Zygmunt Bauman has known the terror of war and the trauma of exile. These experiences have made him a champion of the underdog and a caustic critic of the status quo. Yet for all his international popularity - he is one of Europe's most influential sociologists - he remains a loner and a maverick
Madeleine Bunting Saturday April 5, 2003 The Guardian
The name of Zygmunt Bauman prompts awe amongst fellow sociologists. "Late flowering" is the phrase which frequently crops up to describe his extraordinarily prolific output since his retirement from Leeds University in 1990. Book has followed book, almost annually, almost all of them breaking new ground and drawing admiration for their reflections on a vast range of questions from intimacy to globalisation, from the Holocaust to reality television programme Big Brother. At 78, he shows no sign of faltering in either his rapacious intellectual appetite - he picks his way, jackdaw-like, through material as diverse as obscure European philosophers and EastEnders - or in his stamina to keep churning out thousands of words a week from his home in a leafy suburb of Leeds.
Bauman is now counted as one of the most influential sociologists working in Europe. He is in international demand as a lecturer, and frequently spends several months travelling in Russia, eastern Europe, China, Germany (where he is particularly fêted) and France. He is probably better known on the continent - which has always had a higher opinion of sociology - than in the UK where he has consciously avoided the public profile of sociology colleagues such as Professor Tony Giddens, intellectual architect of Blair's third way.
He says he "sees nothing in the corridors of power" for his kind of sociology; the audience he has in mind for his work are ordinary people "struggling to be human". What preoccupies him is how social conventions obstruct the possibility of human liberation and it makes him a stern critic of the status quo, particularly in his growing focus on how an individualistic society finds common cause, and how the public realm can be renewed and sustained.
It might be also true that those in power see little of use in his sociology as it has become increasingly harsh in its judgment of liberal capitalism. Bauman offers no comfortable optimism for the future; in his recent books he has shown a bitter gloominess, calling into question our very capacity to love, to continue to make moral judgments, the likelihood of future holocausts and what he calls the "liquidity of modernity" in which identity is constantly fluid, generating unprecedented anxiety and insecurity.
It is this kind of gloominess which has caused avowed admirers such as Geoff Mulgan, seen by some as Blairism's chief ideologue and head of the government's forward strategy unit, to describe themselves as "sceptical fans". Mulgan claims that Bauman projects his "central European pessimism" on to everything; a pessimism originating in his background as a Polish Jew who survived the second world war as a refugee in Soviet Russia and was expelled from Poland in 1968 in an anti-semitic purge.
But Bauman gives short shrift to the charge of pessimism: we have enough court poets and enough triumphalism in liberal capitalism, he comments drily, so why should he point out its virtues? In fact he is much more optimistic in person than in his published work. His current thinking can be summed up in one of his favourite phrases: do we take "responsibility for our responsibility"? Do we acknowledge and accept our responsibilities, be they personal, political or global? Indeed, much of his writing on globalisation focuses on his claim that it is primarily a moral issue. Bauman points out that Freud's thesis that human beings had traded freedom for security has been inverted; now we have traded security for freedom and with that freedom has come unprecedented responsibilities for the conduct of our own emotional lives and for our political participation.
Fellow sociologist Richard Sennett, professor at the LSE, argues that alongside Bauman's Polish pessimism lies an intellectual challenge to contemporary society which is profoundly invigorating: "When you speak to Zygmunt, he's very optimistic. It's remarkable that at this stage of his life he is so engaged. He wants to know what is going to happen next year. He suggests that there is a real realm to navigate of personal responsibility, and that makes contact with young people. A lot of thinkers of his age think that the world has gone to hell in a basket - for example Adorno who, by the end of his life, didn't seem to like anything. But Bauman's work doesn't read like that, it reads like - make it better!
"Contrary to all the cliches about young people being disengaged and not interested, they are attracted by the idea of ethical action. They're just not buying the New Labour versions, they want something with teeth. So it really appeals when someone tells them that they're responsible for relating to others in an ethical way. That's why he is so popular."
The real pessimism is quietism - not doing anything because nothing can be changed, argues Bauman: "Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better. [My role] is to alert people to the dangers, to do something. 'Don't ever console yourself that you have done everything you could, because it's not true,' says the philosopher Levinas, who believed that you recognised a moral person as someone who does not think he or she is moral enough. That is also how we recognise a just society - a just society castigates itself that there is not enough justice in our society."
Given such restless moral energy, it's not surprising that Bauman has been described as "the Prophet of Postmodernity" in a book of that name by Dennis Smith. As his former colleague at Leeds University, Dr Ian Varcoe, points out, Bauman measures society up against a utopia and always looks at it from the point of view of the underdog.
