Zygmunt Bauman 1925 – 2017

Zygmunt Bauman was a Polish-British sociologist and social philosopher and one of the most widely read social theorists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Driven from Poland by the antisemitic campaign of 1968, he settled at the University of Leeds, where he produced an extraordinary body of work on modernity, ethics, and the conditions of contemporary social life. Modernity and the Holocaust argued that the Holocaust was not a deviation from but a possibility of modernity, while Liquid Modernity and the long sequence of liquid books that followed it described the precarious, ever-changing forms of life characteristic of the early twenty-first century.

Zygmunt Bauman was born at Poznań in November 1925 to non-observant Polish-Jewish parents. The family fled the German invasion in 1939 to the Soviet zone; he served in the Soviet-controlled Polish First Army through the war and afterwards in the political wing of the new security service before turning to academic sociology. He took his master's at Warsaw, studied with Julian Hochfeld and Stanisław Ossowski, became professor at Warsaw University in 1964, and in March 1968 was stripped of his chair and Polish citizenship in the antisemitic campaign of that year. After three years in Israel he moved in 1971 to the University of Leeds, where he held the chair of sociology until his retirement in 1990 and lived for the rest of his life.

His more than fifty books include Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), Postmodern Ethics (1993), Globalization: The Human Consequences (1998), the seminal Liquid Modernity (2000), Liquid Love (2003), Liquid Fear (2006), Liquid Times (2007), Wasted Lives (2004), Identity (2004), Collateral Damage (2011), and Strangers at Our Door (2016).

Bauman argued that the Holocaust was not a regression from modernity but one of its possibilities, that solid modern structures of class, work, family, and nation have melted into a 'liquid' phase of fluid and provisional bonds, and that the human costs are paid in insecurity, consumerisation of identity, and the production of human waste. He died at Leeds in January 2017.