Zygmunt Bauman - Dialectic of Modernity

Z munt
Bauman
Peter Beilharz
Zygmunt Bauman
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Zygmunt Bauman
Dialectic of Modernity
PETER BEILHARZ
SAGE Publications
London· Thousand Oaks· New Delhi
© Peter Beilharz 2000
First published 2000
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Contents
Preface vii
Prologue
Class and Labour 4
2 Culture and Sociology 34
3 Intellectuals and Utopians 58
4 The Holocaust and the Perfect Order 88
5 Touring the Fragments 1 22
6 Following the Human Condition 1 45
Epilogue: Mediations 1 70
References 1 74
Index 1 77
Preface
Does sociology have a future? In one perspective, Zygmunt Bauman might

be its last man. Well recognized for his major work, Modernity and the
Holocaust ( l 989a), Bauman is often also widely imagined as the leading
sociological representative of postmodernism. What lies before us? And,
how do we make sense of modernity, of its century and of what now opens
before us? As sociology enters the millennium, some will have cause to
wonder about its prospects. Others, including Zygmunt Bauman, will
wonder too but will likely rather persist in believing that we have barely
begun this project in earnest at all; critical theory, in this vista, is more like
an anticipation than a result, though it is also that. So this is good news, as
well. The purpose of this book is to enter into this field by introducing,
surveying and interpreting Bauman's work for an audience which, living at a
postmodern pace, may know it only fleetingly, or else partially. Of course
this is an interpretation in itself, therefore partial in its own way; it reflects
my own curiosities as well as his, and says something about the difference of
our life paths and the connection of our moment, and our passions and
shared commitments as well as our differences.
Why an introduction? Bauman's work is extensive, awesome, different; it
denies the systemic nature or relatively clear trajectory which characterizes
other bodies of work like, say, those of Habermas or Foucault. Bauman's
work is notoriously difficult, by comparison, at least inasmuch as it is
slippery and shifting. Those who choose to pursue Bauman's work further
are welcome to head to the library or the bookshop; they might find the
profiles in my Bauman Reader (2000), published simultaneously by Black
well, to be of some use. In Freud's sense, the present book is more like a
prosthesis, a way to handle the work just as culture is a way to handle the
world. The present study works as a lengthier conversation with Bauman,
conducted through the medium of his books and many of his essays
published in English across the past 30 years. There is nothing here on the
Polish pre-life of Bauman's sociology. We await a biography of Bauman;
Dennis Smith's interpretation of his work will appear in the same year as this
book does, and though we two have communicated we have worked inde
pendently of one another, as we have worked independently of our subject.
From differing perspectives, again, Dennis Smith and I seek to rectify the
awkward situation in which the widespread deference to Bauman's ideas has
remained unaccompanied by any more elaborate appreciation of his work.
To this point, the most extended acknowledgement of Bauman's work has
been that registered in Richard Kilminster and Ian Varcoe's 1 996 Festschrift
viII Preface
- Culture, Modernity and Revolution: Essays in Honour of Zygmunt Bauman

- and charted by various writers in a special issue of Theory, Culture and
Society ( 1 998). Hopefully this reception will open into the millennium.
I first made acquaintance with Zygmunt and Janina Bauman in the
1 990s, partly through the medium of Thesis Eleven. It has become a happy
ritual, this annual pilgrimage to Leeds, from whence I inevitably depart
light-headed and physically heavier. Ours is necessarily a long distance
relationship, yet it has intimacies of its own, and I will always be deeply
grateful for the willingness of the Baumans to take me in in this way. It is
not always the case that intellectual enthusiasm transfers across onto other
levels. For my own part, Bauman's Memories of Class ( 1 982) had much
influenced my thinking about modernity and labour, published in a book
called Transforming Labor ( 1 994a) and in its sequel, Postmodern Socialism
( 1 994b). I had sent a copy of my 1 988 review of Legislators and Interpreters
(Bauman, 1 987) to Leeds; a line of contact opened between us which has
developed in the past decade. We discovered shared enthusiasms for
labour's utopias; but he was the teacher. Reading Bauman's work coincides
with my intellectual formation from the mid- 1970s through marxism to
somewhere else.
Moving into the 1 990s I had begun researching the work of the
Australian art historian and cultural theorist Bernard Smith, which resulted
in a book entitled Imagining the Antipodes ( 1 997). In the process I redis
covered the wonder of engaging directly with the thinking of a single,
exemplary writer. This was an intellectual approach I had learned in my
doctoral work with Alastair Davidson, who applied it brilliantly in Antonio
Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography ( 1 977), and which I had then
extended critically to the work of Leon Trotsky in Trotsky, Trotskyism and
the Transition to Socialism ( 1 987). Working on the project of Bernard Smith
was a different kind of experience, because I was dealing with a living
thinker, and because I wanted to appraise his work positively, to value it
anew as a source or tradition to carry forward. This is also my motivation
in the present study, for Bauman is good to think with, to follow not as a
leader but as an example of how to go about the activity of interpretation
and criticism, and this is his invitation to sociology. So this is a sympathetic
and expository study, based on the search for spirit rather than letter. As in
Imagining the Antipodes, I do not offer strict distinctions here between
Bauman's thinking and my own. This is, then, a hermeneutic reading, and
in this it follows his own work and example.
The structure of this book rests on an attempt conceptually to cluster
Bauman's work, in order to open different lines into his labyrinth. The
approach is often chronological, especially in its broad sweep, but
chronology does not govern the structure of the book. My object here is
to establish something of how the works hang together, rather than
necessarily to plumb their inner conceptual depths. My purpose is to chase
themes, to connect and where possible to identify resonances in classical,
modern and postmodern social theory. There are, then, three levels of voice
Preface Ix
in this book. First, there is Bauman's voice, with mine as its sometime
medium. Second, there are presences, echoes and dissonances with contem
poraries, such as Castoriadis and Heller, which I attempt to spell out or
explain. Third, there are echoes with the classics, not least Marx, Weber and
Simmel, to which I allude but do not always elucidate. The attraction of
Bauman's work is based on a combination of sociological insight and
personal commitment; its approach is not that of the professional, or
managerial sociologist. Its classical exemplar is Simmel, not Durkheim.
This is a beginning book, together with Dennis Smith's, a beginning of
that moment in which we take some perspective on Bauman's extraordinary
achievement, that which hitherto we as readers have followed instalment by
instalment. So this book does not seek to establish the inner nature or
secret of Bauman's work, as much as to discern its larger contours, its shifts
and its continuities, recurring themes or motivating curiosities. There is
certainly no single clue to Bauman's work, not even in the idea of ambi
valence or in the overarching theme of the critique of order. My sense is
that Bauman's work shifts by the pattern of at least three different possible
intellectual movements. First, there is a way in which it is continuous, or
linear; some themes lead on to others, some books emerge as it were
directly out of others, as though the entire project were one long conver
sation, extended over 30 years, with such varying interlocutors as pass by,
cut into parts from the longer cloth. Second, there is a sense in which to
plot the path of Bauman's work is to deal with the principle of eternal
recurrence or repetition, for the problems which animate us across time
recur and recycle. As Bauman says, we do not solve problems in social
theory, we become bored with them. But third, there are also moments of
effective opening, reorientation or innovation across this story, or at least
there are turning points or moments of realization like those born in
Legislators and Interpreters ( 1 987), after which perspectives change more
radically or forcefully, or after the collapse of marxism, one primary source
of Bauman's theory and life.
In Bauman's own, conversational self-understanding, his more recent
books have figured perhaps as trilogy, or triptych. The first trilogy consists
of Legislators and Interpreters ( 1 987), Modernity and the Holocaust ( 1 989a),
and Modernity and Ambivalence ( 1 99 1 a). The second includes Postmodern
Ethics (1 993a), Life in Fragments ( 1 995) and Postmodernity and its Dis
contents (1997a), and the final trio consists of the shorter, more directly
political essays in Globalization: The Human Consequences ( 1 998a), Work,
Consumerism and the New Poor ( 1 998b) and In Search of Politics ( 1 999b).
From any other perspective, of course, different profiles emerge; so that it
seems to me, for example, that the books on the Holocaust and Ambi
valence are directly continuous, whereas say Postmodern Ethics ( 1 993a) and
Mortality, Immortality and Other Life-Strategies ( 1 99 1 b) are distinct critical
excurses, while what unites the books published after Life in Fragments
( 1 995) is the essay form itself, especially with the return to the more
specifically political themes as a kind of postmodern reprise of what earlier
x Preface
was carried by marxism. I suppose that this means that my book, like
Bauman's work, can also be entered by any door, though I hope that there
is also some advantage in following its own narrative structure through.
For in that structure some themes, such as power, culture and utopia, also
return with the passing of time, and some openness to these possibilities
ought be important for Bauman's readers, for it will not do to seek
arbitrarily to classify this most avid critic of classification. Arguably this is
the key factor explaining the hesitant general reception of, or engagement
with, Bauman's thinking: you have to work at it.
My personal delight in constructing this project, as earlier in Imagining
the Antipodes, has been to come to know an exemplary thinker, exemplary
in that precise sense, that one can emulate only by going on one's own way.
In Zygmunt Bauman's case, there was also another, Janina, his wife. I
cannot say how much I value their example, their work, their way of going
about the conduct of ordinary life. I hope that this book might help to
acknowledge my debt, as that of others, and to reinforce the process of
their recognition.
For years now I have discussed Bauman's ideas with various folks in
strange and familiar cities and places, from Tokyo and Montreal to New
York and Northcote. My Honours students at La Trobe shared an elective
with me in 1 997, establishing the canvas. Fuyuki Kurasawa and Vince
Marotta helped me with materials and with perspectives on Bauman often
different to my own. Chris Rojek at Sage exemplified the editorial ethic of
pastoral care. My colleagues on Thesis Eleven provide the immediate
theoretical matrix which makes my intellectual work possible. This is my
eleventh book, and my first book with Sage, publisher of our journal,
Thesis Eleven; perhaps it is not too much to say that it is a sign of a superb
working relationship between us. My thanks to Chris, and all the others at
Sage, especially to Jane Evans, my production editor, and to Jill Birch, for
fastidious copy-editing. I also discussed the ideas involved with Robert
Rojek, John Carroll, Trevor Hogan, David Roberts, Johann Amason,
Michael Crozier, Agnes Heller, Claus Offe, John Clammer, Jeff Alexander,
Craig Calhoun, Don Levine, Steve Seidman, Harald Welzer, Bob Tristram,
Simone Clark, Frank Jones and Bill Martin. The office staff at La Trobe -
Bron, Elaine and Merle - have tolerated my idiosyncrasies for longer than I
can remember; I am grateful to them. La Trobe remains a great place to
work, even as its morale is eroded by the state shrinkage of Australian
universities; its culture persists. The support of Graeme Duncan as Dean is
something I shall miss. Parts of this book were drafted in Canberra, where I
worked as an Affiliate Fellow in Sociology at the Research School of Social
Sciences at the Australian National University, whose support I appreciate.
In those recent evenings, as I sat in University House, where Zygmunt and
Janina had stayed 30 years earlier, I could not but ponder what might have
happened had they remained in Australia, had Zygmunt accepted the chair
he was then offered, in 1 970. I am glad they moved on to Leeds, for it
becomes them, and Bauman's fate in the antipodes would have been
P reface xl
different; it remains, still, more difficult to be heard from the edge. But that
distance also affords perspective, and it may help to have an outsider's view
on this outsider's work. In the antipodes, at least, we might perhaps know a
cultural messenger when we see one.
This book is for Zygmunt and Janina, as it is for those I love and depend
upon the most: my family, Dor, Nikolai and Rhea. It has been my
immaculate good fortune to be stuck in the middle with them; they are
more than I deserve, but I am grateful for their love and patience. Finally, it
is for my sister, Sue, who has taught me about love in adversity - to
persevere, still laughing. The spirit endures.
Peter Beilharz
Melbourne
April 1999
Prologue
The work of Zygmunt Bauman has a curious presence in English-language

sociology. In everyone's footnotes, the arguments and larger themes them
selves often seem to elude attention. The field covered by Bauman's work is
massive, diverse and challenging, shifting from class and culture, through
utopia and its difficult bearers, the intellectuals, to the Holocaust and the
postmodern, to globalization, tourists and vagabonds. More, Bauman
offers his writing in a kind of take-it-or-Ieave-it sensibility; he will not act as
his own interpreter, rather he posits his concerns and moves on. He will not
put more value on his own work than to claim it, and he does not like to
talk about his life's path.
There are some clues to his biography in the second volume of Janina
Bauman's autobiography, A Dream of Belonging ( 1 988). There she part
fictionalizes Zygmunt as 'Konrad'; Janina still has mixed feelings about this
book. She prefers the first volume, Winter in the Morning ( 1 986), a book
that was obviously a hard act to follow. Alienated from life in Poland after
the war, the young Janina had contemplated exile, perhaps in Palestine.
While she had been trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto, the two yet unknown to
each other, the young Zygmunt had fled east with his family into the
extremities of the Soviet Union. The two of them met in Warsaw in 1 948.
Zygmunt was born in Poznan in 1 925. Zygmunt had studied at a Russian
university and joined the Polish Army in Russia aged 1 8 . He rose to the
rank of captain and was a proud communist, a member of the Polish
Workers' Party (J. Bauman, 1988: 45). Zygmunt was, as Janina put it, an
honest communist, one who believed that the state would deliver on its
claims, or at least, later, should be held to them ( 1 988: 49). Soon he was to
become a Major. Janina, too, became a communist. Yet in retrospect it all
seemed more plain. As she now wrote, part admonition, part parable:
My children, my grandchildren beware. There is no fair play in the game of

power, no small steps, no meeting halfway with a chance of return. Beware of
those who promise you to bear responsibility for your deeds. What they want is
your compliance. The responsibility will remain your own. Ignorance is no excuse
for complicity. Do not let the powerful catch hold of your finger: they will take
the whole arm. And you will not even notice when they engulf the rest of you.
( 1 988: 89)
So Janina and Zygmunt Bauman learned hard together the nature of those
abstract philosophical problems of conformism and heteronomy. Janina
2 Zygmunt Bauman
worked for Polish Film, Zygmunt continued to study philosophy and social
sciences at night school. Anti-semitism was again afoot; 1 952 marked
Stalin's Doctors' Plot, and in 1953 Zygmunt Bauman was sacked on sus
picion ( 1 988: 1 05). Doors were slammed closed; Zygmunt took an alterna
tive path, out through the mind, becoming a junior lecturer in Philosophy
and Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw, though his marxism had
slipped ( 1 988: 1 1 5). He took his doctorate, and spent a year alone in
London on a postdoctoral fellowship at the LSE. A door had opened.
Having been driven hither and thither by the forces of world history, the
Baumans were developing the English leg they were later fully to stand on.
Leeds beckoned, but only after the pain of further marginalization. Zygmunt
took a visiting fellowship to Manchester in 1 966, reinforcing the suspicion
of the state. But another door was opening. They handed in their Party
cards, but then came the boot. That visceral anti-semitism which had ended
Zygmunt's army life returned, now, to the academy. In March 1 968 Zygmunt
Bauman became a public victim of the state's hostility, this time for corrupt
ing Polish youth; why else would they bother themselves with the activity of
protest ( 1 988: 1 87)? These professors were not just eggheads, or 'dirty Jews';
worse, they were marxists. They would not take the word of the putatively
marxist state at face value. Janina, too, was dismissed as Head of Unit at
Polish Film. The children were being harassed. It was time to leave their
homeland. They escaped out through Tel Aviv, and visited Canberra then to
settle in Leeds, as it then seemed, a dying industrial city in the English
Midlands, now to belong to several places, perhaps nowhere. So Janina
closes her book, A Dream of Belonging, in remembering Poland:
I left that country in the distant past abandoning all my young hopes and
passions. Now I belong nowhere. But perhaps to belong means to love and be
loved and this is all that truly matters. ( 1 988: 202)
All of the writing discussed in this book comes from that period, opening in
the 1 970s, when Zygmunt and Janina Bauman settled in Leeds, where they
remain. We begin at this beginning, in 1 972, in Chapter 1 , with Between
Class and Elite, connecting it laterally into the 1 982 text Memories of Class
and the just recently published return to these matters of inclusion and
deprivation in Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (1 998b). Chapter 2
begins from another beginning, Culture as Praxis ( 1 973a). I connect this to
Towards a Critical Sociology ( l 976b) and then into Bauman's 1 990 text,
Thinking Sociologically, before turning to the more recent essays in which
Bauman negotiates the postmodern and the field of sociology together.
Chapter 3 links up Socialism: The Active Utopia ( l 976a) - the first Bauman
text to have a profound effect on me - and two other books on the pros
and cons of interpretation and its interpreters - Hermeneutics and Social
Science ( 1 978) and Legislators and Interpreters ( 1 987). The discussion of
Modernity and the Holocaust ( l 989a) opens Chapter 4, continuing into
P rologue 3
Modernity and Ambivalence ( l 99 1 a), and the associated problems of

modernity and socialism. Chapter 5 covers Postmodern Ethics ( 1 993a), Life
in Fragments ( 1 995), Freedom ( 1 988), and Postmodernity and its Discontents
( l 997a). Finally, Chapter 6 draws the themes of Mortality, Immortality and
Other Life Strategies ( l 99 1 b) together with the concerns of Globalization:
The Human Consequences ( l 998a) and In Search of Politics ( 1 999b), where,
at the time of writing, Bauman's writing ends, though there will probably
be another book, Liquid Modernity, out before this one appears. For
Bauman's is, as he knows, a journey without end. His is the restless spirit of
interpretation and rediscovery, and this is his legacy to us, for here there is
so much to discover, whether for the first time or not, about sociology,
about the interpreted and the interpreters, about us.
I Class and Labour
The idea of class has always connected sociology to socialism. The image of
modernity has long been that of the working society, where work, as Marx
could have put it, might have been everything but in fact was nothing. The
labour movement, in turn, became widely seen not least on the left as the
practical bearer of modernity, of modernization as industrialization. Not
only the Bolsheviks but also leading Western Marxists such as Antonio
Gramsci identified Americanism as a working class and cultural imperative.
In the 1 960s, labour history was remobilized as history from below. The
popular story overlooked by generations of institutional and elitist scholars
was rediscovered as social history. This particular turn in historiography
and sociology was directly to mirror the extraordinary efflorescence of
marxism itself in the 1 970s. Before it changed everything, interpretatively
speaking, or as it did, marxism also disappeared throughout the period
from 1 979, burned up by the dread and disintegration from the experiences
of Kampuchea and Afghanistan to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1 989. The
marxism which was largely obligatory in the radical ranks of the academy
throughout the 1 970s left its traces, but problems of labour, for example,
were very largely replaced by concerns with language or representation.
Bauman's achievement during this period was to shift, and to move with
the tide, while maintaining the sense that to be human was always to
labour. His curiosities about class and culture thus run in tandem from the
work of E.P. Thompson to that of Foucault and, later, Baudrillard, and
more generally, throughout this period, with Marx, against Marx.
Between Class and Elite
Between Class and Elite was where, in the English language, it all began, in
1972. The original Polish work stretched back to 1 960, and to Bauman's
earliest traffic in the late 1950s between Poland and the LSE. Bauman's
modus operandi is already marked by that combination of modesty and
incision which characterizes his later work. He opens by doubting the
significance of his own work, even as he introduces us into it. Why should
you read this book? the author asks, and answers, that it is interpretative
rather than pioneering in nature, or configurational, rather than substantive
in form ( 1 972: ix). In a different language, Bauman understands his own
curiosity as sociological, rather than historiographical: 'Here I must confess
that I intended to arrive at a relatively coherent theory of labour
Class and labour 5
movements, this being an analytical starting point to a more general theory

of social movements as a whole' ( 1 972: x). The themes posited here, as
elsewhere in Bauman's work recycle and reform. For just as Bauman fore
grounds social movements as the generic field of his concern, and labour
movements as his particular curiosity, so does he insist on the presence of
intellectuals as their interpreters, advocates, critics or theorists. So there are
already at least two distinct, if connected levels of analysis in Bauman's
hermeneutic: one concerning the movements themselves, the other con
cerning the intellectual representations of and projections upon these
movements which become the bearers of other people's hopes ( 1 972: x).
Bauman names this problem of duality here under the category of
messianism. Because intellectuals feel powerless they are compelled to
search for a prime mover, an omnipotent, elemental force; they live in hope
of the continuous dream of a salutary union of 'the thinking minority and
the suffering majority' (Bauman, 1 972: x). The vulnerability of marxism or
Marx's work itself to this line of criticism is not established in these pages,
only anticipated. The victims of Bauman's critique are all those, reformists
and revolutionaries alike, who ascribe to the suffering peoples some histor
ical vocation or mission, forcing on them a mirror in which they cannot see
themselves. Millenarians might want to cleanse and to purify the world; the
others simply want a place in it. The interpretative problem, then, is that
studies 'of actual labour movements became exercises in censuring their
closeness to or deviations from the assumed ideal' ( 1 972: xi). Of course, as
Bauman observes, the projections of radical intellectuals who behave in this
way tell us infinitely more about the intellectuals themselves than about the
plight of the suffering classes. Yet it would also be a mistake, as Bauman
observes, to view the labour movement as a thing in itself, sans telos, or at
least without higher aspirations. The point, as Bauman puts it, is to try to
look at the labour movement as an active, adaptive, and self-regulating
system, assimilating its outer environment by seeking to impress upon it
hoped-for structural changes while accommodating its own structure to the
changing requirements of that assimilation ( 1 972: xii). To make sense of
labour movements, we need then to comprehend them spatially and tem
porally as agents of creation and adaptation: 'To those who feel more at
home when dealing with labels instead of phenomena, I must confess that,
in my opinion, this understanding of social reality is what Marxism in its
activist, uninstitutionalized version is all about' ( 1 972: xii). Thus Bauman
indicates his position, committed, yet independent, interested in labour's
institutions, but located of necessity and desire outside them.
This kind of recognition of limits is necessary, not least of all, because of
the historicity of social movements. So Bauman's optic in making sense
of labour is to enquire into where it has come from and how it has come to
be, for the culture of labour is also its history. Pre-class histories, in other
words, will affect patterns of class formation. Patterns of working class
formation in Britain would remain embryonic even while a modem engin
eering industry came into existence, for contrary to E.P. Thompson's sense
6 Zygmunt Bauman
in The Making of the English Working Class (1962) the industrial revolution
created the working class. It may be politically tempting to insist that the
working class made the industrial revolution, but this is also to project the
categories of class analysis back, anachronistically (Bauman, 1 972: 2).
Knowledge, including self-knowledge, comes late. Marx's error here was to
imagine the creation of a working class as too clean and complete. Workers
in the making, however, were dragged screaming into the factories, so that
their culture and identities often remained elsewhere. The mass worker
came much later. Marx, that son of the steam engine, never fully inter
nalized the significance of the idea of uneven development, or the ration
ality of the politics of popular refusal of or resistance to modernization.
Max Weber, as Bauman observes, got closer to sensing the limits of
modernization when in The Protestant Ethic he discussed the ways in which
sensible peasants and artisans could decide to work less, and not more, for
piece-rates, and leave their levels of consumption intact (Bauman, 1 972: 3).
Marx considered the possibility in the Jamaican case in the Grundrisse, but
apparently viewed the British experience as modernization all the way.
Contrary to Marx's desire, then, the formative working class was not
disciplined into a decisive mass by the development of early capitalism, so
much as its ranks were fragmented, alienated, left amorphous (Bauman,
1972: 1 6). The onslaught of modernity on tradition, on culture and con
sciousness would never be complete, not then, not now. The consequence of
this process of uneven development upon the internal organization of the
working class was significant. For within the working class, the mass of
available hands, there was an elite whose memory and tradition reached
back to the guilds. The so-called labour aristocracy was of local lineage, it
was not only a phenomenon resulting from the extension of British pro
ductive imperialism into India. This labour elite was already advantaged in
its capacity to negotiate with employers and to work the newly emerging
system ( 1 972: 2 1 ). The guilds were less, as Adam Smith thought of unions,
conspiracies against the people than instruments of exclusion of the skilled
against the unskilled. Little wonder that the actually existing working class
failed to live up to Marx's expectations.
The question of the historical relation between the guilds and the genesis
of unions has long been subject of historiographical dispute. As Bauman
indicates, one line of interpretation, as in Brentano, seems to think of
continuity idealistically or culturally, whereas the other line, initiated by the
Webbs, interprets the process of historical development materially and
posits a rupture between guilds and unions (Bauman, 1 972: 26). Bauman's
response is that both interpretations have merit, a fact which only becomes
apparent when the working class/elite distinction is reintroduced. The sense
of continuity is more apparently applicable to skilled workers, the sense of
rupture to mass workers and to industrial unionism. And whether the
unions inherited patterns of identity from the guilds or themselves invented
them, some morphological continuities between the two organizational
forms are in any case undeniable. Both guilds and unions, after all, were
Class and labou r 7
institutions which sought to construct cultures of occupation out of the

conditions of working life ( 1 972: 28). Yet the guilds sought to make of their
people a stratum, not a class, to privilege and protect them rather than to
make them into a single coherent force representing the rights of labour
against capital. The machinery and mentality of the guilds was based on the
distinct stratification of a self-organizing community, and its energies were
concentrated on the conservative tasks of maintaining that community's
social status ( 1 972: 43). This organizational form and culture could not
simply be stretched to fit the emerging facts of factory civilization. It was
for reasons such as these that union culture often revived not medieval but
rather religious symbols and patterns of collective ritual.
The elite of the skilled, however, remained outside the labour movement
in its formative moment. For the labour movement in its earliest years had
no organizational structure of the kind we associate with its later ascend
ancy. It offered no prospects of career advancement, and consequently
attracted few outsiders or class traitors on the make ( 1 972: 60). Only closer
to the turn of the twentieth century did union organization come increas
ingly to resemble the organization of capitalism itself. Patterns of mech
anization in the mid-nineteenth century saw the emergence of a new stratum
of skilled workers, whose particular skills were not interchangeable. This
new stratification differed from the old, because it took place within that
section of the working population which was created by, and owed its
existence to, capitalist industry ( 1 972: 63). Where the old elite was external,
or prior to specifically capitalist development, the new elite was its result,
and was thus internal to the development of the British working class. This
new stratification, according to Bauman, took place within that section of
the working population which was created by and was dependent on
capitalist industry. This group had no history which preceded capitalism, no
collective memory or institutions which went back further than the
industrial revolution. The mass worker, in other words, is a new phenom
enon; the mass worker is not the craftsman refigured, and it is the emergence
of this so-to-say capitalist working class which, into the twentieth century, is
to make all the difference.
The social effects of this path of development include the internal differ
entiation or bifurcation of the working class in terms of material rewards.
Bauman's immediate concern here, then, is that puzzle which within ortho
dox marxism generated the controversy over the so-called labour aristo
cracy. Only Bauman's concern is not limited to questions of income levels
or to the status claims of one group over the other; the larger curiosity is
historical in nature, concerned as it is with matters of memory and identity.
While the category labour aristocracy as employed by marxists has often
been a shadow image of the petty bourgeoisie, the point for Bauman in
referring to labour aristocracy is, rather, cultural, addressing as it does the
material and neutral consequences of this kind of privilege. To use a
different language, the new workers were systemic actors within capitalism
in a way that their predecessors were not; the new working class was made
8 Zygmunt Bauman
in its image. The new workers were social insiders in a way that the older
non-conformists were not. The attitudinal resonances to be observed here,
rather, are potentially between the new skilled workers and the earlier
craftsmen, even if the new workers only yet aspired to increased levels of
social esteem, themselves being viewed by their superiors as little better
than outsiders ( 1 972: 69-70).
The new working class, in this sense, was yet fully to be made. Only this
process would see the modern labour movement become just that, modern,
because modernizing, leaving its own model of industrial development
alongside that of the capitalists, now in sympathy with it, now in opposition
(Bauman, 1 972: 70; Touraine, 1 987). This in turn meant the adoption of a
kind of cultural project of reform and self-reform, construction
and reconstruction. Thus the extraordinary historical experience of endless
programmes for popular self-improvement, both material and spiritual.
Bauman's approach evokes, though it does not name, Max Weber's Protes
tant Ethic and its staff, Benjamin Franklin, Richard Baxter, or locally,
Samuel Smiles. For self-help, thrift, and their institutions, from mechanics'
institutes and savings banks to temperance and mutual aid societies all now
become significant presences in these local histories. As Bauman puts it, the
'members of the new stratum were in a hurry to discard the garments of their
forebears' ( 1 972: 72). At the very same moment, such gestures of pushing
away the stigma of humble origins would mean embracing, or inventing
status signs and trappings associated earlier with craft.
As Bauman observes in passing, the most powerful significance of the
idea of labour aristocracy in this regard is less what it tells us about labour,
and more what it indicates about the still dominant symbolic presence of
the aristocracy. The captains of industry were still not viewed as public
heroes; the connotations of contemporary insights such as Disraeli's Sybil
indicated that the two nations within England were 'the privileged and the
people; the aristocracy remaining both the object of social admiration and
political contempt' (Bauman, 1972: 75-6). But it was the aristocratic model,
rather than that of modernizing bourgeoisie, which remained the frame of
popular as well as entrenched values. The condition of social inclusion for
the new skilled stratum was thus social servility. This mobility strategy was
therefore based on the logic of assimilation; it rested on trading off sub
ordination against recognition. But this is not a story of inevitable prole
tarian incorporation, as Bauman makes clear in taking his distance from
Roberto Michels' 'iron law of oligarchy' in the latter's Political Parties. The
process of development involved cannot simply be viewed as a loss, from
the stated or invisible critical premise of direct democracy; as Bauman
indicates, modern democracy itself depends on elites ( 1 972: 1 1 3) . As Weber
understood, and Marx simply avoided the issue, classes are not actors in
themselves, so that the whole texture of Between Class and Elite continues
to work across that synthesis of Marx and Weber which was a hallmark of
postwar Polish sociology. Partly this reflects the practical, scholarly tension
between the larger concept, class, and its more manageable, specific section,
Class and labour 9
in the idea of elite; partly it expresses the difference between an unskilled

sector, itself alienated from the system, and a sector of skilled workers
actively seeking inclusion and mobility within the very same class. Indeed,
from a perspective beyond marxism, the aristocrats of labour and the
unskilled might well appear to belong in fact to different classes, and not
only in terms of their habits, ways of life or levels of consumption. Artisans
and labourers could look as distinct as they could similar, depending on the
critical perspective brought to bear upon social history. For respectability
and poverty remained still worlds apart ( 1 972: 1 39-40).
The making of the working class was therefore an elongated and contra
dictory process, where the new production process worked against the older
social and cultural superstructures. Only now could the class in itself -
Bauman uses Marx's distinction - open the prospect of the transformation
to class for itself ( 1 972: 147). The concept of general or national union was
one key marker of this process. But the political party, not the trade union,
was the appropriate form for a movement which from its beginnings and in
its very essence was the institutionalization of class and not of occupational
interests ( 1 972: 1 70). The older ideologies of earlier unionism could readily as
not be accommodated into Liberalism. The new unionists were more likely
socialists or, more accurately, collectivists. In fact, Bauman argues, every
general union was basically more like a formative political party than like a
trade union, for its interests and inclinations were general rather than
particularistic ( 1 972: 1 7 1 ). Class forms here generate the labour party, partly
because they now develop more explicitly popular and national arguments
for socialism. This was, however, a particular kind of socialism, linked to
collectivist concepts and made manifest as reformism, far from revolutionary
socialism ( 1 972: 1 72). British socialism is therefore the principal antagonist
of marxist socialism, though the British scene is also characterized by hybrid
combinations of various kinds and proportions. 'British socialism is thus the
purest form of a collectivist ideology, springing not from a total rejection of
the existing structure but from a willingness to adopt that structure' ( 1 972:
1 72). This attitude, according to Bauman, is characteristic of a class of which
whole sections have, as a consequence of its evolution into a vocal and
articulated entity, become rooted in the existing structure before the question
of satisfying its own overall interests as a class is raised. A real socialism in
its own right, British Socialism is therefore diametrically opposed to the
revolutionary and totally unconformist concepts of Marxism ( 1 972: 1 72).
Contrary to the earlier common sense of critics of labourism such as Perry
Anderson, however, Bauman's sense was that the middle class reformers of
the Fabians and the Social Democratic Federation were not the primary
locus of these kinds of ideas. The Independent Labour Party more clearly
captured the spontaneous mood of the working class movement ( 1 972: 1 73),
though it, too, took the risk of alienating the margins when it argued for
dignity through order, against for example slum dwelling as a wretched way
of life ( 1 972: 1 74). Yet working class socialism was nevertheless excluded
from the category of social respectability.
10 Zygmunt Bauman
The Fabian Society was different because it was middle class or aristo
cratic in terms of social origins, and because it did not aspire to perform the
role of a political party ( 1 972: 1 80). It was not of, though it was finally for,
Labour. The Fabians and the Labour movement co-emerged before they
merged, though the presence of liberalism was never absent from this
scenario, right through to the practical victory of Fabianism through the
Beveridge Report in 1 944 (Bauman, 1972: 1 8 1 ; Beilharz, 1 992, ch. 3). All
the same, even granted the collusion between Webb and Arthur Henderson
on Clause Four of the Labour Party in 1 9 1 8 and the consolidation of
influence into the interwar years, Fabianism could not be said to represent
the labour movement except in this formal sense. As I have suggested
elsewhere, the Fabian Society in this sense was the prototypical think-tank
rather than the immanent product or essence of labour. Fabianism became
the de facto ideology of labourism as social policy. Bauman's character
ization of labour's ideology itself is that it was more like an ethos; though
he does not explicitly make the connection with Durkheim, his view is
similar to the latter's sense that socialism (and in the French case, especially
communism) was the cry of the oppressed rather than concrete utopias of a
sociologically specific kind (Bauman, 1 972: 1 83; and see Durkheim, 1 959).
Bauman's own commitment to marxism does not, however, lead him
simply to sneer at the Fabians, nor to insist that the revolutionary alterna
tive of Morris or Hyndman could have done better. Labourism, in any case,
itself became subsumed to the idea of representation, and to the institution
of parliament. The logic of electoralism was built into its programme and its
history. This made British Labour distinct from the continental parties from
the beginning, for parties like the German SPD had begun as the cultures of
alternative society and class. Political Labour in Britain was coextensive
with the formal system of parliamentary representation (Bauman, 1 972:
1 86). If there were in this situation to be a choice between socialist claims
and trade union interests, then socialism would be first to suffer. Indeed, the
ILP focused its attention less on propagating socialism than on detaching
the labour movement from the Liberal Party; increasingly its own political
logic was to set up an independent ladder of upward mobility ( 1 972: 1 87).
Labourism, in short, sought after a strategy of political integration into
capitalism, a long process involving emancipation ultimately from both the
trade union movement and the machinery of middle class political
structures like the Liberal Party.
The idea of political representation became feasible, now, because many
members of the formative class were alienated from its processes of devel
opment and its own, natural political leaders. The labour movement thus
generated its own elite, initially of autodidactic enthusiasts; those that
followed, climbed the ladder which these pioneers had constructed. For as
Bauman observes, the agitator and the administrator are distinct types of
leader ( 1 972: 20 1). Agitators are no use in a bureaucratic organization.
These were issues identified by Weber in his typology of authority, and
traced concretely by Michels in Political Parties; they were also the core of
Class and labour II
the German revlSlonist dispute between Rosa Luxemburg and Eduard

Bernstein, for this was what was at risk when Bernstein had claimed that
for socialism the end was nothing, the movement everything. The process of
institution building which was itself success, for reformers, was for revolu
tionaries proof of having sold out. Only reformist practice was everywhere
in the west on the ascendant; even the Bolsheviks had to build institutions
of their own, and then felt compelled to defend them against enemies real or
imaginary, within or without. Everywhere in socialist circles men were
arriving in uniforms, or in suits. The dawn of administrative socialism was
upon us, and the Fabians were among the prime representatives of this
trend in Britain. But as Bauman understands, the Fabians were not with
labour at the moment of its political arrival; the Fabian Society was a
distinct type of organization, the policy machine of gifted intellectuals
rather than primary organizer of numbers in corridors, and this reflected its
floating middle-class nature. Labour's political leaders remained, by com
parison, evangelical in style, in the manner of Keir Hardie, until Ramsay
MacDonald arrived to replace the aura of the agitator with that of the
suave administrator. The concrete utopia of socialism as an attainable end
meanwhile shifted further and further away (Bauman, 1 972: 224). Bauman
quotes Hubert Bland's denunciation of MacDonald as a sign of these times:
'It seems that we are to work for socialism, fight for socialism, even die for
it, but not, for God's sake, to define it' ( 1 972: 224). Later leaders like Attlee
and Gaitskell would have more traditional senses of loyalty, but the hazier
aura around the idea of socialism only extended. After the Great War, the
Labour Party became one of the two political teams which competed for
control of the country, while its elite became a component part of the
political elite of capitalist Britain ( 1 972: 228).
This process of political, not economic inclusion was consolidated
between 1 924 and 1955. Plainly Bauman's sense of this path of development
is that it is a long-term historical trend, conservatism following consoli
dation, rather than, say, short-term cyclical in the manner of business
cycles. The consistent combination of Marxian and Weberian themes in his
thinking is also apparent. Class is conceptually mobilized here as the larger
category, specified in detail through the image of elite; the labour move
ment achieves some degree of social, or at least economic inclusion, while
its leadership becomes politically assimilated upwards. As Bauman is at
pains to stress, this is a sociological, rather than strictly historical inter
pretation; its implication is that these processes are beyond reversibility, if
not beyond change. Artisans give way to the skilled, and they in turn to the
technically trained, white-collar workers of the post Second World War
period. Deskilling erodes the margins historically associated with skill. The
consolidation of the welfare state also serves to moderate the effects of
these developments, though less, Bauman claims, than is often thought
( 1 972: 235). The welfare state, together with the experience of full employ
ment, may have a levelling effect within the working class, or across its
strata, but not across classes. There is, in short, in the postwar period what
12 Zygmunt Bauman
Bauman refers to as an increasing standardization of the economic situ

ation of the English working class (1972: 237). If this was a long-term,
civilizational process then its achievements to this date were significant,
even as they assimilated the nineteenth century's outsiders into the social
mainstream. The welfare state, for its part, dysfunctioned in well-observed
ways but it also produced the cultural success shown in new senses
of security. Decreasing extremes of inequality promote increasing levels of
security and civility; this all in marked contrast, in the 1950s, to what was
to follow in the 1 980s. The point, from the later perspective developed say
in Memories of Class ( 1 982), is that labour in the postwar period was given
social, political and economic recognition. Labour was a legitimate social
presence, if not a social actor in the marxian sense; and it is this recognition
of legitimacy which has since been eroded, partly because the politics of
production has been eroded by the politics of consumption. On the other
hand, the politics of exclusion has seen the return of the stranger, this time
with a vengeance, just as the traditionally British status claims of birth have
been elongated into those of wealth, as the City replaces the country as the
place of prestige.
Between Class and Elite thus comes to fruition in the period of cor
poratism, or social partnership, where the recognition of labour as a social
presence is confirmed through the inclusion of its representatives in peak
decision-making processes in social as well as economic policy ( 1 972: 272-
3). As Bauman observes, with reference to the period work of G.D.H. Cole
and C. Wright Mills, trade unionism in consequence becomes more and
more a business movement and less and less a democratic fellowship of
equals - but how could it be other (1972: 272-8)? Similarly, the Labour
Party has become in this period a separate organizational structure, meta
morphosing in its class structure at three levels, in the social composition of
its elite, in the class composition of its members and voters, and in the
mutual relations between policy and the interests of various classes and
strata: 'At all three levels the Labour Party has ceased to be a purely
working class party. In composition, its elite is today a social mosaic' (1972:
279). Labour's transformation has taken it from a class party to a national
party. The labour movement, which was revolutionary in origin, has finally
in the 1950s produced what is simply a welfare state in which, as with the
middle classes after 1 832, a working class elite has been admitted into the
ranks of a selective governing group (1 972: 30 I). The trade union hierarchy
itself then emerges more clearly as an alternative means of securing social
mobility ( 1 972: 304), but it is no less legitimate for that purpose, not least of
all in a traditionalistic class culture where life chances are less than
meritocratic.
Working class radicalization, in this scenario, is possible rather than
probable; Bauman hesitates to predict the future on the basis of the
patterns of political sociology thus established. Nevertheless, the general
contours in Between Class and Elite indicate the accommodation of Labour,
whatever the cultural traces of non-conformism which might remain from
Class and labour 13
its formative moment in the nineteenth century. While Bauman does not
labour the early marxian theme of alienation in this text, he does work the
idea that it is the integration of the working class into capitalist society
which changes its nature, making of it a systemic actor rather than the
negation of the negation, the denial of everything capitalism stands for.
Bauman is at pains to stress that this was only one possible outcome in a
bundle of options; but it was the outcome which framed his subsequent
work, especially Memories of Class ( 1 982).
Memories of Class
'Memory is the after-life of history'. So opens Memories of Class, its

implications apparent: for while the retrospective time-frame of the 1 982
work is coextensive with that of Between Class and Elite ( 1 972), it also
pushes more firmly into the present and its possibilities, and the eighties are
a different presence. The subtitle of the book indicates a stronger sense of
the present as history, wedged in between memories of real or imagined
pasts and hopes for the future. Memories of Class - The Prehistory and
After-Life of Class in this way works a dual axis, or perhaps it even tells
-
two, connected but separable stories, one concerning the historiographical

projection of class backward, upon the transition to capitalism, the other
detailing the freezing of its mental apparatus into the postwar period.
Viewed as two separate stories, the earlier sequence is the sharper, even
though it results in working class accommodation into the system of
industrial capitalism, for in the formative period there is a higher level of
stress and creative tension between the actors and the results of their work.
The second, postwar story is rather a story about corporatism, where
working class ambitions have been established internally within the system
and have even to some extent been successfully achieved. What holds these
two stories, or axes, together is the sociological sensibility that class has
also been overloaded as a category. That working class movement of which
marxists expected everything has in a sense delivered it, by way of meal
tickets to the unequal banquet within.
Bauman's argument about memory seeks, however, to reach deeper than
this. For his is an anthropological claim, that we are creatures who
remember, and by necessity therefore also misremember, imagine, seek
order, generate degrees of chaos or repetition in tum, and so on. We are,
then, creatures governed by the after-life of our histories, personal and
collective. If modernity's central challenge to us is its demand that we cope
with and ourselves generate change, then one key concern is how we think
this process. Bauman's argument here is that class society was a kind of
unintended consequence of the struggle to preserve semblances of the past,
to save tradition or community from modernity or industrialism. Social
ism's roots as a practical movement, that is to say, are more fundamentally
reactive than progressivist. But of course such a task is by definition
14 Zygmunt Bauman
impossible, for the older medieval sensibilities and institutions cannot be

stretched this far; modernity tears them asunder. Ironically, then, the insti
tutional success of the class politics of labourism in the twentieth century
itself in tum embeds us into institutions which now also fall into crisis. The
postwar boom delivers, but it also delivers a kind of institutional inertia,
which results in dismay and widespread disarray when it, too, falters and
stumbles in the 1 970s.
Bauman does not make the explicit connection here, but his themes
concerning marxism are consistent with those canvassed by Heinz Lubasz
in his classic essay on Marx's own shift from liberalism to scientific social
ism during the 1 840s. As Lubasz shows, Marx's initial problematic was less
the proletarian subjection to the laws of surplus-value, and more given to
problems of popular suffering, the plight of the paupers, victims of the
erosion of habitual rights via the Enclosure Acts, the Wood Laws and so on
(Lubasz, 1 976; see also Bauman, 1 982 : 7). Marxism became along the path
of the nineteenth century a theory of the suffering internal slave, the heroic
but downtrodden proletarian, to the effective exclusion of the outsider, the
pauper. As radical critics from Castoriadis to Baudrillard then claimed,
marxism became a mirror of capitalist production. For Bauman - and I
think this is true across the extent of his work - the Weberian sensitivity to
exclusion outpaces the conventional marxist concern with the figure of the
proletarian and his exploitation. Bauman has understood all along that
there is one fate worse than exploitation, and it is not being exploited, but
being subject to economic and psychological exclusion instead. Outsiders,
that is to say, are always likely to head up the queue of potential victims.
A different indicator of Bauman's approach here is the way in which he
mobilizes the work not only of E.P. Thompson but also of Michel Foucault
in order to problematize the formation of the modem. Both historians,
after all, had written about discipline, about the moral economy, about that
difficult but vital part of the modem project which depended on making
subjects who would work, and who would comply. Prison, workhouse,
factory and economy ought in this optic to be aligned rather than detached
(Bauman, 1 982 : 8). Ontologically speaking, Bauman remains again more
open to the Weberian sense that power is multiform and ubiquitous; yet the
Foucauldian theme, that subjects can be expected to resist the compulsory
modernization of the world, is also evident. The direct conceptual link here
is to be located in Bauman's sense that the new power of modernity had
through its numerous institutions to chart the entire territory of life: it had
to come into direct and permanent contact with the body of the producer.
For as Marx observed, but then conceptually elided, labour-power is
always embodied, and the consolidation of factory civilization itself is based
on force (Bauman, 1 982: 1 1). When confronted with the new order,
historical memory now would portray the bliss and tranquillity destroyed
by the 'satanic mills'.
If the imaginary of the left was often caught up with the spell of Pro
metheus, molten steel and the muscular, masculine profile of the heroic
Class and labour 15
proletarian, then the imaginary resources available to the labourers often

came closer to romanticism's sense of loss and nostalgia for the green and
pleasant land. Yet already from the nineteenth century, the dominant
interpretation of labour struggles was economistic, presuming that labour's
primary goal in struggle was the 'right to the whole product of labour'. In
Bauman's eyes this critique is anachronistic. The point is not that labour
did not play capital's game, but rather that it only came to do so on
incorporation. The earlier, nineteenth century visions of labour were not
constructed in terms of distribution of the social product, so much as they
embodied a call to restore the old order ( 1 982: 1 3). The anachronism of the
view which casts labour as a systemic actor within capitalism even before
such invitations were potentially issued is that it, too, projects the categories
of class analysis back further than they will travel. While class images
therefore still shadow labour actors into the 1 950s, then, class concepts are
simultaneously projected backwards by marxist intellectuals who will
sacrifice anything to valorize class analysis itself. Labour historically loses
both its relative autonomy and its larger claims to the product, yet labour
also gains in this process the mixed blessing of intellectual advocacy at the
hands of radicals who identify with the proletariat but do not belong to it.
According to Bauman, then, the formation of workers into a class was
more powerfully a response to industrial than to capitalist culture. Yet
capitalism is the primary enemy identified for the workers by their self
appointed intellectual representatives. There was, then, a vital third class
actor in this story: these were the intellectuals, legislators aspirant later to
become the leaders themselves in Eastern Europe. Marxism, in this regard,
was the ideology of the intellectuals on the road to class power; but it was
not only that. For Bauman, too, was, had been a marxist, carried still
marxist memories, or utopias, even as he anticipated the devastating
critique which was in 1 987 to appear as Legislators and Interpreters. For
here Bauman described a process in which intellectual critique displaced
workers' concerns and sentiments while claiming to represent them. Marx's
two-class model, bourgeois against proletarian, became the general prism
through which leftist intellectuals interpreted the world, reading out their
own interests in the process. As Bauman observed, there had long been a
radical sense of unease about this process, beginning with Bakunin and
Machajski through to the work of Bruno Rizzi and James Burnham on The
Bureaucratization of the World and The Managerial Revolution, where, as
after Weber, it was bureaucrats, technocrats or managers, or even intel
lectuals who ruled the world and therefore replaced the bourgeoisie as the
enemy. Whether in its earlier permutations, as in Harold Lasswell's sugges
tion that the future lay with the 'permanent revolution of modernizing
intellectuals', or in the most recent critiques offered by Konrad and
Szelenyi or Alvin Gouldner, those intellectuals so adept in the fine art of
social ventriloquism now also were revealed as deeply interested and
implicated in power (Bauman, 1 982: 24-5). The East European resonances
were bound to be strong, whether the critique was Yugoslav, as in Djilas,
16 Zygmunt Bauman
Hungarian, with Konrad and Szelenyi, or with Polish resonances, in

