bauman also authored 150 book reviews dealing with significant works in contemporary social theory and studies of the classics (Palmer et al. 2020). As a letter from Richard Bernstein recalls, these review essays were not the most faithful to their subject matter, with Bauman often using the work of others as a platform for his own ideas.2 Nonetheless, Bauman’s powers as a commentator on the history of social thought are underappreciated. This volume attempts to correct this, illustrating how Bauman was in a continuous dialogue with both the history of social thought and its most contemporary practitioners. We suggest he can be better understood as a participant rather than a bystander in certain intellectual debates where his contributions were previously less well known. Bauman was deeply committed to being a humanist, and this commitment characterized how he engaged with the thought of others. In bringing together into a single volume those texts where this engagement takes place, we hope to have cast new light on how Bauman believed the vocation of sociology should be practised.
BECOMING A HUMANIST
Bauman’s academic formation begins in communist Poland after the Second World War. His earliest writings were shaped by the official Marxism of the day, and his membership of Poland’s Communist Party (e.g. Bauman and Wiatr 1953).3 By 1964, culture became the definitive concept of Bauman’s analysis (Bauman 2021a). Across this period, he completed his move from a more traditional Marxist-Leninism towards a revisionist form of Marxism (Brzeziński 2022). This change flowed from his interest in Open Marxism – represented by his teacher and mentor from the University of Warsaw, Julian Hochfeld (Hochfeld 1958) – its central tenet being to maintain a dialogue with non-Marxist thought (Kelles-Krauz 2018). Such an open dialogue with a wide variety of intellectual influences comes to characterize Bauman’s entire career. Stanisław Ossowski, also a professor of sociology at the University of Warsaw, is likewise a key early influence.4 As a critic of Stalinism, Ossowski had been banned from teaching and publishing, but in the wake of the Polish October,5 and the de-Stalinization that followed, Ossowski was reinstated (Brzeziński 2022; Wagner 2020). A humanistic form of sociological inquiry was advocated by Ossowski, which demanded of the intellectual a radical independence, even a ‘disobedient spirit’ (Ossowski 1998; Kurczewski 1988). Bauman’s predisposition to be a disobedient spirit, and his openness to theoretical traditions beyond Marxism, form the spine of his humanism, which was richly added to as he discovered writers with whom he shared this temperament. In the mid-1960s, such figures as Camus, Gramsci and Mills were essential discoveries, having a sustained impact on the ethical heartbeat of his sociology.
Mills visited Warsaw in the late 1950s delivering lectures at the Polish Academy of Science, based on The Sociological Imagination (Mills 2000).6 Encountering Mills is key in the formation of Bauman’s humanism, as Mills becomes a keystone reference for Bauman going forward. Bauman describes this in a conversation with Keith Tester:
I myself, together with others wishing (and hoping) to humanize our native brand of socialism, read Mills’ The Sociological Imaginationand The Power Elite as the story of our own concerns and duties. We did not ask for whom that particular bell tolled. There was a lot that I learned from Mills’ books and what I learned was not primarily about America. (Bauman and Tester 2001: 27, 28)
In ‘Mills: The Issue of Sociological Imagination’ (1961) (pp. 1–12), Bauman contrasts Mills’s sociology to competing approaches offered by the general theory of Talcott Parsons and the empirical sociology of Paul Lazarsfeld.7 Bauman deploys Mills to critique both perspectives, arguing that sociology should be engaged in debates on the social issues of the day. An early lesson that Bauman takes from Mills is that those engaged in sociology should consider the vocation of the discipline, beyond the day-to-day priorities of the university. Lengthy discussion of Mills appears in other papers reproduced in this volume too – Bauman (1987) (pp. 73–81) and Bauman (2006) (pp. 147–69) – illustrating Mills’s sustained influence upon Bauman.
From the late 1950s, Bauman was associated with the Polish revisionist school of Open Marxism. In the 1960s, like so many Marxist revisionists, Gramsci performed a vital role in the formation of Bauman’s thought. Gramsci showed Bauman that there were other ways of being a Marxist – new paths were found beyond the Stalinist and official Marxist ones of the day. Encountering Gramsci accelerated Bauman’s existing revisionism, and allowed him to hold steadfast to what was precious in Marx’s legacy. In conversation with Tester, Bauman notes:
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 Notebook [sic]: 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)8
Mills is deployed by Bauman in contrast to Gramsci vis-à-vis the purpose of sociology. For Bauman, Mills and Gramsci both shared a belief that theory was able to provide a historical orientation. In Mills, Bauman saw the intellectual as lonely and central to any possibility of change; whilst in Gramsci, the historical orientation provided by the intellectual is just to perform the ‘role of initiator instead – the initial catalyst in relation to the main actor in history, which is the mass movement’ (p. 30). For Bauman, Gramsci offers a vision of the role of the sociologist that focuses on ‘organizing experience, motivation, and actions’ (p. 31). The final paragraph of this important piece outlines the vision of the human that Gramsci offers; Gramsci is a sustained influence on Bauman’s philosophical anthropology: ‘Above all the reader will find in Gramsci a vision of the human world that is the most optimistic of those currently advanced, saturated with faith in the creative potential of the human and constructed with the singular aim that those creative forces be developed and stirred to action’ (p. 31).
