Man of controversial ideas profiled without them

Polity, £25

Reviewed by Vernon Bogdanor

Zygmunt Bauman, who lived from 1925 to 2017, ended his career as Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds after a tumultuous life not untypical of those rare Polish Jews of his generation who were fortunate enough to survive both Hitler and Stalin.

Fleeing to the Soviet Union in 1939, he returned to Poland after the war to become an official in the internal security corps established by the Communist regime. Driven out by the antisemitic campaign of 1968, he spent three years in Israel, which he disliked, believing it to be tribalistic and guilty of “unconscionable acts” towards the Arabs. After finding a safe berth in Britain, he was to become a public intellectual, publishing more than 50 books and a host of scholarly articles.

He is best known for his theory of “liquid modernity”. This is the idea that modern society destabilises and fragments human relationships. Liberals had hoped that affluence and greater educational opportunity would give men and women more control of their lives. But globalisation dissolves traditional institutional and family ties, leading to loneliness, instability and a general sense of disorientation. In addition, the bureaucratic and technological machinery required to run a modern society undermines the sense of individual responsibility.

In consequence, men and women find themselves lost in a world outside their control, deprived of the sense of identity that had in the past yielded stability. This process affected Bauman with particular poignancy. As a secular Jew, hostile to Zionism but sympathetic to Communism and proud of his Polish origins, he identified himself as a Pole. The Poles, however, persisted in identifying him as a Jew.

Bauman applied his theory, very controversially, to explaining the Holocaust, which he saw as a consequence of modernity. Only a highly technocratic and bureaucratised society, so he believed — echoing Hannah Arendt, a thinker he greatly admired — could have planned and carried out the extermination of a whole ethnic group. The Holocaust, therefore, was not an inexplicable intrusion into human history, nor something to be explained solely in terms of German history, but a phenomenon to which all modern societies were prone. Far from being an aberration, it was, in Bauman’s view, a product of modernity, and something similar could easily occur again.

These ideas have provoked considerable criticism; most sociologists and historians have rejected them, regarding the Holocaust as a product of German history and deep-seated intellectual tradition of racist antisemitism. Germany was in fact unique, rather than typical of industrial societies. The highly industrialised societies of Western Europe and the United States do not contemplate the extermination of minority ethnic groups; and if they did, legislative scrutiny and a free press would prevent such a project being carried to fruition, while the genocide in Rwanda 1994 was hardly that of a society in a condition of advanced modernity.

The maddening thing about Bauman is that Izabela Wagner hardly discusses her subject’s ideas at all. Instead, she has produced a long biography, so densely written that it can hardly be read for pleasure — a fault perhaps of the translation. But few would want to read about Bauman’s life unless they were already interested in his thought. What is the point of writing about an intellectual unless one writes about his ideas? This biography, although the product of years of scholarly research, is, sadly, a missed opportunity.

Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Government, King’s College, London