Bauman's case: for in Soviet-type societies those who owned capital had
ceased to rule, yet new rulers were in abundance. But the new theorists were
also part of the problem, at the very same moment as they denounced it; for
this kind of critique was based on the identification of power with class, so
that the two-class model of capitalist society is reproduced and projected
back and forward at the expense of any other possible interpretations of the
present - or future (Bauman, 1 982: 28). All politics here in this view, which
Bauman renounces, is economics, which means that there is no such thing
as politics any more. For this, to anticipate, is precisely the problem of
corporatism, where the only politics admissible is that of competing GNP
shares.
Bauman's message, both analytical and social, is that the industrialist
mechanism of social reproduction and its mindset are nearing exhaustion.
Both as a way to live, and as a way to think, industrialism is in crisis, 'a
qualitatively new stage in history which can be passed only with a change in
the type of social power as seminal as the one which took place in the times
preceding the event of the industrial system' ( 1 982: 33). But it is not yet
called postmodern, at least not in 1 982; and while Bauman engages with the
most significant advocacy of postindustrialism, in the work of Alain
Touraine, no major nominal concessions are offered here to postindus
trialism either (Bauman, 1 982: 3 1).
Returning to the process of industrialization, Bauman's concern is that
the cause of labour dissent be respected, as political rather than econ
omically driven. The civilizing process of the modem project was based on
a new imperative to order within urban space, and it was this which elicited
resistance. Here the reformers return. In sympathy with Marx's Third
Thesis on Feuerbach - who educates the educators? - Bauman reminds
that the Enlightenment project drew too easy a distinction between those
who could perfect mankind and those who were to serve as objects of
enlightenment (Bauman, 1 982: 48). In sympathy with Feher and Heller,
Bauman here proposes that there are in effect several logics in modernity,
which is not reducible to capitalism. Discipline might run together with the
despotism of the factory, but it has other dynamics as well. The zeal of
Bentham's urge to reform humanity cannot be explained by a simple appeal
to the idea of class interests. Bauman's critical interest, in passing, is as
much in Chadwick, or symbolically in Fabianism as it is in the Foucauldian
obsession with the Panopticon. But in any case, the focus of Memories of
Class remains with work relations, and thus with the birth of the factory
( 1 982: 5 1 ), though the scope of his analysis is disarming, for Bauman also
connects up the factory to the imperial experience of slavery ( 1 982: 3).
Within the metropolis, the project of a new moral economy often associated
with Weber's idea of the Protestant Ethic also, however, played on images
of craft tradition, the job well done for its own sake rather than rattled
together ( 1 982: 60). Early factory culture was punitive, rather than efficient,
political, in this sense, rather than driven by capitalist economic rationality.
Class and labour 17
Industrialization was made possible less by the pursuit of a profit ethic than
a control ethic ( 1 982: 87). Capitalism, again, could logically therefore only
be part of this problem; the larger critical frame implied the problem of
modernity, and its own drive to order, that critical impulse which was to
hold up so much of Bauman's later work through Modernity and the
Holocaust ( l 989a) and Modernity and Ambivalence ( l 99 1 a).
Yet the older themes and memories still return, for author and subject
alike. For Bauman must traverse again here the analytical fields of Between
Class and Elite ( 1 972). How then did labour become a system-actor?
Labourism was not simply an extension of the politics of the guilds. Para
doxically, what later came to be considered the working-class movement
was born of resistance to enforced labour unification (Bauman, 1982: 88).
Yet the dignity of labour remains a constant theme, for labour is that rare
commodity which cannot actually be separated from its bearer, and labour
is therefore the commodity that speaks back, that says no ( 1 982: 94).
Conventional economics loses this insight when it substitutes economic
categories for the image of actual groups of people, but so then does
marxism ( 1 982: 1 09). Labour and Capital may be necessary abstract con
cepts, but it is their sentient, suffering bearers who actually hold the system
up; this is something Marx lost sight of, perhaps because he spent too long
seeking to decode the abstract culture of capital.
But the sentient, suffering actors have in the meantime, after the long
postwar boom, also to be reeducated as consumers, more, now, than as
producers; so at this point Bauman's focus shifts to the second axis, or story,
away from the development of capitalism towards its postwar reconfigura
tion. Now consumption looms large as economics, as does corporatism in
politics, and both reform culture.
One of Bauman's more recent collections of essays is Postmodernity and
its Discontents ( 1 997a); now, in Memories of Class he twists Freud's book
politically, turning to 'Corporatism and its Discontents' ( 1 982: ch. 5). Why
the fuss about corporatism? Corporatism became the name associated, as
Bauman offers it in acute summary, with the systemic economization of
politics. The twentieth century became identified, on this view, as that
period when politics was colonized by interest groups, and the older idea
that there was a contingent common good negotiable by other means
became laughably obsolescent, a throwback to the ancient Greeks. Cor
poratist arrangements might therefore advantage labour, but only as the
peak group representative of its economic constituency. Individual actors
within corporatist arrangements might thus gain legitimacy as representa
tives of producer groups, but never as citizens, and those citizens whose
identities lay outside producer groups could never be more than outsiders
(Bauman, 1 982: 1 29; Triado, 1 984; Beilharz, 1 994a). Politics in this scenario
would only approximate simulated politics through social contracts medi
ated via the state. The question of the good society would ever be lost in the
politics of the goods society; political issues proper could never transcend
questions of distribution. Politics proper might then disappear, as there
18 Zygmunt Bauman
could be nothing to disagree about, just a representative range of snouts

sharing the trough (Bauman, 1 982: 1 39).
The prospect of corporatism thus involves the potential closure of the
public sphere, where 'private interests' would now reign supreme. At the
same time, the politics of 'personality' stands in for the absent argument
about principles ( 1 982: 1 40). The absence of vigorous political dispute leads
to simulated politics, the daytime television skits of Ronald Reagan, later
the Bill and Monica Show. Classes become legitimated, but this kind of
class politics leads at best to cross-class solidarities between the represen
tatives of producer groups, to the exclusion of the outsiders. Economics
replaces politics; distributive issues replace substantive debates about the
good society. But even this corporatist outcome is unstable, restricted
largely to the postwar period, for it is dependent on the relative abundance
of Fordism, where production and consumption develop in tandem, and
the producers of automobiles, white goods and so on are also at the same
time their consumers. The possibility of corporatist arrangements therefore
hangs on the ongoing expectation of economic growth within national,
rather than global, economy. Corporatism is thus both simultaneously a
standard trend within postwar Fordist regimes and yet inherently unstable,
a tendential possibility rather than a necessary concrete trend ( 1 982: 1 59).
Class politics emerges through corporatism as a new possibility, only of a
radically displaced kind, where social contracts are pursued in the name of
classes as national actors. The right to the whole produce of labour is
renegotiated by tripartite means. The very possibility of oppositional
politics becomes blurred, because potentially disruptive of these fragile
strategies of crisis-management ( 1 982: 1 6 1 ). As Touraine argues, then,
labour becomes an agent of order. Politics, in a sense, moves outside the
system, which is both its strength and its fatal weakness.
The language of class now outlives its practical application. On Bauman's
interpretation, indeed, class is now part of the problem. Both the idea
of class politics and the practical political energies expended on the part of
the labour movement become invested within the system. Both the real
suffering, and the in-principle possibilities of change, lie outside the system,
though Bauman avoids the kind of politics-of-refusal advocated earlier by
Marcuse and later by Foucault. We cannot simply shift the historic vocation
of social change from the proletariat to the outsiders or the marginals, for
Bauman; if the world still needs changing, there is no magic conceptual wand
which can solve the problem by anointing any single social group as the
waiting saviour. The system now has its new victims, who often seem to
represent its earlier victims - not the organized ranks of the labour move
ment, but the new poor, the outsiders themselves, those new victims sacri
ficed to the momentary victory of corporatist arrangements ( 1982: 1 66).
But there remain internal social problems, and not only these problems
of exclusion. Throughout Bauman's work there can be detected a residual
ambivalence about social engineering. In Memories of Class, Bauman
identifies the waning will-to-reform as one factor crucial to this new
Class and labour 19
configuration o f political economy. The immediate postwar situation was

different, because it was based on a cross-class alliance which included the
outsiders in its purview, which spoke, indeed as T.H. Marshall did in
Citizenship and Social Class ( 1 950), of the rights of citizens rather than of
the rights of producers. Yet the goal of the labour movement in this context
was self-improvement, rather than equality, and the increasing hegemony of
the politics of consumption in the postwar boom saw the consolidation of
these kinds of indicators of what was to constitute social progress (Bauman,
1 982: 1 68). While the postwar politics of inclusion was not universal, it
nevertheless reformed the actors, locking their objectives into those of the
state.
The undoing of the postwar pact or historic settlement between labour,
capital and the middle classes thus disadvantages anew those whose original
plight was to stand outside these locations. Now Bauman's eyes tum else
where, outward, away from the implicitly or explicitly British case which is
the model for his analysis here, as earlier in Between Class and Elite ( 1 972).
Like that other great, this time nineteenth-century exile, his focus remains
on Britain as the paradigm case of capitalist development. Like Marx,
perhaps more so, Bauman connects these problems in tum into the larger
conceptual unit of the world system. Having taken a distance from the
Marcusean idea of an alliance of outsiders as the potentially revolutionary
force against the system, Bauman now identifies the Third World, rather
than the inner dynamics of British capitalism, as the major concern. The
cunning of history returns with the unfolding consequences of decoloniza
tion, which themselves return directly to the heart of the empire, to London,
to Toxteth, to Brixton ( 1 982: 1 72). Here, in a sense, the dynamics of
economic growth are simply mislocated, centralized rather than directed to
the peripheries. Yet it is also the case, as Bauman observes, that the critique
of growth remains a substantially middle class activity ( 1 982: 1 75). So the
critique of capitalist overdevelopment holds all the ambivalence that we, as
middle class critics are; we know that this rapacious kind of development
cannot occur without drastic effects, but we are also vulnerable, in this
situation, to the charge that we want to keep the civilizational proceeds to
ourselves: 'The age-old wisdom of the rich, "money does not bring happi
ness", has always had a hollow ring for the poor' ( 1 982: 1 78). More, the
middle class snobbery which has also affected the left, and Critical Theory
in particular, plays on themes of aristocratic radicalism too arrogant any
longer to defend. These are the problems facing democratic radicals today.
We cannot either give up our criticisms of the way we live, but nor can we
decide for others what is in good and bad taste, high or low culture - at least
not for others. The temptation of the critics, of course, is also the urge to
legislate, which as Bauman knows is at its most poisonous when it is
concealed or invisible, presumed as the right of intellectual superiors rather
than earned through trust and trial and error.
But criticize we must, for the world we inhabit seems also to decline all
around us. While there are always to be found around us examples of the
20 Zygmunt Bauman
goodness of people and their strivings, the degradations of consumer culture

also seem to indicate some kind of decivilizing process underway ( 1 982:
1 80). Obviously we all need to consume, and only the puritans among us
will deny this. When however consumption also consumes us, when com
modified pleasures replace all other senses of meaning or obligation, then
the very idea of the social and its semantic extension, into socialism, decays
before us. If economic growth brings no guarantee of happiness, then its end
suggests rather the expansion of resentment. Either way, there seems to be
less indication than ever before that modernity can continue to call out
civility. The insiders are too busy partying to take in what happens outside,
until they get mugged or their car mirrors are ripped off.
Returning to more conventionally sociological register, Bauman quotes
Claus Offe, whose work in the critique of political economy of the
Keynesian Welfare State he often in this book relies upon. The problem is
that 'under State-regulated capitalism, all-out class conflict is no longer the
driving force of social change. A horizontal pattern of inequality, that is,
disparities between vital areas, is emerging increasingly into the foreground'
(Bauman, 1 982: 1 86). Viewed graphically, as sociologists are wont to do, the
crude line of division in society is no longer vertical, between two warring
camps or classes, but horizontal, between labour and capital inside the
system and the excluded, outside and below it. Bauman did not in the
writing of this book have Jeremy Seabrook's 1 985 classic Landscapes of
Poverty ( 1 985) available to him, but there are elective affinities between the
two critical projects, and by Legislators and Interpreters (Bauman, 1 987)
Seabrook's work became grist to Bauman's mill, not least in the idea that
Britain once again had become 'two nations'. Part of the power of
Seabrook's work is exactly in its sensitivity to the dimension of both local
and global outsiders across the empire, cockneys and Indians in London
and in Bombay, cockney Indians in Brixton. There are outsiders, that is to
say, both inside and outside the immediate boundaries of the nation-state.
Further, this pauperization effect has a structural logic as well as a practical
effect. The pauperization of groups or categories of people is a secondary
effect of the pauperization of specific areas of public life ( 1 982: 1 87). Offe's
proposal that corporatism redefines patterns of exclusion horizontally
rather than vertically then opens the possibility that globalization, or life
after corporatism, will punish those outside the renewed boundaries even
more ruthlessly than before. As Bauman is later to argue, the victims of
corporatism are simply ignored; after corporatism, in globalization they are
to be held up as horror stories, cases of failure to be shamed, to be made
examples of. The excluded have no voice, their grievances have no specific
culprit, nor a concrete adversary. The inevitable result of structural
unemployment is the generation of a permanent underclass ( 1 982: 1 78-88).
Beneath this, or beyond it, the problem remains that even redistribution
does not deal out dignity.
Memories of Class then works this elongated theme, that while class
matters it has been analytically overvalued by those who have projected it
Class and labour 2 1
back, misleadingly, onto early practices of dissent, and then it has come
back to haunt the postwar society which institutionalizes it while
relocating the extremities of suffering beyond the labour movement.
Memory counts, in this process, because we cannot think without it, yet it
disables as well as enables us. Projected back upon different histories, the
concept of class colonizes anti-industrial struggles, subsuming them to a
marxian narrative at the expense of their specific content. The after-life of
class then carries on through the period of corporatism, even when class
has ceased to denote struggle or difference or to connote refusal or dignity.
As Bauman concludes, though, we can as humans probably do no other,
though there always remains hope that we might do better. Memory works
by assimilation; we absorb and accommodate new experience into the old,
familiar picture of the world even when this involves violation ( 1 982: 1 92).
The accumulation of anomalies over time then sometimes results in the
overburdening and collapse of the old ways of thinking. All these things
matter because what we define as real has practical consequences. We
reproduce concepts and ideas even at the expense of what goes on around
us; and yet, we learn, and the old ideas do still enable, do still 'work', even
as they disable, for we are creatures of habit, even at our most potentially
innovative moments. The point, then, for Bauman, is that concepts have
an astonishing capacity for deferring their demise and outlining the reality
they once connoted, and this is nowhere more evident than in the case of
class ( 1 982: 1 93). The result is that class, alongside commodity the most
critical of marxian concepts, becomes world-denying in the ease with
which it self-reproduces. For the conclusion of Memories of Class follows,
that:
the historically conditioned tendency to perceive the structure and dynamic

tendencies of the late capitalist society through the prism of the struggle between
two great classes which confronted each other inside the ascendant capitalist
industry clouds rather than clarifies vision. (Bauman, 1 982: 1 93)
The issue is not that the marxists were hesitant to leave their studies, but
rather that they like others saw only what they wanted, defended the
paradigm or the explanation at the expense of what stood to be explained,
and this partly because of the will-to-Iegislate already in their heads.
Industry therefore always looked like capitalism, suffering like exploitation,
the victims like proletarians.
The way out? If marxism singed the fingers, then perhaps the problem of
interpreting the world would become more immediately urgent than that
of changing it; for the coupling of those two verbs also seemed indicative of
the problem of the intellectuals on the road to power, 'we' interpret, 'we'
change, to know is to understand and to lead. As generations since Marx
had also understood, however, socialism could by definition never be
legislated; you cannot give autonomy away to others. And it is autonomy,
22 Zygmunt Bauman
here, which is at risk for Bauman. Returning momentarily to the earlier

phase of capitalism-in-the-making, he reminds that
The formation of class society was the outcome of the submission of the vast
masses of expropriated and unemployed poor into a new type of work discipline,
which entailed control over their bodies and the denial of their personal
autonomy as producers. ( 1 982: 1 95)
If autonomy is that which is lost, it must in turn be sought again. Politics

would then become more political, less economic, again. Politics might again
become concerned with the organization of social life, self-management,
restitution and preservation of human control over the ways in which human
bodily and spiritual potential is developed and deployed ( 1 982: 1 97).
Can politics reclaim control over economics? Facing the millennium, the
prospects are less than cheerful, though the possibility always remains
that the dominant social paradigm itself will collapse under the weight of
its own anomalies. Humans retain the capacity to learn, however slowly; in
this regard Bauman's sympathies touch those of Castoriadis, for whom the
human need for autonomy might diminish but will never disappear.
At the same time, the shifts in Bauman's own ways of thinking might here
be observed. If marxism was to collapse under the weight of its own hopes,
the idea of the alternative possible society would nevertheless remain. While
the focus of Between Class and Elite would bring the analysis into the middle
of the Fordist period, the 1950s, the idea of Fordism as a phase of devel
opment would of course only emerge later, as Fordism and the national
social policy of Keynesianism began to unravel, though the American story
of making the modern was arguably longer (Smith, 1 993). Fordism, in short,
only really began to emerge in clear contours when talk began of Post
Fordism, just as the stronger debate about modernity was also called out by
the idea that it had passed, called postmodernity. The crucial conceptual shift
in Memories of Class is not so directly that signalled by the idea that class
analysis itself was inflationary, however. What the postwar period indicated
practically, in the west, was the possibility that the older emphasis on
production might now give way to the political economy of consumption.
Labour's part in this transformation could be seen, in retrospect, in the
belated enthusiasm for the policy of distributive justice. The early slogan
concerning the 'right to the whole product of labour' referred to the question
of who consumes. As labour was fully commodified, workers' struggles
became fundamentally consumers' struggles (Calhoun, 1 982: 284). If the
identity politics of labour in the nineteenth century connected to the politics
of production, then midway into the twentieth century the indications were
that consumption would now be central to identity. Labour, in turn, was not
merely the recipient but also the agent of this process. The brief prospects of
postwar corporatism sought then to consolidate the interests of producer
groups as consumers of managed shares of GNP. Then the process we now,
again after the fact, call globalization changed all that.
Class and labour 23
Work, Consumerism and the New Poor
In 1 998 Bauman was to publish two books returning to and developing these
themes. One, on globalization, will be discussed in Chapter 6. The other,
Work, Consumerism and the New Poor ( I 998b), involved treading again after
the postmodern turn these paths of work and consumption, inclusion and
exclusion.
Sociologists in the 1 960s seem, in retrospect, to have perhaps run the risk
of replacing the earlier obsession with mass society with a new slogan:
consumer society. Ideas of postindustrialism were sometimes taken to indi
cate an end to work, or the arrival of the leisure society. It was as though the
Protestant Ethic, which had actually or metaphorically to be beaten into
people, could now, amidst potential abundance, be relieved. Such premature
enthusiasms for the prospect of a leisure society were to evaporate amidst the
rediscovery of scarcity, or at least of the Post Fordist revival of scarcity for
some combined with abundance for others. Yet work in the meantime had
also become socially enshrined, and this not only because paid work and
available consumption levels were often connected. Work had become a
norm, a good in itself, in modem times.
Bauman's interim turn into ethics connected all this together powerfully.
For the work ethic is also that, a moral insistence or exhortation. And
whenever you hear people talking about ethics, you may be pretty sure that
someone somewhere is dissatisfied with the way some other people behave and
would rather have them behaving differently. Hardly ever [did] this advice make
more sense than in the case of the work ethic. ( l 998b: 6)
The need for work - for advancement, motion, progress, development - is

necessarily caught up with the extension of systems of needs. Endless work
comes together with the open-ended need to consume. As Bauman indicates
in Memories of Class ( 1 982), and reminds us again here, the Protestant Ethic
understood as performance principle was in fact an attempt to resuscitate
basically preindustrial or craft work attitudes, under new conditions that
rendered them meaningless ( 1 998b: 7). The regime had to be generated; it
was one of modernity's greatest challenges. Loosened, perhaps, into post
modem times, it could hardly be cancelled; the new model of desirable
behaviour would rather be work hard, play hard. The work ethic is therefore
a vital sign of modern aspiration, and not only a tool of would-be capitalist
regulation. For symbolically it is connected into what Castoriadis ( 1 987)
would call the fantasy of rational mastery. In Bauman's understanding, the
work ethic would privilege 'what can be done' over 'what needs to be done';
it would encourage the setting of social goals in terms of the Promethean
or Faustian sense that humans would always feel compelled to aspire after
that which is technically possible, regardless of its desirability or ethical
consequences ( I 998b: 8). Part of the ruthless modem attack on tradition also
took in this strategy, where the idea of limits or limited needs-structures
24 Zygmunt Bauman
could be ridiculed as old hat. Mere 'traditionalism' was but an obstacle on

the road to happiness.
Bauman's own memories of working on the nineteenth century haunt his
contemporary narrative. For the astonishing feature of the postmodern
story is precisely its replay or replacing of the nineteenth century discourse
and practice of pauperism. Disraeli, the 'Two Nations', Carlyle, Gaskell,
Ricardo and Mayhew, Bentham and Chadwick, all these voices come back
to haunt us, as 'less eligibility' resurfaces and welfare talk, itself born of the
culture of noblesse oblige, returns now without the compassion which in
principle animated its precedents. Today's poorhouse is in the head; its
forms of confinement may again be the dubious right to sleep under the
overpass rather than in more vigorously policed spaces. Work, in short, or
its absence is central to the new industrial mode of regulation. Even in its
formative phases, more perhaps in the United States than in continental
Europe, however, work was geared into the idea of more, rather than
better. Taylorism or scientific management, according to Bauman, worked
on developing money incentives rather than work ethics or company
loyalties ( l 998b: 20- 1). Work became the price of consumer freedom,
opening that long process already alluded to in which consumption stands
in for production as a primary source of loyalty. If America led the way in
this experience, then it also came to represent the acme of the modern
project, which all should follow on pain of extinction.
Whether we learn to love work, as Big Brother, or whether we simply
accept it as the precondition of life, its value becomes set in concrete. Work
may therefore, despite Weber, not strike us any longer as a superior way of
life, but merely as an instrument to earn more money, not to seek the good
or the better life but more. The message retreads the memory paths of
Bauman's 1 982 work:
What used to be at the start of industrial society a power conflict, a fight for
autonomy and freedom, has been gradually yet relentlessly channelled into the
struggle for a greater share of the surplus while tacitly accepting the existent
power structure and striking its rectification out from the agenda. Increasingly, it
was the ability to win a greater share of the surplus that came to be seen as the
definitive way to restore that human dignity which was lost when the craftsmen
turned into factory hands. ( I 998b: 2 1 )
Wage differentials, not claims to the nobility of labour, now substituted for
the loss. Labour and capital, insiders and outsiders all took up the noon
ward race. Quality gave way to quantity and to the monetization of
everyday life. All, in this sense, became capitalists actual or aspirant; such
were the blessings of the image of upward social mobility. In this regard, at
least, Weber's expectations were accurate; the legitimacy of capitalism
depends crucially on its cultural internalization by rich and poor alike, less
now through claims to morality than to the promise of self-advancement.
Finally, as Bauman indicates in opening up this optic, it was differences in
Class and labour 25
this sphere which help to explain the struggles between the two dominant
versions of modernity in the twentieth century, Communism and Capital
ism. Communism, in this sense, was more faithful to modernism as a
production culture; consumption was always viewed as secondary, even up
to Khrushchev. Capitalism outperformed Communism, pace Khrushchev,
exactly because it delivered shoes and books as well as tanks and nails. The
Soviet Union had hoped to bury capitalism with producer goods like these,
not with consumer goods; but consumption won out, as McDonalds in
Moscow illustrates ( l 998b: 22). Yet what this results in, as Bauman puts it,
is the long-term replacement of the work ethic by the aesthetic of con
sumption. Post-Panopticon, consumption becomes the new and dominant
form of self-regulation ( 1 998b: 24). Self-choice and the contingent identity
in the supermarket or mall replaces citizenship in the workplace or politics
in the domestic sphere.
The language of modernity varies, in Bauman's hands, as we will see
further later. Often our modernity, our today is for Bauman postmodern,
especially in the sense that it is and feels itself to be after the high modern
ism, say, of the 1 950s, when all seemed certain, clear and fixed, and neatly
divided between communist and capitalist paradigms. In passing, in this
text, Bauman indicates a different and suggestive way of thinking or
naming these phases. In the industrial phase of modernity, he suggests here,
one fact was beyond all question: that everyone's primary identity be as
producer, or provider. In modernity mark two, it follows, that we inhabit
the modernity of consumers, where each is a consumer before all else
( l 998b: 26). As an old marxist, of course, Bauman is well aware that every
act of production is also an act of consumption; in what he calls modernity
mark two, however, not every act of consumption is also an act of pro
duction. Production remains, but consumption rules, both economically
and socially. So there now emerges a sort of pre-ordained harmony or
resonance between these transient qualities of consumer life and the
ambivalence and contingency endemic to contemporary identity-concerns.
Identities, just like consumer goods, are mobile, to be appropriated and
possessed, but in order to be consumed, to disappear again, in a process
that ends only with death ( l 998b: 29). Modernity, phase one or two, is the
epoch of the spirit of restlessness. No stasis, no stable state is possible in
economy or in life.
The moral, or rather ethical issue here for Bauman is that consumption
society erodes social solidarity. Thus for the first time relatively affluent
middle class citizens will approve welfare cuts provided that these go
together with tax cuts or personal benefits. Thus the citizen, too, becomes
refigured as the consumer, he or she who possesses not solidarity or
belonging so much as the means ( l 998b: 30). The shift in work solidarity is
equally profound. Producers can fulfil their vocation only collectively;
producers are together even when they act apart. Consumption, by com
parison, is anomic, thoroughly individuated. There is no such concrete
experience as 'collective consumption'. Consumers are alone even when
26 Zygm unt Bauman
they act together: 'It is aesthetics, not ethics, that is deployed to integrate
the society of consumers, to keep it on course and time and again salvage it
from crises' ( 1 998b: 3 1 ). Images of the personal sublime replace those of
duty to the other. Even the idea of duty itself begins to look silly, tawdry,
old hat, a value for 'losers' . This is a long way even from the 1 950s, as
Bauman tells, because the period idea of full employment implied work
both as a right and as a duty. The high modernism embodied in the
Keynesian Welfare State may have been both conformist and masculinist,
but it was open in principle to the politics of inclusion. Ergo the difficulty
we have coming to grips with the idea of the 'working poor', given the
historical coupling of the idea of work and that of a decent income ( 1 998b:
37). Poverty, of course, is a social stigma, but working poverty is a
quandary which has somehow still to refer to weaknesses in the actors
involved rather than in the social arrangements which call out their
condition. The new poor of modernity phase two may therefore bear a
double stigma; that of not working, compounded by the inability suffi
ciently to engage in socially approved levels or kinds of consumption. They
are what Bauman refers to as flawed consumers ( l 998b: 38). If our primary
duty now is to consume, then the flawed consumer is a kind of blot on the
modem landscape. Our task, before God, is to strive for perennial pleasure,
eternal happiness, that is, for anything the other side of boredom:
But to get rid of boredom one needs money; even more than money one needs
to stave off the spectre of boredom once for all . . . . Money is the entry permit to
places where remedies against boredom are peddled (like shopping malls, amuse
ment parks, or 'health and fitness centres'). ( 1 998b: 39)
Money becomes the passport in modernity, to link into another Bauman

motif; for money divides us into tourists and vagabonds, travellers through
modernity with the means, or without, those with itineraries and those
compelled to move on.
Thrill-seeking connects also into crime and violence. Challenging the
forces of law-and-order, in this scenario, may well become the poor man's
practical substitute for the affluent consumer's well-tempered anti-boredom
adventures ( l 998b: 39). As Robert Musil ( 1 995) observes, violence is a
simple, concrete act in a complex, abstract world; little wonder it attracts.
Ours, then, is the dissatisfied society, where as Seabrook observes, the worst
confession would be to declare that one was satisfied with one's lot
(Bauman, 1 998b: 40). Now Bauman returns to the Keynesian Welfare State
as a symptom of and response to these developments. Probably all of us
living through the heyday of the postwar period were inclined to view the
welfare state as part of the problem rather than the solution (Beilharz,
Considine and Watts, 1992). Bauman, too, might reasonably be expected to
have more than a passing sneer at its results. The state has committed as
many heinous crimes as capital, by any account; yet the modern state has
also historically been tied to the idea of citizenship and the kinds of
Class and labour 27
material provision which might promote it. In fact, Bauman's appraisal of

the welfare state is more positive than might be anticipated, in part,
perhaps, because he seems as interested in potential as in results. The idea
of the welfare state, as Bauman observes, was typically positive rather than
minimalist in design; it held out the hope of something more than mere
survival. Its aims, historically, were more like survival in dignity, as under
stood in a given society at a given time (Bauman, 1 998b: 45). More
generally, and in sympathy with the work of Claus Offe, Bauman views the
Keynesian Welfare State as politically significant because it opens the in
principle possibility that work and income can be uncoupled ( 1 998b: 45).
Yet more than Offe imagined in the period of his most creative work in this
regard, in the 1 980s the welfare state is also reversible, and it has in fact
been reversed in most settings known to us, as citizens have been econ
omized, restructured in the later 1980s as consumers or clients. Even the
leading institutions of the welfare state - health care systems, universities,
public transport facilities - now are based on inclusion and exclusion via
the cash nexus. So far away do we now seem from these senses of inclusion
and dignity, even when based on inequality, that now even Beveridge's
vision of the good society becomes attractive again ( I 998b: 47). Plainly
Bauman prefers universalism to targeting in social policy, for all the reasons
advocates like Richard Titmuss made plain. Even if we tire of Durkheim,
the most routine of sociologists, we are stuck with his residual sense that
community will be constructed or it will not be at all. Solidarity is not
somehow naturally given, by class or by gender or by ethnic origins; it is
something we must work at. Since Thatcher, and now with Blair, however,
ethics, the need of the other, is increasingly subsumed to a certain economy
of interest. Means-testing divides rather than integrates; even the principle
of social inclusion has now been abandoned as a fiscal luxury.
This is not, however, merely a tawdry political story about the failure of
the parliamentary will-to-reform. Neoliberalism is rather the result than the
cause of this process of decline in social solidarity. The first question to be
answered when we confront this seachange is why neoliberalism was so well
received. The rise of neoconservative elites is not the cause, or the expla
nation, but itself requires an explanation. The focus ought then shift to the
contradictions of the Keynesian Welfare State itself. For the welfare state's
commitment to full employment opened and extended its formal role in
the ongoing process of the 'recommodification of labour' ( l 998b: 52). In
tandem with the long boom, the welfare state project indirectly supported
consumerism itself, undermining the prospect of citizenship in the process.
Socializing the reproduction costs of labour was also to consumerize them
in effect. The end of this story, however, results not in the reproduction of
labour but in its expulsion. How wrong Marx was, to imagine even
hypothetically that all potential labour-power would be commodified, even
subject to the moderating effects of the reserve army of unemployed.
Logically, Marx's labour theory of value in Capital could never be replaced
by the technological inputs to value-creation in, say, the Grundrisse. Marx
28 Zygm unt Bauman
could not imagine the possibility of capitalism without labour, or at least

without labour as we came to know it, massified and organized or organ
izable. The 'recommodification of labour strategy' pursued by the welfare
state on behalf of capitalism could only survive as long as profitable pro
duction depended on the increasing contribution and available volume of
labour (Bauman, 1998b: 53-4).
The Marx of The Communist Manifesto, as many commentators left and
right have recently observed in the meantime, did indeed offer the acute
version of the anticipated scenario we now know as globalization. Capital
ism comes now to work through ships with 'flags of convenience', knowing
no home, ignoring the fate of geographically fixed workers. This seems, as
Bauman puts it, to be the logic of late modem capitalist production: having
manoeuvred itself into the use of consumer desires as the major mobilizing,
integrating force of postmodernity, capital tends in the long run to 'price
labour out of work' . As Joseph Schumpeter was later to term this process
out of Marx, creative destruction was to become the hallmark of capitalist
progress. The error of sociologists, marxists included, was as ever to
imagine the present phase, whatever it is, as stable rather than transient. So
the reserve army still exists, only now it is global in reach, while welfare
provisions, such as they are, remain local (Bauman, 1 998b: 54). The
denationalization of economies makes the welfare state redundant, then, as
capital can now afford to be indifferent towards the socialization or
recommodification of labour. As a result a major problem emerges for
social democracy. For capital can be persuaded to stay, say, in Britain or in
Australia, only on the condition that governments oversee the reduction of
local labour costs. The old 1 960s fears concerning 'capital flight' in the face
of governments with reforming intentions become a standard expectation of
everyday political life. Post Fordist, on Bauman's account, means also post
welfarist; the image of the high-wage, high-consumption relatively closed
national economy is now made to look like a Keynesian fantasy, like
digging holes and filling them in again. Now the proletarians dig only their
own graves, through overwork and superexploitation.
Bauman does not emphatically mobilize the language of class here, but
the problem he describes could also be explained in terms of the collapse of
the postwar class alliances which held up social democratic experience
around the western world. The middle class in the 1 950s benefited
materially from the welfare state, perhaps even disproportionately so; but
they also contributed, and universalism in social policy opened the in
principle possibility that denizens of different class backgrounds might
encounter each other as citizens. Now, today, the middle class is not only
allowed but is encouraged to take all available opting-out clauses. The
'median voter' has apparently grown in confidence, even in this new age of
uncertainty, and seems to be satisfied that he and his family (some things
remaining equal, or rather unequal) can cope with the challenges of life
without contributing to the costs of the state-maintained safety-net. Or else,
perhaps, the new mood is not so much reflective of a newfound self-
Class and labour 29
confidence as it is a sober reflection of the fact that the alternatives to self

reliance are increasingly unattractive. Money in the pocket appeals, after
all, these days, more than abstract claims to state or public provision where
the latter conjures up images of queues, delays and something less than
'value for money'. Bauman quotes Serge Halimi to emphasize his claim,
that increasingly in the public perception 'programmes for the poor are
poor programmes' ( l 998b: 57). The popularity of welfare protection having
evaporated, the middle classes agree to its abolition.
The logic of consumerism thus finds its way also into the heart of the
welfare state and its institutions. The formal mechanisms called 'choice'
insinuate themselves here as well. To depend upon welfare is to have no say
in the matter, again to be a flawed or deficient consumer, even if the 'choice'
itself is empty or meaningless: 'The no-choice situation - taking what one is
given and solely because nothing else is on offer, having no voice in the
selection - is accordingly the anti-value of the consumer society' ( l 998b:
58). Markets therefore claim to facilitate difference, whereas welfare
identifies the sameness of its citizens as the operative basis of its activities.
Even if the state-offered services were of much better quality than they are,
they would still be burdened with the fundamental flaw of being outside the
scope of the allegedly free consumer choice.
But as Bauman has already indicated, to rehearse all these kinds of
analyses and criticisms is still to leave unanswered the riddle, how did this
come to be? How is it that citizen now means consumer? One possible
explanation Bauman offers, which opens rather than closes the issue, has to
do with the pursuit of dignity, and the backfiring or unintended conse
quences of the affirmative action mentality which underlies much ordinary
welfare strategy. Affirmative action thinking, according to Bauman, not
only riles whites in America but also those numerous African-Americans
who want to 'arrive' or 'make it' by themselves. Social dignity, on this
account, is not something perceived as a gift so much as a reward for
conscious effort, personal talent or diligent work. Ironically, however, the
confidence which the originally subaltern get to make it on their own itself
results in part from welfare's aspirations to citizenship. To put it differently,
the aspiration of the welfare state is exactly to level the so-called playing
field a little. Thanks to positive discrimination, in short, a newly-self
confident black middle class has been born ( l 998b: 6 1), this after rather
than because of Roosevelt or the New Deal. Affirmative action also then
breeds its own gravediggers; and so in social policy, as in life, it goes. As
Bauman summarizes, the
Welfare State came nowhere near the fulfilment of its founding fathers' dreams of
exterminating once and for all poverty, humiliation and despondency; yet it did
produce a large enough generation of well-educated, healthy, self-assured, self
reliant, self-confident people, jealous of their freshly acquired independence to cut
the ground from beneath the popular support for the idea that it is a duty of
those who have succeeded to help along those who go on failing. It is to the ears
30 Zygmunt Bauman
of this generation, empowered by the Welfare State - the 'self-made' men who
would not be self-made if not for the material assistance or reassuring impact of a
ready-to-help community - that the arguments about the disempowering impact
of collective insurance and social wages are most telling. ( I 998b: 6 1 )
The consequent problem, of course, is that we know that the effects of this
process will be dire in the long term; so far, we have only been witness to
the possibilities and the beginnings of decay and decadence. The decon
struction of the welfare state will result in problems which would make us
regret these processes, if only the 'we' who reaped the whirlwind was the
same generation as the we who authorized or submitted to it.
The underclass will haunt us again, those of us who escape its clutches;
the poor will always be with us, only in ways both too reminiscent of the
nineteenth century and too pressingly present and real. The older pauper
ism could be justified sneeringly by its superiors as the plight of the ne'er do
wells. At that time, as Bauman says, labour was effectively the sole source
of wealth; to produce more, and to involve more labour in the process of
production meant very much the same thing ( l 998b: 63). In this setting, the
work ethic meant something; it offered the in-principle prospect of social
harmony or at least inclusion: 'The idea of work as the route leading
simultaneously towards a wealthy nation and out of individual poverty
rang true' ( l 998b: 63). Nowadays economic growth and job growth are no
longer unproblematically correlated, but rather are at cross-purposes; tech
nological progress is measured by the replacement or elimination of labour
( l 998b: 65). What this means, in short, is that capital can no longer 'afford'
a working class; the new century, the new millennium opens the possibility
of capitalism after labour, or at least after the labour movement. 'Working
class', as the category of subordinate or subaltern actors, now gives way to
'underclass', underground, outside society, outside hierarchy ( l 998b: 66; see
also Beilharz, 1 994b). This class Marx did recognize, as quickly as he was to
dismiss it as the lumpenproletariat, the 'dangerous class', the class in rags.
Yet the idea of 'underclass' will not really do, for Bauman, as like many
other concepts it offers a classificatory response to a moral or ethical as well
as sociological problem. The idea of 'underclass', of course, has a history of
its own, growing out of the Cold War and the subordinate status of
African-Americans; so there are already reasons why perhaps the category
should be handled with care, or will not travel.
'Underclass' indicates obsolescence, for its victims are disposable, and this
may well be all they have in common. Like weeds, the undcrclass take up
resources but fail to contribute. They are useless at best, dangerous at worst
(Bauman, 1 998b: 66). As a danger, they become useful, however, in terms of
the potential for moral panic; these are the socially useful bad examples,
those who have taken the human paths to be avoided. The idea of 'under
class' nevertheless serves a political as well as a normative or classificatory
purpose; beggars, addicts or teenage single mothers are thrown together as a
category in this as an exhortation for the decent public; 'thou shalt not'. The
Class and labour 3 1
meaning o f underclass, then, i s politically driven and transient. For as