Despite his sometimes dark analysis of society and the perils we face, Bauman maintained hope in the creative potential of humans – a hope drawn from Camus, Gramsci and Mills as illlustrated by Bauman’s remarks on the formative role of Gramsci in relation to the spirit of existential humanism that he encountered in Camus’s The Rebel:
I suppose it was from Gramsci’s Prison Notebook [sic] which I read a year or two after absorbing Camus’ cogito ‘I rebel, therefore I am’, that I learned how to rebel armed with sociological tools and how to make sociological vocation into a life of rebellion. Gramsci translated for me Camus’ philosophy of human condition into a philosophy of human practice. (Bauman 2016: 233)
This Camus–Gramsci–Mills axis orientated Bauman’s work in a humanist direction over the coming decades, with this thread remaining clearly detectable across the many forking paths his writing followed.
In ‘Creative Personality and Adaptive Personality’ (1965), abridged and translated in this volume (pp. 32–42), Bauman finds another humanist, Abraham Maslow, concerned with enhancing human creativity and agency. Best known for his ‘hierarchy of needs’, Maslow’s psychology draws upon both phenomenology and existentialism, which remain touchstones in Bauman’s later work.9 Maslow’s belief in the potential of humans to make their shared world a better place clearly resonated with Bauman, who wished to be able to say the same for sociology. Learning from Maslow, he cautioned sociologists against spreading an image of the human that deepens our fears and anxieties. Acknowledging that it may be naïve, Bauman imparts a vision of sociology that aims to ennoble us, that might help to cure our ailments, that allows us to understand the social sources of the problems we face. Despite being criticized for the pessimistic tone of his analysis, it is hope, a vision of humanity where they can affect change, that underpinned Bauman’s theorization of society. The humanistic interpretation of the existentialists and phenomenologists would become methodologically important after his often-overlooked detour via Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism.
THE STRUCTURALIST PROMISE AND THE LEGACIES OF BAUMAN’S ’68
Bauman publishes on structuralism during the height of its intellectual influence,10 and his move beyond the structuralist paradigm is contemporary with the most esteemed post-structuralist thinkers. Bauman is sometimes positioned as an unsystematic thinker, similar in character to that sociological flâneur Georg Simmel, though his Polish pre-exile work is more systematic. He should also be understood as part of a broader Marxist revisionism that we know is never completely abandoned.11 Reconnecting Bauman’s intellectual biography to the structuralist and Marxist currents of the 1960s is essential, however, for understanding the approach to writing sociology that he takes in the decades that follow. It is worth considering that, in the same way that May 1968 is seen as an axial point in French thought, the tumultuous year of 1968 and the particular personal consequences of the Polish ’68 for Bauman and his family should also be seen as a turning point in his intellectual project.12 The shift in his theoretical project after arriving at Leeds in 1971 is clear, his work continuing to develop over the next years away from this earlier structuralist influence. His theory of society at this time is an attempt to go beyond the limitations of structuralism, whilst maintaining the spirit of Marxist revisionism. Bauman’s place as one of the most prominent sociologists of the last sixty years is without question – achieved first from the margins of Central Europe, then as an outsider within British sociology. His relationship to broader theoretical currents and established schools of thought is less appreciated. We have endeavoured to add to the understanding of Bauman’s work by illustrating for the reader how embedded he was in the main intellectual movements of his day, showing a greater coherence to Bauman’s approach to theorizing society than has often been assumed.
Bauman was an early adopter of structuralism, a wide-ranging project with its origins in the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. There was deep engagement with Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, for example, in Sketches in the Theory of Culture – a great lost work from structuralism’s intellectual apex.13 Beilharz (2020: 72) and Tester (2018: 107) both recognize Bauman as having a structuralist period, but both the significance of this period and the path he trod to overcome it have perhaps been otherwise underestimated. The similarity of Bauman’s path out of structuralism (his formation of ‘sociological hermeneutics’) to contemporaneous moves made by post-structuralists such as Jacques Derrida can be seen by the restoration of Bauman’s place in the history of ideas, one of the tasks of this introduction.14
Like its more famous francophone cousin, Bauman’s Polish structuralism became intimately entangled with the year 1968. Within French intellectual history, May ’68 is often positioned as ending the dominance of the structuralist paradigm (Ross 2008; Dosse 1997). The year 1968 was a tumultuous one globally, with the assassination of Martin Luther King, the invasion of Czechoslovakia following the Prague Spring, and student protests in many cities, including Paris and Warsaw. The year looks very different depending on whether it is viewed from Paris, Prague or Warsaw (Judt 2006). Yet the personal character of 1968 for the exile of Bauman and his family is an axial point also within Bauman’s thought. Like his more famous francophone contemporaries Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, Bauman is an intellectual responding to the political turbulence of 1968 from a position of being immersed in structuralism. An affinity to Derrida is the clearest connection here, as Bauman’s theoretical reference moves from Saussure and Lévi-Strauss to writers within the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions. Derrida too is well known for his analysis of Saussure, animated by phenomenological concepts derived from Husserl and Heidegger. Both Bauman and Derrida were contemporaneously mining Husserl, Heidegger, and different branches of what we might call ‘post-Heideggerian phenomenology’. Bauman (1978) has a sustained engagement with Husserl, Heidegger and Schutz in Hermeneutics and Social Science, and Arendt, Jonas, Levinas and Derrida himself later become frequent references.
