Zygmunt Bauman
Sociologist who traced the Holocaust to the Enlightenment
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN, who has died aged 91, was a Polish Jew who became a leading sociologist in Britain.
The unifying and broadly Marxist ideas behind Bauman’s 50-odd books were the idea that systems make individuals, not the other way round, and that whether one is talking about totalitarian or democratic societies, states want to control their publics and reproduce their elites.
In his most famous book, Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), he argued that the Final Solution did not represent some reversion to pre-enlightenment barbarism, or something innately evil in German society, but was an event that could not have taken place without the social and technological changes the Enlightenment made possible.
Along with railways, gas chambers and other tools that facilitated mass murder, modern division of labour had established a gulf between human beings and the consequences of their actions, creating the perfect conditions for them to act unethically. The threat was not irrationality, Bauman argued, but bureaucratic rationalism that enabled ordinary people to connive in genocide.
More controversially, in such works as Consuming Life (2007), Bauman argued that in place of totalitarian rule, western democratic elites seek to secure their own position at the top by manufacturing public panics and seducing people with shopping, a process, aided by globalisation, which had freed the rich to pursue their own interests while paying no attention to the rest. As a consequence, society had slid from “the ideals of a community of responsible citizens to those of an aggregate of satisfied, and therefore selfinterested, consumers”.
When Leeds University opened the Bauman Institute for Sociology in 2010 more than 200 foreign delegates flew in to listen to the octogenarian thinker. Indeed he seemed to be a prophet everywhere but the country where he had made his home. New Labour flirted with some of his ideas, but found them too downbeat when things could “only get better”.
Bauman was born in Poznan, Poland, on November 19 1925 and was a teenager when the Germans invaded. His family caught the last train to Russia and when he was old enough he joined the Fourth Division of the Polish army in exile in Russia. He was wounded while serving in an artillery unit, recovering in time to participate in the final battle of Berlin. He joined the Communist Party and because the Fourth Division was co-opted for the job, became a member of the “internal army” – the force charged with “suppressing terrorism” in Poland. After the war he worked at the University of Warsaw.
In 2007 an article in the Polish magazine Ozon alleged that Bauman had participated in the political cleansing of opponents of the regime. Bauman admitted that he had worked for the Polish intelligence service for two or three years from the age of 19, though he was mainly employed writing pamphlets and could not recall informing on anyone.
As time went on Bauman became involved in the movement towards “Marxist humanism” that emerged in the wake of Khrushchev’s speech at the 20th Party Congress. During a short spell at the London School of Economics he became a great friend of Ralph Miliband, father of Ed and David.
As Marxist orthodoxy was reimposed, however, he himself became the object of persecution from the secret police. Following an anti-semitic purge in 1968 he and his wife Janina lost their jobs at Warsaw University. In 1971 they moved to Britain, where Bauman became a lecturer at Leeds University. He officially retired in 1990 as professor of sociology.
In 1948 Bauman married Janina Lewinson, who had survived the Warsaw Ghetto and later became a writer. She died in 2010 and he is survived by their three daughters.
Zygmunt Bauman, born November 19 1925, died January 9 2017