Bauman observes, 'underclass' in its earliest usage, by Myrdal in 1 963,
referred to victims of exclusion through economic processes, not to social
failures as scarecrows. These outsiders, in the meantime, have been demon
ized, othered, reconstructed as enemies. The victims now are habitually
blamed, as though they have chosen exclusion. The mobilization of the
underclass phenomenon thus normalizes the problem of poverty at the same
time as it marginalizes it (Bauman, 1 998b: 7 1 ). We can forget, or overlook
the masses of the poor because of our obsession with these particular
demons, drug-crazed and rapacious. The 'merely' poor simply disappear
from sight. Bauman's summary is as powerful as it is painful:
in the beginning, the work ethic was a highly effective means to fill up the
factories hungry for more labour. With labour turning fast into an obstacle to
higher productivity, work ethic still has a role to play - but this time as an
effective means to wash clean all the hands and consciences inside 'the accepted
boundaries of society' of the guilt of abandoning a large number of their fellow
citizens to permanent redundancy. Purity of hands and consciences is reached by
the twin measure of the moral condemnation of the poor and the moral
absolution of the rest. ( I 998b: 72)
The poor, then, fail finally to act as citizens because they fail as con
sumers. Inasmuch as identity is consumed, purchased, exclusion from
consumption involves the denial of mainstream forms of recognition. The
enemies of society are no longer those rabid revolutionaries but the out
siders, those inner demons who are deprived of the right to consume suffi
ciently and who are then stigmatized for their apparent choice of this
refusal. Not revolutionaries, but the criminal classes are now our greatest
fear. And none of this can be sidelined as incidental: for linking poverty to
criminality helps to banish the poor from the realms of ordinary moral
obligation ( l 998b: 77). Law stands in for morality where ethics is weak, or
else absent. This process of generating the poor as counter example, itself
generalizing, also has a more general social trend attached to it. Bauman
links it to this larger trend of 'adiaphorization', that process whereby
ethical opprobrium is separated out from morally repugnant acts ( I 998b:
80). All around us, but perhaps nowhere as obviously as on television or
video-games, we encounter the naturalization of violence and suffering,
examples of which until recently would have drawn responses of horror,
then sympathy. The rules of 'anything goes' indicate that ultimately,
everything is permissible. Adiaphorization thus leads towards the increased
presence of nihilism, where we neither approve nor disapprove, say, of
representations of human cruelty, but are merely indifferent to them. Pulp
Fiction becomes just another movie, just a further distraction. Virtual death
on film, real death on the television news, it all blurs as we grab for the
remote or order pizza.
32 Zygmunt Bauman
Moral impulse can never be shifted completely; and here Bauman's

suggestion is that we moderns, or postmoderns, both ritualize and com
mercialize moral response to deprivation, repackaging it through periodic
'carnivals of charity' like Live-Aid. Morality becomes a media morality
play. We offer our momentary remorse, and then get back to the real world
of consumption. In order to do this with clear conscience, however, we
citizen-consumers must perforce deny our sociality, our dependence, as well
as our morality. So it is that 'dependency', too, becomes a dirty word, even
though dependency of the other on me is but a mirror image of my own
responsibility ( l 998b: 80). The patterns of order we choose thus translate
into our norms, displacing the others. Norm also involves normalizing, and
the abnormal. Yet this all smells of crises, not of success. For as Castoriadis
puts it, and Bauman concurs with his judgement, the crisis of the western
world consists in that it stopped putting itself in question. We can revive the
sense of question, for example, by discussing again Claus Offe's suggestion
that we need to uncouple work and income or dignity and money (Bauman,
1 998b: 95). This means to open, again, those horizons called utopia, not in
naive hope but because our world has changed, and may by that virtue
change again.
Ufe After Class
Class was the great hope of the marxism which carried on from Marx's
nineteenth-century legacy through Kautsky to Lukacs and later, to
Althusser. The failure of the working class to live up to the vocation which
marxism had ascribed to it led to disillusion and to the collapse of the
western left. From the outside, the story must look rather hilarious, if not
tragic; marxists had expected everything of a class they had adopted, and
which then lapsed in turn into nothingness, or else they nursed their
residual fantasies for later, when that class failed to live up to the task they
ascribed it. Bauman's own path through this labyrinth was different,
because even while his earlier work is more marxist and optimistic in tenor,
he avoided both the over-investment and the subsequent disillusion with
class. As Bauman would later argue, more fully, for example, in Modernity
and Ambivalence ( 1 99 1a), the very idea of classification runs the risk that it
tells more about the classifiers than the classified. To classify may be
necessary, but it is also to objectify, which then leads to dismay when the
world fails to live out the expectations which we at an earlier moment have
put upon it.
Class, in Bauman's writing, works both as a category and as a name for
those bundles of experience that are associated with particular roles or
places in the division of labour or the order of domination. His is not,
therefore, a frame of interpretation within which we encounter the 'end of
class'. What we follow through Bauman's writing on class is rather an
expansion of the category of suffering or exploitation from class, in the
Class and labour 33
closer sense, to domination or especially exclusion as the work progresses.

Class remains a powerful way to think about the suffering and the
validation of the working population in the twentieth century, when politics
and culture change, when their representatives become systemic actors and
consumptive identity begins to displace production as the apparent centre
of life. The point, then, is not that class no longer counts, rather that as a
category it fails to illuminate social critique in the way it did earlier. And
how could it be other? For if marxism, too, is a product of history, it
cannot finally claim by any dialectical tricks to escape the judgements of
history itself. Nor, to the contrary of external or cynical critiques, however,
can we reasonably expect the impetus of marxism or socialism simply to
disappear like water into the arid sands of life after history. As Bauman will
make more apparent in later work, sociologists cannot afford to let others
do their thinking for them. The essential challenge for all social critics
remains Kant's imperative: dare to think for yourself! We can never make
peace with dogma, even though, in an existential or ordinary practical sense
we of course will. The intellectual challenge raised, then, by Bauman, in
these works as elsewhere, is to be ethically consistent at the same time as we
strive to be curious or open to the world. Neither, then, can Bauman
properly have followers, for he is demanding that each of us also go our
own way. At the same time, however, this paradox may help to explain why
so few of us seem able to follow his example; we know he is onto
something, but the challenge seems simply too big a task in a world which
otherwise asks so little.
2 Culture and Sociology
How do we know how to go on practically? And, how can we understand

these mundane yet vital dimensions of our lives theoretically? What can we
hope for? Two key themes which run across Bauman's work are those of
culture and socialism. Perhaps, in a certain way, they are one; for the
concern with social reproduction over time is also connected to the fact of,
and the need for change. More, as the century has unfolded socialism has
returned again to the culture from which it emerged, its claims to an
independent existence as a politics exhausted by the travails of communism
and the erosion of social democracy. For socialism was also, in a sense, a
way of life, and perhaps that is what it is again today, as it was in the
nineteenth century, an ensemble of sensibilities which could help actors seek
out their own paths of self-development through cooperation. Of course
culture and socialism are not the same, not then and certainly not now. Yet
in Bauman's formation the two seem inevitably to turn on each other, even
if socialism finally is more contingent, dissolving into culture as culture
expands categorically into postmodern times.
Culture as Praxis
Between Class and Elite is the first indicator in the English language of
Bauman's lifelong curiosity about socialism. Published in 1 972, its intellec
tual genesis goes back into the 1 950s. By 1 973 Bauman had published
another book, Culture as Praxis, which opened quite distinct lines of investi
gation. Culture and praxis - both words are ambiguous, or at least, open to
dual meanings, both larger and smaller. Culture in the larger anthropological
sense refers to whole ways of life, all their rituals, habits, institutions and
artefacts; in the closer, traditional sense, it refers to high culture, culture as
innovation or preservation. Ditto praxis: in the larger sense praxis refers
merely to practice, to activity in general, to culture as human activity rather
than as structure or result; in the closer sense, again, it refers to the
particularly marxian sense, beckoning Aristotle, where to act is to change or
wilfully to transform the world. Only here, in Bauman's work, the tension is
maintained; his concern is not only with culture and praxis as socialism, but
also with the conceptual stretch suggested by the ambivalence within and
across the themes.
So how should we proceed into this labyrinth? As conversation does,
when we offer some definitions as a way into the discussion. Bauman begins
Culture and sociology 35
by addressing this very ambiguity in the concept of culture. Culture is an

essentially contested category, only we use it as though we actually agree on
its meaning. Even before we really agree on any kind of basic working
definition, however, we discover that there is the stink of a corpse in the
cargo. Without our necessary prior consent, the word culture takes on some
kind of direct opposition to the idea of nature. Before we agree, the idea of
culture as exercised by those who have used it before is smuggled in, in
associated notions of civilization and progress (Bauman, 1 973a: 3). Bauman
proposes that we slow down the chase by identifying three separate uni
verses of discourse within which the idea of culture has been incorporated.
This diversity suggests the richness of the field of interpretation; the point is
to make sense of these differing discursive usages of culture, rather than to
settle on one or another.
The first field of usage indicates that culture is a hierarchical concept,
where some have culture and others lack it. Culture in this usage is a
possession, whether inherited or acquired; it needs maintenance, else nature
and wilderness are reasserted. Culture needs cultivation. This way of
thinking, of course, is value-saturated ( I 973a: 6-8). The second field indi
cates that culture is a differential concept, one that is used to establish or to
claim difference between peoples, times and places. Bauman gives here the
example of Herodotus who, when discussing other peoples encountered on
his visits to various foreign lands, routinely uses phrases such as 'They do
not' and 'contrary to us' ( 1 973a: 1 7). This usage of the idea of culture may
be implicitly hierarchical, in that it silently values the known, 'our' culture,
over theirs, over the others. But it can also be used as an open, serial system
of classification that is more arbitrary in effect, more like Borges' Chinese
Encyclopedia or the comically chaotic Encyclopedia of the Philosophes than
the Encyclopaedia Britannica A-Z, all bases ordered and covered.
If the first usage is narcissistic or self-referential, then, the second is more
anthropological or at least ethnographic. In the second, difference is
observed or posited rather than immediately valued. Paradoxically, then,
the second field of discourse can either suggest radical difference or cultural
relativism, or else that all peoples do the same things, only differently. The
third usage, in Bauman's suggestion, is the generic concept of culture
(1 973a: 38). The generic concept feeds on the overlooked and unsaid parts
of the differential concept: only where that discourse values difference, the
generic emphasis focuses on the allegedly essential unity beneath the mani
fest differences. Here the reality of culture is viewed as its unity. Bauman
associates one variation of the argument with the work of Clifford Geertz,
where all humans are compelled to work through the same life path or
process; the argument is equally compatible, in another form, with the
structuralism of Levi-Strauss, where all difference is emitted cross-culturally
from brain patterns that are universal and uniform. Culture, however,
involves for Bauman a great deal more than structure, symbol or language:
'Structure . . . is a less probable state than disorder' ( l 973a: 54). Structure is
a hope more than a pattern or achievement. Structuring occurs, but more as
36 Zygmunt Bauman
an activity of varying impact and durability than as a firm result: 'The

continuous and unending structuring activity constitutes the core of human
praxis, the human mode of being in the world' ( 1 973a: 56). Praxis, or being
in-the-world, relies on two essential instruments - tools and language.
Culture is the perpetual effort to overcome the tension between creativity or
freedom and dependence ( l 973a: 57).
Structuralism is therefore interesting to Bauman, if less than exhaustive in
its interpretative potential. Its general weakness lies in a definitional
substitution or semantic slide from culture to structure, or else to language.
But this is not the only available elision. Others use culture in its Germanic
sense, as though it were Geist or spirit ( l 973a: 1 1 3). Thus Durkheim in effect
defines culture as society, as idea lived out through ritual. This kind of
argument is both too materialist and too idealist for Bauman; too materialist,
in that culture is reduced to ritual, too idealist, in that we all somehow
become the servants of society, morality, or of society as God. Culture as
praxis occurs rather between these stultifying or dizzying alternatives:
Since cultural ordering is performed through the activity of signifying - splitting

phenomena into classes through marking them - semiotics, the general theory of
signs, provides the focus for the study of the general methodology of cultural
praxis. The act of signifying is the act of the production of meaning. ( 1 973a: 1 1 9)
Human praxis or activity therefore consists in turning chaos into order, or

substituting one order for another. Structuralism mirrors this curiosity,
except that it seeks out the generative rules which monitor the process,
which is either to ask for the impossible or else, worse, to find it and to
insist that all else must follow these rules of the master. What remains of
significance here, however, is less the systems of classification which include
and assimilate difference than what Roland Barthes, the most supple of
structuralists, calls the 'rules of exclusion' (Bauman, 1 973a: 1 22). The
practice of ordering, that is to say, is also contingent and problematical.
Bauman insists here that the role of rules of exclusion is crucial, indeed
fundamental, for it preconditions the applicability of all other rules.
Ordering involves transmuting what is fundamentally a continuous, shape
less stream of perception into a set of discrete entities, which we then
hypostasize ( l 973a: 1 23). The other is taboo. The boundaries are thrown up
and must be policed in order to assume group cohesion. 'We' and 'they'
routinely allows for no third party or alternative ground: hence ambi
valence is squeezed out and into one category or the other ( 1 973a: 1 26).
This is also to indicate that the hierarchical concept of culture rules; the
Herodotus, or differential view could deal with difference without necessary
stigma, for the others could be more or less like us without being bar
barians. Only this latter view is, for Bauman, less readily available to us, for
it is too heavily subversive of the firmer distinctions which we use to hold
up our own image of the world ( l 973a: 1 27). 'We' and 'they' tend to be
constructed as antonyms, rather than as graduated degrees of meaning. Our
C ulture and sociology 37
sacred depends on their taboo, our certainty on their chaos. 'Marginal men'
work here as anomalies, reinforcing the two essential categories rather than
validating a third between or across them ( l 973a: 1 28). Marginals are
everything and nothing: they are in consequence alternately hated, or else
granted superhuman powers, as devils, or dirt.
Bauman turns to precedent in order further to probe the issue of
marginality. His authorities here are Georg Simmel and Roberto Michels,
the latter best known to English-language readers as the primary sociologist
of political parties, though this was not his only talent. Both Simmel and
Michels are fascinated by the insider-outsider, i.e. the stranger, who comes
and stays, not he who is transient, the foreigner or alien. The perverse
oddity of the stranger is exactly this dual status, which immediately
suggests a third term, but which cannot be legitimately recognized as such
given the power of the dominant mental dualism. For Michels, the potency
and danger of the stranger was exactly that he represented the Unknown.
Paradoxically, the uncertainty impressed upon the figure of the stranger
also imperilled the certainty of the host society; uncertainty spreads, like a
plague, from the bearer to the host culture. The figure of the stranger
violates the order he enters; the host society awaits its chance for revenge.
Strangers are precisely people who say things like 'They do not' and
'contrary to us', and they speak too loudly for the comfort of the guardians,
even when they say nothing at all; even their visual presence can be
disturbing. They move, in an early modernity where tradition is still capable
of conferring stability; so that order now becomes a social imperative
( l 973a: 1 35). The figure of the Jew, in particular, thus represents chaos.
Now Bauman employs Sartre's notion of the slimy or 'Ie visqueux' and
Mary Douglas' work on purity and danger to amplify the point. Dirt is dirt
by social agreement rather than by physiological necessity; dirt is matter
out of place, just as the stranger is a perennial candidate for scapegoat,
always potentially the subject out of place (Bauman, 1 973a: 1 37-9). When
the praxis of the group or community is destabilized, its capacity to tolerate
difference decreases. Thus, for example, racism is not caused by economic
crisis, but it is often called out by the heightened psychological insecurity
associated with crisis. On the other extreme, human creativity is at its best
when freedom expands, when actors are free of the immediate necessity to
secure the means of survival ( 1 973a: 1 7 1). The culture of critique may thus
be at its most expansive at that very same moment of relative abundance in
which citizens have no need of it. For Bauman wants culture to have a
political dimension, or purpose. The voice is more marxian in inflexion than
much else that we are offered in the 1 980s:
Culture is the only facet of the human condition and of life in which knowledge
of the human reality and the human interest in self-perfection and fulfilment
merge into one. . . . Culture is, therefore, the natural enemy of alienation. It
constantly questions the self-appointed wisdom, serenity and authority of the
Real. ( 1 973a: 1 76)
38 Zygmunt Bauman
Coming towards the end of the book, it is as if Bauman is adding a fourth,

alternative definition of culture as critique, rather than as hierarchy, differ
ence or genera. The alternative field of discourse suggested in the idea of
culture as critique is that of the 1 960s critical theory associated with
Marcuse and the early Habermas, where it is positivism in social science
which is the major enemy, and marxism lies somewhere between philosophy
and science, as critique but also as a political critique or a practical
philosophy searching for a transformative praxis. But there is also some
thing else going on here, for Bauman's work may run in tandem with
critical theory but it is not the project of an intellectual who believes that all
is lost because the theory failed to meet its addressee, the revolutionary
proletariat, on proper time. Bauman takes sides rather with Camus, agree
ing that struggle or revolt is not an intellectual invention but a human
experience and action. Existential nihilism has no place here, for Bauman;
alienation cannot be our fate. Human practice is all that we can know; if
only we could know it ( 1 973a: 1 78).
Culture as Praxis is the only one of Bauman's earlier English language
books so far to have a second life. Its second edition was published in 1 999.
Bauman takes advantage of the moment to reflect upon its content and
significance (modesty forbids too much curiosity in the latter aspect). So why
might we be interested in such matters as culture and praxis today? Bauman
comments, laconically, that we never solve any problems, we only get bored
by them. On the other hand, in these present, postmodern times, everybody
is into recycling. So what endures? As Bauman recognizes, books date partly
because their interlocutors do; Bauman's early works argue with or depend
upon various authorities whose names are now unknown to us, though some
endure; Mary Douglas and Sartre recur much later in Bauman's postmodern
concern with the stranger. In between times, of course, there was an extra
ordinary English boom in cultural studies. By the 1 980s culture meant
everything to everyone in and around the academy. Culture as Praxis was
written BSH - before Stuart Hall, before the Birmingham School.
Reconsidering his work nearly 30 years on, recognizing the risk that we
invent or discover things in retrospect that may not exactly have been there
in the first place, Bauman identifies one central feature of his book to be its
claim about the core ambivalence of the concept of culture ( 1 999a: xiv). To
concentrate the issue, at least one major tension arises within the concept of
culture, as one discourse generates the idea of culture as creation, invention,
self-critique and self-transcendence, while another discourse posits culture
as instrument of routinization and reproduction, as a tool of social order.
These differences correspond to culture in the special sense, and culture in
the expansive or ordinary sense. What, then, has changed? Looking back,
Bauman's sense is that culture is now seen as much as an agent of disorder
as it is the tool of order, a factor of ageing and adolescence as much as of
timelessness ( l 999a: x).
Where the critical focus of Culture as Praxis was largely on the stranger,
or the problem of exclusion or marginality, one theme that looms larger in
the Introduction to the second edition is assimilation. The path of Bauman's

work in the interval leads him to focus on both as aspects of domination:
cultures seem to need either to swallow others up or else to expel them.
Culture in the meantime has been internally pluralized, or multicultured; the
necessity of traditional Einheit, unity or oneness has been eroded, at least in
some quarters of civil society, though as Bauman argues more recently, it has
also been tribalized in the process. Theoretically speaking, Bauman now
identifies Levi-Strauss as the animateur of his book, especially in the sense
that culture is a structure of choices. Levi-Strauss' impact, for Bauman, was
less directly structuralist than it was subversive of the hard science of
structuralism. In Bauman's reception of his work, Levi-Strauss turns struc
ture from a cage into a catapult (Bauman, 1999a: xxvi-xxvii). This was
arguably a Levi-Strauss unavailable to younger readers, like those of my
own generation, for whom Levi-Strauss was read through the lens of the
French communist philosopher Louis Althusser, a thinker that Bauman
assiduously ignores, with the deafening contempt of silence. What should we
learn from Althusser? About this Bauman says nothing, because he believes
that there is nothing to learn, and here, as elsewhere, the sympathies with
other East European Renaissance marxists such as Agnes Heller are evident.
In explicit sympathy, here, with Castoriadis, Bauman argues rather that the
theoretical distinction central to structuralism between diachrony and
synchrony simply dissolves under scrutiny, as it cannot capture the way in
which society, language and culture persist through change ( 1 999a: xxviii).
Intellectuals, in this scenario, insist on the necessity of their own social role
as educators by insisting on the ignorance of those to be educated. Their
voices become annexed to the modem project of nation-building, for while
races seem given, nations have to be built. Civil society is weakened rather
than strengthened in the process ( 1 999a: xxxvi). Communitarianism now
emerges as ersatz nationalism, the local version of nation-building. We
should, with Touraine, solidarize with the slogan multiculturalism rather
than support the idea of multicommunitarianism, a thousand little islands of
local separatism with no traffic between them. Culture as multiculture
encourages traffic; culture as community suggests closure and hostility
( l 999a: xlii).
Bauman now introduces Stuart Hall into the discussion, for if the fact of
multiculturalism shifts the meaning of culture, so has Hall's work radicalized
the usage of the term after Culture as Praxis. As Hall has argued, identity
claims vary between naturalistic and discursive or (new) traditionalistic and
modem or postmodern. Culture today is mobile, processual and open-ended.
This is not the same as saying, as is fashionable, that culture is hybrid, for
culture is not neatly packaged out in some imaginary beginning in the first
place. In this sense, the technical idea of multiculturalism is also nonsensical,
for culture is mUltiple by definition (Bauman, 1999a: xliv). At the same time
the hermeneutic challenge persists, to seek the fusion of horizons while
maintaining their distinction, so that the interpreter's own universe of
meaning does not disappear. If modem hermeneutics was too much defined
40 Zygmunt Bauman
by the universe of the interpreter, then postmodern hermeneutics needs to

avoid suspending that position altogether or losing it in the imaginary
horizon of the other. Earlier, the risk was that meaning would be lost in
translation; today, the possibility is rather that translation collapses into
tokenistic assimilation into the other. We are, or should all be translators
now, as plurality of cultures becomes cultural pluralism ( l 999a: xlvii, Ii).
Towards a Critical Sociology
If the work of Levi-Strauss was the provocation which helped to draw out
Culture as Praxis ( l 973a), where culture, like structure, was an activity,
Towards a Critical Sociology ( l 976b), 'An Essay on Commonsense and
Emancipation', seemed closer to the concerns of East European marxist
humanism. Perhaps one difference between Bauman and, say, Heller,
remained that while Heller often thinks sociologically, her vocation is that
of the philosopher. While Bauman shares the Hungarian allergy to
orthodox marxism, Dialectical Materialism and Laws of History, however,
there remains throughout his work a conventionally sociological curiosity
about social structure. The inflection of Bauman's work is therefore sym
pathetic to phenomenology, and this returns later in Postmodern Ethics
( l 993a), his work is also animated by the sense that there is something
beyond the subject or the intersubjective which is the proper object of
sociological analysis. Sociology's vocation is to look both inside and out.
Towards a Critical Sociology again evokes for period readers the sensi
bilities of the field of Critical Theory; but this is only true in the
topographical sense. Bauman opens this study with a discussion of the idea
of 'second nature', for it was second nature that announced the arrival of
sociology. Nature is the name we give to the excess, to that which resists
our desire to change the world: 'nature' is a byproduct of human practice
( l 976b: 2). Nature is constraint, to our own need for freedom. Nature is
that which is beyond human control, but which we nevertheless seek to
submit to our will. Society is to humans a 'second nature', as unchal
lengeable and beyond their control as non-human nature is, or becomes
( 1 976b: 1 0). Only mainstream sociology, as in Durkheim, in tum natur
alizes society, gives it a determining character of the same kind as nature-in
itself. 'Second nature' is somehow placed outside of us, as actors, which in
one sense at least is to miss the point, for as Bauman will argue later, with
reference to totalitarian regimes and the western hegemony of consumer
culture, second nature is really also part of us, becoming a second order
level of habit and mentality which is as contingent as collective choice
might be. Second nature does not permeate every fibre of our beings,
though it seems to us that it may as well do, as we observe the phenom
enology of everyday life in these settings.
What is second nature? Within the history of the discipline of sociology it
is 'the social', that category we cannot dispense with and yet which entraps
Culture and sociology 4 1
u s a t every move, for i t becomes a kind o f dominant disciplinary ideology

or culture or ether, logically shifting or sliding the analysis away from
practices to this ghostly level of choreography. Between God, or Nature,
and us, there is always this third level of 'second nature' which works
against our increasing intimacy with the world of subjects that we, also,
inhabit. The argument which naturalizes second nature itself is not only
traditionalistic, as only the modernist discipline of sociology can be, but
also in a particular sense theological. The major culprit in Bauman's
unfolding narrative is Comte. For the implication in classical sociology is
that human activity is best explained not by immanent analysis but by
referring elsewhere, to the social heavens as it were. And this self-deception
will become the bane of sociology after the Second World War, where as in
the 'dominant ideology thesis' critics will happily blame some abstract
capitalistic or individualistic ethos for how it is that the world works,
denying the actual actors themselves either nous or intelligence. In this way,
the idea of 'second nature' becomes doubly distracting, for it directs our
curiosity away from closer accounts of what actually occurs in everyday
life, and it at the same time projects second nature away from us, as a level
above us, rather than viewing it as a culture which we selectively borrow
and only ever partially internalize.
Intellectuals, in this early formative moment of the history of sociology,
would be the Priests of the Religion of Humanity, interpreters and legis
lators all at once; the rest of us would merely follow. For the third level of
'society' would serve to tame the savage beast in men ( 1 976b: 1 3). Where
Comte began, Durkheim took over: 'It was left to Durkheim to deify
society' (Bauman, 1 976b: 14). God now was society in disguise, as society
was God; law and morality were henceforth sacred, and at the very same
time were nothing more than conventional and arbitrary. The emphasis is
significant: instead of secularizing God, Durkheim deifies society, for he is
as fearful of the practical consequences of modernity as he is enthusiastic
for its blueprinted prospects through the further cultivation of the division
of labour. Postmodern sociology, or a sociology of postmodernity, to
anticipate, will in this regard rest on the attempt to get beyond Durkheim's
reified metaphysic of the 'social'.
Ideas, or values, are central for Durkheim, as in the 'conscience collec
tive'; and conformism is the goal to be achieved. Durkheim's sociology in
this sense at least is further away from us than some would like to think; its
imaginary horizons are closer to Gustav Le Bon's fin-de-siecle anxiety
about the crowd than to Parsons' image of the well-oiled social system.
Conformism, in any case, can lead in various different directions, from
good civic mid-Western behaviour to judicious goosestepping through Nazi
Berlin; and in either case, its reach can be skin-deep as well as deeply
heartfelt. Pathetically enough, the shared distinction of the image of the
good society in Durkheim and Parsons is that the social order is sufficiently
civilized to call on nothing more than 'soft coercion', a vista which sure
beats the prospect of Nazi and Stalinist horrors, but fails to inspire by any
42 Z!Jl}m unt Bauman
other criteria ( l 976b: 24). For 'Durksonianism', then, as for Hobbes,

society is the cure for the wolf in man. Not so, says Goffman, however, for
whom society can run wild (as in McCarthyism) exactly when overwhelmed
by the zeal of its own moralizing mission (Bauman, 1 976b: 24). Masking,
on this account, does not make us wicked, but allows us to go on. Even
when we kneel before the flag or our fearless leaders, this kind of activity
tells us nothing analytically except that we learn how to go on. Compliance
does not mean that we love Big Brother, any more than readiness to shop
means that we are deeply committed to commodification.
Sociology, however, understood here as the science or critique of unfree
dom, finds it easier to explain domination by reference to anything other
than the actors - ideas, values, religion, culture, structure, patriarchy,
whatever ( l 976b: 35). Our occupational hazard in sociology is that it is our
task to make sense out of common sense, to construct order or to discern
pattern out of the chaos of everyday life; and once we do so, we habitually
substitute the construction for the problems with which we ostensibly
began. Common sense indeed reinforces the view that our lives are closed,
because socially determined. Sociology can therefore serve very well if our
curiosity is pitched on the level of the question, 'how does society persist?',
but it offers to tell us rather less as to the lives of humans themselves, not
least in their stubborn struggles to be free ( l 976b: 42). Officially, sociology
is the critique of common sense, all common sense of course except that
which we call sociology ( l 976b: 43).
Bauman turns now to Husser!' Against the empiricism of the things in
themselves, we need per Husserl to relocate the subject as itself a valid
subject matter of knowledge. To focus again on subjectivity, and inter
subjectivity, is also to reconsider intentionality (Bauman, 1 976b: 47). Here
the 'inside' counts, and not only the sociological 'outside'. Meaning is not
objective, but subjective, or rather intersubjective. Existence is primary,
but for Bauman this is no ontological puzzle. For existentialists, in
opposition to Durksonianism, the herd-society of totalitarianism or con
sumer society does not gain mastery over the self unless invited to do so,
even if more by default than by deliberate surrender ( l 976b: 5 5). To be
enslaved by society is a matter of decision, or rather non-decision. Exis
tentialist philosophy seems therefore to offer an outright and most radical
critique of sociology, while meeting sociology on its own apparent ground.
Existentialism, however, also suffers from the residual tendency to reify
society, even while it values agency. Within existentialism the actor often
seems to be alone; the third term disappears. It is Alfred Schutz who with
his emphasis on members rather than subjects identifies the line which
leads out of this impasse. Here sociability and individuality are thrown
together: it is the sharing of the same structural rules of world perception
which assumes the uniqueness of each experience and each individual
world of meaning ( l 976b: 60).
Mead and Dewey are other stimulants to Bauman's thinking in Towards a
Critical Sociology ( l 976b: 63-7). The object of sociology here is process,
C ulture and sociology 43
rather than stasis or structure; self and society are irreducible and yet
mutually constitutive. Yet this is a minority voice within sociology, at least
inasmuch as it stands against positivism; and here it is positivism, as ration
alism, rather than Enlightenment or modernity, which Bauman identifies as
the cause of the trouble ( l 976b: 72). This is about as close as Bauman comes
to sympathy for Habermas' early critique of modernity as technical reason:
emancipatory critique has to be applied to the cult of reason in positivism.
To use the terms applied here, Bauman becomes progressively less interested
in Habermas the closer Habermas comes to the Durksonian labyrinth.
Marx, rather than Habermas, emerges at this point to carry the argument
forward. Marx's critique of political economy seeks from the first to
denaturalize its object. Here 'second nature' becomes historical; second
nature is created, rather than essentialized. Political economy becomes
sociology, which in turn becomes history (Bauman, 1 976b: 82). Marxism
counts here as a critical sociology, as historicism; this is the influence of the
early Marx, the Paris Manuscripts and The German Ideology, The Poverty of
Philosophy through, tentatively, to the Grundrisse. Capitalism, on Marx's
view, emerges and sustains itself culturally and materially precisely as second
nature, projected upon its bearers so powerfully that we can no longer
readily distinguish between first and second nature. Indeed, the champions
of the regime announce loudly that capitalism is nature, that greed and
avarice are natural, and therefore both good for us and eternal. Sadly
enough, as Bauman will have cause to observe on later occasions, the
utopian followers of Marx then merely relocated the problem by arguing as
though communism or socialism, once achieved, would or could remain
permanent as the riddle of second nature solved.
At this point of his work, Bauman closes Towards A Critical Sociology
again in the company of Habermas, a thinker who hereafter tends to
disappear from his project. This was the Habermas of Theory and Practice,
arguably the most stimulating of his work alongside The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere ( 1 962). Here Habermas sees Enlight
enment both, already, as a failure and yet as maintaining a field of tensions
between the competing claims and power of practical, technical and
emancipatory reason. The idea of emancipation itself evaporates, not only
from Habermas' work but also from Bauman's, perhaps with the difference
that Bauman made the idea of emancipation dependent, anyway, on the
unbreakable dialectic between freedom and domination. Habermas' con
cerns came rather to be with labour and communicative action, and the
scope of his work expanded dramatically, from reconstructing critical
theory to recasting the social sciences. Bauman's path was to lead even
further away from these kinds of claims to systematicity or comprehensive
theory-building. His commitment to critical sociology was to remain, even
if its meaning was to shift and to vary, not just with postmodern times, but
also depending on what day it was. For Bauman is nothing if not ambi
valent about this child of Enlightenment that we call the sociological
project itself.
44 Zygmunt Bauman
Thinking Sociologically
Bauman still defends sociology today, even if only as we would often

defend democracy or equality, or hitherto socialism as the idea which we
cannot fulfil but which orientates our action and gives us hope, even against
hope. For, of course, it is we who let sociology down, not the other way
around - sociology itself does nothing, possesses no great riches, and so on.
Bauman's defence of sociology itself gives the lie to any absolutist claims
that we inhabit postmodern, resolutely non-modern times. Amidst a some
times apparently widespread sense that sociology either is extinct or else
should be, the modern in Bauman continues to argue that sociology
potentially enables. So in 1 990 he published a text, Thinking Sociologically.
It is one of the finest introductory sociology texts I know, for it does not
condescend to its readers, or presume that they are necessarily young and
fresh, only that they are readers of an introductory text, which therefore
needs to work laterally, sufficient to be accessible while also working at
levels of sophistication enough to provoke and excite. Definitions open the
book. Sociology might be viewed as a tradition, or else as a culture, an
activity into which newcomers are welcomed (or sometimes not). But these
definitions would also be indicative of common sense, descriptive
approaches to the task at hand. These approaches would take us to the
object called sociology, but not into its content or labyrinth. The question
then arises, what is distinctly sociological about these curiosities or
activities and practices, other than that we name them in the same way?
And what, then, is to be the basis upon which we discriminate between
sociology, politics, anthropology, history, economics? Do these divisions
not reflect divisions in the way that the world works? More common sense,
even if it is professorial, the wisdom of the gatekeepers.
Where did we ever get the idea that human actions divide into a certain
number of distinct types in the first place ( 1 990: 4)? The systems of
classification precede us, they are conventionalized, second-natured, and we
are inducted into them as discrete professional cultures or language-games.
In fact, these distinctions violate not only common sense but also good
sense; we do not experience the social world as parcellized in this way, and
this regardless of whether we are well-schooled or not. The boundaries all
bleed and seep across into one another. One does not live now in politics,
now in economics; one does not move from sociology to anthropology
when travelling from England to Brazil, or from sociology to history when
one grows a year older. In academic life, as elsewhere, it is the division of
labour that is projected onto the mental map of the human world that we
carry in our minds and then deploy in our deeds ( 1 990: 5). The distinctions
between disciplines, then, are not entirely arbitrary or accidental, but they
are political and artificial. Disciplines are prostheses which we humans
often mistake for the object of curiosity, as is our wont. We tell stories
about our worlds through intellectual grids which very often tell us more
about the grids than about the other, and we become bitterly defensive of
these worldviews because of the academic premium on certainty, or being

correct. But grids, or ways of seeing, we nevertheless need, if only we can
recognize their actual contingency as against their inflationary effects.
Sociology cannot therefore be defined as everything, for in that case it
would be nothing, it would have no distinguishing features at all. So
Bauman offers us a first definition:
What sets sociology apart and gives it its distinctive character is the habit of
viewing human actions as elements of wider figurations: that is, of a non-random
assembly of actors locked together in a web of mutual dependency,
dependency being a state in which the probability that the action will be
undertaken and the chance of its success change in relation to what other
actors are, or do, or may do. ( 1 990: 7). So dependence, and its old friend,
freedom, loom large in the elementary definition of sociology. Sociology,
therefore, is a way of thinking about the world. Now comes another old
associate, common sense. As we have seen in Towards A Critical Sociology
(1 976b), common sense is a staple of sociology, which can neither afford to
ignore it nor take it for granted. Common sense is second nature, and in
one way, it is exactly second nature which is the core concern of a critical
sociology.
Bauman offers four possible ways of distinguishing the sociological
sensibility from the logic of common sense. First, sociology, unlike common
sense, makes an effort to subordinate itself to the rules of responsible
speech. What does Bauman mean by this? We are all social animals, there
fore we are all specialists or natural authorities on matters social. Prejudice
or mere opinion thus often masquerades as sociology, and not only at the
hands of non-specialists; sociologists in general suffer from a terrible
tendency to generalize the particular, a tendency we need to recognize and
to work against. Second, sociology claims to draw on a larger field of
evidence in order to arrive at its judgement; no research, no right to speak
when it comes to properly sociological (but not ethical, or political) matters.
A third difference between sociology and common sense pertains to the way
in which we seek to make sense of human reality. Sociology stands in
opposition to the overly personalized worldview. It shifts, rather, from
figurations (networks of dependencies) to actors and actions, seeking to
make sense of the human condition through analysis of the manifold webs
of human interdependency. Fourthly, and in some ways most significantly,
sociology seeks to defamiliarize the familiar. Routine, habit and repetition
all conspire together to generate familiarity, certainty, fixity. Thus:
Familiarity is the staunchest enemy of inquisitiveness and criticism - and thus