Made stateless during an anti-Semitic purge by the Polish government in 1968, Bauman took up a post at the University of Tel Aviv. There, we discover in the Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman at the University of Leeds, he worked on a proposal for a Centre in Cultural Semiotics signalling the continuing influence of structuralist concepts on his thought. Reproduced from this period is the article ‘Uses of Information: When Social Information Becomes Desired’ (Bauman 1971) (pp. 43–56). Bauman is then appointed, in 1971, as Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds. Divorced from Polish sociology, his work censored in Poland, and with much of his writing inaccessible to his colleagues in Britain,15 one can see how the image of Bauman as an isolated thinker emerges.16 Bauman’s inaugural lecture at Leeds, ‘Culture, Values and Science of Society’ shows the centrality of structuralism to his thinking at this juncture (Bauman 2021b), and this engagement continues in ‘The Structuralist Promise’ (Bauman 1972b). As Tester (2018: 107) recognizes, this text ‘was indebted to Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology’. Bauman’s more explicitly structuralist texts (1968a, 1973) nevertheless provide a heterodox reading that emphasizes process. For example, his structuralist account of culture is diachronic in character, rather than the synchronic form that structuralism typically takes. This analysis, by emphasizing process, is already showing nascent signs of post-structuralism. When Bauman reflected back on this work in 2017, he saw Lévi-Strauss as providing a path from structure to structuralization. Tester (2018: 108) outlines how Bauman’s relationship towards the structuralist promise becomes more nuanced as he considers this in relation to his commitment to human values:
as Bauman’s reflections on the ‘structuralist promise’ developed[,] the commitment to human values so strongly stressed in the Leeds Inaugural became more obviously pronounced. The emphasis on ‘the totality of human activity’ was linked to a stress on human creativity as a ‘knife against the future’ seeking to open up action in the ‘living space of human beings’. This is the nub of the argument of Culture as Praxis … In other words, despite the promise of structuralism, it had to be handled very carefully or else it would deny the possibility of human creative action in favour of a focus only on the structured ‘living space of human beings’. Or, to put the same point in different terms, it might too easily emphasize the ‘not in the circumstances of their own choosing’ over and above the ‘men and women make history’.
Bauman is reconciling what remains of the structuralist promise, so often anti-humanist, with the humanist impulse, the disobedient spirit, that he derived from Camus–Gramsci–Mills. Tools derived from phenomenology and hermeneutics help him to achieve this, and Bauman’s sociological hermeneutics can be considered a humanist rendition of the problems the post-structuralists strove to answer. Rather than Bauman’s move to an increasingly processual understanding of culture being influenced by the aforementioned post-structuralists, he was responding contemporaneously to the same theoretical challenges, to a world changed by the political and personal events of ’68. Bauman’s project was not derivative of the francophone superstars; he was drinking from similar wells – coming to conclusions which, if not identical, are adjacent. For Tester, Bauman takes hermeneutics ‘in a sociological direction’: ‘Intentions are desubjectivized and instead made into contextually available choices in unchosen circumstances. The choices are informed by intentions, and to be able to interpret social phenomena is also to be able in principle to understand the contextual intentions behind them. This point applies to the social phenomenon of the sociological work itself’ (Tester 2018: 109).
Bauman’s move from a structuralist account of culture influenced by Lévi-Strauss to a humanist but desubjectivized sociological hermeneutics bears similarities to moves made by contemporaneous thinkers immersed in structuralism, such as Derrida. Derrida’s innovations began by analysing structuralism with the assistance of key phenomenologists, such as Husserl and Heidegger. It is tempting to see Bauman as making steps forward similar to Derrida’s, as Bauman moved from a theory of culture influenced by Lévi-Strauss to a sociological hermeneutics of culture attentive to what remained of the structuralist promise. Perhaps this move was more solitary than it might have been, with his professional networks shaken by the trauma of exile. In turning from structuralism to hermeneutics and phenomenology, therefore, Bauman found a unique approach to practising sociology that would remain central to his project for the rest of his life.
