Bauman criticizes every aspect of modernity in his writings and thinks that modern thought contains an elite, elitist understanding and ideology. He argues that modernity is destructive rather than rational.
Zygmunt Bauman was born on November 18, 1925, in Poznan, Poland, to a Jewish family. In his biography, A Dream of Belonging, written by his wife, Janina Bauman, the Bauman family not only suffers from poverty but also from anti-Semitism.
When World War II broke out in 1939, his family fled to the Soviet Union under Stalin, due to the Nazi occupation of Poland. Four years later, 18-year-old Bauman joins the People's Army, which is organized as part of the Red Army in Russia. With the end of the war in 1945, he returns to his country; but he does not leave the army. He becomes the Chief of Military Intelligence of the Polish Army. He is a major in the rank of major and also obtains the title of the youngest major.
Zygmunt Bauman (19 November 1925 – 9 January 2017) was a Polish sociologist and philosopher. He was driven out of the Polish People's Republic during the 1968 Polish political crisis and forced to give up his Polish citizenship. He emigrated to Israel; three years later he moved to the United Kingdom. He resided in England from 1971, where he studied at the London School of Economics and became Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, later Emeritus. Bauman was a social theorist, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity.
While serving in the Polish army, he completes his undergraduate studies in social sciences, where he will build his later career. After a while, the antisemitic wave caught him in the Polish Army, causing him to leave the army. After that, the period that we can describe as Bauman's second career begins. In 1954, he started to work as an assistant lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw. Bauman, who also met his wife Janina, who was very impressed with his social thinking, also started his doctorate education in the same year.
The Six-Day War between Egypt and Israel in 1967 caused anti-Zionism (ideological opposition followed by the State of Israel) to become stronger in Poland. During these years, Jews living in the country would be accused of spying on foreign powers, and many Jews would be fired or forced to resign. Among them is Bauman. Together with his five professor friends, his duties at the University of Warsaw are terminated. Bauman left the Communist Party, of which he became an official member in 1951, in 1968.
This is how Bauman begins what can be described as his third career. Although he went to Israel with his family in 1968, he was disturbed by the nationalism of the administration and did not stay long. After being in countries like Canada, USA, and Australia for a while, it arrives in the UK. Here he began working as a professor of sociology at the University of Leeds. During his Leeds days, which began in 1971, Bauman published five books that had wide repercussions in the world of sociology. He won the Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Theory with his book "Modernity and the Holocaust" published in 1989. He retired from the University of Leeds in 1990. In 1998, he was awarded the Adorno Prize.
Bauman has been on a quest throughout his life, witnessing the exile of the Jewish consciousness, which is his ideal of a homeland and land. For this reason, in his books, there are searches on how to overcome this eternal life of exile by relentlessly repeating the topics that will reflect this consciousness. This is why he frequently emphasizes the phenomenon of foreignness in his works. It is possible to find traces of his life story in the process that broke his ties with modernity. Bauman, who had the opportunity to get to know different manifestations of modernity in his adventure that started with communism and then continued to the West, will not be able to feel at home in any of these processes. He will find the remedy against modernity in postmodernity.
Bauman criticizes every aspect of modernity in his writings and thinks that modern thought contains an elite, elitist understanding and ideology. In his book, Modernism and the Holocaust, he emphasizes that modernity does not actually bring the expected prosperity and optimism, but that the real face is the civilizations destroyed by human slaughter. He explains in his book that modernity is destructive rather than rational:
“We know of many massacres, pogroms, mass murders, many incidents that are not really different from genocide, without the modern bureaucracy and the skills and technologies at its disposal, without scientific principles in its internal order. But it is clear that the Holocaust is unthinkable without such bureaucracy. The Holocaust was not an irrational overflow of remnants of pre-modern barbarism that had not been completely eradicated. He was a legitimate resident of the house of modernity; he could not accept another house as his home.” (Modernism and the Holocaust)
Bauman, who conveys the brutal face of modernity over the word Holocaust used to describe the Holocaust committed by the Nazis on the Jews, states that modernity actually has destructive activities within itself. In other words, genocides are not the remains of barbarism, but the inner face of modernity.
It is seen that the main issue that dominates Bauman's articles and books is a consciousness caught between modernity and postmodernity. As he writes as a result of the process coming from his personal past, he also acts as a sociologist of his age. However, it is thought that he interprets the dualistic approach in the subjects he deals with more in favor of postmodernity. Dennis Smith sees Bauman as the prophet of postmodernity. It seems impossible to disagree with this judgment by looking at the names of Bauman's books.
Bauman accepts that postmodernity, which displays a radical rebellion and a critical attitude against modern values, also includes a new transcultural stance and a search for an alternative solution to the problems of the age. However, he also states that the reason for this is the defense of all kinds of logic, value, morality, aesthetics, and cultural elements produced in the philosophy of the modern age with objective superiority. Because he claims that modern science will put an end to all obscurity by revealing the mysterious laws of nature and that he does this in the name of universal principles and modern truths.
Although Bauman initially saw postmodernity as a remedy, he later made harsh criticisms of postmodernity in his works. He frequently emphasizes in his works that the atmosphere of uncertainty and insecurity that comes with postmodernity, which he sees as a glittering version of modernity, creates fear in individuals. Lydia Bauman, one of Bauman's daughters, actually sums up all his work with the words "My father defines himself as a historian of modernity and postmodernity".
Bauman evaluates the phenomenon of globalization not only in the context of the reflection of the political and economic transformation experienced in today's Western societies to the whole globe but also as a universal transformation project that aims to detach capital from politics and labor from the local, targeting the established political order of the 19th century. According to him, globalization should be seen not only as a movement of rebellion against the economic and cultural order on which modernity is based but also as an echo of a rupture that upsets the way we perceive and comprehend the world that has existed until today.
According to Bauman, with globalization, space and time lost their importance and became fluid. Bauman criticizes postmodernity by stating that modernity has also become fluid, and together with the theorizing of fluid modernity, he works in a wide perspective from consumption to business life, from critical thinking to surveillance.
Zygmunt Bauman passed away in England in 2017 at the age of 91.