Discover the Best Books Written by Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman 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; he moved to the United Kingdom three years later. He resided in England from 1971, where he studied at the London School of Economics and became a 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.

Bauman was born to a non-observant Polish Jewish family in Poznań, Second Polish Republic, in 1925. In 1939, when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland, his family escaped eastwards into the USSR. During World War II, Bauman enlisted in the Soviet-controlled First Polish Army, working as a political instructor. He took part in the Battle of Kolberg (1945) and the Battle of Berlin. In May 1945, he was awarded the Military Cross of Valour. After World War II, he became one of the Polish Army's youngest majors.

According to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, from 1945 to 1953, Bauman was a political officer in the Internal Security Corps (KBW), a military intelligence unit formed to combat the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the remnants of the Polish Home Army. However, the nature and extent of his collaboration remain unknown, as well as the exact circumstances under which it was terminated.

In an interview with The Guardian, Bauman confirmed he had been a committed Communist during and after World War II and had never made a secret of it. He admitted that joining the military intelligence service at age 19 was a mistake, although he had a "dull" desk job and did not remember informing anyone. While serving in the Internal Security Corps, Bauman first studied sociology at the Warsaw Academy of Political and Social Science. 

In 1953, Bauman, already in the rank of major, was suddenly dishonorably discharged after his father had approached the Israeli embassy in Warsaw with a view to emigrating to Israel. As Bauman did not share his father's Zionist tendencies and was indeed strongly anti-Zionist, his dismissal caused a severe, though temporary, estrangement from his father. During the period of unemployment that followed, he completed his M.A. and, in 1954 became a lecturer at the University of Warsaw, where he remained until 1968.

While at the London School of Economics, where his supervisor was Robert McKenzie, he prepared a comprehensive study on the British socialist movement, his first major book. Published originally in Polish in 1959, a revised edition appeared in English in 1972. Bauman went on to publish other books, including Socjologia na co dzień ("Everyday Sociology," 1964), which reached a large popular audience in Poland and later formed the foundation for the English-language textbook Thinking Sociologically (1990). 

Initially, Bauman remained close to orthodox Marxist doctrine, but, influenced by Georg Simmel and Antonio Gramsci, he became increasingly critical of Poland's Communist government. Owing to this, he was never awarded a professorship even after he completed his habilitation. But after his former teacher, Julian Hochfeld was made vice-director of UNESCO's Department for Social Sciences in Paris in 1962, Bauman did, in fact, inherit Hochfeld's chair. 

Faced with increasing political pressure connected with a political purge led by Mieczysław Moczar, the Chief of the Polish Communist Security Police, Bauman renounced his membership in the governing Polish United Workers' Party in January 1968. The March 1968 events culminated in a purge that drove many remaining Communist Poles of Jewish descent out of the country, including those intellectuals who had fallen from grace with the Communist government.

Bauman, who had lost his chair at the University of Warsaw, was among them. He had to give up Polish citizenship to be allowed to leave the country. In 1968, he went to Israel to teach at Tel Aviv University. In 1970, he moved to Great Britain, where he accepted the chair of sociology at the University of Leeds. There he intermittently also served as head of the department. After his appointment, he published almost exclusively in English, his third language, and his reputation grew.

From the late 1990s, Bauman exerted a considerable influence on the anti- or alter-globalization movement. In a 2011 interview in the Polish weekly Polityka, Bauman criticized Zionism and Israel, saying Israel was not interested in peace and that it was "taking advantage of the Holocaust to legitimize unconscionable acts." He compared the Israeli West Bank barrier to the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, where thousands of Jews died in the Holocaust. 

The Israeli ambassador to Poland, Zvi Bar, called Bauman's comments "half-truths" and "groundless generalizations." In 2013 Bauman made his first visit to Israel after he left it in 1970: he accepted an invitation offered by the Israeli Sociological Society to give a keynote lecture at the ISS Annual Meeting and conduct a seminar with Israeli Ph.D. sociology students.

Bauman was a supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organization that advocates for democratic reform in the United Nations and the creation of a more accountable international political system.