The focus of Bauman’s writing during his short time in Israel moves to reflect on the Polish ’68 anti-Semitic purge and questions of Eastern European Jewry. ‘Uses of Information: When Social Information Becomes Desired’ (reproduced in this volume, pp. 43–56) pre-empts some themes later returned to in his Modern Trilogy17 – the relationship between power and knowledge and modernity’s bureaucratic style of reasoning. For Bauman, information is crucial in the pursuit of certainty, order and stability. ‘Information is a measure of the “uncertainty” of a situation’ (p. 45) – access to information is related to power, since power is proximity to the sources of uncertainty. Social science information becomes desired as a mechanism of ‘control over input and processing of information is the most powerful armament in the intra-organizational power struggle’ (p. 50). Bauman illustrates this through Kafka who ‘forecast just what this possibility could mean and he did it well in advance of sociologists’. Bauman continues:
The nightmare of ‘K.’ in The Trial consists not in physical suffering, not even in fear of severe and painful punishment, but in a total lack of knowledge of the intentions of the other side. Indeed, the opponent is sinister exactly because [they are] unpredictable.... A monopolistic access to information concerning some field makes the monopolist invulnerable, at least in the limits of the field in question. (p. 51)
This is the perfect planning model of a ‘centralized’ system, which Bauman contrasts with decentralization. In the former, ‘The top organ does not just predict, but manipulates and shapes the future, while lower organs have no rule whatsoever over their own behaviour’ (p. 51). The tension between centralization and decentralization is ‘a struggle for power’ (p. 53). Stalinism is presented as exemplary of the centralized system’s perfect planning model.
Intellectuals become significant when particular forms of knowledge serve the interests of power, by surveying the field of uncertainty and rendering it stable, predictable, orderly (Bauman 1987b). Social science information grew in significance when it became useful to the project of social engineering. The ingenuity of this analysis may not be apparent to the contemporary reader as the relationship between social science and systems of control is so well trodden through Foucault’s analysis of power. ‘Uses of Information’ was, however, published in 1971, four years before Discipline and Punish was published in France. Once again, Bauman is working on intellectual problems that are shared with the post-structuralists – there is something in the air. Bauman’s own engagement with Foucault begins in 1983 with ‘Industrialism, Consumerism and Power’, and he remains a frequent interlocuter from then on, as Bauman develops the critique of order that characterizes his celebrated account of modernity.
‘Uses of Information’ also foreshadows his later piece on ‘How to be a Sociologist and a Humanist?’ (pp. 147–69). The significance of intellectuals is again affirmed as they can endeavour to keep the future open to indeterminacy and uncertainty, rather than being foreclosed by the perfect planning of social engineers. This perspective of the future being open explains his hostility to futurology and forecasting in ‘Is the Science of the Possible Possible?’ (pp. 57–72), and has a thematic affinity with ‘Do We Need the Theory of Change?’ (pp. 117–34) and Socialism: The Active Utopia (Bauman 1976). It also maintains the spirit of disobedience, of rebellion, the vocation of the intellectual that Bauman derives from Camus, Gramsci and Mills. ‘The Limitations of Perfect Planning’ and ‘Uses of Information’ see Bauman producing a nascent analysis of Stalinism.18 It is noteworthy that his humanist sociology appears to be written well aware of the long shadow of the social engineers (represented in extremis by the Stalinists). Bauman will revisit his critique of perfect planning in his Modern Trilogy with his critical account of modernity as gardening culture.
WHAT REMAINS OF THE STRUCTURALIST PROMISE? THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS
In 1971, Bauman arrives at the University of Leeds. He becomes interested in, but not uncritical of, what he calls anti-positivist sociology, an umbrella term for sociologists exploring ethnomethodology, phenomenology and existentialism. A common influence on all these approaches is Martin Heidegger. Whilst Bauman has been consistently engaged with thinkers for whom the shadow of Heidegger remains prominent, such as Arendt, Derrida and Levinas, this exploration of anti-positivist sociology allows Bauman to move on from his structuralist period by developing his ‘sociological hermeneutics’. Heidegger (1993) had famously distanced himself from his francophone acolytes (Sartre, etc.) in his Letter on Humanism. Bauman, forever the humanist, does not give in to the anti-humanist temptation of structuralism, laying the ground for his future engagement with Levinas (Bauman 1993).