"This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying," says Bauman passionately. "You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside. I read a horrifying account of the new American ghettos as the dumping grounds of unnecessary people and how they become greenhouses of hatred. We normally speak about the money aspects of poverty which are extremely important and I wouldn't play them down because it's the conceit of people who are better off that being deprived of money is not a painful thing. But I think we underestimate often the pain of humiliation, being denied the value of your worth and identity, of how you earned your living and kept your commitments to your family and neighbours.
"In a consumer society, people wallow in things, fascinating, enjoyable things. If you define your value by the things you acquire and surround yourself with, being excluded is humiliating. And we live in a world of communication, everyone gets information about everyone else. There is universal comparison and you don't just compare yourself with the people next door, you compare yourself to people all over the world and with what is being presented as the decent, proper and dignified life. It's the crime of humiliation."
In the many twists and turns of Bauman's intellectual preoccupations throughout his life, the thread of continuity is this trenchant moral critique and angry compassion. It attracted him first to Marxism which he studied in the Polish division of the Red Army in Soviet Russia as a teenager in the second world war. It fuelled his enthusiasm as a young Communist party member in the 1940s and early 1950s when a new Poland was being built out of the wartime devastation. Then it underlay his growing disillusionment with Soviet communism as an academic at the University of Warsaw when he was one of a group developing a "humanistic Marxism". He still calls himself a socialist, indeed he maintains that never has the world "needed socialism more than now". He describes it as a "sharp knife pressed against the blatant injustices of society... bent on spoiling the self-conceit and self-adoration of Galbraith's 'contented majority.'"
But the period in which Bauman kept to the official Marxist line was brief: "I discovered Gramsci and he gave me the opportunity of an honourable discharge from Marxism. It was a way out of orthodox Marxism, but I never became anti-Marxist as most did. I learnt a lot from Karl Marx and I'm grateful."
Probing details of Bauman's life for the events which have shaped his intellectual preoccupations is not easy. He is a private man, subscribing to Richard Sennett's thesis that public life is vitiated by the confessional culture. "Men and women can only act in public if they are not forced into the paralysing straitjacket of displays of ersatz intimacy," Bauman has said.
He bats away questions about his early life with self-deprecating comments: "I don't have the capacity to present my life as a story," he claims. Over the years, he has given a few details: his birth in the provincial town of Posnan in west Poland to a family of very modest means; his struggle for an education as a poor Jew; the flight to Soviet Russia when the Germans invaded and how he joined the Red Army. He was posted to a remote town (westerners were not allowed in big cities) in northern Russia and whiled away his free time by studying for a physics degree. To these bare outlines, he adds a few new details:
"I was brought up in the kitchen. My mother was a woman of great ambition, inventiveness and imagination, but we were relatively poor and she was confined to the housewife role. My father came back from work in the evening and immediately fell asleep, he was so tired. But I hold him in very high esteem; he was a self-made man. He never went to any schools, but he learnt to read several languages and was an avid reader of wide horizons. Above all, he was amazingly honest.
"In fact, we almost lost our lives because of his honesty. In 1939, we were running away from Posnan as the Germans were invading - the town was almost on the German border. We took the last train east, but we were stopped at a station which was being bombed by the Germans. We should have run away from the station because that was the object of the bombing, but he wanted to find a ticket inspector to pay for our tickets."
Although aware of being a Jew, Bauman was brought up speaking only Polish, eating Polish food and mixing only with Poles. His grandfather tried to inculcate some Judaism into the small Zygmunt, to no effect. But his wife Janina is adamant on one aspect of Bauman which is quintessentially Jewish: he is a Jewish mother and, since his retirement, does all the cooking. He presses visitors to try the little cakes, strawberries and canapés spread out on the coffee table with napkins, forks and sideplates and offers coffee and tea with solicitous eastern European hospitality.
The escape to Soviet Russia saved him from the worst experiences of wartime Poland: the ghettos, concentration camps and the Holocaust. Indeed, he says that it was not until his wife wrote her own memoirs of life as a young Jewish girl in the Warsaw ghetto that the enormity of the suffering hit home. Janina's account, Winter in the Morning, which was published in 1985, describes how she was hidden and survived while much of her extended family perished.
It influenced enormously Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust published four years later. The book received great critical acclaim in Germany, and provoked controversy elsewhere for "letting Germany off the hook". Bauman's thesis was that the Holocaust was a product of modernity rather than being specific to German nationalism. As Dr Richard Kilminster, another Leeds sociologist colleague, explains: "When the book was published in Germany, it caused a sensation. He argued that the Holocaust could only happen because of modernity's technology and bureaucracy. What modernity did was to generate unintended consequences of bureaucratic complexity and created the conditions in which moral responsibility disappeared."