also of innovation and the courage to change. In an encounter with that familiar
world ruled by habits and reciprocally reasserting beliefs, sociology acts as a
meddlesome and often irritating stranger. (Bauman, 1 990: 1 5)
46 Zygm unt Bauman
Critical sociology is in this sense alien; little wonder it was viewed by its
anti-semitic enemies as the Jewish discipline, modernist, mobile, cosmo
politan, dangerous; or that its aura is often caught up with and sometimes
mistaken for that of socialism. Critical sociology is dirty-handed, both in
the practical and the symbolic senses.
Throughout this discourse Bauman defines sociology by default as critical
sociology. There is another sociology, or perhaps there are two more: there
is the mainstream sociology which apologizes for modernism, and offers to
help knock off its rough edges (Durksonianism), and there is the conser
vative, sometimes aristocratic or nostalgic sociology which we could trace
back to de Tocqueville and forward, say, to some themes in the work of
Robert Nisbet and John Carroll. Would these other sociologies conform to
Bauman's four attributes? In different ways, the answer to this question
is yes. Conservatives, for example, would simply render them otherwise;
responsibility is paramount; one must know whereof one speaks; one ought
seek out intelligibility, and still seek to defamiliarize, even though the points
of comparison may be with the world we are alleged to have lost rather than
with the goals we have yet to achieve (the latter, because they are always
beyond us). As Bauman argues in Towards a Critical Sociology ( l 976b), it is
mainstream sociology which can be expected to default, perhaps especially
on the fourth criterion, for Durksonianism seeks implicitly or explicitly to
familiarize the present rather than to defamiliarize the familiar. The radical
observation is rather in sympathy with Castoriadis, that we have not always
lived this way, which leaves the possibilities open rather than closed.
Sociology, for Bauman, then, is political or more directly, radical, for
it moves around concerns such as freedom, dependence, solidarity, contin
gency. In this regard sociology indeed is dangerous, if only it lives up even
to the most modest of its dreams, for to be critical is precisely to be open to
arguments for change, in whatever direction ( 1 990: 1 7). Bauman has set the
trap: dare to think! dare to be critical! Now he employs a series of examples,
both at the same time thematic and experiential, in order to open the field
of sociology to its visitors. The first theme is freedom and dependence.
Mutually constitutive, this couplet condenses much of the entire field of
Bauman's work, revisiting themes elaborated earlier in Freedom ( 1 988) and
elsewhere, in Memories of Class ( 1 982) and Legislators and Interpreters
( 1 987). For freedom is configured with dependency, in ways that generate
both slavery and domination or mutuality and cooperation. Here we see
Bauman the pedagogue as hermeneut, for all that is of significance to us leads
somewhere else, perhaps unexpected. Freedom thus leads into dependence;
all our curiosities are but ways into the labyrinth of interpretation. So finally
we can say that sociologically speaking the ratio between freedom and
dependence is an indicator of the relative position a person or group occupies
in society. What we call privilege appears, under closer scrutiny, as a higher
degree of freedom at the expense of a lesser degree of freedom ( 1 990: 36).
Bauman's style in this book is friendly, almost avuncular. He combines
familiar or ordinary images or experiences with glimpses of the arguments
that inform them, Freud, often especially Elias, Mead. The next interval, on
Us and Them, follows the same strategy, example and insight, Schutz and
Bateson. Us and Them raises questions of proximity, inclusion and
exclusion, insiders and outsiders, reciprocity and hostility. Which leads, of
course, to the Stranger. The stranger is not nobody, but somebody who
does not belong. Hence Goffman returns, as the theorist of civil inattention,
pretending that one does not look and does not see the other, a highly
developed habit especially in urban spaces where one goes to be seen but
not to see (Bauman, 1 990: 67). Avoid the eyes! Avoidance of eye contact is
the clearest modern prohibition, at least in the street, if not in the cafe.
Enter Simmel, together with his stunning insight that urban life and
abstract thinking grow together (Bauman, 1 990: 68). The others, here, are
truly othered; they become little more than the backdrop to our closed
personal paths through the dense traffic of everyday life. Physical proximity
persists, indeed heightens, but moral or ethical proximity is eroded. The
great risk of modern society, then, is that civil inattention leads to moral
indifference. Here strangers may not be enemies, but they may not appear
at all; they risk falling between the categories we use to divide up the world,
and slipping into nothingness ( 1 990: 70).
How then do we interact? Through bonds of community, replete with the
aura of tradition and comfort, or through organizational affiliation, by
choice or circumstance. Communities consist of persons, organizations of
roles. Both forms generate particular problems to do with conformism.
Communities can submerge the individual within their bonds; organiza
tions, by comparison, always run the risk that there is nobody home, for
the administrative position is prior to its bearer. Here Bauman's discussant
on total institutions is Goffman, rather than Foucault, where total insti
tutions like prisons or asylums are enforced or compulsory, coercive com
munities ( 1 990: 86), and the parallel by extension is the image of the
totalitarian society as a mono-organizational institution, a form where
there is no space available for anything other than the party-state and its
apparatus. But in less closed situations than these, how do we go on? Now
Bauman introduces gift and exchange as alternative forms of currency, both
sociological staples and prime needs in everyday life, where love or
friendship, and money, remain so elemental, whether we fancy ourselves as
modern or postmodern.
Power and choice, self-preservation and the priority of moral duty lead
to the themes of Nature and Culture. Agri-culture is not the only fruit;
there is also homini-culture, the training of human individuals, imparting to
them knowledge of the cultural code, so that they can read the social signs
as well as learn to select and display them ( 1 990: 1 5 1). As in Barthes'
Elements of Semiology, the traffic light ceases to be a technical or techno
logical object and becomes part of a whole system of signs and symbols,
with moral and cultural effects built in, indicating a whole universe of
possible meanings. Through culture humans strive, again, towards order;
for culture is a proselytizing or missionary activity: it seeks to convert, and
48 Zygmul1t Baumal1
it spurns heresy. When several cultural designs coexist the possibility of

mutual tolerance or pluralism emerges, but it lives in tension with the larger
impact of the quest for order (Bauman, 1 990: 1 60). State and nation, in
turn, are implicated in culture and order. States work through pastoral
power, power exercised 'in the best interests' of the subjects who need to be
protected against their own morbid inclinations ( 1 990: 167). The nation, in
comparison, is an imagined community, which effectively becomes real
through the conduct of war. Nation-states claim legitimacy partly through
claims to nature or primordial belonging through myths of origin ( 1990:
1 7 1 -3).
The idea of the nation-state coincides with the arrival of modernity. But
the very success of modernity in its search for artificial order is the cause of
its deepest, most worrying ailments: the incredible results of an over
developed division of labour where the pursuit of social rationality gener
ates generalized irrationality, all of which comes back to haunt us, as second
nature. Each of us becomes as specialized as our sphere of the system or
private life necessitates; we all become professional idiots, even just in
dealing with domestic technology ( 1 990: 1 97). The skill levels we need just to
cope with everyday life never stand still, but keep changing. We are con
sumers of expertise, mortified that we might miss out, look stupid by coming
last in the technological race; nothing old will ever do for very long, heaven
forfend that you might use a little book and pencil rather than an electronic
diary. All these gadgets in turn add up to 'identitykit' lives (1 990: 205). It is
not, contra Huey P. Lewis, in fact hip to be square, unless this involves
buying new· means of identity; for styles might be desperately recycled, but
the fashion goods we purchase as commodities must be new. The right to
revolt, however, remains an individual rather than a tribal affair ( 1 990: 2 1 3).
So much for life - what of sociology? Bauman concludes Thinking
Sociologically with the suggestion that there is an internal alternative. We
can choose to follow Durkheim, with his insistence that social science really
is scientific, and therefore at once both different and superior to its liberal
arts competitors. But this brings us back to where we began, with the
problem whether sociology has its own distinct object of knowledge or
whether, rather, it is somehow queen of the human sciences, taking in all
that it surveys. An alternative would be to follow Weber, where natural
science is anything but the model for our activity. In this way of thinking,
human reality is different, unique, because it is subjective in various
differing ways. Perhaps, then, we still face the same choice as that posited in
Towards a Critical Sociology ( 1 976b), between science and hermeneutics,
Durksonianism and critique, even if these days there may be more critics
crossing the lines, seeking to use Durkheim for interpretative, anthro
pological purposes in cultural sociology. Bauman identifies a third practical
strategy, but it is not that of American cultural sociology. Rather, it is the
reformist, progressive school of social science associated historically with
the Chicago School. Less philosophical than pragmatic, and pragmatist,
this variant follows some Durkheimian sympathies in that it seeks to
analyse and redeem those social pathologies which modernity throws up

and does not automatically or 'naturally' resolve or reform ( 1 990: 224). The
risk here is that sociology becomes managerial, is assimilated into the social
system whose critique is its other purpose; that sociology disappears into
the state.
Richard Rorty gets the last word in Thinking Sociologically: 'if we take
care of freedom, truth and goodness will take care of themselves' ( 1 990:
232). If Rorty here unwittingly carries the torch for the cause of critical
sociology, with Elias as its undercurrent and Durkheim providing the main
and predominant alternative variant of sociology (whether as science par
excellence or as diagnosis of social pathology and its remedy), one other
leonine head has disappeared in the process. Where's Charlie? Marx, with
whom Towards A Critical Sociology ( 1 976b) closed, has disappeared from
these critical horizons, in letter, if not in spirit. For marxism's fate across
these years is to return to the critical culture from whence it came. And this
particular claim of Rorty's is not that far from a Marx for the 1 990s
(Beilharz, 1 994b). We still follow Marx, even when we do not name him.
Marx disappears into Bauman's work like labour into the product.
In actuality, all three strategies or futures for sociology coexist, even if
some overpower the others; there is a kind of alliance between the first and
the third, Durkheim and the state, which practically marginalizes the
second, hermeneutics or critique. Probably this helps explain why it is that
Bauman takes a more critical stand on American than on British sociology.
The purpose of sociology is to add ambivalence. American sociology is the
great success story, even still today; yet its victory is discernibly also its
failure, for it has been achieved through the reform-managerial synthesis at
the expense of critique. Bauman's view of British sociology seems to be
that, at least since the 1 960s, its critical and cultural credentials, whether
local or continental, better balance out the limits of the local tradition of
social administration. This also seems to explain Bauman's higher-than
common levels of critical enthusiasm for the project of Anthony Giddens,
though now even Giddens seems to align sociology with the prospect of
state power through New Labour in Britain, rather than its critique.
Bauman's views on Giddens are scattered throughout his writings, though
there are two sources which warrant inclusion here.
Bauman draws Giddens' work and the field of hermeneutics together in
his contribution to Held and Thompson's Festschrift for Giddens (Bauman,
1 989b). Perhaps it is the fate of ageing sociologists all to become reformers
rather than radicals. Certainly Giddens' earlier work, like Habermas', was
closer to hermeneutics than to the idea of the system. Bauman is full of
praise for a Giddens who named hermeneutics as the path sociology should
take, the sole alternative to the hilarities of collective amnesia and the
Columbus complex ( l 989b: 35). Here he parallels Giddens' structuration
theory with Elias' idea of figuration, the point in both cases being that
structure is carried out, it does not float above the players like a langue or
the system of language in structuralism, but has to be enacted to become
50 Zygmunt Bauman
apparent. The game, whether say of politics or football, is comprehensible

only in its activity (Bauman, 1 989b: 39). Simultaneously, however, our need
for understanding cannot be satisfied by the game-caller or the after-match
interview with the participants. Figuration seems to capture the problem
better than structuration, which both reproduces it semantically and gives
away the open secret, that this is a nominative solution to a conceptual, or
rather a practical problem ( l 989b: 49). Sociology, on the basis of this
judgement, remains too much caught within the nineteenth century. Its
central task, indicated by Bauman in discussion of Giddens, is to revise the
theory of society rather than the idea of social action ( 1 989b: 55). Perhaps it
is this which predisposes Bauman to the larger idea of the postmodern.
Giddens' sociology consists of an interpretative and analytical beginning,
in books like Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, and The Class Struc
ture of the Advanced Societies, which leads into an overextended attempt at
synthesis, marked along the way by significant but more regional studies
of issues such as the nation-state and violence, passing in turn to political
and personal essays about intimacy, private life, and the emergence of
New Labour in Britain as a political force potentially responsive to these
changes. Bauman responds to some of more recent essays in a review of the
anxiously titled book by Giddens called In Defence of Sociology.
Unlike, say, Habermas, whose sociological work remains ambitious and
systematic at the same time as he acts out the role of the public intellectual
in Germany, Giddens seems to have shifted from one role to the next. In
the 1 990s, he has become the intellectual advocate of Blairism, or the New
Labour Third Way in Britain; his books have become shorter, more
popular in style and political in orientation. As Bauman notes, Giddens is
both the prime-mover and the secretary of British Sociology; via the Polity
Press, he continues its European imprint, and in his own essays he monitors
the results of the process. Bauman's sense here, as earlier, is that it is
mainstream American sociology which is generating the crisis; probably the
Americans would disagree, at least in public. Of course there have been
various controversies over the question of American academic imperialism,
and whether or not sociology might return 'home' to the New Europe after
the fall of the Berlin Wall. Only sociology, at least since the Chicago
School, has been as recognizably American as it is European, making the
distinction less than easy to observe, let alone police. Bauman's worry
about American sociology here is that its only obvious imperative seems to
be 'business as usual'. Managerialism rules (Bauman, I 997b).
One possible line of interpretation here would be that, as American
sociology's failure lies in its very success, so European sociology has
maintained a more dispersed emphasis across its romantic and critical
streams. Durksonianism has dominated the American scene. Critical
theory has not been a major strength in American sociology, though its
own internal tensions may well belie this; after all, American sociology also
begins with Tocqueville and contains critical thinkers like Richard Sennett
and Craig Calhoun along the way. Giddens and Bauman seem to be
Culture a nd sociology 51
suggesting here that Americanism sinks together with modernism o r with

the sociology of modernity. Sociology would be less well connected into,
say, the British establishment historically, and would therefore be less
likely to share its mentality, whereas American social engineering and
sociology were mutually constitutive; with the end of one, it is less than
clear what we might expect of the other. In other words, the fate of
American sociology has been tied to the figure of the academic as legis
lator. Only Giddens, too, now offers advice to the Prince. This New
Labour Prince speaks a postmodern language, of a third, local, personal
way somewhere between capitalism and socialism. If Bauman remains in
this sense the sociologist of modernity, then perhaps it is Giddens who
really represents postmodern sociology.
A Postmodern Sociology?
By the mid- 1 990s, the work of Zygmunt Bauman was identified more than
any other in its reception as postmodern sociology. Giddens, in turn, played
some good part in the promotion of this image, as for example in his
cover endorsement of Life in Fragments: 'Bauman, for me, has become the
theorist of postmodernity. With exceptional brilliance and originality, he
has developed a position with which everyone now has to reckon'. Bauman
thus appears as the postmodern sociologist, the sociological equivalent of
Lyotard or Baudrillard or Jameson or Foucault (the English language
reception of ideas routinely obscuring the distinction not only between
postmodernism and postmodernity but also between the postmodern,
structuralism and poststructuralism). Yet as we have seen, Bauman remains
stubbornly defensive of the sociological vocation, itself often identified by
its modernist baggage, statism and reformism, as the very discipline of
modernity itself. What would it mean to speak of, or practice, a postmodern
sociology? Bauman discusses this issue extensively in the essays gathered
together in the collection called Intimations of Postmodernity ( 1 992).
Bauman establishes the field by defining postmodernity as a state of mind
(1 992: vii). The postmodern state of mind is the radical victory of modern -
critical, restless, unsatisfied, insatiable - culture over the modern society it
aimed to improve through throwing it wide open to its own potential ( 1 992:
viii). Reason has disenchanted the world; the point is to re-enchant it, and
this is one aspect of the enthusiasm we encounter for the postmodern.
The idea of the postmodern travels into sociology from art, for some,
more specifically, from architecture. Modernism, the synthetic international
style that runs after the fact from Bauhaus to postwar New York, is always
contested internally by the avant-garde, surrealism and Dada, where art is
anti-art (or anti-art is art, or not art). M odernism in art travelled together
with the apparent victory of modernism in postwar American society -
growth, progress, abundance, certainty about the world and our (their)
place in it. The solution to all outstanding problems as might present
52 Zygmunt Bauman
themselves was simple - more. As Simmel had anticipated, the surge of

modernity brought with it the growth of abstraction, and so abstract art
and universal, stripped functional style in architecture came to rule. Until
the restless flux of modernism began to upset this style, which itself became
institutionalized and therefore open to criticism and change. In art and in
architecture collage was revived; postmodern architects bathed in the
promiscuity of mixing styles that hitherto were kept clinically, or classically,
apart. All the bits were starting to move around, or so it seemed; and so, as
Bauman expresses it, postmodern sociology appears as a mimetic rep
resentation of the postmodern condition. If culture or its representation or
perception changes . . . then sociology will change too ( 1 992: 42).
It is not the world that has changed, however, so much as our attitude
towards it. Perhaps, then, sociology should also follow the example of
collage, or pastiche; perhaps the possibility of eclecticism is already built
into the principle of pluralism. But if the postmodern is an attitude, rather
than a period or a type of society like capitalist democracy or totali
tarianism, then modernity nevertheless remains, and sociology with it. This
latter is one dominant response on the part of sociologists to the arrival of
the postmodern; to sneer, to walk away, or simply to insist that the old
analytical tools still work, for the nature of the problem is unchanged by
such new Columbus discoveries ( 1 992: 43). Some such scepticism is well
grounded, both because what sociology has achieved is also worth valuing,
however critically, but again because we have had such radical breaks
trumpeted out before; one such false alarm was called postindustrialism.
Indeed, sociology as a discipline is not only defined by its modernism, and
its immersion in the present, but also by its traditionalism, manifest in its
commitment to a recently invented canon, and by its futurism, evident in its
tendency to anticipate that what lies ahead is rather closer than it later
turns out to be.
As Bauman observes, sociology is also the discipline perhaps most
obsessed with its own crisis, contingency and possible extinction. The crisis
of society, real or imaginary, also presents itself as the crisis of sociology;
sociology is always in crisis, too close to the house of power or else too far
away, lost in navel-gazing irrelevance. At the same time, sociology in its
more confident mood presents itself as the cure for social crisis, offering the
solution to modernity's riddles solved. In this, however, sociology risks
missing the sense that the nature of problems or crises involved have
shifted; the logic of habit and inertia suggest that we are always ready to
fight the last intellectual battle, not the present one. Sociology is like the
drunk who looks for his lost keys under the only available street light.
What if the world has actually changed? This is the possibility which
Bauman is prepared tentatively to entertain:
The suggestion I propose to consider is the following: in present-day society,

consumer conduct (consumer freedom geared to the consumer market) moves
steadily into the position of, simultaneously, the cognitive and moral focus of
life, the integrative bond of the society, and the focus of systemic management.
( 1 992: 49)
Little wonder that Marx is of less direct use to us here, for what Bauman is
prepared to contemplate is the possibility that culture is organized
increasingly around consumption rather than production; that production,
from being the locus of popular life in the twentieth century, is symbolically
displaced by consumption as the primary source of meaning in everyday
life. But Marx persists, as well: for with consumption firmly established as
the locus of, and the playground for individual freedom, the future of
capitalism looks more secure than ever ( 1 992: 5 1 ). The good citizen is
refigured less as the good producer than as the good consumer. Post
modernity, then, is not a complete new social form or system so much as it
might be an aspect of a fully-fledged, viable social system which has come
to replace the 'classical' modern, capitalist society and therefore needs to be
theorized according to its own logic ( 1 992: 52).
What kind of sociology would be adequate to this task? The difference of
emphasis which Bauman introduces now is that we face a choice between a
postmodern sociology and a sociology of postmodernity. The first, rather
than being an oxymoron or a redressed modernist sociology, would take
the postmodern itself for granted, as the explanation rather than as what
needs to be explained. The second - a sociology of postmodernity - is
Bauman's own preference, as it posits the postmodern as the puzzle, that
which needs to be explained. Obviously an unmodified modern or modern
ist sociology will not be up to this task; yet the implication of Bauman's
preference is that the tradition of sociology is continuous, exactly as its
object, society, transforms ( 1 992: 65). Bauman's response to the choice,
postmodern sociology or sociology of postmodernity, is then a transitional
strategy, for it privileges neither the old sociology nor the newly discovered
postmodern to the exclusion of the other. The challenge is neither to dig in
nor to give way to 'anything goes', but to work in the field between, which
leaves us in principle both still located in our traditions and yet open to
the possibility of the new, this latter not least, as Bauman hints, because the
coincidence of globalization and the postmodern simultaneously under
mines both the nation-state and the modular social systems theory of
sociology which corresponds to it ( 1 992: 65). Bauman does not labour the
last point, but it hangs heavy. As Touraine has argued, the residual nega
tive effects of sociology's origins include its obsession with system, structure
and stasis rather than with change (Touraine, 1 992). The modernism of
sociology is at its most evident in this identification of society with system
and nation-state, this modular prejudice which presumes the nation-state/
society to be self-contained, and adds in the world-system or regions as an
afterthought, as the sum or subsection of the national parts. This view is
hopeless, and not only because it adds in imperialism or cross-cultural
traffic after the fact, as a result rather than a primary reality of modernity .
For if patterns of consumption as well as production take on a globalized
54 Zygm unt Bauman
character, just as locality is reasserted, then the central terms of reference of

the old modernist sociology are jeopardized.
This is the new context in which the condition of mainstream American
sociology appears to Bauman to be most problematical. For American
sociology was born in the mid-west in the heyday of the twin processes of
urbanization and industrialization, massive immigration and new starts
( 1 992: 76). These problems persist, in the so-called third world, in Mexico
and Brazil as well as in Chicago, and as immigration expands as one of the
natural narratives of modernity. The American propensity, however, is
often to imagine the entire world as though it were the United States,
perhaps with the odd nodding recognition of Canada and Mexico. None
of this will pass muster any longer, given the extraordinary permeability of
national borders, not least of all in North America, for labour and con
sumption if not for reciprocal intellectual traffic. But it is not the case that
Bauman is smug or certain about the postmodern. Indeed, in another essay,
'Is There a Postmodern Sociology?', Bauman plays with the idea that the
term postmodern is redundant ( 1 992: 93). Postmodern argument can be
playful in the distracting sense, where the intellectual becomes the clown,
and the notion of performance replaces that of ethics or politics, analysis or
critique. Certainly the debate about the postmodern has generated a surplus
of stylized intellectual combat, challenging all, participants and observers,
to take sides and kick the heads of their enemies. On the ground, in the
streets of cities along the American continent, the problems of life still look
modern. Even though the word 'postmodern' now appears in popular
media, in the press and sit-corns, it is, as Bauman acknowledges, primarily
the novel experience of just one, but crucial social category of contem
porary society: the intellectuals ( 1 992: 94). The postmodern is a semantic
confession that intellectuals can no longer behave as though they were the
legislators of the modern world. We do not set the aesthetic rules of taste,
we do not know better than others how to save the world, we can translate
or explain, but the world does not follow our rational edicts or insistences.
To be postmodern, in this way, is to rediscover self-doubt, to contemplate
again the necessity of limits to the developmental manias of modernity.
If Bauman's cautionary note is strong, his conclusion is framed by the
sense of possibility rather than the obligatory self-flagellation of the guilty
intellectual.
To sum up: if the radical manifestos proclaiming the end of sociology and social
philosophy 'as we know them' seem unfounded, equally unconvincing is the
pretence that nothing of importance has happened and that there is nothing to
stop 'business as usual'. ( 1 992: 105)
While it is in no way doomed, sociology must adjust itself to new conditions

in order to self-reproduce, and to grow. These issues are revisited, finally, in
the essay 'A Sociological Theory of Postmodernity'. The title itself suggests
a settling clarity of terms: postmodernity needs to be taken seriously, but as
Culture and sociolo!}y 55
the cultural problem rather than the conceptual solution. Postmodernity

here is the spirit of modernity looking back, in order to see forward.
Postmodernity may be interpreted as a fully developed modernity taking
full measure of the anticipated consequences of its historical work ( 1 992:
1 87). Postmodernity is modernity conscious of itself. It is this very differ
ence which calls out a sociology of the postmodern condition, though as
Bauman insists earlier, this is not a matter of judging the postmodern by
modernist sociological criteria. The postmodern has distinctive features of
its own, which modernist sociology cannot capture, not least because of its
own traditionalism. Images like stability, society as the organism, the telos
of progress can no longer be presumed. The image of society as system or
mechanism, similarly, is disabling. Perhaps even the idea of society has to
go, tainted as it is by all of the above connotations. For if 'society' implies
fixity, then it may well be sociality or the interdependence of freedom and
heteronomy which is actually our concern ( 1 992: 1 00). Structure, in any
case, is now less important than agency, habitat or habitus, the way in
which we go on in institutions across all senses of the idea, from the dyad or
group to the organization or movements of civil society.
Under the postmodern condition, according to Bauman, the habitat is a
complex system rather than a mechanical system. Two parts of significant
distinction emerge: habitat is unpredictable, and is not controlled by statis
tically significant factors. This is why the older sociological metaphors of
organic or mechanical structure will no longer work. Sociology was built on
the image of the human body, and then the machine; the corresponding
image of system and isolable subsystem no longer bite ( 1 992: 1 92). It follows
that, contrary to Durkheim's sociology, there can be no 'social brain' or
controlling centre. Actors and agencies depend on each other, but there is no
clear overall pattern of dependence or coordination. Patterns of constraint,
consequently, are also less predictable. Indeterminacy rules. The ways of life
which were relatively stable in high modernism - full employment, Key
nesianism, nuclear family, male breadwinner - are also displaced: 'The exis
tential modality of the agents is therefore one of insufficient determination,
inconclusiveness, motility and rootlessness' (1 992: 1 93). Patterns of identity
formation and maintenance are less predictable or stable. The more or less
fixed idea of a life-project is displaced by the process of self-constitution. The
old romantic idea of making and remaking the self becomes part of ordinary
life, mediated by the consumption of fashion and style. Both individuals and
institutions become more volatile. From this it follows, further, that body
cultivation becomes a way of reforming or reassembling the self. Even this
restlessness must be institutionalized, or organizationally underpinned.
Second nature becomes something like the will-to-self-transformation, and
this takes cultural as well as individual forms ( 1 992: 1 95).
While all this has a kind of Hollywood flavour, Bauman also wants to
indicate its openings, and not only its closures. One effect of these changes,
according to Bauman, is that politics is reborn in the realm of personal
lifestyle or habitus. This is a process which coincides with the reduction of
56 Zygmunt Bauman
state responsibility for politics or policy. Markets are thus strengthened, but
so, potentially, are the fibres of civil society, for actors can take on the
challenge to remake themselves in various different ways; the heavy hand of
mindless conformism does not always reign. Politics might at least poten
tially shift from claims to redistribution to arguments concerning freedom, or
human rights ( 1 992: 1 97). Arguments to citizenship or solidarity may be
reconfigured in this way, but they do not disappear; to believe that they could
is to identify politics with its modernist forms. Politics may develop in at least
four different possible ways. Tribal politics is one possible path; in Bauman's
understanding, this is potentially retrogressive, as tribalism coincides with
some forms of retroactive communitarianism, though tribalism of course can
also take on more playful forms, as in the Italian cultural radicals of the
1 970s, the Metropolitan Indians. Another possibility is the politics of desire.
Again, the politics of desire can lead to encouraging autonomy through the
reconstitution of sexual identity, but it can also lead to the aestheticization of
the body-image at the expense of the suffering of actually existing bodies. A
third possibility is the politics of fear, an associated effect of Beck's 'risk
society', where fear say of pollution or contamination immobilizes civil
society and ultimately expands the authority of the newly emerging ranks of
risk-experts. Fourth, there still remains a possible politics of desired
certainty, or the manipulation of trust through simulated politics. Here
politics becomes impression management, and the private lives of public
figures become the most significant measure of their good character in office
( 1 992: 200).
The problem is not, then, that postmodernity swallows up politics -
modernity already made a solid start at that - so much as it is that the
expressions of politics change. At the same time as these uncertainties
appear, Bauman's sense is that the challenges of a postmodern ethics con
front us anew: amidst all this choice, we are forced to learn how to deal with
choice and with responsibility for the other. We can still walk away from
choice, turn our heads or the TV channel, but it is arguably more difficult to
do this than before, because we know that individual responsibility counts
and that large-scale organizations are incapable of responsibility. So what
does this mean for a postmodern sociology? Bauman's point is that we can
no longer imagine that we inhabit the world described by rule-governed
diagrams of society in terms of inputs and outputs or four-box schemes. The
challenge of self-reflexivity can no longer be defined mechanically or
functionally by my role in the system. There is still a system, it still holds
together, but it allows some of us some room to move, as it puts upon us the
responsibility to follow the rules either dutifully, or creatively.
Exit. Pursued by a Bear
Change is, or ought to be, the founding curiosity of sociology; only

sociology, like its bearers, is fragile, habitual, given to repetition and to
reinventing the wheel. How could it be other? For sociology, too, is a

cultural form. Two major facts govern Bauman's sociological trajectory, and
the path of his life. One is the dominance and eventual disappearance of
socialism as a culture, or counterculture of modernity. The other is the
apparent transformation of culture itself as the cult of Reason is exposed,
not least in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and as modernism comes
unstuck as an intellectual attitude or cultural form in the 1 970s. Modernity,
however, is like the sun that fails ever fully to set upon us, so that sociology,
too, maintains its potential vocation as the critique of modernity: but it
needs to earn it, not just claim it. The prospect of a postmodern sociology
lies before us, this as an activity, not just as a promise. Do we then change, or
remain the same? Bauman's wager is that we remain anthropologically
prepossessed with universal problems - sex, love, death, responsibility,
maintenance of the self, care for others, putting food on the table, sweeping
up after. But the forms of these activities change, and so does second nature.
This is as close as we may get to a sociological basis for hope; and this may
be why it is that Bauman has staked such a claim on the idea of the
postmodern in sociology, and remains open to the possibility of a post
modern sociology. For to contemplate these possibilities is to open the
chance that we might push away the dead weight of modernity, or at least of
the dark side of modernity, as the historic period which has delivered us into
a century of horrors from Gallipoli to Auschwitz and Hiroshima and on to
Kosovo. History, as Marx said, progresses by its bad side. As Bauman says
somewhere, the average Pole believes nothing good can come of the past. If
Bauman dwells upon the depths of the dark side of modernity, this is because
he wants us to believe that we might still step closer to the bright side of
postmodernity. For postmodernity is not only the cultural self-consciousness
of modernity, for Bauman; it is the promise of modernity, after the threat.
3 Intellectuals and Utopians
Sociology, the textbooks tell us, depends on self-reflexivity; for sociologists

seem to have a characteristic knack of knowing what is wrong in what other
people do, but never ourselves. Zygmunt Bauman's sociology is persistently
self-reflexive; his view is that we, too, are part of the problem, indeed that
we as intellectuals or legislators aspirant have been a big part of the
problem of modernity. Our attraction to the modern possibility of change
sometimes leads us to value change over everything else; yet we cannot
deny, either, that the world needs changing, even if it is less immediately
clear than ever exactly whose responsibility this task is. Thinking, acting,
interpreting, dreaming, these are nevertheless some of our major activities.
Seeking out the balance seems to be the most impossible of challenges, yet it
is also the most interminable.
Socialism: The A ctive Utopia
Utopia is a ubiquitous presence in the lives of moderns. We love it, we hate

it; we know that the world needs change, yet we resist or detest the changes
sponsored by others, which often seem to make the world less inhabitable
than it was before. In the twentieth century the story intensifies, for now we
encounter utopia in power, in the Soviet experiment and then under
fascism. Utopia, dystopia, Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World,
alternative models of living from Shakers to hippies, dreams to go forwards
or back, utopia seems almost to enclose the modern experience, encom
passing both the desire for self-creation and the horrors of rational mastery.
Attitudes towards utopia are also likely to shift historically, and con
juncturally; these are not simply matters of personal taste. The practical
and theoretical western enthusiasm of the 1 960s for utopia indicates the
relative abundance of that moment; we had the luxury of realizing then that
social arrangements did not mirror economic potentials. Utopianism,
however, can also be romantic or modernizing, as the themes of Memories
of Class ( 1 982) suggest. Some utopias are born in the blackest of moments,
though we should also contemplate the fact that there are, in a sense, no
utopias after Auschwitz; or at least, utopia then becomes contemplative
again rather than active.
Zygmunt Bauman's vision of utopia was positive when, in 1 976, he
published Socialism: The Active Utopia ( 1 976a). This was a good moment
in his life; settled in Leeds, after years of disappointment and harassment,
I ntellectuals and utopians 59
he dedicated the book to their twins, 'To Irena and Lydia - my twin
utopias'. Actually-existing socialism, or its concrete representatives, may
have expelled the Baumans from Poland, but in spirit with that period of
Marx-Renaissance, Zygmunt Bauman opened his book with a character
istic claim: 'Socialism descended upon nineteenth-century Europe as utopia'
( 1 976a: 9). Reality was to be measured against the ideal, against utopia; it
was the latter, the project of socialism, which remained both defensible and
desirable. But more, utopia is real; it is part of us, that part which remains
uneasy at the sense of the achievement or arrival of our great civilizations.
If normality generates conformity, then utopianism is vital even in its most
fantastic or ridiculous guises. Societies like ours, based on the hegemony of
instrumental reason, need mental space to discuss ends, and hopes. Utopias
are significant, for Bauman, in four generic ways. First, utopias relativize
the present. They offer us criteria other than immanent measures in order
to take stock of where we are, and where we are heading. They open
horizons of comparison, but unlike history, they also evoke future possi
bilities, and not only past achievements, more or less imaginary ( 1 976a: 1 3).
Yet, second, utopias are also significant because they are aspects of culture
in which possible extrapolations of the present may be explored. Utopias
are driven by hope, but they can also be concrete; they express the possible
hopes of an age, and they say something about its capacities ( l 976a: I S).
Third, utopias are useful because they pluralize; they generate dissensus
rather than false harmony, even though individual utopian projects might
themselves enthuse for false harmony or stasis. Utopias split the shared
reality we inhabit into a series of competing projects for the future and
assessments of the present. This is why one person's utopia is another's
dystopia. Utopias are political, in the best sense of the word, in that they
express distinct and competing images of the good society, images whose
expression often coincides with the activity of distinct social groups ( 1 976a:
I S). Fourth, utopias do in fact exert enormous influence on the actual
course of historical events. Utopias have an 'activating presence'; yester
day's utopia - as in the idea of guaranteed income - may be on today's
social policy agenda.
As Bauman summarizes, utopia is an image of a future and better world,
which is not at all inevitable so much as it is desirable; which is critical of
that which exists, and in this sense is beyond practical realization; and
which relies politically on the possibility of collective action ( l 976a: 1 7).
Not all utopias, then, are socialist, but socialism has been the most promi
nent member of the family. Of course, the figure of utopia is also classical,
arcing back at least to Plato; but modern utopias are different, and this is
where socialism comes into its prominence. For socialism has always been
caught up with the sense of change which we identify as modern, and this
whether positively, as futuristic, or negatively, as romantic in tenor ( 1 97 6a:
1 8 - 1 9). Bacon, not Plato, is the driving face of its earlier vision; the
distinction in Bauman's mind is similar to that in Durkheim's lectures on
socialism, where communism looks back, to simplicity, and socialism is a
60 Zygmunt Bauman
modern, future-orientated and modernizing force (Durkheim, 1 959). The

commune seeks stasis; socialism, by comparison, is complicit in the very
restlessness of modernity itself. Socialism mirrors capitalism, and this is one
of its weaknesses as well as its strengths - it seeks out perfectibility rather
than perfection ( l 976a: 1 9). Thus the complicity of socialism in social
engineering, and ultimately in lacobinism. lacobinism is based conceptually
on the image of the weak individual who needs only to be led by Those
Who Know ( l 976a: 21 ). lacobinism is a kind of utopianism based on
contempt for the impassive, the ordinary, for the present, the impure, the
unwashed ( 1 976a: 22). Marx short-circuited this logic of contempt and
leadership only by introducing the impossible, the idea that capitalism
automatically generates its own fatal economic contradictions, or else, its
own proletarian gravediggers. This false marxian solution to the problem of
political organization in turn opens the door for the Bolsheviks, or the New
Prince as the missing link to fuse the gap between the proletariat and
history ( 1 976a: 24).
Now Bauman confronts a theme which is to anticipate the path of his
life's work into the 1 990s: the problem of order. As he announces, with
stark clarity, 'It is only recently that we have begun to realize the extent to
which modern thought is prompted by the cravings of order' ( l 976a: 28).
While it is less than controversial to observe that the utopian impulse often
historically takes architectural form, Bauman's concern here is rather to
probe into the motivation involved. For architecture is co-terminous with
the thoroughly modern, scientific, social engineering attitude. Utopianism is
based on the quest for order ( 1 976a: 29). With the advent of modernity,
order shifts from the realm of 'nature' to that of techne; this is a fact both
'real' and 'utopian' in its dimensions, for modernity is the field of social
self-constitution. The anthropological and ethical issue here is whether we,
as moderns, are prepared to live with the mess, or whether we are to
become obsessed with the idea of cleaning it up, once-and-for-all ( l 976a:
30). As Bauman notes, the central utopian socialists, including Saint
Simon, Marx and Bellamy all remained deeply ambivalent on this score.
Their work combined in different ways the lust for change and progress
together with the very different, residual sense of loss of the past. Perhaps
this is why Marx and Bellamy remained caught between Durkheim's
imagined options, trapped between communism and socialism, stretched
across the desire for simplicity and the thrust towards dynamism.
The emphasis in Bauman's argument, however, is on the distinction
between the industrializing socialist intellectuals like Marx and the alterna
tive currents which valued nostalgic dreams about the precapitalist world
we had lost ( l 976a: 3 1 ). As Bauman acknowledges,
Even the most ardent preachers of the new industrial world must have drawn
their definition of order, as a safe and predictable situation founded on the
regularity and recurrence of human conduct, from the living memory of the past,
since it was never demonstrated by the system currently in existence. ( l 976a: 3 1 )
Utopias, then, will not neatly be classified as exclusively oriented to the past
or to the future; progress and nostalgia, hope and memory will always be
caught up together. The real dividing line runs between the preachers of
greater complexity and admirers of simplicity, where simplicity conjures up
the image of return.
If the presence of Durkheim is often apparent behind arguments in
sociology, so does the ghost of Ferdinand Tonnies shadow many of its
concerns. Bauman acknowledges this directly when he aligns the value
of simplicity with the image of Gemeinschaft (I 976a: 3 1 ). Gemeinschaft or
traditional community works as the usually unstated image by which much
of contemporary sociology still will measure the present; modern sociology,
that is to say, has at its heart a deeply traditionalistic core. Marx, too, was a
follower of Tonnies without ever knowing it; for what else could the
critique of alienation imply than a return to simplicity? For Marx was not
only the son of the steam engine; and Tonnies, who historically followed
him, was also a socialist and a utopian.
Socialism has been, and to some extent still is for Bauman in 1 976, the
modern utopia. Or else, and here he quotes Tom Bottomore, socialism is
the counterculture of capitalism, both within and without it. Yet if social
ism has been historically important, its significance as utopia is more
powerfully as the not yet. If it is realized, as state power, then it will die; at
the other extreme, utopia which rests always somewhere beyond would
seem merely illusory ( l 976a: 36-7). Yet it is modernity which ultimately
frames socialism, and not capitalism alone; it is modernity, and not just
capitalism, which is the problem, and in a certain perverse sense it will
therefore be modernity (or later, the post modern), which will be the
solution; not socialism. For socialism is also caught up with, continuous
with liberalism and not only capitalism ( I 976a: 42). More precisely,
The socialist utopia could present itself as a genuine substitute for the bourgeois
way of dealing with the issues of modernity, or as a further stage into which the
previous stages smoothly and imperceptibly merge. ( I976a: 48)
But the family resemblances across the different social isms are weak, and
dispersed, as in Wittgenstein's sense; they resemble each other, but only in
mirroring a different feature. Bauman now addresses Durkheim's use of the
specific category socialism to denote the idea of state-directed economy.
But this, too, is a specific rather than generic image of socialism, and it
privileges images of the desirable over the actually achieved ( l 976a: 50).
Socialism is made a programme, more than a critical spirit, which is to
presume that the utopia can be realized concretely, like a builder's plan.
This is to substitute an accountant's conception of socialism for its ideal
of freedom, or equality. For socialism has these two goals, freedom and
equality, both of which have been trampled on by its enthusiasts ( l 976a:
53). But it is also marxism, as an ideology, which opens this slide into
economism and grey industrialism. For it is in the hands of its marxist
62 Zygmunt Bauman
spokesmen that socialism is centred upon and thus reduced to economy, or