Bauman retains a keen interest in the concept of the possible – a concept that has a sustained exposition in the lecture ‘Is the Science of the Possible Possible?’.19 No, Bauman says, the science of the possible is not possible. A sceptical tone to futurology is taken, prefiguring his later warnings on engaging in prophecy. The possible is a key concept in Bauman’s later work, central to his analysis of the temporal character of modernity. The possible defies the scientific concepts of causation, truth, law and determination. Bauman situates his argument in a brief history of Western attitudes to the future. He refers to medieval scholastics who posited ‘a neat line between the facts open to man’s scrutiny and the universe of truth visible only to God’s eye’, arguing this division long preceded Christianity. Overall: ‘There is no place, therefore, in the well-ordered universe, for the category of the possibility’ (p. 58). Possibility is a tenuous category, weaker than predictability; probability leads from the unknown to the certain. Possibility is uncertain, and uncertainty is pre-scientific; it is uncertainty itself which propels the scientific orientation. There is a resemblance here to arguments that are revisited in Socialism: The Active Utopia. From here on, possibility is a central theme for Bauman, with Tester (2004) describing Bauman as a ‘sociologist of possibility’.
The ‘active’ function of utopia corresponds to the ‘activistic’ image of man, drawn from Bauman’s reading of humanist writers. This is a processual philosophical anthropology. Critical sociology, in Bauman’s (1976) definition, is an activity which redeems this activistic function of man by providing ‘a sovereign vantage point from which to render the existing order questionable and gnaw at its commonsensical “obviousness”’ (p. 64). For Bauman, there is in sociology ‘a flat refusal to seriously consider “mere possibility” as an object of study of a status equal to this of the reality’ (p. 66). Bauman is critical of sociology that produces information for social engineers aligning itself with common sense. This kind of sociology is concerned with how the world ‘is’; Bauman’s humanist sociology is concerned with how the world ‘is’, but it is also concerned with how the world ‘ought’ to be.
In the early 1980s, Bauman responded to two key political events: the rise of Solidarity in his native Poland, and the effects of Thatcherism in his adopted home of Britain (Bauman 1983, 1982). He pointed to the ‘possibility’ of social change, hoping for the realization of his vision of socialism as the ‘active utopia’ (Bauman 1976), but the subsequent course of events dispelled this dream somewhat. Nevertheless, Bauman by no means ceased to reflect on the importance of socialist values (Bauman 1987a), the history and future of socialist states (Bauman 1985b) and the role of intellectuals in social change (Bauman 1983).
‘The Importance of Being Marxist’ (pp. 73–81), published initially in 1987 in a volume celebrating the work of Tom Bottomore,20 is particularly intriguing as Bauman was developing his account of postmodernity at this juncture (Bauman 1987a, 1985a, 1983). Postmodernity was seen by Lyotard and others as announcing the end of meta-narratives that sought to change the world, but Bauman’s social theory, following Marx, was always concerned with the necessity of changing the world. The compass of his humanist social theory was always aimed towards the betterment of humanity. Perhaps an alternative title to ‘The Importance of Being Marxist’ could have been ‘The Importance of Remaining a Marxist in Postmodernity’. Bauman reads Bottomore as having an understanding of the vocation of sociology shared with Mills and Lewis A. Coser. Bauman positions Bottomore as an equal of these two great sociologists:
What Coser, Mills and Bottomore saw clearly was that, given the direction the academic adaptation of social science had taken, the resuscitation of sociological tradition and the return to the orientations and the concerns of the classics were progressive steps and revolutionary tasks. Coser, Mills and Bottomore were rebels who challenged established academic wisdom in the name of its own conveniently forgotten past. They used the repressed memories to prod the conscience of the complacent profession. Rediscovery, reinterpretation and reappropriation of Marx, Weber or Simmel in the 1960s and 1970s have proved to be a most fateful event in the history of sociology, one that seriously challenged the domination of both ‘Grand Theory’ and ‘Abstract Empiricism’. (p. 75)
The dominant sociological approaches Coser, Mills and Bottomore challenged were the ‘grand theory’ of Parsons and the ‘abstract empiricism’ of Lazarsfeld. Bauman celebrates Bottomore’s contributions: the translation (with David Frisby) of Georg Simmel’s philosophy of money, and important studies on Joseph Schumpeter and a number of Austrian Marxists, but his chief achievement for Bauman is as an interpreter of Marx’s social thought. Bauman describes Bottomore’s way of being a Marxist as follows:
being Marxist is not for Bottomore a matter of the party badge, group affiliation or salon-operated fashion.… Instead, being Marxist means, for Bottomore, to proceed, continuously and in a cumulative manner, with the one task of social science which truly counts and makes the whole work worth the effort: the study of the development and the historical tendency of the society we live in, aimed at the discovery of the roots of its present troubles, and factors which may lead to their solution. (p. 76)
It is easy to see how the Marxism of Bottomore would appeal to Bauman, as it requires no party membership or affiliation, as of course Bauman was so shaped by Marx’s ideas, but he suffered first-hand the violence of a Marxist state. Being a Marxist in Bauman’s reading of Bottomore is rescued from its relationship to political parties. This is, for Bauman, the orthodox form of Marxism. It is focused on the troubles of the day, concerned with identifying their roots, and, most importantly, it wants to find a solution to the injustices we face. The first element that characterizes Marxism for Bauman is analysis of the historical development of society. Bauman identifies with the vocation of Marxism, rather than seeing Marxist thought as a doctrine that needed to be adhered to. The second element of being a Marxist that Bauman draws from Bottomore is beginning from an analysis of class dynamics and control of the means of production. Penned during the period of the development of his Modern Trilogy, ‘The Importance of Being Marxist’ is one of Bauman’s many reflections on the vocation of sociology, written as a manifesto for how sociology should be practised.
BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM: THE BROKEN MIDDLE
From the mid-1980s to the end of the twentieth century, Bauman published numerous books and articles concerned with the genesis and development of our modern condition (Rattansi 2017; Beilharz 2000; Smith 1999). The concepts of modernity and postmodernity are used to describe, respectively, the era whose dusk we had reached and that whose dawn was just arriving. After completing his Modern Trilogy, Bauman returns to the issue of postmodernity he had focused upon in the first book of that trilogy, namely Legislators and Interpreters (Bauman 1987b), and the article ‘Viewpoint: Sociology and Postmodernity’ (Bauman 1988). Thematic unity is provided for much of the 1990s through a reconsideration of morality and ethics (Bauman 1993, 1992), in relation to the now poly-vocal world of postmodernity. From this period, we reproduce the previously unpublished ‘Athens and Jerusalem: Variations on the Theme’ (pp. 82–94).21 Athens and Jerusalem could be said to represent the two sides of humanism – with Athens standing for reason, totality, identity, and Jerusalem standing for ethics, plurality and otherness. Bauman’s discussion centres on Matthew Arnold’s (2006 [1869]) Culture and Anarchy and Lev Shestov’s (1966 [1930–7]) Athens and Jerusalem, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1956 [1872]) discussion of Apollo and Dionysos. The gap between Athens and Jerusalem can help us understand the space between modernity and postmodernity. The space between Athens and Jerusalem that Arnold and Shestov describe allows us to better understand ‘the dusk of modernity and the dawn of the postmodern age’: ‘Matthew Arnold (1869) wanted reconciliation between Hellenism and Hebraism. Lev Shestov (1937) demanded a choice between Athens and Jerusalem. Arnold’s call was addressed to the most confident of centuries. Shestov’s call came from the most frightened one’ (p. 82).
Bauman welcomed postmodernity because, in the face of a faceless ordering march of modernity, he saw postmodernity as retreating to Jerusalem. The ethical opportunity that Bauman saw in postmodernity derives from the optimism of his humanism.
In this volume, therefore, we also include ‘Narrating Modernity’ (pp. 95–117), an essay on the Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller, first published in a 1994 volume celebrating her work. Bauman discusses Heller’s (1990) book Can Modernity Survive? This question allows him to interrogate the contours of modernity and postmodernity, asking what place tolerance and solidarity have in a world where contingency is embraced. In investigating this question, Arendt’s philosophy is, for Bauman, renewed by Heller:
It was left to Heller to take Arendt’s analysis into a territory Hannah Arendt could not herself visit; to find out what for the human life follows from the aspects of social setting revealed, or brought into the focus of attention, by the ‘postmodern mentality’. This is the part of Heller’s work I most admire. I believe that Heller unerringly pinpointed the central, constitutive traits of the human condition as it appears to us from inside our postmodern experience; and that with equally sure touch she sketched the most essential issues which must be a part of any political and moral strategy that follows. (p. 112)
The affinity that Bauman draws between himself and Heller in relation to postmodernity centres on the human condition. At this time Bauman engages with themes related to postmodernity and post-structuralism, such as contingency and difference, but does not engage in the anti-humanist deconstruction of the human – in fact, his sociology is one grounded, like that of Heller and Arendt, in the analysis of the human condition. Bauman’s understanding of the fundaments of the human condition, his philosophical anthropology, is considered in a number of essays we have included in this volume. For Bauman, human beings are activistic – if we human creatures are fundamentally dynamic, then society is also.
We present in English for the first time ‘Do We Need the Theory of Change?’ (pp. 117–34), which deals with this central problem in social theory. Bauman illustrates the breadth of his erudition, discussing William E. Moore, Karl Marx, Anthony Giddens, Piotr Sztompka, Neil Smelser and Norbert Elias. Bauman establishes, via Sztompka and Smelser, the centrality of change to the way in which many of sociology’s most eminent practitioners think of their discipline. He follows Sztompka in suggesting that, in Comte, an original sin of distinguishing between what Comte called ‘social statics’ and ‘social dynamics’ hampered the development of the discipline. Giddens’s, Moore’s and Sztompka’s contributions to overcoming this problem are outlined, with Giddens presented as the apex of this discussion. For Bauman, Giddens remains within the orthodoxy of how sociology has treated the question, but places an emphasis on the actor in the creation of society, rather than social structures. The radical departure that sociology must make if it is to overcome Comtes’s ‘original sin’ is not to focus on agency, but on conditions.