Bauman argues that to blame Germany effectively exonerates everyone else, whereas the ideas of eugenics were adopted and received scientific credibility in many countries including the US and Scandinavia.
The Holocaust triggered the ethical preoccupations of his books of the early to mid-90s: "What is it in our society which makes this sort of thing possible? The real problem is why, under certain circumstances, decent people who are good husbands, neighbours and so on, participate in atrocities. That's the real heart of the problem. There are not so many psychologically corrupted people in the world to account for all the many atrocities around the world. So that was my problem: people who, under other circumstances, would be exemplary members of society, participate in monstrous things - though it's difficult to say if they become monsters.
"It all boils down to a person and personal responsibility. I was fascinated by sociologists' research into the people who helped the victims: these people were a cross-section of the population. None of the factors which sociologists believe to be the determinants of human behaviour - education, religious belief, political attachment - correlated with the incidents of heroic resistance against evil. Somehow, the ability to resist is not fully dependent on social conditioning."
After the war, Bauman returned to Warsaw as a Red Army officer, a position which gave him a decent flat and access to a university education. He described in one interview how he and Janina sometimes play a game over a drink in the evening, speculating on how Hitler changed the course of both their lives. Paradoxically, he owes his education indirectly to the Nazis; in inter-war Poland, severe quotas on Jews would have ruled out a Polish university, and the option of studying abroad - pursued by well-off Jews - would never have been open to him. Bauman also acknowledged that he owed his marriage to Hitler; the enormous gap in social status between the poor provinical Baumans and Janina's wealthy, cosmopolitan family would have made a relationship impossible. But by the time the two met in their early 20s in a lecture theatre in Warsaw University, Janina was living in genteel poverty with her mother and younger sister.
"Immediately I saw her, I knew I didn't have to look further and within nine days, I'd proposed. Why did I know I didn't need to look any further? I'm not a poet," says Bauman shortly, though he adds that she has been the most important woman in his life. Janina's wry comment on their 55 years of marriage is obviously a familiar joke: "We're Poles apart."
Their every gesture expresses their mutual respect and love. Although she admits her reading of his work can't keep up with his writing, she accompanies him on all his lecture tours. In her second volume of memoirs, A Dream of Belonging, Janina describes with tenderness their whirlwind courtship and the happy early years of marriage with the arrival of a daughter, Anna, now a mathematics professor in Israel, then Bauman's assiduous care of Janina after the birth of their twin daughters, Lydia, now a painter, and Irena, an architect. These were good years despite the small flats and shortages of postwar Poland; their lives were full of family and friends and their careers flourished as they were both drawn into the dream of creating a new communist society. Janina worked as a film script editor while Bauman was forging a career in sociology, an academic discipline which was then at the centre of public debate. He founded and edited a journal, Sociological Studies , which sold out on its first day of publication.
"Sociology was very interesting to our generation; it was seen as a kind of medicine for many problems, social and psychological, a way of helping people. Now, young people look in a different direction," says Elzbieta Tarkowska, professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences, who has known Bauman ever since her interview for Warsaw University as an 18 year old. It was Bauman's then bestselling Sociology of Everyday Life which inspired her to study sociology.
Tarkowska describes Bauman as a brilliant teacher, attracting young people around him, of whom he expected high standards and from whom he had a knack of drawing out their full potential; a group of them would meet in his flat for a seminar every Saturday to discuss ideas. But the dream went sour. Janina charts in her memoirs how, yet again, she was to be rejected. Horrified at the repression, police violence and undercurrents of anti-semitism, she resigned from the party, was demoted and then lost her job. Bauman himself has never described the details but the noose slowly tightened on him also and finally in 1968, after 20 years as an academic, an anti-semitic purge of Warsaw University forced them and a number of other leading Jewish intellectuals into exile in Israel, leaving close relatives and friends behind. It was a shattering experience for them; Janina writes of the "despair" of starting life again in their late 40s. Tarkowska remembers the gap they left behind: "All of us were very shocked when he was expelled - it was a kind of catastrophe."
Nor did Israel prove congenial for the Baumans despite the fact that their eldest daughter had settled there with her husband, and they left after only three years: "It 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," says Janina.
Bauman's reputation had spread well beyond Poland so there were no shortage of job offers. They turned down one in Canberra, Australia, as too far from Europe, and accepted the next offer, as head of the sociology department at Leeds at the invitation of the then vice-chancel lor, Edward Boyle, a former Conservative education minister. They arrived with little knowledge of Britain, and none of Leeds, but have been in the same roomy 1930s house surrounded by an overgrown garden next to a busy main road ever since. The job offers from more glamorous locations - such as Yale - have come and gone. Bauman was not tempted to pursue the prestigious posts at British universities such as the LSE or Oxbridge. By way of explanation, Janina interjects, "We moved enough in the past."