'necessity'; whereas early marxism, and alternative streams of socialism
actually sought to problematize economy itself, not to harness but to
transform it. The workers' utopia thus in a certain sense became a bour
geois utopia ( l976a: 58).
Bauman earlier in his text, as we have noted, clears his throat on
Gramsci's idea of the New Prince, the party to end all parties. Certainly the
historical trajectory of Gramsci's own thought is away from council com
munism and towards the new party; likely under fascism and in Mussolini's
prison he could think no other. At this point of his discussion, however,
Bauman returns to Gramsci, for whatever the contradictions of the
Sardinian's thought his legacy to the Marx-renaissance was among the
richest, and Bauman had been contemplating this since the early 1960s, well
before the English-speaking new left discovered Gramsci. Further, just as
Gramsci was less ideologically available to the thinkers of the Budapest
School, who recoiled at mere mention of the New Prince, so was Lukacs
more part of the problem for Bauman than of its solution.
Why Gramsci? Ideology, culture, civil society were keywords in the
reception of his marxism, offering an alternative link to the Bolshevik Party
between the socialist idea and its subjects, an argument at once more
sophisticated and more democratic in its timbre. Where economy ruled, for
the orthodox marxists, for Gramsci humans did, even if in manners medi
ated variously through habit, custom and belief or common sense. Gramsci
stood almost alone in viewing socialism as a popular challenge, neither as
an historic inevitability, as in Kautsky, nor as something to be seized, as per
Lenin. State and economy mattered, for Gramsci, but citizens inhabited
civil society, which was henceforth where socialists might direct their
attentions. The struggle for socialism, for Bauman as for Gramsci, is the
struggle for a new culture ( l 976a: 65-8). But Gramsci, of course, appeals
also to intellectuals, not only because he was one, but also because he takes
intellectuals seriously; we know one of us when we see one. Popular culture
counts, then, but so do the intellectuals who are its cultivators. While
Kautsky viewed social democracy as the confluence of socialism and the
working class - an idea and an agent - Gramsci more accurately conceived
it as the project of a potential class alliance or new historic bloc including
intellectuals and workers. To acknowledge the importance of the intellec
tuals, as Gramsci did, was also potentially to foreground them as a
problem, as the aspiring social ventriloquists ready to educate and to speak
for the uncultured proletariat. At least, on Gramsci's view, we would be
spared the pathetic comedy of intellectuals masquerading as pantomime
proletarians, at the beginning of the long drama which ends: 'we rule you;
we fool you; we eat for you; we shoot you, we serve all'. The Bolshevik
experiment acted on the possibility that economy, not culture, still ruled;
that to solve one problem would still imaginably solve the other. Yet the
spirit of marxism, as Bauman concludes, was not about the management of
the economy, and not even about forms of ownership, but about the
I n tellectuals and utopians 63
activity of the masses. Lenin took the baton, but was unable to run with it
(I 976a: 76); perhaps he was actually running somewhere else.
The history of marxism, in any case, was transformed by the Bolshevik
initiative. The Soviets were compelled to make a modernity of a particular
kind, rather than a socialism of a marxian kind. This meant that the
Soviets were faced with an impossible challenge: not only to generate a
modern economy, but also a modern culture and forms of legitimation
with it ( l 976a: 8 1). This was exactly the feature which Gramsci had
discerned, later and at a distance; seizing state power, as in the Soviet
experience, was deceptively easy; the problems came later, and were
grounded rather in civil society, or perhaps in its weakness in this case.
Nevertheless, in Bauman's eyes, one major problem in pre-revolutionary
Russia was to be located in the fact that the marxists belonged to the
emerging civil society rather than to the state; state power was not thrust
upon them, but the change in mentality across the two spheres was
nevertheless dramatic ( 1 976a: 83).
Lenin identified his party with the people, against the actually existing
population. Both the people, and the individual were occluded in that
process, conceptually and politically. Seeking to sidestep the stage of indi
viduation, as the Bolsheviks did, could only lead to the complete subjuga
tion of the individual by a totally alienated social power ( I 976a: 89). No
individuals, no possibilities for democracy. Yet the Soviet experience was a
path through modernity, of a particular kind. It was a modernizing revolu
tion, bringing together industrialization, urbanization, nation- and state
building, which compressed and out-achieved earlier capitalist processes of
primitive accumulation.
The dominant image of socialist utopia was thus transformed, indus
trialized, flattened out; utopia was realized, in a sense, and therefore lost.
It was no longer a utopia on the other side of the industrialization process . . . . On

the contrary, it is now a utopia of industrialization as such; a capitalist utopia
with no room for capitalists, a bourgeois utopia in which the private tycoons of
entrepreneurship have been replaced by the grey, smart conformity of the
bureaucratic octopus. (I 976a: 9 1 )
Socialism, after the Soviet experience, says Bauman in 1 976 is a 'populist'

version of the old bourgeois utopia. Yet the Soviet claim is not simply
capitalist, even if the opposition between those who control and those they
control is a similar kind of bipolarization to that evident in capitalist class
relations ( l 976a: 93). One key difference, in the 1 970s, remains in the way
that politics is directly militarized ( l 976a: 96; see also Castoriadis, 1981).
Politics, in the classical sense, is notable in its absence; but unlike capital
ism, it is not economics here that sucks up politics, but rather the militar
ized political realm which controls the economy. Bureaucracy rules here,
not capital. A good ten years before the western radical rediscovery of civil
society, Bauman suggests that it is only the emergence of civil society
64 Zygmunt Bauman
alongside the end of scarcity which would potentially open this Soviet
scenario up in a socialist direction.
Viewed from the perspective of utopia, however, the problem is even less
shiftable; for the Soviet experience has aligned socialism with capitalism,
whereas its critical role is caught up with the idea of socialism as the
counter-culture of capitalism. The hegemony of the Russian Revolution
within socialism has meant the closing of radical horizons, the relative
disappearance of alternative points of view or judgements of value. Social
ism's 'success' was now also to be measured by the number of factory
chimneys, by the dominance of work discipline, puritan morality, by all the
indicators of industrial progress. The Soviet system came to measure its
own perfection and its own progress in the 'building of socialism' with the
help of a bourgeois measuring rod ( 1 976a: 100). Socialism, like capitalism,
became a dystopia, neither a no-place nor a good place. Socialism, there
fore, must start over ( 1 976a: 1 08). The narrowing of modern common sense
into its capitalist confines means that the mere possibility of social alterna
tives needs to be established again. What began as an idea in search of a
constituency now becomes a constituency in search of an idea ( 1 976a: 1 09).
Socialism in a sense has become real, practically embodied in both east and
west, and therefore has lost its defining, visionary capacity ( 1 976a: 1 1 2).
The role of marxism in all this also becomes problematical. While the
young Marx imagined a radical solution in a utopia back beyond capitalism
and alienation, the Marx of Capital already opened this route in explaining
the self-reproduction of capitalism. No amount of guarantees about the
negation of the negation could solve this (Bauman, I 976a: 1 37). Marx's
own vision thus shrinks across the path of his thought. Hope, then, needs
more than vision or insight. Marx's vision ultimately fell too low, too close
to the reality of capitalism. Marx, and marxism begin to emerge, finally, as
part of the problem, not only part of the solution.
Socialism: The Active Utopia ( 1 976a) is an inconclusive study. It is a
report on the desirability and difficulty of socialist hope. Three themes
emerge here which have especial significance for Bauman's later work:
labour, order and intellectuals. The arguments about labour and socialism
in this text plainly connect back to Between Class and Elite ( 1 972), and
stretch forward, to Memories of Class ( 1 982) and beyond. Written in the
mid- 1 970s, Socialism: The Active Utopia still persists in connecting labour
and utopia, even if its referents are often more to the 1 960s period -
Marcuse, Andre Gorz, more generally Gramsci. Yet the impetus of the
labouring utopia seems already exhausted; labour is increasingly part of the
problem of modernity. Socialism, then, is a utopia or a culture more than a
movement; the labour movement is not a utopia in itself, except in the most
immanent sense. Yet the problems of the labour movement, and the value
of labour, nevertheless remain central, and the coming eclipse of the
moment of production by that of consumption changes none of this;
problems of working life remain central to our spiritual and material
existence. For socialists, still today, the idea of utopia cannot be reduced to
Intellectuals and utopians 65
the problems of labour, but that utopia which has nothing to say to work
or labour is useless. The larger problem here is that already in this book the
closure of socialism itself can be anticipated. If utopia remains possible, at
the end of the book, then the future of socialism seems considerably less
certain (see Beilharz, 1 992, 1994b).
The problem of order is also foregrounded in Socialism: The Active
Utopia ( l 976a), though its centrality only emerges fully in hindsight. Order
shifts further into central focus in Legislators and Interpreters ( 1 987), where
it is intellectuals who seek to legislate order on behalf of the masses, and
finally in Modernity and the Holocaust ( 1 989a) and Modernity and Ambi
valence ( 1 99 1 a), where the quest for order becomes the central problem of
modernity as such. In Socialism: The Active Utopia the idea of order
remains both less developed and more ambivalent. The impulse to order is
one fundamental motive in the utopian project; utopian intellectuals seek to
redesign and rebuild the world, and, as radicals, we cannot but help being
both attracted and repelled by these ambitions. Perhaps we are more
attracted by the possibility of the thought-experiment than by its prospects
for realization; for the point, ultimately, may be less to seek actually to
change the world than to know that the possibility exists, that we know we
can live differently, that alternative ways persist. For Bauman, in any case,
the negative credentials of the utopians as budding social engineers are here
posted; the intellectuals are warned, but not yet damned for their open
ended legislative ambitions.
That famous propaganda image of Lenin did have him wielding a broom,
sweeping away the parasites, the vermin, the scum of the earth; and the
Bolsheviks were, of course, part of this problem, seeking to clean up the
world for once and for all. The Bolsheviks were less gardeners than sur
geons; ultimately this part of their project, as Bauman will argue later, is in
direct sympathy with that of the Nazis, only where Nazis seek to exter
minate Jews, for the Bolsheviks the vermin is a class enemy, the Kulaks.
But both social forces wage civil war against one particular part of the
project in order to cleanse the world. Neither are driven by intellectuals, but
seek to destroy them.
The debate about the intellectuals is an old one, and it shows no signs of
abating. Intellectuals, those who take themselves really seriously, have a
residual problem with democracy. For if they, we, know better, why should
we not rule the world? As Bauman indicates, this kind of mentality rests on
a spurious scientistic and godly fantasy about mastery, as though the
human world were amenable to 'fixing'. The Bolsheviks remained unable to
transcend these barriers; Lenin agreed with Kautsky that workers would
always need to be led, and Trotsky never escaped from the fantasy that the
real crisis of marxism was only ever a crisis of leadership. The Western
discovery of Gramsci in this context was a phenomenon in its own right.
For Gramsci's marxism began from the recognition that everyday life was
an extraordinary mixture of intelligence, habit and prejudice and Gramsci
therefore insisted that in principle all citizens were intellectuals. Of course it
66 Z!!gmunt Bauman
remained the fact that some were more intellectual than others; yet it
remained part of the socialist utopia, for Gramsci, that the marxist image of
the future presumed that there was no genetic distinction between leaders
and led. Gramsci, however, never escaped entirely from Bolshevism, or
from the Jacobin way of thinking. When push comes to shove, marxist
intellectuals who became professional revolutionaries cannot jump off the
locomotive of history; democrats become demagogues, thinkers and inter
preters become the legislators and hooded magistrates of history.
Yet just as Bauman remains ambivalent about the problem of order, to
this point, so does his critique of intellectuals remain suggestive. For
Bauman was also on the verge of making the transition out of marxism. His
next book is directly continuous with these themes, even if it seems like
something of a departure from socialism, into the realms of social science.
Hermeneutics and Social Science
In 1 978 Bauman published Hermeneutics and Social Science: Approaches to

Understanding. Obviously the text stands in its own right, but is also a key
connector through to Legislators and Interpreters ( 1 987), as the hermeneutic
model begins to jostle with that of critical theory as a way to proceed in the
intellectual world. For when Shelley proclaimed that poets were the legis
lators of the world, his sense was evidently metaphorical; ideas ruled, not
those who articulated them. Even critical theorists could not entirely escape
the sense that their thought should rule, ideologically at least, over the
philistine and commodified world they were born into.
Hermeneutics and Social Science might seem at first glance to be only
scholarly, a diversion, a different path from socialism. Yet Bauman's pur
pose in this book both cuts across those of Socialism: The Active Utopia
( l 976a) and anticipates the 1 987 turn in Legislators and Interpreters, inter
preters, by extension, being hermeneuts. Just as Gramsci became a major
source of inspiration for western marxism, so the rediscovery of hermen
eutics was a major, if marginal trend in critical thinking. Swamped by the
more popular French trends in structuralism, then poststructuralism and
deconstruction, hemmed in on the other border by the stern second
generation critical theory of Habermas, hermeneutics has remained, ever
since, something of a lost cause. Nevertheless, the image of knowledge as a
conversation or dialogue between reader and text, where a 'hermeneutical
circle' works both ways between the two, remains one of the richest of the
available repertoire of interpretative tools in the human sciences and it does
seem actually to describe how we work, whether we choose to recognize it
or not (see for example Rundell, 1 994).
If hermeneutics has remained somehow invisible, then, Bauman's chal
lenge is to show that much of our common sociological culture, from Marx
to Schlitz, is nevertheless recognizably hermeneutical in its approach. Yet
hermeneutics has a longer history as well, which Bauman traces from its
Intellectuals and u topians 67
classical focus upon the text through to its romantic obsession with the
author ( 1 978: 10). Like structuralism, much later, hermeneutics encouraged
the idea of a depth-reading. Unlike structuralism, hermeneutics maintained
a concern with the author, or with intention. Whereas structuralism, at least
say per Levi-Strauss in one sense sought to mimic natural science, hermen
eutics sought to focus on the interplay between actors, readers, texts and
writers ( 1 978: 1 2). Knowledge is circular, repetitive if partial; it consists in
an endless recapitulation and reassessment of collective memories, ever
more voluminous, but always selective ( 1 978: 1 7).
The hermeneut, as interpreter, is a translator across time or place, a
cultural messenger or broker who mediates between text and context. In this
sense, all sociology is practically hermeneutical, as it seeks to connect or
compare moments or cultures, movements or ideas, to link up sympathies or
experience ( 1 978: 29). Hermeneutics is therefore definitionally intersub
jective, yet its process is also cumulative; interpreters can know more than
the author, authors count but they are not gods. The interpreter approaches
what is familiar to the author as though it is foreign or unknown; the
hermeneutical enterprise resembles anthropology in this regard, that it seeks
out resonances and dissonances between inside and outside, older and more
recent. The interpreter is therefore a messenger, only the message is not self
evident; for contemporary hermeneutics the interpreter is the receiver, and
not only the agent of transmission. The hermeneutic circle is the process of
constructing understanding which holds up culture, makes it possible.
Hermeneutics opens up as it develops historically, from text to culture, for
to understand is also to value ( 1 978: 34).
Bauman's purpose in Hermeneutics and Social Science ( 1 978) is less to
track this movement comprehensively than to identify its significance in this
moment of the late 1970s. This is also one measure of his achievement; his
purpose is less to master hermeneutics than to capture its importance as a
symbol. For these kinds of reasons, Bauman detours his path through
Marx. While Marx's work is fundamentally sympathetic with hermeneutics,
its usual lineage would be traced rather from Schleiermacher through
Dilthey to Weber, Heidegger and Gadamer.
Why Marx? Bauman's approach to hermeneutics is broad and symbolic
rather than narrow or literal in scope. The theoretical affinities are with the
early, existential Marx of the 1 840s. Marx's early work, historicist and
humanist, runs a parallel path to that of the history of hermeneutics, for
which meaning is created, exchanged, recycled and transformed as well as
inherited. One difference is that Marx locates the roots of miscomprehen
sion not in the mind of the cognizing subject, but in the object of cognition,
within the structure of domination which constitutes the object ( 1 978: 58).
Thus, as Bauman observes, Marx transforms hermeneutics or epistemology
into sociology ( 1 978: 58). Herein lies the possibility of the critique of
political economy, the expose of commodity fetishism which is the peak
of his achievement. Marx's work runs alongside hermeneutics, in this par
ticular if idiosyncratic way; for here interpretation leads to or results in
68 Zygmunt Bauman
revolution. Yet where Marx figures in Bauman's cast as the young revo
lutionary, Weber now appears as the institutional voice of mainstream
sociology. Bauman knows that knowledge is perspectival; as he says later,
in discussion of Husser!, as 'in the case of every great work, there are many
sides from which Husser!'s contribution may be approached, and many
contexts in which its significance reveals itself' (1 978: I l l ).
Bauman's Weber, in this text, is not the existentialist Weber whom, say
Kar! Lowith aligns with Marx in his famous 1 932 essay, Max Weber and
Karl Marx (Lowith, 1 982). Weber's voice here, then, is less the sober or
black gaze of the soul who looks into the abyss and sees the future as the
iron cage, than the detached analyst of objectivity. It is difficult not to
suspect that at this point of his own biography, Bauman's personal sym
pathies are still more evidently with Marx, the romantic critic of reification,
rather than with the stoical figure of Weber. For even though Weber's
position is more sympathetic with the distinction Bauman later crystallizes
between legislators and interpreters, Bauman at this point observes the
distinction between spheres of value in Weber and proceeds to focus mainly
on the claim to objectivity. This Weber seems more decidedly American
than German, as sociological rather than philosophical or existential in
stance. For Weber's distinction between scholarship and politics exactly
anticipates Bauman's between hermeneutics and legislation, as it anticipates
the later foregrounding of ethics as the realm where no one can decide but
the subject, him- or herself. Intellectuals have to recognize that they have
no right to lead, or at least no right more than any other citizen. Weber is
thus both the analyst and the critic of rationalization ( 1 978: 73-4). The
problem, of course, is that sociology is in the meantime turned into science,
losing the better sense of its own limits and claiming exactly that right to
legislate which Weber was wary of ( 1 978: 86).
The further characters in Bauman's procession of hermeneuts are more
predictable, perhaps with the exception of Parsons: Mannheim, Husser!,
Heidegger, Schutz and ethnomethodology. Imaginably, were the book
written today, it would include Gadamer and Ricoeur. But as I have
observed, Bauman's purpose is less to establish a catalogue of victorious
heroes than it is to seek to capture the aura around their shared idea or
practice. Through the discussion of Heidegger the register of discourse
seems to shift. 'Things must go wrong' before they can reveal themselves as
problems ( 1 978: 1 63). Later Bauman quotes Schopenhauer, to the same
end: 'If I talk of happiness, it is because something makes me suffer' ( 1 978:
1 94). This way of thinking is later extended in Freedom ( 1 988), where the
argument opens with the sense that freedom and dependence are mutually
constitutive, or chained together. The larger claim, characteristic of
Bauman's entire project, is that there is no such state as happiness; it is only
a moment, or moments in the struggle against the state of suffering. This
claim, sympathetic again with the anthropology of the young Marx, echoes
out through Bauman's work on class, dignity and deprivation. Within the
horizon of arguments concerning hermeneutics, its immediate connotations
are more precise. Within the realm of understanding, Bauman argues, it is

incomprehension which is the norm. Understanding is nothing more than
the struggle against incomprehension. The image of understanding is the
negative of the experience of incomprehension: 'It is only the experience of
incomprehension which makes us, in a flash, aware of the task of understand
ing' ( 1 978: 1 95). Incomprehension is the norm, understanding the exception,
not because we are stupid, but because our means of proceeding are
habitual, customary, ritualized, routinized. It is consequently only in the
breaking of these habits and rituals that we momentarily glimpse the
possibility of other ways to live or to proceed: 'We perceive the knowledge
of "how to go on" as a task only when we do not know how to go on' ( 1 978:
1 95). Again, Marx's presence can be felt behind the shoulder, for this is why
change is the precondition of understanding, even if this is not always
change of our own choosing. Bauman's is not an argument for revolution in
permanence; but it does rest on the claim that by virtue of our nature as
creatures of habit, the capacity to learn may be less natural than connected
to changes in perspective, in sense of time or place, to juxtaposition of the
uncanny with the familiar whether at home or afar. Certainly the whole of
Bauman's Hermeneutics and Social Science ( 1 978) is constructed within that
sense of Vico, mediated through Gramsci, that what we know best is what
we make or create; only this is not simply an occasional, accumulative
process, but is also accidential and ruptural.
Alongside Vico, Bauman now turns explicitly to Montaigne, later to
become the postmodernists' hero as essayist. It is not only custom or ritual
in the general active sense but also in the mental or conceptual sense which
hermeneutics seeks to place, as prejudice. Finally, Bauman introduces
Habermas, rather than Gadamer, into this context, in order to discuss the
image of communication. In this text Bauman probably spends more time
discussing Popper and kindred problems of philosophy of science than he
does Horkheimer and Adorno or Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and
Horkheimer, 1 944). His enthusiasms for Habermas are also contained,
though he evidently draws more from the early Habermas of Knowledge and
Human Interests, and largely ignores the systematic-synthetic turn which
Habermas much later takes into Theory of Communicative Action. Bauman's
general claim here is that the epistemology of hermeneutics cannot be
detached from the sociology of communicative action ( 1 978: 244). It is less
language that is central, than culture or in this sense communicative action.
If sociology as a utopia were successful, then understanding and communal
life would be more closely interconnected ( 1 978: 246). Utopia would
connect science and life, not suspend or submerge them.
Bauman thus closes his book on hermeneutics in a circular manner, as he
began: for he socializes, or sociologizes hermeneutics, viewing it as a prac
tical and social rather than cerebral or merely intellectual challenge. The
focus, in other words, is on intellectualizing life and concretizing the life of
the mind, rather than on cultivating a specific theory of reading or advo
cating an academy of eggheads capable of propagating it. Ordinary life is
70 Zygmunt Bauman
full of intellectual challenges; only in the twentieth century, in particular,

political life is also inhabited by particular human problems called
intellectuals, those for whom Truth is transparent and Progress a tributary
path that is obvious. Ironically, in one way, this is a problem outside of
hermeneutics, for the Road to Truth is more often or usually based on
claims to natural scientific credibility, objective truth without subjects,
which is the very approach that hermeneutics seeks to problematize and
offer an alternative to. If positivistic claims to science are the norm, then
hermeneutics is the exception. If explanation is the norm, understanding
offers the hope of an alternative. The prospect of hermeneutics is thus like
that of critical theory, marginal and tentative but no less compelling for
that.
Structuralism , Semiology, Marxism
The intellectual profile of hermeneutics has always been marginal, partly

because it is not a tool or method that can simply be operationalized, partly
because its reception at least in English has been overshadowed first by
structuralism and then by deconstruction. Bauman's work has a clearer
proximity to hermeneutics, not least because the significance of interpreters
becomes more prominent as his project proceeds. But he was not dismissive
of structuralism either, or at least not of the structuralist activity. Semi
ology, likewise, is an open field for Bauman, as more primordially is the
culture of marxism. These enthusiasms are detailed in three different and
significant essays published through the late 1 960s and into the 1 970s.
Bauman's extended analysis of structuralism is presented in 'The Struc
turalist Promise' ( 1 973b). Structuralism's appeal was apparent in its uni
versalism, not least per Levi-Strauss, combined with its sense of opening up
into linguistics and semiology. The problem Bauman focuses upon is that
anticipated already by Saussure in his 1 9 1 6 Course in General Linguistics.
Could the model provided by language itself legitimately be universalized
across the social sciences? Just when the linguistic tum in contemporary
social theory was taking hold, Bauman is already anticipating its con
ceptual inflation. Miscomprehension, as he argued earlier, is the norm. His
own terms of criticism are strong and clear. Language is part of culture,
and culture may even function like a language, but culture itself is not a
language ( l 973b: 7 1). To identify language and culture is to do violence to
both in the process. For even language cannot be 'pure communication';
meaning is as often contextual as it is indicated by the relation between
signs or between signifiers and signifieds ( l 973b: 72). 'The empirical reality
of each culture can be said to be full of "floating" signs, waiting for
meanings to be attached to' them ( l 973b: 75). Communication ultimately
works through ordering, rather than structuring; it is order, the central
issue of Modernity and the Holocaust ( 1 989a), rather than structure, which
is predominant. Because communication is equivocal, it is better to speak of
I ntellectuals and u topians 71
'ordering' a s the superior function of culture a s a whole (Bauman, 1 973b:

77). Culture rests upon the substitution of artificial order for natural order.
Yet order itself is also highly variable in practice. Order is a graded notion:
the level of order is measured by the degree of predictability ( l 973b: 79).
The prospect of eliminating disorder remains illusory. Ordering works
against an incertitude which itself is indissoluble.
The implication of this argument concerning order, then, is that the
central frame of meaning is to be located in culture, rather than in lan
guage. Language belongs to culture, rather than the other way around. If,
therefore, according to Bauman we need to direct attention to codes, rules
or language then the interest in structure ought take us to system, to
systems-theory rather than to structuralism as such. Language is a system;
it cannot stand for the idea of system as such without risking the reduction
of culture to language ( 1 973b: 80). Thus Bauman's provisional conclusion
regarding the 'structuralist promise':
It is my conviction that the structuralist promise can materialize only if it is

understood that the role played in linguistic analysis by the semiotic field is
assumed, in the world of human relations, by social structure. ( l 973b: 80)
Social structure offers a cultural repertoire or field of action. But structural

linguistics, as Saussure understood, is part of semiology rather than the
other way around. Life also exists outside or alongside language; it can be
silent, inert, or it can be rich in symbolic meaning of a non-linguistic kind.
The habits of being in the world cannot be captured within or reduced to
the spoken or written word. In the beginning, was activity.
Bauman chases the idea of culture further, via Marx, in his 1 968 paper
'Marx and the Contemporary Theory of Culture' ( l 968b). Here Bauman
rehearses themes which, like that of order in the foregoing analysis, will
extend right through his later work. One such is the sense of culture as
cultivation. Bauman begins with Plutarch's definition of culture as agri
culture, as the combination of soil, seed and skill ( l 968b: 1 9). The project of
perfecting the primitive turns the intractable into the tame. So far so good;
for this is the beginning of the classical road to Hi/dung, or cultivation of the
self. Yet danger lurks nearby: for the active striving for the perfection of the
human being also presupposed a 'breeding ideal' ( 1 968b: 20). For centuries,
hitherto, it has been class domination which has provided the basic mech
anism for the construction of breeding ideals. The distinction, of course, is of
an elementary marxian kind, for class categories have for centuries coincided
with the division between those who must work in order to live and those
who live without working ( l 968b: 20). Culture thus comes historically to be
associated with the immaterial, the spiritual, the intellectual. Much of this
remains intact into modernity, only it is also, now, increasingly open to
contestation. The nineteenth century socialist movement, however, was still
in its thrall. The classical socialist argument concerned the universalization
72 Zygm unt Bauman
of high culture more than its transformation. Bildung for all was its cultural
hope; culture should be democratized. This, too, was Marx's frame of
reference ( l 968b: 2 1 ) .
Culture itself i s transformed when the old European continent 'discovers'
the new world on the basis of the former's economic and military suprem
acy: 'Initially Europe was bound to the view of the newly discovered world
as "primitive", as traditionally strange customs were interpreted as "lack of
culture'" ( l 968b: 22). Cultural argument now emerged concerning the idea
and fact of progress. Some, like Wesley, viewed civilization as an achieve
ment at any cost; others, like Montaigne, the ideological precursor of
romanticism in the Enlightenment, viewed the idea of European civilization
as a puzzle, if not a contradiction in terms ( 1 968b: 22). But these remained
arguments about what was to be valued as culture, rather than arguments
about the scope of the idea of culture in itself. Bauman credits Gustav
Klemm with the achievement of opening the Pandora's box in 1 848, for he
was the first to apply the term 'culture' to everything produced by humanity
rather than to the selected products of fine art alone. According to Klemm,
culture included all those things which we add to nature, which would not
exist without us (Bauman, 1968b: 22). Having viewed Marx in this context
as S.S. Prawer would, as a cultural universalist in the European tradition,
Bauman does not connect this sensibility to Marx's in The German Ideo
logy, where culture in effect is human activity or history rather than the
work of Goethe or Shakespeare alone (Prawer, 1 978). Klemm thus antici
pates the distinction that Bernard Smith was later to articulate as that
between art in the general and art in the special sense (Smith, 1 998). This
was a kind of distinction at best incipient in the work of Marx, where the
concept of culture as Bildung appears alongside that of culture as human
activity in the anthropological sense.
The course of Bauman's argument takes him closer to the history of
anthropology as such. Morgan and Engels remained evolutionary; it was
not until Malinowski and Boas that cultures were valued and interpreted
internally or relationally rather than comparatively in this hierarchical
manner (Bauman, 1 968b: 23). Only around this point the possibility
emerges that everything is culture, in which case the category may literally
become meaningless. On a practical level, the irony was different. For just
as the idea of cultural value was being opened up or decentred away from
Europe, western culture was permeating virtually every alternative culture
on the globe ( I 968b: 25). Perhaps, then, it comes as little surprise that
Bauman now empathizes with the Levi-Strauss of Tristes Tropiques, for
whom all of western civilization reduces to a scar on the preexisting land
scape. Not because, for Bauman, the human experience is a waste of time,
whose end we might celebrate, but because of this dissonance between what
we are and what we achieve. In this sense, Bauman's immediate sympathies
in this essay lie less with Levi-Strauss the structuralist, than with Levi
Strauss the romantic, the inheritor of the tradition of critique pioneered by
Rousseau and before him, by Montaigne, where the problem is less culture
than civilization ( l 968b: 26). Certainly this is a motif which recurs, not least
later, say, in Bauman's critique of consumerism or of globalization.
For again in irony, Levi-Strauss' own work deteriorates in the power of its
insight from Tristes Tropiques to the later Mythologies, as it twists from
critique of culture to the science of structure. In this way Levi-Strauss'
project, like that of other structuralisms, comes in the long run to value
similarity over difference. Bauman's preference, in 1 968 and long after, is to
focus on activity and on culture rather than structure. In the 1 960s, very
clearly, it is Marx whose theory remains central to Bauman's vista, although
his argument already proceeds through the articulation of the views of
various others, anthropological, sociological, semiological and linguistic.
The centrality of Marx is foregrounded more systematically in another
essay from 1 968, 'Modern Times, Modern Marxism' ( I 968a). Already it
beckons, to those of us who read it now 30 years later, in the direction
separately followed by Stuart Hall, to the last years of Marxism Today,
around Post modern Times and Postmodern Marxism. This is an astonishing
essay, the content and logic of which have barely aged across the three
decades in between. Bauman opens the first few pages evoking, if not always
directly naming, those central themes in sociology which we would associate
with Marx, Simmel and Weber. First, he insists that Marx counts, but not as
any kind of economic determinism, for marxism cannot be rendered as any
kind of single-factor analysis ( l968a: 400). Economy might be viewed as
primary by Marx, but only or especially in the anthropological sense, that
humans must first of all make a living, produce and consume. The second
reference, to Simmel, is implicit in Bauman's introduction of the themes
of social scale and complexity ( l 968a: 40 1). Large-scale organizations
generate unmanageable 'noise' in communication channels. Organizations
run through the logic of technical nationality, for managerial purposes. This
leads then to the introduction of the third presence, that of Weber. For our
culture in modernity has been transformed so that social science, too, is
defined by quantification, and sober realism predominates ( l 968a: 402).
Cultural problems become managerial problems; this is the theme at which
Bauman arrives at this theoretical three-step via Marx, Simmel and Weber.
This is the theoretical manoeuvre he follows, through critical social theory,
even at his most marxist; it is never, in Bauman's case, marxist alone, and in
this, it is most like Marx's own work, which draws together arguments from
all kinds of sources too unholy for the most orthodox of marxists to
swallow.
The issue that emerges at this point in Bauman's argument is conform
ism. Personal life also becomes a problem of management. Humanity is
constructed from the viewpoint of the social system, rather than the other
way around. But to the contrary, for Bauman,
What is of primary concern is how to adjust society to individual needs, not the
reverse; how to extend the range of freedom of individual choice; how to provide
room enough for individual initiative and non-conformity. ( I 968a: 404-5)
74 Zygm unt Bauman
Bauman's marxism is inconceivable without this libertarian thread, which

connects his to the work of Castoriadis and, like that in Castoriadis,
outlives his earlier formal commitment to marxism. Marxism, in this sense,
is methodologically optional rather than compulsory:
As far as research methods are concerned, their merits and shortcomings can be
reasonably judged solely in the light of the volume and competence of the
information they lead to. The choice of cognitive methods always is, or should
be, secondary to the choice of problems one thinks important enough to be
investigated. ( I 968a: 406)
Consequently, in theoretical or interpretative life, it all depends; struc

turalism, for example, may be a constraining theory and yet, in sensitive
hands, it can generate insight just as well as hermeneutics or semiology can.
Marxism, in this account, remains significant symbolically more than
methodologically; its pertinence is bound up with the power of the themes
and problems it identifies. Marxism is thematically useful or interesting,
that is to say, rather than theoretically 'correct', because the problems to
which it responds persist; and still do today. Since almost nothing has been
done to prevent fragmentation of human action and human personality, to
prevent the restriction of the individual's liberty to the sphere of consumer
choice, to prevent the limitation of expression to the selection of goods
offered by the market, marxist thought remains, for Bauman as in this
context for his fellow exile Leszek Kolakowski, of profound contemporary
importance ( 1 968a: 407).
On Bauman's account, then, marxism is useful because it works on
general problems of the human condition. Marxism is not unique in any
sense rather than the incidental. For its theoretical attributes are variously
shared by followers and representatives of other critical trends. Marxism,
and by implication Marx's own theory, possesses originality only in the way
in which it integrates historically available principles or insights: 'That is
why the very nature of Marxist theory makes it an open and developing
system, existing only in permanent dialogue with the most modem of its
scientific contemporaries' ( 1 968a: 4 1 2). Yet Bauman's sense of marxism as
social science remains weak, or hermeneutical rather than natural scientific.
His distinction between knowledge that takes the managerial view (Parsons)
and that which is anthropological in orientation (Marx, Gramsci) aligns his
own thinking with Alvin Gouldner's later attempt to distinguish between
two marxisms, those of science and praxis respectively (Gouldner, 1 975). If
Bauman's sympathies as a Polish marxist are evidently with Lukacs, and
more so Luxemburg and Gramsci, then his ontological focus remains both
upon the individual (as in Schaff and Kolakowski) and upon the social
relations of the historic bloc (Gramsci) (Bauman, 1 968b: 4 1 4). Having
himself recently been released from his bonds to the Polish academy,
Bauman also here takes the opportunity to remind that marxism itself is
endangered if it becomes managerial. Because it is political, marxism is
obstinately opposed to the conformity of academic respectability. Marxism

is oppositional and critical by nature: this is Bauman's moral in this paper,
poignant as it sits, between the lines, of his academic dismissal and personal
harassment by the Polish 'marxist' authorities. A political nonconformist
by choice, Bauman is also now compelled not to conform - to rebel, to say
no, to oppose that obsession with order which itself calls for compulsory
conformism.
Legislators and Interpreters
Bauman's Polish brief as sociological interpreter had led to an impasse; the

state in its mercy had decided not to shoot this messenger, but compelled
him and his family rather to leave their homeland. They became exiles, like
so many other modern intellectuals who insisted on their vocations.
Bauman's working life took him through Tel Aviv to Canberra to settle,
finally, in Leeds, where he was Professor and Head of Department for
almost 20 years. By necessity, then, an academic manager of sorts, he
obviously continued to write throughout that period. But it was on the cusp
of retirement via a stay in Newfoundland that he produced Legislators and
Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity and Intellectuals ( 1 987). This is
the next book, after Memories of Class ( 1 982), of his own transition.
Bauman's opening ambit is apparent. The idea of intellectuals coincides
with that of Enlightenment. By this stage of the twentieth century, we have
some justifiable right to be sceptical about the claims of both, whether
separately or together. Part of this sensibility is openly Foucauldian. For it
was in this era, when intellectuals and Enlightenment began to generate
some mischief, that for Bauman the power/knowledge syndrome, that most
conspicuous attribute of modernity, had been formed ( 1 987: 2). A new kind
of state power coincided with a new form of intellectual discourse. So far,
however, it remains clear that the field we inhabit is modernity. And so
Bauman makes it clear, that for him modernity and postmodernity are
not phases or crystal-clear conceptual markers. The two terms, he insists,
are not like 'industrial' and 'post-industrial' or 'capitalist' and 'post
capitalist'. Nor, more emphatically, is modernity the same as modernism.
For both modernism and its shadow, postmodernism, refer largely to self
conscious cultural and artistic styles ( 1 987: 3). For Bauman, rather, the
point of distinction at risk in the difference between 'modernity' and
'postmodernity' is primarily a matter of intellectual style, or the difference
in context in which intellectual roles are performed. Modern and post
modern, in this way of thinking, might then be periodized as successive
historical sequences; but the real point of distinction is the dominant image
or model of intellectual activity in each:
In referring to intellectual practices, the opposition between the terms modem

and post-modem stands for differences in understanding the nature of the world,
76 Zygmunt Bauman
and the social world in particular, and in understanding the related nature, and
purpose, of intellectual work. ( 1 987: 3)
To use the conventional distinctions, however limiting they are, the post
modem is then a phenomenon aligned with spirit, or culture, or ideas and
intellectual practices. The postmodern might then usefully be viewed as
ontological or epistemological, philosophical rather than firmly historical
or sociological.
Wherein then resides the difference between modernity and postmoder
nity? The two frames offer, according to Bauman, quite clearly distinct
worldviews. Modernity presumes an image of the world as an ordered
totality, open to the prospects of explanation, prediction and control.
Control itself is bound into the idea and practice of social engineering,
planning, and mastery over nature. Effectivity of control and correctness of
knowledge are tightly related. The typically postmodern worldview, in
contrast, generates a plurality of models of order. Truth claims are con
nected to communities of meaning rather than higher or necessarily external
goals. Localism and relativism rule, as they implicitly did before the
modem. This then is the background against which types of intellectual
activity are to be defined. For the typically modem strategy of intellectual
work is best characterized by the metaphor of the 'legislator' role. The
legislator possesses final authority and ultimate knowledge; his power rests
on the social distinction between those who know, and those who do not.
Legislation calls upon general and schematic knowledge which, as Weber
said of bureaucracy, can be generalized in order to anticipate all future
developments (as ifl). Such is the extraordinary traditionalism of modern
ity. In contrast, again, and though Bauman does not summon up this
precise word here, the typically postmodern strategy of intellectual work is
hermeneutic. The postmodern intellectual is a translator, not an arbiter. He
or she translates statements, made within one communally based tradition,
so that they can be understood within the system of knowledge based on
another tradition. Interpreters do not decide on behalf of others; they seek,
rather, to facilitate communication between different autonomous parti
cipants. The postmodern strategy, in this way, might in one sense be
imagined as closer to the practice of a certain kind of anthropology than to
mainstream sociology. Yet these kinds of distinctions are bound to blur, for
as Bauman insists, 'the post-modem strategy does not imply the elimination
of the modem one; on the contrary, it cannot be conceived without the
continuation of the latter' ( 1 987: 5). As Bauman explains, there are levels of
meaning at work here which make all this persuasive. For while, say, the
postmodern strategy entails the abandonment of the universalistic ambi
tions of the intellectuals' own tradition in-the-world, it does not abandon
the universalistic ambitions of the intellectuals towards their own traditions
( 1 987: 5). Interpreters maintain a great deal of power or influence. Funda
mentally, Bauman's is a Weberian or Kantian case seeking to reclaim the
distinction between proper spheres of analysis or activity. For the real issue
is the public claim of the intellectuals to power, as legislators, as phoney

representatives of Reason or the People when in actuality they have their
own agenda to bear.
Legislators and Interpreters is, then, an attempt to reconstruct a
hermeneutical circle of its own, where hermeneutics can be brought to bear
on the problem of hermeneutics and its eclipse by managerial or legislative
forms of knowledge and power ( 1 987: 6). Yet the position of critique is not
yet entirely clear, as Bauman insists that he does not want to view the shift
from modem to postmodern as necessary or progressive. He does not, at
this point, further entertain the possibility that the hermeneutic then might
be a return, rather than a progressive or regressive shift. Instead, Bauman
returns to and departs from an earlier topic, the aetiology of the intel
lectuals. Through an extended discussion of the analysis of primitivism in
the work of the anthropologist Paul Radin, Bauman arrives in effect at
two provisional definitions. Intellectuals are ideologists; and they are
defined relationally, by the role they perform in the reproduction and
development of the social figuration ( 1 987: 1 9). Again, the frame of refer
ence is reminiscent of Marx's discussion of the emergence of the division of
labour in The German Ideology, though Bauman does not invoke it here.
Rather than referring here to Marx's priests, Bauman introduces
Foucault's critique of the 'pastoral', for it is the power/knowledge nexus
to which he draws attention here. Marx's was still, ultimately, an argument
concerning economy more than culture, leading to the focus on exploita
tion rather than domination. Here, for Bauman, it is domination that
counts.
Not that the road from interpretation to legislation was simple, however.
For as Bauman emphasizes, one model for the intellectuals-in-formation
was the 'active utopia' of les philosophes ( 1 987: 24). The philosophes were
not intellectual entrepreneurs seeking to sell a paradigm. Thus the ambi
valence of the entire problem to hand; intellectuals are never only just
power-hungry experts in the making. The root of the contradiction can
nevertheless be located within the field of education. For the long change
associated with Enlightenment privileges reason over experience, coming to
the conclusion that humans most need instruction in what lies outside,
or beyond them: 'To acquire excellence, men must be taught. They need
teachers. They need those who know' ( 1 987: 33). Bauman thus opens one
possible path to his later discussion of the Holocaust, and then ethics; for
whatever we can learn outside of us, whatever procedures and rules we can
learn or are taught us, they cannot teach us how to act, or when to say no.
In this, modem society nevertheless resembles images of traditional
society, where proximity and the relative transparence of social relations
ostensibly went together with higher degrees of stability and control. The
process we have made familiar to ourselves under the name of the
Industrial Revolution changes this, by generating a category of vagabonds
or 'masterless men' and their attendant institutions of disciplinary control,
from the school to the poorhouse, the hospital and asylum. What Bauman
78 Zygmunt Bauman
adds to Foucault's adoption of Bentham, here, is a heightened sense of

actors within these formative institutions. For the far-reaching conse
quence of the asymmetry of surveillance is the demand for a specialist in
a position of supervision, which equals super vision. The practice of
surveillance itself depends on the existence of a category of surveillors
(Bauman, 1 987: 47).
But at this point, Bauman changes metaphors, from Panopticon to
gardening, or cultivation, and replaces Foucault as his marginal authority
with Ernest Gellner. Whence comes modernity and its penchant for
regulation? It is as though the gamekeepers of an earlier moment become
gardeners; and it is the specific image of cultivation which here draws out
Bauman's critical ire. For the emergence of modernity rests on the process
of transforming wild cultures into garden cultures. The sensibilities under
lying this critique seem to be recognizably romantic, valuing nature over
culture; but this is also the beginning of a case in Bauman that leads to
Modernity and the Holocaust ( 1 989a), to the exposure of Nazi theory and
practice in anti-semitism constructing the Jew as the weed. Nazism, too, is
based upon the attack on nature, not only on rhapsody or rhetoric sung in
praise of the weedless Black Forest.
The gardening state opens the way for eugenics. The power presiding
over modernity (the pastoral power of the state) is modelled on the role of
the gardener (Bauman, 1 987: 52). The gardener becomes the image of that
pattern of social engineering which in turn defines modernity. All of nature
needed to be civilized, including the vagabonds and the motley members of
the dangerous classes. The great unwashed would have to be re-educated, in
their own interests. The specialists had arrived just in time to save us all;
experts, teachers and social scientists in their vanguard ( 1 987: 67). Educa
tion would arrive to free us all of our prejudices. The good citizen could be
grown, like a grafted tomato, or the blue rose. Before our eyes, historically
speaking, we see now the philosophes turning into legislators. Whether this
is a fair representation of Enlightenment, however, is another issue; for the
Kantian idea of regulation as self-regulation seems to disappear from these
pages. Its central figure, in Bauman's argument here, is rather Rousseau
forcing people to be free ( 1 987: 74). The men of Enlightenment doubtless
had the contempt for the rabble which Bauman describes; the critical
question, however, is whether this exhausts their contribution to modern
culture. If the project of Enlightenment is reduced to its tutelary outcome in
education or instruction, then we are all in consequence far poorer indeed.
Yet it is indubitably the case that, if the west has given us for example the
modern project of democracy, it has also simultaneously given us the
civilizing project in its dirtiest sense. The singular ideal of 'civilization' has
always pitted itself against the actual contents of other, actually existing
civilizations ( 1 987: 93). And in this regard, as Bauman intimates, to civilize
is not qualitatively different an act than to enact culture, or to cultivate.
The pox of humanism here meant not only that nothing could be left alone,
but that everything was open to change:
The forms human life and conduct assumed did not seem any more part of the
'nature of things' or part of a divine order which would neither need nor stand
human intervention. Instead, human life and conduct appeared now as something
which needed to be formed, lest it should take shapes unacceptable and damaging
to social order, much like an unattended field is swamped with weeds and has
little to offer its owner. ( 1 987: 94)
At this point of the argument, Bauman turns more directly to discuss