It is in the figurational sociology of Elias, however, that Bauman sees an offer for a more radical move that fully jettisons the residue of ‘static’ thinking in sociology.22 Bauman draws upon one of Elias’s fundamental concepts – figuration – which, along with the concept of process, characterizes Elias’s sociological project. For Bauman, figuration is superior to structure, because hardwired into the concept of figuration is the possibility of change. Figuration, unlike structure, is a dynamic concept. In his discussion of Elias, Bauman makes an extraordinarily prescient comparison between Elias and Heidegger, a comparison that also tells us much about the role that Heidegger and those influenced by Heidegger played in Bauman’s work. Bauman compares the metaphysical move that Heidegger makes in his criticism of Husserl’s phenomenology – which leads to Heidegger stating that Being is always ‘being with others’, ‘being in time’, ‘being towards death’, and so on – with Elias’s sociological description of long chains of human interdependence: ‘the mutual interdependence of action and its results defines in advance the situation in which actors function, before the action takes place’ (p. 127). To put it more starkly than Bauman, Elias could be said to be rendering the innovations of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology into the sociological idiom. Bauman, inspired by Elias and recognizing a commonality with Heidegger, thus sees change as a fundament of human societies, a basic characteristic of being human. For Bauman, being human is not a birthright, it is attained via culture, in learning from other humans. Culture is central to his activistic philosophical anthropology, and culture is the means by which humans overcome their biology. Having a theory of change in sociology is like having a theory of stationary wind in a hurricane. The concepts that we deploy in sociology must always be dynamic rather than static, so it therefore makes no sense to speak of a theory of change.23
HOW TO BE A HUMANIST IN LIQUID MODERN TIMES
Bauman marked the turn of the millennium with a conceptual break from postmodernity with his new diagnosis of our contemporary condition, and its ills – liquid modernity. The metaphor of liquidity was then deployed extensively to analyse various elements of contemporary life.24 Bauman remains influenced by Levinas but, rather than offering an opportunity to be ethical (as postmodernity had, for Bauman), liquid modernity is positioned as a moment that is corrosive to our moral impulse, as market forces necessitate hyper-individualized and haste-ridden lives (Davis 2013a). The picture that Bauman paints of the lives of we, the inhabitants of the liquid modern world, is frequently understood as shrouded in darkness, even as dystopian. As the texts we reproduce from this period illustrate, Bauman never gave up hope that humans could overcome the problems that they have created. That which was made by human hands could be undone by human hands.
‘Repairing the Broken Middle’ (pp. 135–46) was a lecture delivered at a conference at the University of Warwick in 2001, in honour of the philosopher and social theorist Gillian Rose (who passed away in 1995). Bauman and Rose maintained correspondence on the Holocaust and on Rose’s proposed research programme of Holocaust Sociology. Bauman’s lecture is a sustained reading of Arendt in relation to Levinas and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, illustrating the importance of Rose’s work in offering a lightness that can illuminate our dark times (Pollock and Davis 2020). Similarly to his reading of Heller, Bauman is using an affinity with Arendt to identify Rose as a fellow traveller, a humanist doing social theory in our post- (and soon-to-be-liquid) modern times.
Despite finding himself talking of Lessing, Arendt and Rosenberg, Bauman believed he was always speaking of Rose, ‘whose thought was a dazzling shaft of light aimed to pierce the darkness of our time. Gillian Rose’s life-work was a persistent and consistent effort to confront the same dilemma which haunted the heroes of our story so far’ (p. 139). Rose and the other figures discussed in Bauman’s lecture all ‘glimpsed the same antinomy at the far end of extant life strategies’ (p. 139), a fundamental contradiction that they all struggled to resolve regarding the containing of human imagination and invention – that any absolute made of human hands will be ‘shortly afterwards melted and dissolved in their turn’ (p. 140). This is Rose’s ‘broken middle’, the irresolvable space, the antinomy that characterizes human ingenuity. Rose recognizes the dynamic character of human culture deriving from our powers of imagination and invention.