Varcoe believes Bauman never moved on partly because of the "terrible trauma of exile" in his 40s and partly because "he was pleased to be left alone, he had peace and quiet and a predictable environment". He likens Bauman to another distinguished European refugee sociologist, Norbert Elias, who similarly found a quiet niche at Leicester. Both the Baumans talk warmly of the acceptance they have found in Britain as Poles.
Sennett thinks Bauman made the right decision not to go to the States: "He would have felt very marginal there. He is one of those displaced intellectuals who have come home to Britain; they never assimilate, but at the same time they are very comfortable. They all dwell on the great crises of central European culture - the second world war, Holocaust, communism and its collapse. It speaks well for Britain that these men could work out this crisis of European humanism here where many of the terms are not familiar to the UK."
Bauman is hugely admired now in eastern Europe and Russia where he regularly lectures (he speaks fluent Russian as well as Polish and English). Varcoe believes that part of his appeal to post-Soviet bloc countries is his attempt to articulate an ethical vision amidst the wreck of communism: "His concern is how to save the ethical principles of socialism when communism is finished. He thought about all of this years before everyone else, and saw the collapse of communism as a great opportunity, but as the 90s wore on he became increasingly depressed that these ethical issues were not being addressed and, instead, consumer values were more deeply entrenched than ever."
But for all his international popularity, Bauman is very much a loner and something of an intellectual maverick. "I've never dreamt of belonging," he says with sudden fierceness.
His preoccupation with morality makes him an unusual sort of sociologist. Not for him the exhaustive statistical analysis and surveys, he prefers the grand, sweeping assertion which his reader can accept, reject or reason with. He never builds his arguments on assembling facts, but on provocation. Nor is he prepared to accept the traditional boundaries of sociology; Mulgan places him at the interstices of sociology, philosophy and psychology. That can make him seem eclectic to some; Mulgan accuses him of not being a systematic or logical thinker. To others, it is precisely the unpredictable maverick thinking with its powerful rhetorical imagery (remarkable in a man for whom English is his third language) which is so compelling.
On the war in Iraq, for example, he says: "What we have here is a huge china shop with a huge elephant and no one can tame its utter disregard for the realities of the world. What has pressed the current elite of the US to war is the American economy. The military warehouses were full to the brim and now the war has started there is room for new orders... it's a way of stimulating the economy. Technology has its own momentum - if you produce a billion dollars' worth of weapons, you have to use them. This war is playing with fire. The long-term outcome will be terrorism. Iraq will become another Afghanistan, only this time the mojahedin are not on our side but the other side. It has been a very bad calculation."
Bauman hasn't founded a school of sociology although many sociologists take his work as a starting point for more empirical research. He has never cultivated the British Sociological Association. Fellow Marxists treated him with some suspicion in the 1970s and 1980s either because he had been a Communist party member (not a real refusenik) or because he had been expelled from Poland. When he first arrived in Leeds, he was renowned for his inscrutability, remembers Varcoe. Perhaps it was the result of years of being watched under communism, or even earlier experiences of being a Jew in Poland. Despite the charm and warm humour which has attracted a network of friends throughout Europe, Varcoe claims that Bauman is what psychologists would describe as "a well-defended personality. It is precisely this distance and position of the outsider which has so richly fed his analysis of the way human beings build, and are continually rebuilding their understanding of the world, and in the process always opening up new possibilities.
His detachment extends to the academic discipline to which he has dedicated his life; it is literature - writers such as Italo Calvino and Borges - not sociology or philosophy which he cites as his greatest inspiration: "Their books are exemplary of everything I learned to desire and struggled, in vain, to attain: the breadth of vistas, the at-homeness in all compartments of the treasury of human thought, the sense of many-facetedness of human experience and sensitivity to its as-yet-undiscovered possibilities."
Zygmunt Bauman Born: 1925, Poznan, Poland Educated: University of Warsaw Family: Married Janina in 1948. Three daughters Anna, Irena, Lydia Career: 1954-68 University of Warsaw; 1968-70 University of Tel Aviv; University of Leeds 1972-1990 Some books: Modernity and the Holocaust; In Search of Politics; Modernity and Ambivalence; Globalisation: the Human Consequences; The Individualised Society; Society under Siege; Liquid Modernity.
· Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds by Zygmunt Bauman is published this week by Polity Press at £14.99.