ideology, including the humanist ideology of marxism.
Marx's own obsession with changing the world, rather than merely
interpreting it, places his legacy squarely within the tradition of thinking
which Bauman here is rejecting. For Marx, too, knowledge could lead to a
certain kind of collective mastery. Savants wanted not only to explain the
world, but also to save it. Yet this was also part of the worldview which had
sustained Bauman from the 1940s to the 1 960s. What, then, had changed?
Marx now appeared to Bauman, as per Marshall Berman's portrayal in A ll
That is Solid Melts into Air ( 1 984), as an unqualified modernist ( 1 987: 1 1 2).
For Bauman, in other words, the later Marx loses the balance which earlier
sees him weigh up the respective gains and losses of modernity. For
Bauman, as for Castoriadis and Baudrillard, marxism became the mirror of
production. Entrapped within modern significations, marxism then became
a theory of state-planned modernization. Bauman in turn discusses the
image of Faustian man, but connects him here with Nietzsche rather than
Marx; as I shall suggest later, it seems to me that it is Faustianism rather
than humanism which best deserves Bauman's critical contempt. It is the
Marx that stretches out through Trotsky who turns most fully from the
spirit of Prometheus to that of Faust the developer (Bauman, 1 987: 1 1 3;
Beilharz 1 987, 1 992). Marx, in any case, remained I think both a romantic
and a classicist as well as an ideologue and a revolutionary modernist. At
this point in Bauman's own project, however, Marx begins to appear at least
as much as the problem than as the resource for its interpretative solution.
Yet it is Marx whose visage remains on Bauman's study wall in Leeds,
and it is Marx's critical spirit which animates much of his work. For our
new world, brave or not, remains continuous with these older worlds and
their problems. What becomes open to question is whether the classical
sociological interpretations, from Marx to Simmel, either managed to
determine the uniqueness of modernity or the continuity of its concerns
with all hitherto existing social forms. Bauman's sense of sympathy with
classical sociology of this critical kind is high, yet his sense is also that from
our vantage point, a manic century on, the world also looks rather differ
ent. Or more precisely, the ways available to us to look at the world seem
more diverse and contingent in nature. How so? Three factors are involved.
First, the critical classics tended to assume the irreversible character of the
changes which modernity signified or else brought in its wake. Secvnd, the
critical consensus conceived of modernity in critical terms, as an essentially
unfinished project. Third, the critiques of modernity were all 'inside' views.
80 Z!Jgmunt Bauman
The philosophical discourse of modernity became both self-referential and

self-validating ( 1 987: 1 1 5- 1 6). The idea of the postmodern is significant if
only because it offers a margin for critical manoeuvre or detachment from
these positions. At the same time, as Bauman consistently is given to
emphasize, there is in another sense nothing 'outside' the modern or the
global. So the postmodern is necessarily continuous with the modern, both
in historical and in conceptual terms. Thus the irony, often, of various
postmodern critiques of modernity which insist on their own novelty and
nevertheless reproduce, for example, the first attitude of classical sociology,
its principle of the irreversibility of change. The postmodern often presumes
an end to the conception or epoch of modernity, a view which itself is
quintessentially modernist in substance ( 1 987: 1 1 7).
For Bauman the postmodern refers usefully not to an alleged change of
epoch, nor to the arrival of 'postmodern times', but to this change in
attitude or self-consciousness. The postmodern is a manifestation of the
crisis in modern, and modernizing mentalities :
The post-modernist [sic] discourse . . . is about the credibility of 'modernity' itself

as a self-designation of Western civilization, whether industrial or post-industrial,
capitalist or post-capitalist. It implies that the self-ascribed attitudes contained in
the idea of modernity do not hold today, perhaps did not hold yesterday either.
The post-modernist [sic] debate is about the self-consciousness of Western society,
and the grounds (or the absence of grounds) for such consciousness. ( 1 987: 1 1 8)
The emphases are characteristic of Bauman's thinking, and are worth

dwelling upon. First, the postmodern is a debate about, or a critique of,
culture rather than, say, economy or history in the first instance. Second,
the argument looks back as well as forward; we may never have been
modern in any thoroughgoing sense, indeed the modernist or boosterist
model of modernity may be impossible, less unachieved than simply
unachievable. But this would also mean that the 'premodern' is probably
'modern' in various different ways; for if high modernity is not modem,
neither is early modernity; in which case, what does it mean to speak of
modernity at all? Perhaps it is rather the case that we have always been
modern, or open to change. And third, even though the argument here
refers primarily to culture and has an historical inflection, its ultimate
message is ethical: for it is not practically the case that culture thinks
through subjects or actors, but rather that they, we, think through culture.
The postmodern is also, then, a question of how we see ourselves; and as
Bauman shows so painfully in Modernity and the Holocaust ( l 989a), there is
at least one way in which the most modern of totalitarian actors and
subjects are also the most excessively traditionalistic, or morally dutiful.
To put it in plainer terms, the postmodern attitude reflects a basic unease
with high modernity and its humanistic claims of individual perfectibility to
be achieved through social engineering. At century's end, we - many of us;
or western middle class radicals in particular? - are no longer convinced
that these ends are either possible o r desirable. The ethical problems raised
in a global register by these kinds of claims have long been identified as
Eurocentric. It is as though we, the privileged, further down the path to the
abyss of futile consumer hedonism, cannot resist calling back to those
behind us that it only gets worse, the further we progress. Yet it is also this
unease with our worlds and ourselves that drives the critical enterprise
which in turn sustains sociology. As Marx observed somewhere, one cannot
but help from time to time contemplating whether we have generated too
much civilization, this for all concerned, north and south. What we cannot
do, for Bauman, is to translate this interpretation directly into legislation.
We do not have the ethical right to decide for others, if this means trying to
help others avoid their own mistakes. It is as though for Bauman this
should be the primary universal right, the right of all peoples to make their
own mistakes. To behave otherwise, is to behave as though it is only the
other who is capable of mistakes, or of evil. It is this sense of difference
which has been lost in the rush of modern intellectuals to become legislators
of taste, or of the world. Even so, the final claim of intellectuals remains
Luther's, to speak the truth as we see it; we can do no other.
The implication is clear: intellectuals should embrace, again, the logic of
interpretation, so that what we or others routinely call the postmodern also
includes the practice of hermeneutics. This would mean to recognize that if
we all inhabit the one world we also at the same time occupy different life
worlds. In this scene, avants-gardes whether artistic or political are bound
to collapse, as the absence of all clearly defined rules of the game renders
innovation impossible, which explains the predominance of the images of
pastiche or collage; even surrealism is no longer iconoclastic (Bauman,
1 987: 1 30). Yet in this situation the ethical problem remains. For if the
intellectual obsession with classification also always carries with it the act of
valuation, the question remains, how should we live? and the tradition
alistic, and modernist insistence remains with it, that the moral respon
sibility of intellectuals is to tell others (their readers) how to live. Whereas
the unpalatable truth in the story told by Bauman is different: all we can
tell others is the hardest thing, that they have to decide for themselves. The
ultimate register of decision, then, is ethical rather than aesthetic, and this
regardless of whether we view ourselves as modern or postmodern. The
point is not that we should each of us cease to judge, but to the contrary
that the fragility or provisionality of judgement be recognized. So this is a
call for more debate and argument, not less; only for a different style of
dispute, whether in politics or aesthetics.
Bauman's own debating partners in this are various, but they include the
relativism of Rorty and the hermeneutics of Gadamer, both of them
traditionalisms of different sorts ( 1 987: 1 44). The issue then becomes one of
community, and whether we inherit or make the communities we inhabit or
hope for. Philosophers, henceforth, can behave more authoritatively in
their own communities of scholars than they can in the community at large.
Intellectuals, in other words, ought no longer dream of themselves as
82 Zygmunt Bauman
heroes. Bauman proceeds to connect this theme to Weber's Protestant

Ethic, which he presents as a sociological myth, or at least as a myth made
for and by sociologists. To view the arrival of capitalism as something other
than intentional is one thing, for Bauman. What is more striking, to this
critic of Weber, is the sense that the intellectuals, more than anyone else,
liked Weber's tale immensely: 'In the myth of the Puritan, they immortal
ized a mirror reflection of themselves' ( 1 987: 1 49). If the noble captains
of industry were the obvious tragic heroes of this story, the projection
involved revealed the interpretative heroes to be we sociologists, hard
working, righteous and stoical. Bauman's interpretation of Weber here is
stunning, and reveals perhaps more clearly than elsewhere his relative
indifference to the formal corpus of Weber's work, at least in its philo
sophical dimensions. His interpretation is as shocking as it is idiosyncratic.
Yet a moment's reflection also reveals its immense power of suggestion. For
Weber plainly is nostalgic for a lost world inhabited by great men, and he
himself aspired to greatness. The Protestant Ethic, in that sense, involves a
projection, just as by extension we could say that Marx's critique of
alienation includes a projection, for this new world of capitalists is one that
denies him a place in history, and not only the proletariat. The critique of
alienation also indicates Marx's own sense of having been misplaced by a
history out of joint.
Against the sociological projection of Puritanism, Bauman calls on the
support of Richard Sennett and John Carroll. Whether the Puritan was the
figure of the capitalist or of the sociologist, or whether he was entirely
fictive, the dominant cultural model today is rather remissive or hedonistic.
The contrast implied is nevertheless difficult to avoid: that if the modern or
postmodern personality is hedonistic, it is the figure of the sociologist that
acts as the censor or Puritan ( 1 987: 1 52-3). The sociologist has become the
Man of Reason, which is exactly the thesis of Bauman's book, interpreters
become legislators in other words. Culture is tragic, rather than human
izing; the surplus of its achievements, as Simmel argues, serves rather to
numb than to enable us (Bauman, 1 987: 1 56-7). We drown amidst our
cultural achievements because their abundance blinds us to each other.
Ours is the story, still after all these years, of the sorcerer's apprentice. As
intellectuals, we cede our autonomy into the institutions which control us,
at the very same moment as we style ourselves as independent, mavericks,
puritans or outsiders. We end up looking like the Marlboro Man,
auratically strong and independent yet held up by the highway billboards of
the culture-industry, supported by the very agent that poisons us. And even
postmodern culture, this new critique of critical criticism, is delivered up to
us daily by the market like toothpaste or cornflakes ( 1 987: 1 63).
But if Bauman seeks to avoid the narcissistic self-projection of the
sociologist as hero, he is clearly not in all this giving up the right to judge,
and to judge harshly. For the undercurrent in Bauman's worldview
remains, and it involves both a sense of loss and some sense of continuity in
the form of anthropological street-wisdom. Bauman criticizes sociology
persistently, but never deserts it; there is an insider/outsider dialectic at

work here of the most extraordinary quality, and for us - as creatures of
ambivalence - it is exactly this which appeals. It is as though the sense
of loss encountered in modernity is precisely civilizational or in that sense,
cultural; as though it constrains us powerfully and yet brings out the best in
us, as creatures of habit, persistence, routine and innovation. Modernity
becomes second nature, as it were, but it does not impinge directly upon
our souls, for human beings are smarter and more resilient than that. We
may be fools, in this way of thinking, or creatures of habit, but we are not
idiots. We retain our need for dignity and freedom, and this is what
generates the critique of modernity and its illusions. For consumer culture
can only satisfy our second natures. We do see ourselves in the mirror of
consumption, but we do not recognize the whole of our being there. Thus
Bauman here damns the world of consumption but also decries the exclu
sion of the poor from its apparent rewards and riches. There are now, he
concludes, still two nations in Britain, as there were when Disraeli first
discerned the dichotomy in Sybil. If the market economy now is the
kingdom of freedom, then the striking social division is that between those
who can participate in this world and those who are excluded from it. The
two nations are no longer Disraeli's, or Marx's, exploiters and exploited,
bourgeoisie and proletariat (Bauman, 1 987: 1 69). Our two nations are those
of the seduced and the repressed. 'Without the second of these two nations,
the picture of the post-modern world is totally incomplete' ( 1 987: 1 69).
Thus our most ambivalent of sociologists returns to the path of sociology;
for the postmodern must also be viewed sociologically, precisely because, in
the old language, it is a culture which is delivered (or denied) through an
economy.
The irony about the way in which intellectuals identify with History or
Progress, however, is that they also insist on insinuating others into the
picture. So it is, for example, that peasants or proletarians become por
trayed as stereotypical heroes. The flaws of the socialist imagination and
those of sociology are often connected. Indeed, while the history of
sociology should never be reduced to that of marxism there is nevertheless a
particular sense in which their fortunes across recent times have been
intertwined, for better and for worse. So here Bauman's thinking connects
back to Memories of Class, where the 'Progress of Reason' involves a
process in which the fact of factory confinement is substituted for what
memory held alive as the image of the freedom of the petty producer ( 1 987:
1 74). Only this dream of reason could not hold, even if this fact, in turn,
was until recently too painful for us to recognize. The middle classes,
socialists included, were so entranced by their own civilizing mission as to
occlude their vision when it came to popular desire. Lenin agreed with
Kautsky, that, left to themselves the proletariat would fail to come up with
much; probably they would rather kick a football than get really serious.
Marx's views were more complicated, but remained ambiguous; he pre
sumed that the working class were capable of self-organization but analysed
84 Zygmunt Bauman
the problem away in what Lukacs later constructed as the epistemologically

privileged proletariat, positing alongside this the simultaneous sense that
only those who had really understood Hegel could respectably call them
selves marxists (Bauman, 1 987: 1 75).
Bauman does not use these words here, but his arguments are caught up
with representation and social ventriloquism. Marxists have long claimed to
know, and to represent the interests of the workers better than they could
themselves; there is, therefore, a kind of weird sense in which marxists
magically become the proletariat made articulate, in a kind of substitu
tionism which even the young Trotsky might have marvelled at. But at the
same time this is an issue more easily identified than resolved; for represen
tation nevertheless remains a fact of modern life. If social ventriloquism is a
moral problem, then institutional representation remains also a political
fact. Bauman's purpose here, however, is less to resolve the issue itself than
to argue forcefully for its recognition; for intellectuals are both narcissistic
and yet self-denying. They both project their own problems and insecurities
onto others and yet deny their interest in between those who rule and those
who are dominated; they identify with superiors or inferiors as they choose,
making invisible the specificity of their own project or ambition in the
process. In other words, the ambiguity of legislation and interpretation is
built into the position of the modern intellectual itself, which results in the
combination of all rights with no responsibilities. The radical intellectual is
the pantomime proletarian, the son of the people until the people get out of
hand. If the proletarian therefore lets the intellectual down, this is only
because the intellectual has constructed the proletarian in his own heroic
image. The workers, in the meantime, stubbornly persist in identifying
themselves as they will; they have better things to do than listen to the
hectoring speeches of others.
And this is part of the problem, in turn, for the institutionalization of the
working class by capitalism was never fully realized, and is now, again,
unravelling, as labour is expelled from Fordist capitalism. Whereas marxists
hitherto pondered the prospects of labour after capitalism, we today are
faced with the puzzle of capitalism after labour, at least in the Fordist sense.
That capitalism which vampire-like sucked the lifeblood from labour, in
Marx's image, is replaced historically by the international mobile phone,
don't-calI-us of footloose finance (Bauman, 1 987: 1 79). Today, we are
locked into economic life less by the imperative to sell our labour-power
than by the proliferation of things to consume. So class remains an actu
ality, as there is an apparent connection between personal income and
expenditure, even as some categories of the popUlation are redefined as
economically redundant, surplus to the system's need. The old marxian
theorem which indicated that the unemployed belonged to a reserve army,
no longer then holds; and now Bauman begins to develop what becomes a
standard claim in his work, that the dysfunctional can now be held up as
examples, as human scarecrows as the rest of us scramble to keep up paid
work. The new poor fail, on this account, to make good the transition from
the old, productive way of life to that of consumptive bliss. They are not
good consumers, or rather, their consumption does not matter much for
the successful reproduction of capital ( 1 987: 1 8 1 ). Even worse, they are
known to consume outside of market circulation, an anti-social act if ever
there was one.
For Bauman, then, this new postmodern population can either be
seduced by consumerism, glitz and neon, or risk repression, harassment,
being moved on endlessly at other people's insistence. So it is in this text,
Legislators and Interpreters, that Bauman's work meets up with Jeremy
Seabrook's, most notably Landscapes of Poverty ( 1 985) (Bauman, 1 987:
1 86). The virtual realities of endless orgasmic consumption, sex, lies and
video generate a world which makes Weber's Protestant Ethic seem a
universe, rather than merely a lifetime away. The outsiders, those without
goods or hope are the cultural other of those elegant yuppies who spend
money like there was no tomorrow. Yet this pair of others is not like that
bourgeois and proletarian, set, as it were, against each other implacably,
bearers of two difference cultures. The 'achiever' is rather a trend-setter, an
example to be followed, 'a pioneer on the road everyone must aspire to
follow, and a confirmation that aspiring is realistic' ( 1 987: 1 87). Within
these parameters it is impossible to criticize this endless noonward race; we
can only be enjoined to catch up, to run faster.
But now it is time for Bauman to close this book. He does so by
returning to the two possible optics before us, offering two conclusions, one
each in modern and postmodern style. For while his purpose has plainly
been to criticize the modern, his stated intention is also to avoid viewing the
postmodern merely as its victorious or superior historical replacement. And
as the foregoing shows, there will be ways in which the postmodern involves
more senses of gain than loss, at least for some of us.
Bauman's modern conclusion to Legislators and Interpreters invokes the
spirit of classical sociology with its core concern, that capitalism unregu
lated would erode society as we knew it. Markets rule; consumption replaces
needs and transforms identity. Modernity in this sense has failed ( 1 987:
1 9 1 ); or else, perhaps it has merely lived up to the blackest sociological
scenarios anticipated by Weber or Simmel. To argue in this way, as Bauman
recognizes, however, is nevertheless to hold open the principle of
redemption. On this account, the 'potential of modernity is still untapped,
and the promise of modernity needs to be redeemed' ( 1 987: 1 9 1 ). Bauman's
terms of reference in this modernist scenario are evidently Habermasian,
which in a way surprises given the effective absence of Habermas' work
from Bauman's analysis in this text. In any case, the coincidence is enough
to make one wonder how much plausibility Bauman gives to this 'modern'
conclusion. Yet Bauman does insist that the modern prospect remains open:
we still strive towards the in-principle possibility that we could combine the
dual values of personal autonomy and societal rationality ( 1 987: 1 92).
Bauman's postmodern conclusion seems more resonant with the sym
pathies of his book. Here, the general scenario is that the Puritan gives way
86 Zygmunt Bauman
to the consumer, bracketing the poor and oppressed out of the social picture,
socially or sociologically invisible, beyond redemption. The oppressed are no
longer imagined as the antithesis of the system; rather, they are the failed
attempts of the mediocre to fly ( 1 987: 1 93). If, then Bauman's analytical
sympathies stretch towards the idea of the postmodern as the critique of the
modern, his personal sympathies are more old-fashioned. This is a world of
hedonism where cynicism reigns. Bauman, the old utopian, must needs now
protest; for even for moderns, utopianism ruled ( 1 987: 1 94). It is as though
Bauman recasts Durkheim's old insistence in Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life ( 1 9 1 5), where the implication is that the society which has no
image of itself - no tradition or vision - will surely die. For Bauman, in
contrast, that society which cannot sustain a plurality of imagined futures is
already dead, closed, at least, to its own possibilities. So how can we do
better, without endlessly retreading these old paths? The essential clue to the
postmodern alternative in Bauman's work remains with the idea of
interpretation, or legislation. The refusal of strategy is still, as he puts it in
discussion of Rorty, a strategy in itself ( 1 987: 1 98). Bauman's final
conclusion is, in effect, to step out of his text altogether:
Rorty's anti-strategy seems to fit very well the autonomy and the institutionally
encouraged concern of academic philosophy with its own self-reproduction. Until
further cuts, that is. ( 1 987: 1 98)
Philosophers are permitted to abuse philosophy, for internal consumption,

as it were; only then the postmodern huns arrive at the academy door,
offering to confirm the diagnosis of the philosophers by closing the uni
versity. Thus do we speak authentically in one voice to our colleagues, and
in another to our enemies, without undue fear of inconsistency; and in
sociology it is just the same.
Conclusions: Out, towards Understanding
The path of the twentieth century may well lead from utopia to dystopia.
Modernity opens the skies on our sense of possibility, even if it leaves us
entering the millennium clutching only showbags or glossy brochures. The
limit of utopia, in Bauman's argument, emerges as connected to its opera
tionalizability. Utopia ought to remain in the realm of hope rather than
programme, ending up in the brochure or in Disneyworld. The attempt to
make utopia raises the question of the status of lacobinism, discussed
in Chapter 4 of the present study. Bauman's temptation is to identify
lacobinism and Enlightenment, or at least Reason and State with the
project of les philosophes. We might choose to criticize this identification on
analytical or historical grounds, only then the task of explaining modernity
would remain. For we may well be prepared to grant that modernity is by
nature ambivalent, but how does that help us explain the damage done in
its name? Bauman's achievement in this context is to contribute more, I

think, to the sociology of intellectuals than any other such writer in the
twentieth century. Is this a confession on his part? as a lapsed marxist? No
more so than the rest of us. It remains morally necessary for someone to
call the injustices of the world we have made.
It is not Bauman's claim that we can do without intellectuals; in one
residual respect his is only the Weberian reminder, that forms of authority
ought not be inflated or illegitimately transferred from one sphere into
another. Yet the messenger, the hermeneut will never only bring the mail.
Some interpreters will also bear utopias, which we can accept or reject or
pass on for the consideration of others. The point is that, at the end of the
day, the political opinion of the intellectual is worth no more than that of
any other citizen; and this is why we are bound to muddle through, occa
sionally shooting the messenger, metaphorically speaking.
In Bauman's work, in any case, it becomes apparent that language matters
as communication, and not the other way around. Utopian horizons count
along with traditional horizons, cultures, activities and habits whether real
or imagined or both. The oddity about modernity, in this regard, is what
centrality of place and value it has given to ideas and to their bearers, we
intellectuals. Modernity truly is, or was, the age of ideology, but this holds
true only as it reveals to us the worst and the best of its potentiality. We
believed in the possibility of reform; we hoped for human perfectibility. As
Bauman indicates, various interpretations or conclusions can be drawn from
this assessment: more damning - what a disaster modernity has been; more
modest, in turn - perhaps we need still to persist, do better. The latter, more
powerful implication I think remains more resonant in Bauman's work. For
contrary, say, to the legacy of aristocratic radicalism worked out through
Critical Theory, Bauman's project seems to retain the sense that innerly
humans do not fully internalize the disasters of the cultures or civilizations
which they inhabit. Second nature remains misleading. We still retain our
own ways of going on.
4 The Holocaust and the Perfect Order
Modernity and the Holocaust is almost certainly Bauman's most influential

book. Winner of the European Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social
Theory in 1 989, it has generated an extraordinary degree of interest, though
perhaps not as much as Bauman might have hoped within mainstream
sociology itself. For Bauman's purpose in this book was not to add another
voice to those across Jewish or Holocaust Studies demanding that the
ethical import of these events be recognized, nor yet was it another spin on
preexisting cases or an attempt to draw new evidence to light. Bauman's
insistence, rather, was that those practising the normal science of sociology
were obliged to view or review the Holocaust as a central fact of modernity,
of modern rather than German history, us and now and not just them or
there. Modernity, on this account, was then and remains now as capable of
generating barbarism as civilization. The message in the Holocaust, for
Bauman, addressed the human condition in modernity. Sociologists could
not afford to leave this to the specialists, even if this is exactly what could
be expected in modern times.
Modernity and the Holocaust ( l 989a) is dedicated 'to Janina , and all the
others who survived to tell the truth'. The Preface to the book tells the story
of how his wife Janina's own work had such an incredible impact upon
him. Zygmunt Bauman had not personally been directly touched by the
Nazi Holocaust; Janina, in contrast, had grown up in the Warsaw ghetto.
As Zygmunt Bauman puts it, to this point in his own life the Holocaust had
been like a picture on the wall, tragic but neatly framed, a kind of closed
capsule containing Germans and their abominations against Jews ( l 989a:
vii). As these matters opened up on him, Bauman recast his image; for now
the Holocaust appeared as a window, rather than a picture on the wall. It
was a window on modernity.
Winter in the Morning
Janina and Zygmunt Bauman are a couple whose companionship is intel

lectual and political as well as personal and private. The significance of her
work for his should not be underemphasized. Winter in the Morning ( 1 986),
her memoir of childhood, is an extraordinary book, impossible to sum
marize in its pathos and persistence, for its capacity to relate the horrors of
life in the Warsaw ghetto is balanced by the ability to indicate that even
in these depths, life and love went on. As overwhelming as passages in the
The Holocaust and the perfect order 89
book can be, Janina Bauman's own sense of ambivalence saves it from the
unrelenting blackness which often compels readers of books like this to
push them away, numbed, overwhelmed by the desperate hopelessness of it
all. The book is an act of recovery. It restates not only the depravity of the
institutionalized anti-semitism which was Nazism, but also reinstates the
ordinary resilience of its victims, who had to go about making what they
could of their lives in or outside the cast of the searchlight and the ever
anticipated doorknock. The world of Janina Bauman's childhood changed,
in effect, overnight. Its relative comfort gave way to hiding and starvation.
The little things that held life together disappeared, were simply destroyed.
So were the larger things; Janina's father died in the Katyn massacre.
Under all these devastations, life continued; reading poetry and Descartes,
or the Communist Manifesto, or The Life of Termites by Maeterlink,
minding her mother and sister, worrying about love and boys while
working in the cemetery or else hiding in those false compartments in backs
of cupboards which most of us know about only from movies; these are
extraordinary stories, told without self-pity.
As Janina Bauman puts it in closing Winter in the Morning, to look as a
young Jewish girl upon the face of a German, a boy in this case rather than
a man, left no sense of pity, or hatred, or joy, even though the war was
over. Life returned to an earlier order, after a fashion, but in a different
sense it was never the same. For while the enemies around her had shown
Janina Bauman what depths humans would sink to, thieving petty personal
belongings if not actually kicking Jewish heads, there were ordinary heroes
aplenty fighting against them or merely offering compassion or a crust of
bread. The message, if there is one here, seems to resemble Zygmunt
Bauman's own sensibility (or perhaps it is the other way around) that
humans are capable of all kinds of descent into inhumanity, and yet of
snapping, shifting out of this as well (1. Bauman, 1 986). The capacity for
evil lies within each of us; and modernity compounds this, as Zygmunt
Bauman will argue in Modernity and the Holocaust ( 1 989a), by removing us
from the face of the other. Winter in the Morning is an astonishing book,
the enchantment of which cannot be conveyed; in order to understand
Zygmunt Bauman's work, you must read it. For it contains the same kind
of hope amidst despair, or sense of prospects among limits of the most
severe kind, as holds up Bauman's sociology. The point is not so much, as it
was for the redemptive young Marx, that everything is possible, as it is that
anything is possible, perhaps even at the hands of the very same human
actors.
How can we make sense of these human extremities? How can it be that
humans could be capable of such violence and cowardice and yet of such
compassion and sacrifice? For Zygmunt Bauman, the initial response was
to look upon the Holocaust as a kind of radical exception, a gaping hole
that had opened up in the fabric of what should have been a better history.
Bauman tells us that earlier he still believed, by default rather than by
deliberation, that the Holocaust was an interruption in the normal flow of
90 ZI,Igmunt Bauman
history, a cancerous growth on the body of a civilized society, a momentary

madness among sanity ( 1 989a: viii).
But if the Holocaust opens all kinds of ethical or anthropological ques
tions about us, and our propensity to do good and evil, then Bauman's
major task in his book is more pointedly sociological. As he writes, it must
also be a problem for sociology as such:
The Holocaust was born and executed in our modern rational society, at the high
stage of our civilization and at the peak of human cultural achievement, andfor this
reason it is a problem of that society, civilization and culture. ( I 989a: x)
Already Bauman hints at one aspect of his major thesis, that the Holocaust
represents some kind of collusion between universal or transhistorical
purposes and particular, technological means. Bauman early sets his argu
ment against that view for which the Holocaust was a German, cultural
problem without messages for all of us as humans or citizens of the planet.
To compartmentalize the Holocaust, in this way, is to push it away, as
though the other is elsewhere, rather than part of us. Bauman's hope, to the
contrary, is to mainstream the Holocaust for sociology, for the Holocaust
will surely tell us something about modernization, civilization, science and
social engineering, and about us. Bauman begins from this claim, that 'the
Holocaust was a characteristically modern phenomenon that cannot be
understood out of the context of cultural tendencies and technical achieve
ments of modernity' ( 1 989a: xiii). What Bauman sets out to capture ana
lytically is the extraordinary ethical ambivalence of the Holocaust as an
event or process simultaneously 'unique' and 'normal'. Even those categ
ories of contrast cannot easily capture the slipperiness of the phenomenon
at hand. Bauman summarizes his case, in anticipation:
The Holocaust was an outcome of a unique encounter between factors by themselves

quite ordinary and common; . . . the possibility of such an encounter could be blamed
to a very large extent on the emancipation of the political State, with its monopoly
of means of violence and its audacious engineering ambitions, from social control -
following the step-by-step dismantling of all non-political power resources and
institutions of social self management. ( I 989a: xiii)
The provisos concerning politics and the sense of political contingency are
worth emphasizing from the beginning. For even in bringing attention to
bear upon the technological determinants of the Holocaust, Bauman is not
offering an interpretation based on technological determinism. True, the
Nazis needed the means to make the Holocaust, which was qualitatively
and not only quantitatively more exhaustive than the hitherto-existing
tradition of pogrom or random acts of violence against Jews. But it was
the political will of Nazism which made all this happen; so that it is the
combination of factors which begins to explain the event. It was not enough
Tlie Holocaust and tlie perfect order 9 1
that the technological means of destruction were available, or that

totalitarian political forms prevailed; it was also necessary that the Nazi
Party actively set out to destroy the Jews as an ideal and real threat to their
own project. Such is the sociological perspective which Zygmunt Bauman
brings to bear upon the experience related by his wife in Winter in the
Morning.
Modernity and the Holocaust
Bauman's project in Modernity and the Holocaust ( l989a) is more than a

little heretical; for he wants us to view it less as a sequence in itself, than as
an opening onto something other. Invariably we can expect that his work
will be criticized for failing to say enough about Germans and Jews as the
specific actors involved. So why did this terror occur in Germany? and so
on. Suffice to say, for the present, that Bauman eschews the kind of cultural
particularism which informs a controversial work like Daniel Goldhagen's
Hitler's Willing Executioners (Goldhagen, 1 996; see also Beilharz, 1 999).
The distinction in approach is simple: where Goldhagen sees the Holocaust
as a German accident waiting to happen, Bauman views it as an accident
waiting to happen within the field of possibilities we call modernity. In any
case, Bauman does not approach the problem of the Holocaust as an
immanent problem or a local story. Why? Because it speaks to all of us, not
just Germans and Jews; and because our discipline, sociology, needs to face
up to this, for ' The Holocaust has more to say about the state of sociology
than sociology in its present shape is able to add to our knowledge of the
Holocaust' (Bauman, 1 989a: 3). Sociology has missed the boat, on this
score, because it can only view the Holocaust as an accident, more speci
fically as the failure rather than the product of modernity ( 1 989a: 5). Thus
the stock western remedy for Nazism, after the fact, would be: more
modernization, as though all that were modern were good, and all evil
resulted from surplus traditionalism, or barbarism or ignorance.
Nor does Bauman seek simply to reverse this optimistic view of history
and make the Holocaust the beast or the necessary result of modernity. The
point is not, as the cynics would have it, that the Holocaust is the truth of
modernity, but that it is one possibility within it. This is where both the
analytical and the ethical challenge begins. Nazism is, among other things,
inescapably modern. Auschwitz was also a mundane extension of the
modern factory system, a sort of murderous Fordism in the making, a
massive system of social engineering gone awry through reaching its own
technical apogee. For Bauman, every element of the Holocaust was normal,
in the sense of being fully in keeping with everything we know about our
civilization, for civilization both creates and destroys. This contradiction,
however, is exactly what is missing from most of the sociology of
modernity, which identifies either dynamic progress or barbarism but not
both, together.
92 Zygmunt Bauman
Modern civilization, then, was not the sufficient but the necessary con
dition of the Holocaust. Without it, the Holocaust would be unthinkable
(I 989a: 1 3). Certainly the Holocaust would have been unimaginable outside
not only the industrial image of production but also the bureaucratic model
of rationality. Bureaucracy, of course, can be put to any end, can serve any
master; and the instructions given did change historically across the history
of the Third Reich. The early plans, to physically expel the Jews from
Germany resulted in the Final Solution's diktat of elimination. Physical
extermination became the most efficient bureaucratic response to the Jewish
'problem' ( l 989a: 1 7). The Final Solution knew nothing of the street
passions of small town Germans; it was a serious business, guided by
scientific management. The intersection of social engineering and instru
mental rationality proves fatal, for the gardening posture divides vegetation
into 'cultured plants' to be taken care of, and Jewish weeds to be exter
minated ( 1 989a: 1 8). Yet all these possibilities only begin to make sense of
the Holocaust on the basis of something more elemental: the social pro
duction of moral indifference. Bauman argues per Herbert Kelman that
moral inhibitions against violent atrocities tend to be eroded once three
conditions are met, singly or together: when violence is officially authorized,
routinized, and the victims dehumanized ( l 989a: 2 1 ) . What is disarming
about this list is that the first two features are already built in to so much of
our institutional lives, yet the normal result of their combination is so
radically different to 'ordinary' life. As Bauman observes, cooperation
of the victims with the perpetrators of a pogrom is inconceivable ( I 989a:
22-3). The story of the Jewish police, in the Warsaw ghetto or elsewhere,
makes all this difference through cooptation and routinization. The space
for moral argument is closed, squeezed out, politically circumscribed by the
anti-politics of totalitarianism. Arbitrary state power justifies violence as its
own end. Indeed the state here becomes the object of Bauman's critical
scrutiny as much as anything else.
Why, then, ought the Jews be the particular object of the Nazi will to
obliterate? Together with the Gypsies, they were self-evidently nationless,
even though as Bauman observes the Jews were perhaps more fully accom
modated into German culture, by the Weimar Republic, than any other such
group ( I 989a: 3 1 ). Plainly the Jews could be fitted nicely into the category of
the other. Here Bauman connects his thinking back to the themes of Culture
as Praxis ( 1 973a), where the conceptual Jew is analysed as visqueux, in
Sartre's term, or 'slimy', in Mary Douglas', begging for expUlsion in the
lexicon of the Nazis ( l 989a: 39): ' The conceptual Jew carried a message;
alternative to this order here and now is not another order, but chaos and
devastation' ( l989a: 39). So the order/disorder, order and ambivalence issue
is also posited here, though it is more fully elaborated upon later, in
Modernity and Ambivalence ( l 99 1 a). For the meantime, the Jew was an
empty signifier whose identity could be filled up with anything or everything
to which the mainstream objected. The Jew could be Bolshevik or bourgeois,
socialist or capitalist, weak pacifist or ferocious warmonger, masses or elite,
parasite or seducer, or all of these at once ( 1 989a: 42). The figure of the Jew
became a kind of floating signifier upon which all kinds of crimes or
disorders could be projected as the meretricious immoralities of proletarians,
aristocrats and shopkeepers alike. 'And so', Bauman summarizes, 'the Jews
were caught in the most ferocious of historical conflicts: that between the
pre-modern world and advancing modernity' ( 1 989a: 45).
This is the fate of all of us, in different ways, given that modernity and
tradition are always, ever complicit. Modernity and modernism become
traditions, or habits at least. Fascism could therefore emerge not as a mere
throwback to plebian demagoguery or Black Forest fantasy, but as what
Jeffrey Herf would conceptually capture as 'reactionary modernism', a kind
of hybrid necessarily combining high technology with romantic antimodern
illusions of native teutonic grandeur (Herf, 1 984). ' The irony of history
would allow the anti-modernist phobias to be unloaded through channels and
forms only modernity could develop' (Bauman, 1 989a: 46). Only these ironies
of history are normal, rather than exceptional, for modernity and anti
modernism always carry each other, as later do the modern and the post
modern (Beilharz, I 994b). The Jews, in particular, were also both of those
things; traditionalistic, yet the epitome of the hated modernity itself. As
Spengler had argued in The Decline of the West ( 1 922), it was the rootless,
cosmopolitan Jews who presented such a threat to the peace and stability,
hearth and home warmth of Gemeinschaft. It was the Jews who in a sense
represented the corrosive effects of modernity better than anyone else, for
their identity was mobile rather than concretely rooted, though this was
hardly a new experience for these people. Thus even socialists, like Werner
Sombart, could end up anti-semites, on specific grounds of their opposition
to usury or finance capital as well as those of generalized anti-modernism.
As Bauman had shown in Memories of Class ( 1 982), socialism could be
reactionary as easily as it could modernist; and the path of reaction could
travel in various different ways, some of them xenophobic or chauvinistic.
Judaism became identified with money and power, indeed with 'the money
power', for opponents left and right; anti-semitism made for some unholy
alliances. For as Bauman observes, the way in which the Nazis forced the
issue itself brought on the clarification of these political and ethical
differences. It was not until the emergence of the Nazi movement that
popular opposition to capitalism finally split and polarized, and the
socialist branch finally adopted the uncompromising struggle against anti
semitism as one of the necessary elements in its attempt to stem the rising
tide of fascism ( l 989a: 48). Anti-semitism had been the socialism of begin
ners. Even then, the question of remaining sympathies between Bolshevism
and National Socialism was allowed to smoulder, or else was analytically
avoided by resort to the categorical insistence that because of the agreed
system of classification 'left' and 'right' could have nothing in common.
Bauman assembles his case here from all kinds of available materials,
drawing perhaps especially heavily on those of Raul Hilberg and
Christopher Browning. If there is a philosophical frame of reference
94 Zygmunt Bauman
which he relies upon more than others, it is likely to be located in the work
of Hannah Arendt. Thus he proposes, invoking Arendt's memorable
phrase, that in 'contrast to all other groups, the Jews were defined and their
position determined by the body politic' (Bauman, 1 989a: 50). The Jews
were defined and then destroyed by the Nazi body politic; nothing in this
was technologically given or culturally necessary. The decision to destroy
the Jews was political, not economic. The Jews were unlike any other
nation; they were also unlike any other foreigners; they were, indeed, the
epitome of Simmel's strangers always on the outside even when inside, as
-
the sadness of their willing if contingent assimilation into German culture

was to reveal. As Bauman painfully expresses it, 'there was hardly a single
door slammed on the road to modernity in which the Jews did not put their
fingers'. So they 'were the opacity of the world fighting for clarity, the
ambiguity of the world lusting for certainty' ( l 989a: 56). Only this local, Nazi
world with global pretensions sought for certainty in tradition and not only
through modernity, in the fantastic images of imaginary purity of a lost
world destroyed as well as transmitted by modernity's ambivalent arrival.
At this point Bauman invokes again the image of the gardening state to
symbolically represent the modern mania for a tight and final sense of
order, as opposed to the earlier complacency of a social model more like
gamekeeping ( I 989a: 57). Perhaps what is at issue is that the garden is
bulldozed into nature, and only then 'naturalized'. For as Bauman argues,
the elimination of the Jews was presented as a synonym of the rejection of
modern order, yet it was achieved through that order. Racism as a modern
phenomenon is unthinkable without the advancement of modern science,
modern technology and modern forms of state power; racism as such is a
strictly modern phenomenon ( 1 989a: 6 1 ) . 'Racism, in short, is a thoroughly
modern weapon used in the conduct of pre-modern, or at least not exclu
sively modern, struggles' ( 1 989a: 62). Now Bauman develops the argument
that racism, itself, is an overinflated category which risks losing thereby its
critical sting. Heterophobia is one thing; inter-group prejudice or resent
ment is widespread, and tends to stay this side of action. Racism proper
involves less a personal attitude than a mobilization of political will:
Racism differs from both heterophobia and constant enmity. The difference lies
neither in the intensity of sentiments nor in the type of argument used to
rationalize it. Racism stands apart by a practice of which it is part and which it
rationalizes: a practice that combines strategies of architecture and gardening with
that of medicine - in the service of the construction of an artificial social order,
through cutting out the elements of the present reality that neither fit the visualized
perfect reality, nor can be changed so that they do. (1 989a: 65)
In other words, racism manifests the conviction that a certain category of

human beings cannot be incorporated into the proper rational order,
whatever the effort. In the modern world, distinguished by its ambition to
self-control and self-administration, racism declares a certain category of
people endemically and hopelessly resistant to control and immune to all

efforts at amelioration. The consequence is inevitably associated with the
strategy of estrangement ( 1 989a: 65).
Racism, then, is an institutional matter, a problem of state policy, which
in the Nazi case is mediated through social engineering on a grandiose scale.
The very idea of social engineering raises again the question of Enlight
enment. For Enlightenment deifies not only science, but also Nature.
Arguments to nature, disguised so as to appear primordial rather than
artificial, now become a standard strategy. It is within the realm of this
social engineering neutrality that gardening and medicine supply the arche
types of the constructive (sic) stance ( l 989a: 70). Judaism becomes a
problem of Political Hygiene; the Nazi task consists of safeguarding the
good people from an overgrowth of the weeds. This in turn means that the
people have to be educated about the threat to their wellbeing, for there will
be a good chance that they do not know their enemy and need warming up
on the issue sufficiently to follow their Aryan leaders with the appropriate
levels of frenzied enthusiasm. This is exactly what necessitates some formal
distinction between racism and heterophobia, for where heterophobia is a
fact of daily social psychology, racism is an institutionalized form rooted
within modern neutrality and modern social organization ( 1 989a: 8 1 ).
Modernity cannot explain the Holocaust, but it did make it possible.
Modern genocide is political, in the sense that it is goal-orientated. It seeks
to destroy an adversary, but with a specific purpose in mind: to achieve the
grand vision of a better, and radically different society; so that Stalinism,
too, depended upon a particular kind of genocide, this time directed against
a class rather than a race. The kulaks or rich peasants, like the Jews in
Germany, are the weeds which choke up the lives of those whose birthright
it is to inhabit the garden. This, according to Bauman, is because modern
culture is a garden culture: it defines itself as the design for an ideal life and
a perfect arrangement of human conditions.
Put in more general terms, modernity has yet to come to grips with its
others; to this point in time, it tends rather to grip them by the throat, or as
Bauman will later suggest, either to expel them or to devour them.
Modernity espouses the value of difference, as against the traditionalistic
insistence on Oneness, Unity or Einheit; yet the very nature of modernity or
at least of moderns is to lapse always back into traditionalism. Modernity,
or its inhabitants, in any case reinvents the other over and over again.
Partly, as Bauman will detail in Modernity and Ambivalence ( l 99 1 a), this is
bound up with the way we think or are encouraged to think. But as
Bauman insists, this does not cast us inevitably in the pattern of hopeless
repetition; if modernity is not exactly the history of progress, then it is not
coextensive with totalitarianism either. Totalitarianism, to the contrary, is a
specific political form available within modernity; it is one pattern of an
alternative modernity, offering a different route, say, to liberal capitalist
democracy, Fordism or welfarism. So while Bauman wants us to draw the
horrible image of Auschwitz closer, so that we can also see ourselves in it,
96 Zygmunt Bauman
he does not want to argue that we all live our daily lives 50 years later on
Auschwitz principles:
From the fact that the Holocaust is modem, it does not follow that modernity is a
Holocaust. The Holocaust is a byproduct of the modem drive to a fully designed,
fully controlled world, once the drive is getting out of control and running wild.
Most of the time, modernity is prevented from doing so. Its ambitions clash with
the pluralism of the human world. ( I 989a: 93)
The Holocaust is unique because it brings together some ordinary factors of

modernity which are normally kept apart.
Is not modernity then after all a pattern of decline? This is nevertheless
the logic of Bauman's work, that the substitution of civilization for nature
leads us down the road to ruin. Civilization does not replace violence; it
both institutionalizes and represses it. We learn to be more civil to each
other at the very same time as we become progressively more indifferent
and nasty ( l 989a: 95-7). Modernity provides us with the means or practical
forms which enable us to be less human towards the other. Now Bauman
turns his critical attention to the distancing effects of the division of labour.
All divisions of labour create distance between persons by establishing links
which take us away from the face of the other. These result in levels of
opacity never before encountered; the decision-makers do not actually wit
ness the outcomes of the processes which they bureaucratically initiate
( l 989a: 99). These processes are universal in modernity; they are as appar
ent in the working of capitalist corporations or instruments of the welfare
state as they are in Auschwitz. Imperatives are inserted into the top end of
these social machines, and statistical (and human) results come out the
bottom end. The result is the irrelevance of moral standards for the tech
nical success of the bureaucratic operation ( l 989a: 1 0 I). The complexity
and scale of modern divisions of labour mean that morality and compe
tence are redefined as obedience. Bureaucracy generates dehumanization.
As Musil has one of his characters say in The Man Without Qualities:
This system of indirection elevated to an art is what nowadays enables the

individual and society as a whole to function with clear conscience; the button to
be pressed is always clean and shiny, and what happens at the other end of the
line is the business of others, who, for their part, don't press the button. Do you
find this revolting? It is how we let thousands die or vegetate, set in motion whole
avalanches of suffering, but we always get things done. (Musil, 1 995: 696)
Bureaucracy works, even as it generates dehumanization.