Bauman reads Rose as defending the humanist dream of reason, learning from postmodernity humility, whilst holding steadfast to the ambition of modernity’s utopian projects. This broken middle that Bauman celebrates has a shared spirit with his vision of how to be a sociologist in our liquid-modern era – a vision described in the 2006 paper ‘How to Be a Sociologist and a Humanist? Sociology as a Vocation in Liquid-Modern Times’ (pp. 147–69). This reflection on sociology’s purpose revisits themes and figures that have been central to his writing since the 1960s. It was first published in a volume celebrating the sociologist Edmund Mokrzycki,25 whom Bauman positions as Stanisław Ossowski’s ‘most faithful disciple and intellectual heir’ (p. 147). Bauman outlines the debt he owes to Ossowski’s humanistic sociology, and humanistic sociology more broadly. In Ossowski, he identifies an alternative sociological impulse to the production of knowledge to aid social engineering purposes, which for Bauman characterized the bureaucratic states that emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War.26 Ossowski’s approach to sociology was for Bauman a defence against the growth of sociological empiricism:27
Ossowski did not, as it were, question the validity of studies aimed at statistical, thoroughly quantitative, and reductive descriptions of spatially and temporally fixed segments of social reality. But he emphatically objected to the pretence that such kind of studies are the only way valid sociological work can (or for that matter, should) be conducted.… Ossowski insisted [that] two kinds of sociology coexist side by side, both valid and indispensable, though each is targeted on different goals and aimed at bringing different kind of benefits. (p. 149)
Bauman shares the view that both kinds of sociology coexist, and both are vital for human mutual understanding. Bauman is conducting a sociology grounded in a humanism rather than empiricism – he describes Ossowski’s project as follows: ‘empirical yet not empiricist … adding to the wisdom of humans rather than to their utility’ (p. 152). Bureaucratically driven social science can only aim at increasing human utility – in its most economically focused versions, perhaps even productivity. As we know from Bauman’s analysis in ‘Uses of Information’, as well as in his Modern Trilogy, both discussed earlier, such utility-driven knowledge can be deployed for both noble and inhuman means. Such knowledge was a necessary part of the modern – all too modern – project of the Holocaust. Social science that aims to increase human wisdom aims to increase our reflexivity, to brighten the darkness that modern processes of adiaphorization have engendered. It is unsurprising therefore that Bauman then reflects on the centrality of reflexivity to the vocation of the intellectual in liquid modernity. Bauman was not nostalgic for the era of his teachers but rather kept the humanistic flame alive, updating it with the most advanced theoretical tools of the day. For Bauman, following Bourdieu, Mokrzycki and Ossowski, in studying the social world we cannot remain neutral and indifferent: responsibility to other humans is the first principle of social science.
In pieces praising his contemporaries, the theoretical principles of Bauman’s work and moral commitments are often laid bare. His piece on the legacy of the Birmingham school of cultural studies continues this practice where comparisons are drawn to both Gramsci and Mills – both of whom, we have established, are essential for Bauman. In 2002, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham was controversially closed; in this volume, we reproduce the lecture, ‘The Legacy of Cultural Studies of Birmingham’, which Bauman delivered at a conference in celebration of the Centre’s work (pp. 170–81). It describes the contributions of the Centre as a whole, with a particular focus on Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. It is evident that Bauman understands their agenda as inspired by similar humanistic values to himself, with shared intellectual influences28 on how they approach culture; importantly, he sees their understanding of culture as opposed to Parsons’s understanding of sociology. In Bauman’s reading, Parsons centred sociology around Hobbesian questions: ‘how come that there is an order when individual humans are so disorderly? How come that people with free will can submit themselves to orderly life in human society?’ (p. 174). In Bauman’s humanistic vision, sociology is concerned with freedom; Parsons’s sociology was seen by Bauman as the enemy. Beilharz recalls that Bauman saw Parsons as ‘truly the thinker and advocate of solid modernity’ (Beilharz 2020: 98–9). For Bauman, Parsons was concerned with ‘the science of unfreedom’ (p. 174), animated by the question of ‘how to make existentially free humans still submissive and obedient to commands coming from outside’ (p. 174). Hall and Hoggart represented for Bauman a revolutionary break because of their completely different understanding of culture. The agenda of Hoggart and Hall’s Cultural Studies resists the danger of producing an analysis of culture that only aims to expand human utility (a danger Bauman associates with Parsons); instead, theirs is one that tries to deepen human wisdom.
Bauman situates the research programme of the CCCS in relation to three intellectual projects contemporaneous with its formulation, all of which have their roots in phenomenology: (1) Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s (1991) book Social Construction of Reality, which for Bauman is Heideggerian in character; (2) Alfred Schütz’s sociological rendition of Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity; and (3) Harold Garfinkel’s development of Schutz’s principles into ethnomethodology.29 All of these projects owe much to phenomenology, an intellectual current we have established is crucial for Bauman’s theoretical development. These projects are positioned as radically contrasting the Parsonian platform upon which much sociology in the mid twentieth century had been conducted. Bauman devotes considerable discussion to the way Hall and Hoggart developed the concept of hegemony from Gramsci, another Baumanian keystone. Through celebrating the work of the CCCS, Bauman lays bare his affinity with their animating spirit: their opposition to a utility-driven Parsonian sociology; the influence of sociological traditions that draw upon phenomenology; and, of course, the centrality of Gramsci. Culture remained a central concept for Bauman throughout his career (Brzeziński 2022). Bauman’s engagement with Hall, Hoggart and Rose is indicative of a tradition that Bauman engages with in a sustained fashion throughout his life – the social and political thought of his adopted home in Britain.30