At times in Bauman's book it is unclear whether it is bureaucracy or
politics which emerges as the main culprit. Perhaps it is both. For Bauman
argues that it was ultimately Nazi policy, as politics, which made the
Holocaust; yet bureaucracy, he says, is programmed to seek the optimal
solution, so that bureaucracy is a determinant even regardless of the policy
which is inserted into it. Certainly bureaucracy, and bureaucratic con

ceptions of 'efficiency' become defined as goals in themselves. Bureaucracy
thus paved the way for fascism: 'Bureaucracy which acquitted itself so well of
the task of cleansing Germany made more ambitious tasks feasible, and their
choice well-nigh natural' ( I 989a: 1 05). The visionaries of National Socialism
made all this happen; for bureaucracy picks up where visionaries stop: 'But
bureaucracy made the Holocaust. And it made it in its own image' ( 1 989a:
1 05). Perhaps it is bureaucracy that delivers the nightmare, and the
visionaries who imagine it, triggering the process of Holocaust through
their possession of State power. For if bureaucracy is intrinsically capable
of genocide, then the process of its development also depends upon the
gardeners, those particular utopians whose image of the good society
depends on the expulsion of a social curse, a race or a class which sym
bolizes all that which the new order seek to transcend. It is this fatal
combination which has such devastating results ( 1 989a: 1 06).
The greatest complacency available to us here comes of the conceit that
we are, indeed, civilized. What Norbert Elias called 'The Civilizing Process'
is an inevitably compromised process, extending Freud's claim in Civiliza
tion and its Discontents ( 1 930). Civility is never more than a veneer; the
prospect of violence and cruelty always rests just beneath that surface. The
Scientists and Sociologists of Nazi Germany were only too happy to ride on
this train. Now again Bauman insists that the direction of this story is
primarily political. Social dislocations may differ in form and intensity, he
says, but they are invited by the general effect of the pronounced supremacy
ofpolitical over economic and social power, of the state over society ( I 989a:
1 1 2). Modernity remains the frame within which all this becomes possible,
for Bauman, though the characterization he offers here sounds more like
modernism - an age of artificial order and of grand societal designs, the
fantasy of Faust, the era of planners, visionaries and 'gardeners' who treat
society as a virgin plot of land to be expertly designed and then cultivated
and doctored to keep to the preordained form ( l 989a: 1 1 3). Modernity
becomes modernism fulfilled: perhaps this is the conceptual message which
Bauman urges upon us here; all its other prospects become closed or
blocked. As Bauman summarizes, three major factors here come in to play:
the design or vision gives the modern holocaust the legitimation; state
bureaucracy gives it the vehicle; and the paralysis of society gives it the
'road clear' sign ( I 989a: 1 14).
Subsequent developments, Bauman notes, make the present scenario even
more cheerful. Information technology - the electronic battlefield - takes
the face of the other even further away. The face of the other today wears
the mask of Saddam Hussein. The psychological or moral distance between
actors now becomes entirely absolute, or opaque. Bauman reminds us of
Jacques Ellul's famous caution, that anything technologically possible will
now be done, just because of this possibility ( I 989a: 1 1 6). It is as though
ours is a civilization altogether out of control. What is surprising, in this
sense, is the singularity of the Holocaust, rather than its specific occurrence.
98 Z!Jgm unL Bauman
For Bauman also wants to argue that the Holocaust is an extraordinary

example of the irrationality of modem rationality. Thus the Nazis sought to
exterminate the Jews rather than to enslave them; to destroy, rather than to
take advantage of them. As Bauman proposes, this illustrates the perverse
ability of modem, rational bureaucracy to induce actions functionally
indispensable to its purposes while jarringly at odds with the vital interests
of the actors ( 1 989a: 122). This led both the Jews to participate in their own
destruction, and the Nazis finally to create theirs, in tum. The victims soiled
themselves, as their perpetrators did all along. But if the ethics of survival
in the camps were extreme, the nonns of the oppressors were more con
ventional, and this remains Bauman's primary orientation in Modernity and
the Holocaust.
Bauman opens his discussion of the Milgram experiments by quoting
Dwight Macdonald. Macdonald warned in 1 945 that we would now have to
fear the law-abiding person more than the one who broke the law (Bauman,
1 989a: 1 5 1 ). The Holocaust forced upon us this universal message: faced
with a morally impossible command, what should I do? Fascism did not
result from chaos, from the heat of madness, but was administered through
an impeccable, faultless and unchallengeable rule of law and order. The
good Nazis were, after all, those who like you and me did what was expected
of them, followed orders. If they did it, so could we. They were not
monsters, even if they acted monstrously. Thus Bauman summarizes this
most pertinent of conclusions: ' The most frightening news brought about by
the Holocaust and by what we learned of its perpetrators was not the likeli
hood that "this" could be done to us, but the idea that we could do it' ( 1 989a:
1 52). It is exactly this kind of claim which Bauman must make in order to
centre the Holocaust within the field of sociology; and it is just as likely this
strategy of cross-reference which will also anger those working in Jewish
Studies or Holocaust Studies, for whom the problems of Germans and Jews
remain ever-present. Bauman's purpose is rather to generalize the Holocaust
as a universal event. So he argues, for example, against the precedent
established by Adorno and his colleagues in The Authoritarian Personality
( 1 969), where it seems that only some types of people are capable of such
terror. Adorno's vision divided the world into born proto-Nazis and their
victims: 'The dark and dismal knowledge that many gentle people may tum
cruel if given a chance was suppressed' (Bauman, 1 989a: 1 53).
The message is continuous with that indicated by Janina Bauman in
Winter in The Morning:
During the war I learned the truth we usually choose to leave unsaid: that the
cruellest thing about cruelty is that it dehumanizes its victims before it destroys
them. And that the hardest of struggles is to remain human in inhuman con
ditions. (J. Bauman, 1 986: viii)
Adorno's vision, like Goldhagen's, particularized or culturalized the

problem, ascribing cruelty as it were to some categories of the population
rather than others, emerging with a neat and simple image of victims and
oppressors, good and bad citizens. Bauman's sociological curiosity and his
ethical mission here is to highlight cruelty as an activity, rather than as a
character-type. Individuals may well be classified as more, or less cruel;
what is striking about the Holocaust, and in Bauman's frame, about the
Milgram experiments, is rather how cruelty correlates with the relationship
of authority and subordination.
Bauman's interpretation thus points in two different directions at the
same time. It is sociological, in that it claims that inhumanity is constructed
and practised within human relationships. As those relationships are
rationalized and technically perfected, so is the capacity and the efficiency
of the social production of inhumanity. But it is simultaneously ethical, for
this claim opens the sense that there is an inverse relationship between the
readiness to be cruel and the proximity of its victims ( l 989a: 1 54-5).
Modernity and the Holocaust not only turns the Holocaust from a picture
into a frame; it also opens the more direct engagement with the face of the
other that culminates later in Postmodern Ethics ( l 993a).
Distance, however, is one thing; the problem which Bauman draws to our
attention here is rationalized, or modernized distance, for the more
rationalized is the organization of action, the easier it is to cause suffering -
and to remain at peace with oneself ( l 989a: 1 55). It is this mechanized
detachment and anonymity which makes the option of cruelty so readily
available to those who would never harm the person whose breath you can
hear. To put it more abstractly, action is removed from the senses, and
from the senses of consequence. The suffering inflicted upon others disap
pears from the field of the senses of the perpetrator. Guilt is closed or
blocked. Obedience becomes the substitute for conscience; law or morality
offer pregiven circuits for individuals to follow. As Bauman summarizes it,
'Bureaucracy's double fea t is the moralization of technology, coupled with the
denial of the moral significance of non-technical issues' ( l 989a: 1 60). When,
to argue in sympathy with Weber, we blur the lines between ends and
means or between ethics and instrumental action both practices suffer in the
process. Morality as a matter of personal judgement seems to disappear at
the very same moment that everyday life becomes moralistic. The point
about the Milgram experiments, once viewed as an optic on the life of
totalitarian societies, is that:
the readiness to act against one's own better judgement, and against the voice of
one's conscience, is not just the function of authoritative command, but the result of
exposure to a single-minded, unequivocal and monopolistic source of authority.
( I 989a: \ 65)
Like Goffman's 'total institutions', the mechanisms of Nazism and fascism

deprive or seek to deprive citizens of alternatives or senses of room for
manoeuvre. Thus this most extraordinary traditionalism of these most
modem, bureaucratic societies, where progress and development depend so
1 00 Zygmunt Bauman
directly and necessarily upon conformism. Modernity, in this way, depends

upon the most robotic of human processes, and consequently is capable of
delivering levels of human destructiveness at hitherto unimaginable levels.
Bauman's conclusion is as simple as, in a different way, this analysis is
complex or paradoxical. Pluralism is the best preventative medicine against
morally normal people engaging in morally abnormal actions. The voice of
individual moral conscience is best heard in the tumult of political and
social discord. This is the liberal, but more emphatically the libertarian
voice in Bauman's writing at its most powerful; it is the voice of Albert
Camus, or that of his characters, saying no, refusing to go along but not,
for this reason, engaging in heroism, or at least not of any other than the
most ordinary kind, like the Gentiles who help Jews under Nazism because
they can do no other. If this is a call for strength in adversity, then, it is at
the same time a social critique rather than a singular gesture towards
psychology. For Bauman insists that if there is one central theme following
from the Milgram experiments, it is that cruelty correlates with certain
patterns of social interaction much more than it does with personality
features or other individual idiosyncracies of the perpetrators: 'Cruelty is
social in its origin much more than it is characterological' ( l 989a: 1 66).
Bauman's purpose here is less to explain human cruelty as such than to
throw light upon the social practices and forms of cruelty which add up to
make a public regime of cruelty like Nazism. Institutionalized patterns of
impersonality, humiliation and indignity become the cultural frames of
totalitarian activity. Totalitarianism is a barred window on modernity.
Society as a Factory for Morality
Contrary to a whole tradition, say, of 1 960s radicalism, then, Bauman here

argues against the idea of the policeman in the head as the primary source
of social reproduction. If society is like a factory for acceptable morality,
then this is also only partly because factories make us work; they also
generate other responses. Fascism does not, for Bauman, result from the
little man that lives in all of us, or from what Etzioni called the 'latent
Eichmann' in each head (Bauman, 1 989a: 1 67). This is not to deny that we
are all capable of cruelty, treachery, betrayal; to say that there is no alien
like gremlin awaiting within each of us is not to substitute for this the image
of the internal angel. Bauman's critical point about the controlled experi
ments of Milgram or Zimbardo or the social-engineering regimes of Stalin
or Hitler is rather that it is these vicious arrangements, and not the
individual viciousness of the participants, that call out the orgy of cruelty
( 1 989a: 1 67). What matters is that some people were given a total, exclusive
and uninterrupted power over some other people: 'If there is a sleeper in
each of us, he may remain asleep for ever if such a situation does not occur.
And then we would never have heard of the sleeper's existence' ( 1 989a:
1 68). This response on Bauman's part may not resolve the ontological
status of evil; but then this is not the task which he has set himself. His
frame remains the more conventionally sociological one, centred on
problems of action while opening the door to ethics which lies on its other
side. For this reason Bauman pushes away the idea of the Nazi Sleeper as a
'metaphysical prop', but only after he has inverted it, in order to make the
observation that whether it exists or not, there is a sense in which those who
resist are also sleepers in the first instance: 'Their capacity to resist evil was
a "sleeper" through most of their lives. It could have remained asleep
forever, and we would not know of it then. But this ignorance would be
good news' ( I 989a: 1 68).
As Bauman proceeds to indicate, his argument leads towards the prob
lem of the social nature of evil, or, more precisely, of the social production
of immoral behaviour ( 1989a: 1 69). Plainly this is a substantial interpreta
tive challenge, for the social scientization of sociology has effectively
expelled morality from the field, reentering it by the backdoor as moralism.
As Serge Moscovici argues in The Invention of Society, sociology becomes a
practice characterized by institution-blaming (Moscovici, 1 996). Whenever
something goes wrong it is the fault of the school, the parents, television,
the police or the welfare state; no one is ever responsible for anything at all
these days. In Bauman's terms, talk about morality is subject to sociological
reductionism, or the premise which runs from Montesquieu to Durkheim
that moral phenomena can be exhaustively explained in terms of the non
moral institutions which lend them their binding force ( l 989a: 1 70).
Having established his curiosity about the Holocaust as a frame for
making sense of modernity and the complicity of sociology in these fields
both as part of the problem and potentially as a means of its explanation,
Bauman now turns more fully into the analysis of sociology itself. This is a
fascinating moment in terms of Bauman's own relationship to the classics.
Deeply impressed by, yet increasingly distant from Marx, he remains deeply
ambivalent about the contribution of Weber. Though there are senses of
fundamental sympathy with Weber's Kantian critique of the way in which
modernity generates its own self-destruction through the implosion of
separate spheres, Bauman also seems to view Weber or Weberianism as
part of the problem itself; the strength of his opposition to bureaucracy and
its consequences pushes him away from this source of ambivalence in
Weber's own project. Of Freud, there are various resonances especially
perhaps later, when it comes to Civilization and its Discontents ( 1 930); and
Simmel's sociology is ever-present, though more as a kind of spiritual
Doppelganger than as an explicit model. But in this section of Modernity
and the Holocaust, it is Durkheim whose legacy comes most powerfully
under scrutiny. The problem in Durkheim's work, in a sense, is obvious; for
it is Durkheim's work that calls out the critique of 'oversocialization'.
Durkheim's identification of morality with social norms is in this way more
potentially poisonous than anything that Marxists or Weberians could
legitimately draw out of the work of their masters. For Durkheim initiates
this modern sociological reduction par excellence, where society gives you
1 02 Zygmunt Bauman
morality and morality gives you society. The younger Durkheim may have
well been a socialist, and the wealth of meaning in the later reflections
of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life ( 1 9 1 5) may still remain
unexhausted, yet there persists around Durkheim's work an aroma of
conformism enough to make even the mildest mannered libertarian twitch.
For if society (=?) determines what is morality, what, in tum, is the basis of
either the critique of society, or of ethical conduct within that society?
There is more traditionalism of a certain frightening kind in Durkheim's
modernism than in either the Renaissance-utopia of Marx or the liberal
stoicism of Weber:
If anything, Durkheim's reVISIOn had rendered sociological reasoning about

morality more circular than ever. If the only existential foundation of morality is
the will of society, and its only function is to allow the society to survive, then the
very issue of substantive evaluation of specific moral systems is effectively
removed from the sociological agenda. (Bauman, 1 989a: 1 72)
How should we live? - as we are told to? If each society has the morality it
needs, what is it that enables us to speak out, or to think for ourselves?
Ultimately the clever insight in Durkheim's maxim backfires: if such actions
are evil as are socially prohibited, rather than social prohibition reflecting
the social sense of evil, then god really is society, and our only duty is to
conform. In this way Durkheim's sociology is both too traditionalistic,
because conformist, and too modernistic, because relativist ( 1 989a: 1 73).
What Durkheim misses, then, is the possibility that while society might
exercise a moralizing function, it may also act as a morality-silencing force
( l 989a: 1 74).
The conclusion to be drawn is not that Durkheim's sociology is worth
less, but rather that it confirms the possibility that morality or ethics can be
explained as a systemic function or secretion rather than as a human
activity. On this score, the moral challenge posed by the phenomenon of the
Holocaust to the discipline of sociology is frontal. The good citizen, law
abiding and civic in his or her obedience, will be the first to head the queue
of would-be gardeners, all ready and too willing to do their duty in the
name of the state or the will of the people. With a slight shift of emphasis,
Bauman argues, the challenge of the Holocaust to law or right is deafening:
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, legal practice, and thus also moral theory, faced
the possibility that morality may manifest itself in insubordination towards socially
upheld principles, and in an action openly defying social solidarity and consensus.
( I 989a: 1 77)
The good citizen may henceforth be he or she who stands against the
diktats of compulsory Gemeinschaft. As Hannah Arendt argued, in effect, it
now became incumbent upon us to contemplate the problem of moral
The Holocaust and the perfect order 1 03
responsibility for resisting socialization (Bauman, 1 989a: 1 77). The ordin

ary relativism in morality generated by communal difference does not apply
to the human capacity to differentiate between right and wrong ( l 989a:
1 78). Something must, on this account, precede socialization or the con
science collective; and this is why solidarity as such is not a good thing, but
can be good or bad, as social solidarities can be constructed for different
reasons and put to different ends, exclusive and xenophobic as well as
warming and inclusive. Moral capacity, in this sense, must be located in the
social, but not the societal sphere; or it must be practised in the realms of
civil society, rather than in the state ( l 989a: 1 79). Morality results from
being with others, not from rote instruction or code lists; we may find
morality acted out within institutions, but it does not originate within the
loci of such structures.
Enter Emmanuel Levinas, this most saintly of theorists. And Bauman
begins in this company to anticipate some of the larger concerns he will
extend into a fuller canvas - or is it window? - in Postmodern Ethics ( 1 993a).
Bauman's turn to Levinas is both necessary, and yet partial. Necessary, in
one way, in that Bauman has insisted on the centrality of ethics to sociology
and has demonstrated the hole in our disciplinary heart, so that the power of
the critical diagnosis calls for a strong remedy, which is what Levinas offers
with his insistence that ethics comes before ontology. For Levinas, as
Bauman indicates, we are always with others; and the sociologists from
Marx to Durkheim would agree, but it is as though they have not under
stood or dwelled sufficiently upon the profundity of their observations, as
though they have shifted focus too soon to the level of seriality or group to
take stock of the elements between you and me. According to Levinas,
however, this is exactly the level upon which responsibility works - not my
responsibility to class or nation or professional group, but to my immediate
other: 'Responsibility is the essential, primary and fundamental structure of
subjectivity' (Bauman, 1 989a: 1 83). Responsibility, however, arises out of the
proximity of the other which modernity modifies and totalitarianism
removes. Responsibility is silenced once proximity is eroded; it may instead
result in resentment for the abstract other (1989a: 1 84).
It is the impossibility of absolute totalitarianism which allows moral
leakage between the hostility to the abstract other and its actually existing
bearers. Thus, as Himmler had cause to lament, too many ordinary
Germans - even devoted Party members - could work up a lather about
the abstract Jewish menace and yet still know their own, personal, 'good'
Jews ( 1 989a: 1 87). Again, it is the social production of distance which
facilitates the manipulation of morality here. For evidently, moral inhibi
tions do not act at a distance; they are inextricably tied down to human
proximity ( l 989a: 1 92). This also helps explain the apparent fragility of
totalitarian politics, in flashpoints such as 1945 or in 1 989; for though
totalitarianism rests on violence, we can never be sure that it is completely
internalized ideologically by its subjects. If it is the culture and institutions
of Nazism which license and advocate attacks on Jews, then Germans will
1 04 Zygm unt Bauman
also be capable of other responses in other settings. A certain amount of

pretence, or masking, or playing along is involved; as in the old Soviet
empire saying, 'you pretend to pay us, we pretend to work', extended later
into 'you pretend to govern, we pretend to believe you'. Obedience, or at
least going through the motions, here replaces any other claim of modernity
to human autonomy.
Ethics, in this regard, is less connected to matters of good and evil in
Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust ( 1 989a) than it shadows problems
of autonomy and obedience or heteronomy. The shadow of Kant's essay
'What is Enlightenment?' seems perpetually present in Bauman's work, as it
does in that of his soulmate, Castoriadis. Only Bauman, as we have seen in
the discussion of Legislators and Interpreters ( 1 987), is less a robust
enthusiast for the idea or project of Enlightenment, too critical of its dark
side to fall in behind Kant's image of the upright man. Kant, and in
different ways Marx and Weber, all seem in common to connect autonomy
to the individual; Bauman makes it clear here that he wants to start from
the image of the other. Marx and Weber are both individualists, of distinct
kinds; Durkheim socializes the individual, projects the image of the multi
faceted individual out onto society. Bauman seems to harbour suspicions
that the good citizen might be as open to the extremes of individualism as
to those of conformism. His sympathies seem rather to be with Nietzsche's
aphorism, that who demands morality is really asking for obedience. These
are issues which Kant posits in 'What is Enlightenment?' but is not yet able
to resolve; the good remains something which might be innerly motivated,
but could also be governed by concerns with respectability or external
experience.
More generally, Bauman is less concerned here with philosophy than
with sociology. His puzzle is guided by the problem of acting, and only then
thinking. Humans are not good or evil, but hold both capacities within
them. The Holocaust becomes a prism on these matters because it distorts
and magnifies them. For the shift against proximity is also a move towards
increasing complexity, itself made manifest in elongated chains in divisions
of labour or command, bureaucracy and democracy. Moral people can be
driven into committing immoral acts even if they know, or believe these
acts to be immoral - providing that they are convinced by experts or
leaders that such actions are necessary ( 1989a: 1 98). For Bauman this
means turning back to, or at least remembering the Sophoclean distinction
between moral law and the law of society (or state). The image is more
powerful than it at first seems, for having referred to Sophocles, Bauman
proceeds to develop the case that what put the Holocaust apart was its
bizarre pursuit of self-preservation at any cost (the extermination of others)
( 1 989a: 1 99, 205).
The inhuman world created by a homicidal tyranny dehumanized its victims and
those who passively watched the victimization by pressing both to use the logic of
self-preservation as absolution for moral insensitivity and inaction. ( l 989a: 205)
Me, or you - you murderous bastard! is the logic which destroys the other,
which can only make a threat of the other. This is exactly why the significance
of the Holocaust reaches out beyond Jewish Studies, into sociology, for it
contains a lesson for the whole of humanity, modems not least of all. Evil
needs neither enthusiastic followers nor an applauding audience, though
Nazism supplies them both; the instinct of self-preservation will do: 'by lying
low, I can still escape!' ( l 989a: 206). This is what happens, or can happen
when rationality and ethics point in different directions, when the
technologies of destruction and the will-to-power of Fearless Leaders are
upon us. Yet the tenor of Bauman's sociology, and of his own personality, is
always to tell us the darkest truth and then to offer a glimpse of hope; for he
knows too well that the truths of modernity can be numbing. Neither
totalitarianism, nor modernity are all-encompassing, nor can they be: 'It does
not matter how many people chose moral duty over the rationality of self
preservation - what does matter is that some did ' ( 1 989a: 207).
Modernity and Ambivalence
To shift from Modernity and the Holocaust to Modernity and Ambivalence is

to move from symptom to field. Yet Bauman's way of thinking and writing
is not systematic - how could it be? - so Modernity and Ambivalence
( 1 99 I a) is also quite literally an extension of Bauman's concern with the
'Jewish Question', as well as a return to and reconsideration of the modern
or Enlightenment pursuit of the principle of order, whether theoretical or
worldly. Let us cross the portal from one book to the next via Bauman's
Amalfi Lecture in acceptance of the award for Modernity and the Holocaust
in 1 989, for there is at least one theme which connects them. This is the idea
of adiaphorization, or the deflation of the realm of morality through the
normalization of what was hitherto unacceptable to us through its reclassi
fication as mundane.
The problem which animates Bauman's Amalfi Prize Lecture remains the
way in which problems of good and evil have become social, or rather
societal ( 1 989a: 2 1 0) . The problem with social organization is that it
neutralizes the disruptive and · deregulating impact of moral behaviour.
Distancing and the will to punish the other through bureaucratic means
eventually renders social action adiaphoric or morally indifferent, neither
good nor evil, measurable only against technical and not moral values
( 1 989a: 2 1 5) . Some command; others execute; we all obey, and indifference
prevails; we work, shop and die. Plainly we persist in encountering prob
lems of recognition on the way; we are not merely molecules in motion. Yet
our difficulties in recognizing each other go together with the astral
capacities of the species now to constantly make and remake the world, or
at least have it made for us by others or else by forces distant and
unknown. The death of God has left us unable to discern the distinction
between what is possible and what we ought do; again, we allow the
1 06 Zygmunt Bauman
technical capacities to generate their own ends as well as the means which
might be appropriate to them.
When the planet is inhabited by Man and Man alone, anything is
possible; yet the world made in our own image is also in a way its own self
negation, for the only measure of Man is abstract Man himself. This is the
world which gives us the Gulag, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, as well as
global poverty and misery on levels hitherto unseen. In high modernity, the
classless society, the race-pure society, the Great Society become the task
of man; somehow the project of caring for others and the self is too
ridiculously modest ( l 989a: 2 1 8). Technology becomes as animated a force
as Man, while we, in a sense, become passive recipients of the devices of the
social order. Modernity and technology fuse to generate a culture and its
attendant social institutions which are, in effect, closed. Bauman cites
Jacques Ellul: technology today develops because it develops: if we can do it,
why on earth should we not ( 1 989a: 220)? The whole world is reduced by us
in the process to objects of utility or else discarded. Thus do we divide the
world into objects of value and rubbish; even humans can be accom
modated into these nice distinctions.
Modernity and Ambivalence ( l 99 I a) opens with a discussion of language,
culture and thinking which reaches back to the more directly political
concerns of Legislators and Interpreters ( 1 987) via some of those indicated
in Hermeneutics and Social Science ( 1 978). The key concept in this key book
in Bauman's project is the idea of ambivalence itself. In one way the very
idea of ambivalence is obvious, expressing as it does a commonplace about
us and our world. We love and hate both it, and ourselves. Bauman's
concern is more directly with the consequences of the principle of endless
motion and its freezing by our language, culture and social institutions, the
latter, of course, including the discipline of sociology itself. Ambivalence, as
Bauman puts it, is the possibility of assigning an object or an event to more
than one category. It is a language-specific disorder: a failure of the naming,
segregating function that language is supposed to perform. 'A' is self
evidently not 'B'. But ambivalence also indicates ambiguity; sometimes 'B'
really looks like 'A'. These kinds of uncertainty, according to Bauman,
generate anxiety; we have a right to presume that 'A' and 'B' are distinct.
Ambivalence therefore feels scary, like disorder. Yet, Bauman insists,
ambivalence is actually not pathological, so much as it is normal. It arises
from one of the main functions of language: that of naming and classifying
(Bauman, 1 99 1a: I).
To classify, then, is to set apart, to segregate; it signals a human activity,
a human presence among the abundance of phenomena and things that go
to make up our world. To classify is to confer meaning, to give the world a
structure or pattern, to make it open to the prospect of predictability. We
are animals that seek out routine or habit, who form conventions and
common senses which enable us to go on. We seek to reduce risk or
randomness through constructing routines or repertoires: 'Because of our
learning/memorizing ability we have vested interests in maintaining the
orderliness of the world. For the same reason, we experience ambivalence

as discomfort and a threat' ( l 99 I a: 2). Yet the risk - for risks remain -
becomes that the naming/classifying purpose embroils us in the linear paths
of instrumental reason; makes us think like bureaucrats. Thus Bauman's
characterization of naming/classifying has an uncanny resemblance to
Weber's characterization of bureaucracy, where all becomes the effect of
precedent and routine, and all difference or creative capacity withers. For
as Bauman has it, the ideal implied by classification is a kind of universal
filing system, or, to change metaphors, a map of the world the same size as
its object.
So why the fuss about classification? And how does the strength of this
critique echo back into marxism, class theory and its own obsession with
classification? Classifying consists in either exclusion or inclusion. Germans
and Jews; bourgeoisie or proletariat. All acts of inclusion imply others, of
exclusion. That these acts may be arbitrary is one thing. Bauman wants
to make a stronger claim: that invariably, 'such operation of inclusion/
exclusion is an act of violence perpetrated upon the world' ( l 99 I a: 2). Thus
the tragic ambivalence of those Jews who were also assimilated Germans,
or the more comic classification anomalies generated by capitalists like
Engels who want to be with their proletariat, or working-class tories who
despise nothing so much as their class peers.
Bauman's next move in Modernity and Ambivalence is characteristically
clever: now he introduces the problem of modernity into the picture.
Modernity is both the object of his book, the field within which the quest
for classification really takes off, and is itself a category full of ambivalence:
for we can be modern, modernist, late modern and even postmodern all at
the very same time ( l 99 I a: 3). M odernity is a name, not a reality; it signifies
something, perhaps even something highly evocative, but it cannot by its
nature capture all of the illuminations and depths of darkness which we
might investigate or visit under that rubric. 'Modernity' as a sociological
term is not the same as 'modernism' or the 'postmodern', which we associ
ate more variously with aesthetic or cultural forms; but all of these are
'quasi-totalities we want to prise off from the continuous flow of being'
( l 99 1 a: 4). Humans, however, have a need for order which again becomes
societally accelerated in the field we call modernity; so that while all peoples
seek order, only moderns seek to place everything in order. Order becomes
that which is not chaos; chaos is what is not orderly. But for Bauman, order
and chaos are modern twins ( 1 99 I a: 4). For we moderns have somehow
come to convince ourselves that order is natural, rather than chaos or flux.
We allow the distinction to become too firm, as though the alternative to
order is not another order, but chaos.
Thus Bauman anticipates the general argument of his book: 'The typi
cally modern practice, the substance of modern politics, of modern intellect,
of modern life, is the effort to exterminate ambivalence' ( l 99 1 a: 7). Of
course, the quest is impossible, but this does little to prevent us from
seeking after it with a vengeance. Bauman's characterization of our culture
1 08 Zygmunt Bauman
is stark: 'Intolerance is . . . the natural inclination of modern practice'

( l99 1 a: 8). Even tolerance is insipid, for it represents nothing more than the
blind eye. Yet modernity, or modernism, is not only capable of self
reproduction. For there is also a love-hate relation between modern exist
ence and modern culture. Modern culture both undermines and serves
modern existence ( l 99 1 a: 9). Bauman endorses the bleak image of our
condition left us by Walter Benjamin: the storm irresistibly propels the
walkers into the future to which their backs are turned, while the pile of
debris before them grows skyward; 'this storm we call progress' ( 1 99 1 a: 1 1).
Only Bauman's claim is less stoical, more incisive. For ambivalence seems
to become the accidental result of this, like Benjamin's debris: 'If modernity
is about the production of order then ambivalence is the waste of modernity'
( 1 99 1 a: 1 5) . Waste; it could be the stuff of modernity, for our discards are
hardly unworthy; or it could be rubbish, excrement, mess, dirt. And then
there is the problem of the status of the concept of modernity in this claim;
for if modernity is the field within which this tragedy occurs, then modern
ism is the force which drives it so relentlessly forward. Ambivalence must in
this way itself remain an ambivalent category. Bauman anticipates this issue
here in insisting that the category of the stranger is ambivalent, rather than
simply negative, as the idea of the outsider might at first suggest. At the
same time as he embraces the pathos of Benjamin's image of history,
Bauman also endorses the more provisionally optimistic view of Agnes
Heller, that it might remain possible for us to transform contingency into
destiny (Bauman, 1 99 1a: 1 6).
More generally, Bauman observes here that the central problem in
Modernity and Ambivalence relates back to the theses of Adorno and
Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment ( 1 944). This acknowledgement in
turn points in at least two distinct possible directions, for the darkest
interpretation of the Enlightenment as modernity's nemesis in Adorno and
Horkheimer coexists with more balanced, niggling curiosities about the
ambivalence built into Enlightenment. In other words, Dialectic of Enlight
enment is a text which also carries its own traces of ambivalence, even if the
mainstream reception of the argument is that modern history has come to
an end through the power of self-destruction. Fifty years after that test,
however, Bauman's concern is not only to hammer the Enlightenment but
also to show its own capacity to generate a postmodern legacy. Critical
thinking, in Bauman's interpretation, is not only self-destructive; more
emphatically, it is also destructive of the worst conceits of modernity, or
modernism - its blind arrogance, high-handedness, and its endlessly
ambitious legislative dreams ( l 99 1 a: 1 7).
The event which called out Dialectic of Enlightenment remains that which
is the pretext for Modernity and Ambivalence. Bauman sets off on this
journey from his last stop, in Modernity and the Holocaust ( I 989a). In its
German edition Bauman's Holocaust book directly evokes Adorno and
Horkheimer: it is translated as Dialektik der Ordnung. Why do we feel
compelled to resist the lessons of the Holocaust? To marginalize, or
exoticize it as peculiarly German ( l 99 1 a: 1 9)? The problem, again, is more

general; it has to do with a way of thinking and being which result in the
practice of the gardening state, the global compulsion to Order. The specific
connection which Bauman wants to draw here is that provided by eugenics.
But eugenics was also a European and transatlantic phenomenon, by no
means peculiarly Germanic or unique to the Nazis. What is astonishing
about eugenics before 1 933 or 1 94 1 , as Bauman observes, is not who
enthused for it but who did not. Eugenics was an extraordinarily influential
movement, bringing together ideologically speaking Nazis and Fabians,
liberals and social democrats. Bauman points the finger at Beatrice Webb,
and especially at H.G. Wells but also at T.S. Eliot in the English setting.
Order, cleanliness, hygiene, race-breeding, all these things went together in
the interwar years, across typically political boundaries ( 1 99 1 a: 34-5).
What is more disturbing, perhaps, is the way in which such thinking crosses
over with the utopian horizons which Bauman also wants to defend. For
genocide is necessarily connected to that desire for rational social engin
eering which is so ubiquitous within utopianism. More, all visions of
artificial order are necessarily asymmetrical and thereby dichotomizing;
there is inevitably an in-group and an out-group, or a problem and an
imaginary solution (for example, eliminate the social parasites and improve
life for the people). Further, the connection between eugenics, ordering and
utopia is apparent in the fact that the imagination of the rationalizers or
social engineers is tempted by the prospect of a state of ultimate and stable
perfection ( l 99 1 a: 38-9). The predominant figure of utopia suspends
historicity or change, and thereby elevates some image of stasis in its stead.
But where there is stasis there can be no life, no struggle for freedom or for
dignity. Only death offers stasis.
This social science fiction, like its natural scientific parallel, suspends the
presence of the other from its purview. Genocide becomes a fact of
modernity, for modernity is its necessary condition. Consequently the sole
factor capable of counterbalancing the genocidal potential dormant in the
instrumental capacities of modernity is the pluralism of powers, and hence
pluralism of authoritative opinion ( 1 99 1 a: 50- 1 ). Conceptual pluralism will
not lead to pluralism in everyday life, but the second is implausible without
the first. For it is, of course, practical rather than merely formal ambi
valence which is Bauman's political concern here. What really matters is the
social construction and legitimacy of ambivalence. This is Bauman's cue to
introduce the theme of the stranger, for the stranger also represents the
third. There are friends, and enemies, and then there are strangers. Friends
and enemies work together as insiders and outsiders, whereas strangers
inhabit the liminal zone in between ( l 991 a: 53). All these categories rep
resent the other, but in distinct ways. The friend is the outsider for whom I
am responsible before they reciprocate, and regardless of their reciproca
tion. The enemy is the other who is beyond the pale, regardless. Following
Simmel, Bauman identifies friendship and enmity as forms of sociation;
friends and enemies represent the other as subjects, like or unlike us.
1 10 Zygmunt Bauman
Strangers are different because they represent the undecidable, as in

Derrida's discussion of the pharmakon, both remedy and poison ( l 99 1 a :
55-6). The third term i s difficult, threatening, yet i t i s ubiquitous, part of
the very condition of ambivalence itself.
Some strangers, in Bauman's understanding, are not just in transition,
yet to be decided; rather, they are undecidable: 'These are the true hybrids,
the monsters - not just unclassified, but unclassifiable' ( 1 99 1 a : 58). The
stranger is, or represents anomaly. The stranger is a constant threat to the
traditional world's order; and given that modernity is a tradition of its own,
the stranger's status in modernity is still uncertain, even in the society of
strangers. The stranger is not only strange, but unknown; strangers are not
original, they were not there in the beginning. By violating history, the
stranger also violates time, and not only place ( l 99 1 a: 59-60). By arriving,
the stranger represents the possibility of an end, the end to our normality or
stability. The stranger represents modernity's scope of freedom, sexual,
geographical, political. 'Even here, however, the treacherous incongruity of
the stranger does not end' ( l99 1 a: 60) for the stranger also undermines the
spatial ordering of the world. The stranger is a walking contradiction, by
the standards of the cosy GemeinschaJt of the sociological imagination: the
stranger is both physically close (too close) and spiritually distant. This
incongruity is what makes the stranger ambivalent; for this reason, the
stranger is the 'bane of modernity' ( 1 99 1 a: 6 1 ).
What can Bauman mean by this claim? His guiding shadow, Georg
Simmel, would rather have suggested that even if the stranger is a novelty,
he or she is paradigmatic of modernity, less its bane than its expression or
symbol. What the stranger violates is less modern boundaries than the
traditionalistic bifurcations of inside/outside. The stranger may then violate
the historical experience of modernity, yet nevertheless embody its idea or
spirit. Bauman, however, does not want to slight tradition in order to save
modernity. At the same time, he is plainly wary of the kind of compulsory
GemeinschaJt which moderns often project upon their own image of tradi
tion. GemeinschaJt-claims substitute images of friendship, or intimacy,
or family, for all other kinds of sociation; the family often thus secretly
becomes the image of the good society, contrary to what many experience
as the constraints of the family, and against the very spirit of the good
society as a political form of association. This, in turn, makes Bauman
twitch because it indicates the presence of a certain kind of ideological
organicism, where the 'natural' is valued over and against the social; it is a
line of argument which remains widely influential in contemporary think
ing, from deep ecology to national socialism. Bauman despises those who
want to garden us into shape, but he also remains deeply suspicious of the
opposite claim, that it is nature rather than society or culture which makes
us what we are. He is a kind of ambivalent modernist, where all the markers
or categories begin to break down, for neither tradition nor modernity, the
modern nor the postmodern can abstractly or absolutely be defended
against all other competitors or classifications.
Tne Holocaust and the per/ect order III
Who, then, is to blame for the human condition? modernity or post

modernity? or us? Surely it is us, as actors or subjects; only Bauman's
cautionary note is that the prospect becomes more dangerous as the means
of destruction expand and escalate in high modernity. Nor do they decrease
in postmodern times, even if critical narratives turn our eyes away from
totality and towards the fragments. The dominant metanarratives, or
ideologies or cultures might enable some outcomes to be advantaged over
others, but they are not actors in themselves, unless, perhaps, we sign over
our own responsibility to them.
How could we reasonably be anything other than ambivalent about
modernity? As Bauman puts it, modernity, after all, is a rebellion against
fate and ascription, in the name of omnipotence of design and achievement
( l 991a: 68). 'There is, therefore, a genuine contradiction at the heart of
modernity' ( 1 99 1 a: 69). Now Bauman turns the case towards problems of
assimilation. How do we deal with strangers? If we are tolerant of them,
our inclusion of strangers remains half hearted. Moderns may shift histori
cally from policies of stigmatization to those of assimilation, but this is
merely to offer a more humane alternative to fascism, to soak up the other
rather than destroy them. Assimilation offers domestication rather than
difference. But this kind of modern offer to the outsider - 'enter, be like us'
- remains essentially traditionalistic, for here identity remains singular and
genetic in origin; fellow travellers will always be second-class citizens,
because they are inauthentic. Modernity remains deeply traditionalistic in
its residual commitment to the image of the national citizens as sprung
from the ground or from its previous generations. Now we are all strangers,
Poles in Britain as much as Germans in Australia, or Indians, or Brazilians
in New York City. Only some remain stranger than others ( l 991a: 97).
Modernity, in Bauman's usage, opens such problems but cannot resolve
them. Postmodernity in his lexicon seems to mean living with, or even
embracing ambivalence. Where a philosopher such as Heller identifies the
possibility of pluralism with a modernity which is escaping from its own
habitual traditionalism, Bauman seems rather to identify the prospects of
such realization with the postmodern. For Bauman:
Postmodernity is modernity that has admitted the non-feasibility of its original

project. Postmodernity is modernity reconciled to its own impossibility - and
determined, for better or worse, to live with it. Modern practice continues - now,
however, devoid of the objective that once triggered it off. ( 1 99 1 a: 98)
Postmodernity is modernity come of age, modernity without illusions . . .

modernity without modernism? Only modernity without modernism -
without the will to power, the will to make, reform, destroy life - this really
would make no sense. Bauman suggests that the postmodern maxim to
replace that of moderns or Enlighteners is 'liberty, diversity, tolerance'
rather than 'liberty, equality, fraternity'; and progress may even be possible
if tolerance is reforged as solidarity ( l 99 1 a: 98). Diversity replaces oneness,
1 12 Zygmunt Bauman
so far so good; equality disappears, or resurfaces as the challenge of solid

arity, and here Bauman himself solidarizes with the pragmatic minimalism
of Richard Rorty ( 1 99 1a : 1 0 1 ). Postmodernity always runs the risk of
extending modernity's other claim, not to social engineering, but to the
decency of liberalism.
As in Modernity and the Holocaust ( l 989a), however, Bauman's argu
ment in Modernity and Ambivalence ( 1 99 1 a) works both on the plane of the
critique of modernity and on the modem tragedy of the Jews. This moment
in Bauman's life's work may be more about the Holocaust than about
modernity as such, even as he urges the painful connection between them
upon us. Assimilation, again, is the narrative link in Bauman's argument,
for it covers not only the more specific problem of the Jews but also the
general proclivities of modernity to swallow up difference, to devour and to
indigest. Assimilation represents a declaration of war on difference, on
semantic ambiguity; as Bauman argues in the opening to this book, it is
therefore both a cosmological or epistemological and a political or practical
matter. It is one, mental precondition of modem barbarism.
Assimilation and After
Bauman recommences his story by focusing upon the travails of the

German Jew. This is a tale of paradox waiting to unwind. Contrary to
the popular pre-Nazi adage 'Be a Jew at home, and a man in the Street', the
Jews as would-be Germans felt truly German only at home, where they
could play their game of illusions undisturbed by the kicks of the Gentiles
passing by in those streets ( l 99 1a: 1 2 1 ). But emancipation cannot come of
assimilation, especially not with a hostile agent as host. Only there is a twist
in Bauman's narrative, for just as later under the influence of Janina's work
he returns to the image of the gypsy as the outsider, so here does he shift to
the case of the less prominent Jews, the Ostjuden, the less civilized Jews
from the other side of the river, not from Weimar or Berlin but from
Poznan or Budapest (see also J. Bauman, 1 998). The Ostjuden were less well
assimilated, and therefore embarrassing to others who chose to leave their
ethnic idiosyncrasies behind. The Jews of Eastern Europe were in a way
even more liminal, for they were refused a category of their own, being cast
rather as failed German Jews ( 199 1 a: 1 32).
Readers of Bauman's work will therefore find that a key issue for
Modernity and the Holocaust ( l989a), the nature of the Jews as a category,
is more fully defined in this other book, Modernity and Ambivalence
( l 99 1 a). The outer frame of a sociology of modernity dominates the first
and returns in the second, again, because assimilation as we know it is a
modern phenomenon. Assimilation is necessarily bound up with the
'nationalization' of the state, or the construction of national identity and
nation-building upon claims to geographically bounded originary belonging
( l 991 a: 1 4 1 ). With typical irony, Bauman notes that the definition could
also be reversed: what is at risk is perhaps less the modern nationalization

of the state than the statization of the nation. Or to put the human problem
in terms of its organizational corruption, the assimilants found much
to their own despair that they had in effect assimilated themselves solely to
the process of assimilation ( 1 99 1 a: 1 43). The policy of assimilation was the
front line of social engineering, the cutting edge of modernity's advancing
order ( l 99 1 a: 1 49). Within the horizons of fascist thinking, this was pre
cisely a matter of fabricating a tradition, often inserting romantic claims
within the most advanced technological forms of organization. In this way,
at least, the reactionary modernism of the Nazis was somehow especially
representative of modernity itself. Bauman's purpose is to establish and to
probe the nature of this connection. To reduce or to identify modernity and
fascism is not his claim, for indeed this would be to commit the very
mistake of conceptual assimilation which he wishes to force upon our
attention as the common underpinning of Nazi and modern traditionalism.
Is not then Bauman's own position, by contrast, some kind of romantic
enthusiasm for chaos or what went before as the sole alternative to these
new kinds of murderous order? Bauman's is not an other worldly rejection
of modernity, like that in Illich or Marcuse. We can expect, instead, that
Bauman would enthuse for the third term if for anything. The only choice
cannot be between state-sponsored order and non-modern chaos; the
challenge must rather be to make your own order. Nor can there be any
happy choice between the alleged alternatives of racism or assimilation,
outright rejection or innerly dilution of the other by the social system.
Sociology, meantime, became part of this state-sponsored project; con
trary to the myth that all the good-hearted sociologists fled from Germany
together with Freud and the Frankfurt School, many stayed and took their
orders from Hitler. Yet here, again, ambivalence reigns, for as Bauman
reminds us, sociology was early on identified precisely as a dangerous,
because dirty Jewish discipline ( l 99 1a : 1 67). Our discipline, bless its ambi
valence, is both willing servant of modernity and its critic. Simmel survives
here as the representative of critique, more even than Marx, for Marx's
followers took his desire for systematicity out of the British Museum and
made it into the operational principle of Soviet state power. Simmel's
famous motif, by comparison, was the fragment, or the very absence of the
ongoing motif. Simmel's sociology remains on the level of phenomenology,
it is manoeuvred through the perspectives of the human condition, like
Bauman's own work; it does not take on where it left off, or channel all
problems through one or two core conceptual concerns ( l 99 1 a: 1 85). In this
sense, it could be said that it is not sociological at all, for it avoids that
temptation to the analytical reductionism of the 'single fix' which is so
characteristic of sociological endeavour ('it's the economy, stupid!').
Nevertheless, Bauman's path in Modernity and Ambivalence goes out
through the mall, the supermarket and therapy, what together he refers to
as the privatization of ambivalence. The conclusion to this book accords
with the later strategy common throughout his writing: the bad news ends
1 14 Zygmunt Bauman
with the exhortation to do better, at least to maintain hope. Bauman opens

his closing by standing together with the modest humanism of Agnes
Heller: the future is by definition open; we might still transform con
tingency into destiny, not as masters of the universe, but as actors in our
worlds, both shared and personal ( 1 99 1 a: 23 1 ). As modems, or post
modems, we have available to us a repertoire of choices or fields of action
which we choose either to exercise or else to neglect. Modernity is a field of
possibilities: why then have we, or others, chosen to work on the most
paranoiac rather than the more modest? Humans will always be tempted by
the fantasy of rational mastery; again, it is our misfortune that modernity
delivers up the means to make the Frankenstein fantasy possible. Post
modernity, understood in the sense that Bauman values it, as modernity
without illusions, this is a chance of modernity. Tolerance, he says, is a
subsequent chance of postmodernity. And solidarity is the chance of
tolerance. Each is preconditional for the next; which is to say, as Bauman
acknowledges, that the friends of solidarity do not seem to have much cause
for cheer ( l 99 1 a: 257). The problem is that one downside of the post
modem sensibility is a kind of numbness that goes together with the
occasional attack of euphoria. Solidarity, care for the other, sometimes
seems to look distinctly old fashioned in a world of speed, gratification and
self-development. Hence the recurrent irony of modem utopia, which draws
its animus from the horror of difference and impatience with otherness:
'And yet they also offered a chance for genuine concern with the plight of
the wretched and miserable' ( 1 99 1 a: 257). The sense of contingency makes
it possible to imagine the world as other, as changeable. The ordinary
humanist impulse to change or reform signals all this in its essential
ambivalence: the world needs to be changed, for too many suffer too much
unnecessarily; so we must change the world for them.
As Bauman puts it, it is not that we have no contemporary equivalents of
the great early sociological muckrakers, like Mayhew or Booth or Riis. The
real difference is between the explosive effect that the revelation of human
misery once had, and the equanimity with which it is received today ( 1 99 1 a:
257). Today we feel morally numbed in the face of other people's suffering,
not least because our proximity to them has declined, or else has been
transformed by the virtual realization of television thinking: what is the
difference between a homeless person on N YPD Blue and the one you climb
over off Broadway? As Bauman has insisted, our second natures at least
have been corrupted by adiaphorization. So much that hitherto repelled us
is now tolerated, and this is the negative aspect of toleration. Morality,
meantime, is reprocessed as the moralism of politics or sexuality as soap
opera, as in the Bill and M onica Show. This is a central issue for those who
would enthuse for postmodernism, alone, without any sense of ambi
valence. For postmodern tolerance goes wide and far, and includes toler
ance for those who choose homelessness as a lifestyle. The arguments being
developed by Bauman here connect back directly to those in Socialism: the
Active Utopia ( l976a). Today, socialism is inert, or inactive, and this may
be a blessing for some, in that we are relieved of the endless complaints and
hectoring from the moral highground of those who know better. On the
other hand, if it is truly the case that anything goes, then there is no forum
any longer in which we might even begin to argue about what the good
society might be, and who exactly has right of entry to it. This represents a
closing of the political imagination, or more literally, of politics, for the
very idea of any notional common good is lost in marketized lunges after
self-interest. It hurts, but as Bauman suggests, it is only too easy for
postmodern tolerance to degenerate into the selfishness of the rich and
resourceful. Indeed, such selfishness is its most immediate and daily
manifestation ( 1 99 1 : 259).
This is not all there is to the postmodern world, for it, too, bears its own
ambivalence. Sociologically speaking, it carries within it the traditionalism
of modernism as well as the flexibility of the present; and this traditionalism
itself will always cut both ways, for we cannot simply presume that tradi
tion is good or bad in itself; some traditions offer balance, others constrain
us. So the postmodern will also cut both ways. As Bauman captures the
contradiction in one place, the 'postmodern world of joyful messiness is
carefully guarded at the borders by mercenaries no less cruel than those
hired by the managers of the now abandoned global order' ( 1 99 I a: 260).
What used to become dissent is now personal anxiety. Postmodernity is
therefore simultaneously the site of opportunity and of danger.
Exit from Modernity, Stage Left
Bauman's work is often received as, or translated into, the postmodern.

There is a certain sense in which Bauman's project becomes increasingly
postmarxist, with the emphasis on both terms; and certainly it is also
postmodern, but not with any illusions of rupture after modernity. The
content of Modernity and Ambivalence ( 1 99 1 a) may surprise, as it returns to
and develops arguments apparently central to Modernity and the Holocaust
( 1 989a). As I have indicated, the critical onslaught against the logic and
politics of assimilation or identity-thinking which opens Modernity and
Ambivalence then tracks the Jewish Problem from west to east, via the
Ostjuden. Bauman then turns to the analysis of new forms of oppression, or
exclusion through the postmodern market and its culture or mentality, and
evokes socialism or utopia as the ambivalence of modernity. So, now, does
he return in concluding the book frontally to discuss 'Socialism: Modern
ity's Last Stand'. Bauman begins by restating his earlier conviction, that
modem socialism is best understood as the counter-culture of modernity:
Like all counter cultures, modem socialism performed a triple function in relation
to the society it opposed and serviced: it exposed the deceit of representing the
achieved state of society as the fulfilment of its promise; it resisted the suppression
1 16 Zygmunt Bauman
or concealment of the possibility to implement the promise better; and it pressed

the society toward such better implementation of its potential. ( 1 99 I a: 263)
Socialism is Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, both therefore responsible for

the status quo and yet free of all blame for its failings. Socialism in this way
was an alternative modernity, even if its modernity was necessarily a
variation on the more powerful capitalist theme. Socialism in the west
played out its role on the oppositional level; in the east, it took the social
engineering prospect to new heights, even if they were paralleled elsewhere,
in Nazism and in the New Deal. Socialism's own project was a version of
that of modernity. Socialism was the idea of a radicalized modernity, a
finished off and polished capitalism; the idea of socialism as radical demo
cracy had to await the 1 960s' rediscovery of democracy as another good
idea which the bourgeoisie had failed to deliver on, rather than just another
bourgeois slogan. Capitalists had failed to make good of modernity; social
ists vowed, as the other football team, that they could do better. Socialists,
in all this, claimed not only that capitalist modernity was inefficient but that
it was unfair.
'Socialism found nothing wrong with modernity' ( 1 99 1 a: 265); apparently
this refers to marxism, for marxism became the loudest voice and the
fiercest opponent on the left, especially after the Russian October. Bauman
here reads socialism as, like history, something that proceeds by its bad
side; the emphasis is similar to that on the bad side of Enlightenment in
Legislators and Interpreters ( 1 987). In a way Bauman's force of attack is
entirely appropriate: for among socialists and Enlighteners, the social
engineers won; modernism, if not modernity, became the playground of the
modernizers, turning the romantics into airy handwavers, dazed nostalgics
for worlds we have lost. Socialism became historically identified with that
monstrous Faustian project of remaking of the world articulated by
Trotsky, the loyal oppositionist, and authorized practically by the fearless
leader, Josef Stalin.
Might there then be something like a postmodern socialism, where
socialism refers more to culture than to politics, to critique and opposition
than to the will to power? (Beilharz, 1 994b). Bauman's emphasis here is
more on the postmodernity of modernity than on its modem residuals. It
is difficult in this wasteland to see what possibilities socialism could have at
all, in any significant form. Communism as a specific experience, however,
is more precisely understood as an alternative experiment in modernity
rather than a counterculture, as it was in the west (Bauman, 1 99 1a: 266; see
also Amason, 1 993). Lenin substituted socialist revolution for bourgeois
revolution, rather than viewing socialism as the extension of capitalism.
Postindustrialism in effect pulls the mat out from under these communist
aims of outindustrializing the west; Gorbachev was a would-be modernizer
and, in this post-Brezhnev context, was therefore a postmodernist, or
postmodernizer (Bauman, 1 99 1 a: 268). Communism was an attempt at
constructing a non-differentiated modernity, a mono-organizational society
where the Party saw all and ruled all. It was a dictatorship over needs.
Bauman endorses that critical category developed by Feher, Heller and
Markus in their 1 983 book of the same name ( 199 Ia: 268).
Is then all hope gone? Social engineering in the megalomaniacal sense
stands damned. But this discrediting adheres to its Faustian excesses: 'To
abandon social engineering as a valid means of political practice means to
discard . . . all visions of a different society; even makes it difficult to
imagine another way of living or of organizing our lives and our priorities'
( l 99 I a: 269). There is always a risk here: to change the world may make it
worse. To leave it alone, laissez-faire, laissez-allez is hardly any self
sufficient alternative. To allow this would truly be to authorize it. In any
case, there are always social engineers, even when they do not proudly or
noisily announce their own arrival.
Thus as a non-decision is a kind of decision, so is the non-celebration of
the planners a silent recognition of their perennial presence and power. Less
has changed than the publicists would like us to believe:
Nothing merely ends in history, no project is ever finished and done with. Clean
borders are but projections of our relentless urge to separate the inseparable and
order the flux. Modernity is still with us. (Bauman, 1 99 1a: 270)
Modernity is still with us; let us beware of mistaking our own mental clarity
or need for clarity with the way our worlds actually work. What strange
creatures we become, that our needs for understanding develop such
elaborate prostheses that we no longer have any idea what it was we set out
to interpret in the first place. Or else, we put all our best talents into
explaining how to explain, not addressing what it is or was we set out to
explain. It is as though the more we know, the more it intrudes upon the
process of understanding. The argument is reminiscent of W.G. Sebald's
more fictive musing in The Rings of Saturn:
Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are
engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing
complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even
while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponder
ables that govern our course through life. (Sebald, 1 998: 1 82)
Ideas, words, theories get in the way; they do not only facilitate under
standing, though yet again we cannot live without them. The problem, as
ever, is in us, not in them, in how we use theory as dogma, in quest of
certainty, to close our eyes against a world both shifting and shiftless. What
we have learned, or stand to learn for Bauman, however, is that something
significant has indeed changed. To speak of modernity as a project, as we
now do is to confess that it is over, or at least determinate: 'Our ancestors
did not talk of the "project" when they were busily engaged in what now
looks to us like unfinished business' ( l99 Ia: 27 1 ). Even the idea of project
1 18 Zygmunt Bauman
starts to age before us, indicating some kind of concordance between

intention and outcome which few of us would commit our lives to. Ergo
the proliferation of posts, the sense that we have arrived after, after the
enthusiasms or expectations of modernity, that our social dreams quite
readily can be realized. Postmodernity expresses the realization internal to
modernity that its own dreams were illusions, even if they were necessary
illusions. It is as though we have broken the spell of our own illegitimate
fantasy, for Bauman; as though we erred, fundamentally in ascribing reality
to modern dreams rather than to everyday existence. The hopes which
make us human, then, do not evaporate altogether; they shift register, from
the paranoiac to the ordinary.
The fragmented society of postmodern capitalism now replaces the more
centred world of western corporatism and communism in the east. Frag
mentation of course also cuts both ways, dispersing power and respon
sibility. Even ambivalence becomes tokenized in this process; so that if
Bauman argues throughout as though modernity cannot deliver or even
tolerate ambivalence, he now senses that postmodernity turns it into little
more than a stage prop ( l 99 I a: 279). Our survey of Bauman's work will
have reason to probe further into the postmodern in the next chapter. To
close this chapter, we will return to Bauman's diagnosis of Soviet modern
ity. The biographical path from which Bauman emerges is more powerfully
informed by the experience of communism than by that of fascism, which
he relays here in the first instance through the direct experience of his wife.
Probably Bauman's increasing distance from the figure of Marx reflects a
similar distance of his personal past with that interval of the history of
Eastern Europe. Yet as Bauman says, nothing merely ends in history, no
project is ever entirely finished and done with. Modernity is still with us,
and so is marxism.
But marxism, today, is too caught up with this historical process to claim
immunity from its own effects, intended or nay. Those of us who remain
inspired by Marx therefore have to start at least to address the question
how all this began, the Bolshevik pursuit of marxism as a paradise to be
achieved. Bauman's views on some of these issues are available to us in his
review in response to the epoch-making work of Feher, Heller and Markus,
Dictatorship Over Needs ( 1 983). The Hungarians set out to establish what
generations of marxists were keen to deny - that Soviet-type societies were
sui generis, with a logic of their own. On this interpretation, the marxist
blinkers of the mode of production type, which would insist that all
societies must be either pre-capitalist, capitalist, or socialist told us more
about the interpreters than the realities they sought to interpret. The Soviet
Union may well have been historically enacted in the name of socialism, but
its social forms displayed none of the dimensions traditionally associated
with socialist claims to freedom or equality. But neither was the Soviet
Union some kind of throwback to an imaginary oriental despotism, nor a
mere duplicate of capitalism this time without capitalists. Feher, Heller and
Markus insist that Soviet-type societies merge particular modernizing and
traditionalistic patterns; like Nazi Germany, they were not a simple denial
of modernity, but represented different attempts to refigure modernity.
Bauman agrees with the Hungarians that the basic organizational
aspiration of actually-existing socialism embodied in the dictatorship over
needs was the imperative to control. To seek control at the level of the
social system is first and foremost to seek the substitution of order for
chaos, design for spontaneity, plan for anarchy, or else: control, control
over both men and women and over nature (Bauman, 1 984: 1 75). Bauman
takes umbrage here at the early marxian fascination with species-being, and
its capacity to crowd out the actually-existing individual subjects who ought
really to make up socialism. In the spirit of his own work, and in sympathy,
as often, with the views of Castoriadis, he suggests rather that the 'project
of a rational society is, in other words, an idea of domination which sets
itself goals no secular power dreamed of before' ( 1 984: 1 75). Whether we
choose to call it capitalist or socialist, this modernizing frenzy of utopia
lives out the dreams of rationalism, or implicitly of Enlightenment.
Socialism remains the counter-culture of capitalism, both born and lived
out under the sign of Enlightenment. Organized socialism's primary claim
came to be that it could rid capitalism of its own rationality. None of this,
for Bauman, is explicable in class terms; rather, he summons up the image
of 'pastoral power' (Foucault) to fill the gap: the Hungarians, for their part,
remained allergic to Foucault, having learned about domination from Max
Weber and Lukacs. They would not therefore simply agree with Bauman
when he blames the communist experiment on Enlightenment, or at least
links the two necessarily, as when he says that 'the Soviet system can be
seen as a practical test of the limits of Enlightenment utopia' ( 1 984: 1 76).
As I have mentioned, Bauman's critique parallels that of Castoriadis,
where the pursuit of rational mastery overcomes the only substantial
alternative, the hope of autonomy. As in the logic of Modernity and the
Holocaust ( 1 989a), the logic of Bauman's critique of Soviet-type societies is
to point out that they tell us more about modernity than about any specific
variation on modernity. Yet the specificity, and limited longevity of totali
tarianism as a form of modernity remains. Bauman does not endorse all the
particulars of the argument concerning dictatorship over needs, though his
sense of the significance of the sui generis case puts him in the same field.
The logic of Bauman's case here, I think, is finally that socialism is so deeply
bound up with capitalism as to return us to the earlier sensibility that it is
industrialism, after all, which threatens to consume us. Modernity is still
with us, and so is marxism, for better or worse. Alongside the persistence of
modernity, there remains the persistence of stubborn subjects who say no,
who refuse to accept that this world is made in their own image.
After Fascism and Marxism
Modernity, communism, fascism - all three inseparable. This has been our
experience, the experience of the twentieth century, and it will haunt us still
1 20 Zygmunt Bauman
into the new millennium. Bauman's purpose is to shift these from experi
ence into theory, and sociology, as well - not as boundary issues or per
sonal worries, but as core problems of our lives and thought. Fascism
emerges from Bauman's work less as the alter ego of capitalism than as a
possible logic, or political form of industrialism. Less predictable than the
experience of communism, nazism nevertheless tells a truth about modern
ity which makes us shudder. Communism, or socialism, in contrast was or
is the countercurrent of modernity as capitalism. The rise of socialism is, in
a sense, more predictable than that of fascism; fascism is among other
things a response to and against socialism, which is an Enlightenment
current reaching out of 1 789. The Holocaust seems in Bauman's socio
logical imagination both to be a contingent historical event and yet some
how the silent secret of modernity, expressing the height of the crisis
generated by the crazy surplus of technical rationality. Communism seems
rather to represent the Faustian revenge of modernity's countercurrent, in
socialism. Socialism's world-historic excesses seem less controversial if more
puzzling than Nazism's; Nazism was an irrational rationality run amok,
whereas high Stalinism's motif was cold, immoral ambition which believed
in human perfection at any cost.
The historic collapse of fascism as a state regime in 1 945 left its onlookers
and participants puzzled; what, actually, had held this monstrous fantasy
up? Communism lasted much longer than Nazism; its collapse also dis
mayed, but more because of this deceptive longevity. 1 989, for Bauman,
was thus in some senses a postmodern revolution; for the tide against
fascism was nevertheless a victory for a particular kind of modernity. That
nazism should collapse was predictable; that socialism would rise was
predictable, too, only its fall made less sense, not least with reference to the
demise of social democracy. Perhaps the citizens of communist and fascist
states eventually did little more than go through the motions. The anti
communist revolution was a victory for the logic of consumption over that
of production, the old so to say Fordist circuit which held Soviet-type
societies together, some pretending to work, others pretending to consume.
The idea of postmodern, therefore, cannot be merely or exclusively cultural,
understood as an intracapitalist development where the sphere of culture
asserts itself more powerfully over economy. Postmodernism is also caught
up with the idea that the modernism of the planned or corporatist society
comes undone; consolidated in the 1 930s and 1 940s, it is loosened in the
1 970s and loses its exemplar in the 1 980s.
It is the irregular, or surprising nature of Nazism which explains I think
why it is that Bauman spends more space, and passion, engaged in inter
preting the Holocaust than in the critique of the Soviet attempt at modernity.
Of course, there is more to the story than that. If Modernity and the
Holocaust ( l 989a) is a wilful critique of his own earlier self-understanding,
Bauman's critique of socialism is a less resolved, because deeply self-critical,
encounter with his own commitment to marxism. Bauman's explicit critique
of marxism is ruthless in its power and persistence; marxism as an historical
The Holocaust and the perfect order )2)
movement emerges as an alter ego of the despised capitalism which excels it

only in the extent of its own illusions. The extent of Bauman's disillusion with
modernity is a direct result of his fundamental disappointment in marxism.
Bauman's worldview, however fragmented such a view might be, is post
modern because postmarxist. Marxism was everything, for years of this
man's social life. Bauman's personal path in league with marxism slowly but
surely inverted the imperative of the young Marx: marxism was everything,
and became nothing. As Arendt says somewhere, however, we can never
paste our own disappointments onto those who follow us, or let these things
close us against the world or against hope, against utopia. Here we stand, we
can do no other.
5 Touring the Fragments
Postmodernity, in Bauman's work, is first of all postmarxism, though in

the long run it is also more than that. The postmodern first up here is the
critique of the illusions of marxism. Bauman's line of argument is auto
biographical as well as theoretical. The certainties of modernity, the
obsession with order, these were our socialist certainties, the mote or plank
in our own radical vision. The semantics of critique in Bauman's work are
distinct: modernity stands for modernism and marxism stands in for, or at
least sometimes expresses modernity. But now, after marxism as a state
form, after the Soviet experience, we feel weary, we feel somehow after.
After fascism, after communism, in the midst of a consumer capitalism that
seeks only to buy us off, in this setting it seems as though the project of
modernity has missed its chance.
Bauman's social theory triggers through the sociology of power in
Memories of Class ( 1982), and explodes into Legislators and Interpreters
( 1 987); the point, hereon, is less to seek to change others than to interpret
the worlds we inhabit. Modernity and the Holocaust ( 1 989a) blows the
whistle on fascism and anti-semitism but also on sociology and modernity.
Elaborated through Modernity and Ambivalence ( 1 99 I a), the Holocaust
book leads directly into ethics; Postmodern Ethics ( 1 993a) is the conclusion
to Modernity and the Holocaust. After the book on ethics, Bauman's travels
become more diasporic or essayistic again in kind, as witnessed in collec
tions such as Intimations of Postmodernity ( 1 992) or more projective
ensembles like Life in Fragments ( 1 995) or Postmodernity and its Discontents
( 1 997a), which in turn begin to reach back to the critique of capitalism and
western deprivation in Memories of Class. As Bauman moves progressively
further away from classical marxism, then, the critique of capitalism is
renewed rather than rejected or distanced; for our world seems again to
become more bipolarized than social democracy after the Second World
War had allowed. In this way Bauman negotiates the terrain he had initially
inhabited, in the 1970s, as a critical marxist. If the silhouette of Auschwitz
remains more prominent in this picture than the camps of the Gulag, this
may well reflect the unalloyed barbarism of fascism as modernity. The
experience of communism remains, in a way, even more elusive, for its own
attempt at barbarism claimed as its credentials not only the victory of the
proletariat but also the liberation of all mankind. The stark challenge
presented by the idea of an imaginary sequel to Bauman's study of the
Holocaust, to be entitled Modernity and the Gulag, stands before us; per
haps such a study would tell us even more about ourselves, those on the
Touring the fragments 123
left, than Bauman's Holocaust book does. Only it would likely be a study
of communism as modernity, rather than of modernity viewed through the
communist experience.
Postmodern Ethics
There is a hole in the heart of modernity. It is called ethics. Moderns fill this
hole with order, with rules and regulations. Ethics was a chance given to
moderns, who have been unable largely to take on the challenge, for they
are still traditionalists at heart, creatures of habit, for whom the prospect of
autonomy is simply too much; easier to just follow the rules. By this process
morality or conventionalism is substituted for ethics, or care of the self and
others; and in turn moralism or hectoring replaces morality, or else
morality gives way to law: we let the magistrates and black letter law books
tell us how to live. This is exactly why Nazism is such an exemplary ethical
tale for modernity, for it rests on the appeal to heteronomy. The post
modern, for Bauman, then opens the prospect of starting over again with
ethics, and forward, rather than back, after the Holocaust, to Aristotle or
Kant. These are problems of ethics for moderns, not ancients; the social
contexts of action have changed, as generalized conformism has become an
attribute of modernity and moderns in general. Enlighteners have set out to
teach the people about ethics; perhaps they have to be untaught (Bauman,
1993a: 6). The legislators, in short, expected the worst of the masses,
presuming that their natural intelligence would always play into vice or self
interest.
Bauman's beginning point in Postmodern Ethics is different. In the post
modern perspective, humans can be neither exclusively good nor bad; this is
a Jacobin residual, this older Manichean image of the world divided into
only two sorts of people, good and bad citizens: 'In fact, humans are
morally ambivalent: ambivalence resides at the heart of the "primary scene"
of human face-to-face' ( l 993a: 1 0). More, Bauman wants to suggest that
moral phenomena are non-rational, not governed by the canons of instru
mental rationality, where any means can get us to particular chosen ends.
Moral behaviour is more like intuition than reason; we are not ignorant of
what is right and what is wrong, but we cannot always rationally justify or
explain a particular course of action or inaction. Further, for Bauman,
morality is aporetic, and complex, mixed; few choices are unambiguously
good ( l 993a: 1 1 ). It follows from this that morality is not universalizable.
Consequently moral responsibility - being for the Other before one can be
with the Other - is the first reality of the self, a starting point rather than a
product of society ( l 993a: 1 3).
Plainly the kinds of concerns established in Postmodern Ethics are philo
sophical, or more explicitly ethical, than sociological. Postmodern Ethics is
a philosophical detour which returns, in its closing moments, to more
properly sociological concerns located within social space and time, in the
1 24 Zygmunt Bauman
context of culture and power, where vagabonds and tourists become the
new tropes used to make sense of the postmodem stranger. The lack of a
stunningly clear distinction between sociology and philosophy in tum
manifests itself in the semantic slippage between 'morality' and 'ethics' in
Bauman's work. The problem with the classification, like all others, is of
course that realities slip and slide. Ethics slip into professional ethics, or
code-lists; morality becomes moralizing, morality in the bad, because
merely conventional sense. Both ethics and morality are therefore cor
rupted; the earthly practices of morality corrode the higher principles of
ethics. This is a challenge, however, rather than a gloomy diagnosis, for the
postmodern challenge is positive; it is not the 'anything goes' of cultural
relativism, but it demands of us rather that we address formally the
question of the Other. The issue forced upon us by the Holocaust is exactly
that no one was responsible; it is this organizational theorem which we
cannot accept as ethical discourse.
Postmodernity challenges us to be ethical, for the very reason that it is
modernity without illusions, including Enlightenment illusions about
philosopher-kings and law or compUlsion as ethics ( 1 993a: 32). Indeed,
Bauman goes so far as to say that postmodemity brings 'reenchantment' of
the world after the protracted struggle of modernity to disenchant it ( l 993a:
33). The allusion to Weber is not accidental, for Bauman here centres
Weber in a way that he otherwise locates only Simmel. How do we respect
the essential integrity of human experience while also recognizing that
distinct fields of activity or spheres of life follow particular ethics appro
priate to them? Weber understood the problem, and perhaps chose too
emphatically the path of distinction. Bauman, here more reminiscent of
Marx, wants to avoid a situation where there are always two sets of rules,
one for life and another for science. But if difference needs to be registered
at the societal or local level, so too does it disturb us globally. Since
Montaigne, at least - perhaps since Herodotus - we have known about
difference, though our habit has been to view difference as stigma or a sign
of inferiority as often as it has been to view these others in wonder, or else
to elevate them above our own cultures and institutions. As Bauman
observes with reference to the work of Johannes Fabian in Time and the
Other, imperial powers identify other places with other times; a certain kind
of primitivism seems to be built into the logic of the civilizing process
( l 993a: 39). We now know these stories about the civilizing mission to be
hollow, based on the superiority of violence rather than of culture or
civilization. Thus the real challenge is to identify the universal in the parti
cular of the face-to-face encounter ( 1 993a: 43). Postmodern ethics is thus
something, like solidarity, that is our responsibility: we have to construct it.
And this is why Bauman shows so little patience for communitarians, for
communitarians in turn seek to short-circuit claims to identity by referring
to where allegedly we have come from, rather than where we might be
going to. Communitarianism is tribal in its logic, for it reproduces the
prescriptive patterns of tradition, where we must assume that my identity is
deeply bound to race, place and tradition ( l 993a: 43). Communitarians

want to rebuild the roots that different modernities have torn up; but we
have to live, today, with dislocation and mobility. We are not bound to
each other by similarity, but by difference, and in contingency. This means
building the kind of moral proximity which modernity denies us.
Yet we are not saints, and the ethics of Levinas, which Bauman often
relies on here, seem ultimately to be a saintly ethics. Who can always, or
even consistently, put the other before the self? How am I actually to be
responsible for the other, let alone for the third party? The practical
implication of Bauman's earlier arguments in Modernity and the Holocaust
( l 989a) and Modernity and Ambivalence ( l 99 I a) is that tolerance may lead
to solidarity; the mechanisms or institutions or social policies which might
mediate between us remain unsighted, and institutions of this kind in any
case remain shadowy in Bauman's thinking, where organizations sometimes
seem like an excuse for a human solution to social problems. The other in
postmodern times depends at least on toleration. Yet the social institutions
known to us either swallow up strangers or else expel them. Here Bauman
turns to Levi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques, and to his distinction between
cultures that take in, eat up or devour the other, in the anthropophagic
strategy, and those which expel or vomit out the stranger, in the anthro
poemic strategy ( l 993a: 1 63). Bauman offers a modified insight based on
Levi-Strauss: societies actually combine both strategies, for this is not an
historical or civilizational distinction. Societies reproduce themselves by
excluding or assimilating the other, or by combining both strategies.
So where does this leave us, or the other? Bauman's optic in Postmodern
Ethics returns to the social, and to the socialized. The real problem with
modernity, or with the modern revolution, the revolution that is modernity,
lies in the liberation of means from ends. If anything is possible, why should
anyone in particular matter? ( l 993a: 1 90). Contrary to the widely shared
view of modernity as the first universal civilization, this is a civilization
singularly unfit for universalization. More, modernity cannot survive the
possible advent of equality. It is a parasitic form of social arrangement
( 1 993a: 2 1 5). As Hans Jonas puts it, and Bauman concurs, the scale of
possible consequences of human actions has long outgrown the moral
imagination of the actors (Bauman, 1 993a: 2 1 7). By this stage, as it were,
Bauman knows that he has spent such a long time staring into this black
hole of modernity as to disappear into it. So he stops, and follows a
strategy of intellectual brinkmanship common to much of his more recent
writing. He brings us into the abyss that we, or our forebears or leaders
have made, leaves us there to contemplate and then says . . . 'well?'. It is not
Bauman's responsibility to fix this mess, especially not when we consider its
extent: technology rules. Nor is it our prerogative to derive solutions from
Theory or History and exhort others to apply them; for superior morality is
always the morality of the superior ( I 993a: 228).
Postmodern ethics is therefore a possibility in a world where there seems to
be little room to move, except as tourists, well-heeled, or else as vagabonds.
1 26 Zygmunt Bauman
We cannot accurately be described as nomads, Bauman says, because they

know where they are heading ( 1 993a: 240). The whole world looks in this
story something like Hotel California. Bauman's only hope here is that our
seduction (or repression) into this Disneyworld is as shallow as the culture
itself is. Humans have a striking capacity to learn, on this account, but this
kind of sensibility only begins to allow for what humans might be, or achieve.
For Bauman also wants to remind us that humans have intuitive wisdoms,
some good, some bad . . . in sum, that the score is ambivalent; and to posit
that if humans learn they can also unlearn. Such a human prospect
seems daunting, but it is only perhaps marginally more daunting than the
alternative.
One other interpretation at least of this dissonance between the larger
pessimism and the more constrained optimism nestled within it might be
ventured. If, as Bauman argues, all our thinking risks substituting pros
thesis for closer intimacy, validating worldviews over the detail of our
worlds, then perhaps it is the smaller message of anthropological optimism
which shines more strongly than the elements of the negative philosophy of
history of decline which frame it. The big picture is always too far away.
Life in Fragments
Postmodern Ethics seems to be viewed in some quarters as the pinnacle of

Bauman's achievement. Why? Because philosophical, or abstract? Or
fashionable, closer to the French philosophy which is still imagined by
others to be the last avant-garde? I am unsure about this issue, and I do not
want to be cynical about it. But it seems to me that Postmodern Ethics is far
more symbolically significant than it is textually central to Bauman's work.
Ethical life is the issue which emerges as vital from Bauman's analysis of the
Holocaust. How does modernity make us conformists, when the Enlight
enment brief was also to encourage us to think for ourselves? Postmodern
Ethics pursues this line, but also in its positive register: perhaps the earth is
now moving beneath our feet. This is an abstract concern because alterity is
an abstract concern, at least until we learn to think of the sensuous other,
the other as the man or woman literally on the street, or to puzzle over the
third party or our concrete social responsibilities to others. Then, instantly,
in Bauman's work as in our own conversations, the philosophical inflection
gives way to the sociological.
Life in Fragments is subtitled Essays in Postmodern Morality ( 1 995).
Fragmentary it is in two ways, both in terms of its form, the collected essay,
and its subject matter, which is more wide ranging. The field of concern is
more sociological again; where Postmodern Ethics eschewed the discussion
of particular forms of morality, Life in Fragments focuses on postmodern
morality in the best and worst senses. Postmodern times make it both easier
and more difficult to behave morally, or to think ethically; if in one sense
the problems we face are more grave than before, then in another our scope
Tou ring the fragments 127
for response is more potentially open. The horizons within which we live
and struggle remain those indicated by Bauman in Modernity and Ambi
valence ( l 99 1 a); our worldly challenges have to do with problems of
tolerance and solidarity. What is it that binds us when all that is solid has
melted into air? What can we tolerate, or advocate, in worlds where the
lack of discrimination is as disabling as the stigma of discrimination? How
do we cope with chaos without succumbing to it?
Bauman's first conversation partner in this volume is Castoriadis.
Castoriadis' work is in a way more central to Bauman's than, say, Levinas';
not because of influence, but because of affinity. Levinas is the main
stimulant used by Bauman in Postmodern Ethics ( 1 993a) to puzzle over the
other. The significance of Castoriadis' work here is distinct, for Castoriadis
is a soul-mate. What in Bauman is significantly connected to ethics, in
Castoriadis is associated with the vital sign of autonomy. Autonomy,
in Castoriadis, has the advantage that it is ambidextrous in nature: it refers
both to the abstract, ethical goal for the good person or individual, and to
the social value of the autonomous society (Bauman, 1 995: 1 9). The converse
value, heteronomy, similarly links the individual and the social; conformism
is both a personal and a social issue. The line of tutelage-thinking that runs
from Hobbes to Durkheim rests on a negative anthropology, where society
(or ideology) becomes the policeman of restitution. Castoriadis' case is
different not only from this lineage, but also from that which through
Critical Theory culminates in Marcuse, where generalized conformism looks
something like the natural outcome of modernity, where society still forms
individuality and therefore conforms it. For Bauman, as for Castoriadis, it
only makes sense to complain about generalized conformism because we
know that there are other possible ways to live. Conformism is modernist
second nature for us, learned and therefore unlearnable.
There are other stimulants here; and it is one of the watermarks of
Bauman's thinking that its intellectual influences or traces are unpredict
able. Christopher Lasch and Richard Sennett more predictably run through
Bauman's footnotes, as critics of a modernity that routinely and necessarily
fails to live up to its promises, as we do. Alongside Castoriadis here, we also
find the presence of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Horkheimer, but more
provocatively, we also encounter the voice of E.M. Cioran, the blackest
Romanian follower of Nietzsche. Cioran is a thinker whose hallmark is
cynicism, and this, too, is an antidote which Bauman employs against the
wide-eyed optimism of the Weltverbesserer or world-reformers aspirant.
Consistent with his own affinities, Cioran offers aphorisms that stop us in
our tracks, which for Bauman is one thing that moderns need daily to do,
to step outside the many paths of self-made progress and to contemplate
the contingency of our world historic achievements. Thus Cioran: 'a
definition is always the cornerstone of a new temple' (Bauman, 1 995: 25).
Cioran's echo of Nietzsche is unmistakable, and it is the presence of this
kind of sensibility which sets Bauman's postmarxism apart from those
other kinds of possibilities, where marxism is relieved of its Bolshevik
1 28 Zygmunt Bauman
clothing but left with its Enlightenment brain intact. Cioran, in short, is for
Bauman a whistleblower; he may have nothing in particular to buy or to
sell in the bazaar of ideas, but he knows deceit when he sees it. Does this
make Bauman, then, an anarchist? The spirit of existentialism sometimes
seems to fit Bauman, and there is of course a kind of cooperative motif
which animates a certain kind of anarchist politics. Bauman is not
obviously a localist, or an explicit enthusiast of small-is-beautiful, although
the logic of smallness does point towards the kind of proximity which he
argues that we have lost, which condition is fundamental to modern
monstrosities like the Holocaust. Nor is it any accident, in all likelihood,
that Castoriadis was long viewed as a kind of hero not only by radical
marxists but also by those western libertarians for whom self-management
was the social goal. The difference in Bauman's case is that the local
(Leeds) coincides with various other sociological or geopolitical dimensions,
the region (Yorkshire) and the national (New Labour) as well as the global
(per globalization). The prospect of autonomy, in this sense, relates more to
a sense of the conduct of everyday life than to specific period images
or slogans such as self-management. The substance of everyday life, viewed
in one way, at least, in turn is chaotic: unpredictable, uncertain, given to
breakdown, relying on a kind of 'Plan-B' readiness to adjust and adapt in
the face of all this.
Conformism is not just a problem because of conventionalism, however.
Bauman's case is not for a generalized nonconformism; this would be a
mere reversal, a substitution of one bad situation for another. Bauman is a
freethinker rather than a nonconformist. The problem of conventionalism
remains, however, as Bauman indicates in discussing Nietzsche's idea of the
will to power. If truth or falsity is also, practically, a political issue, is not
truth itself merely a convention ( 1 995: 37)? As Bauman indicates, however,
not even Nietzsche can stand, last man, outside this problem; for, he, too,
in turn validates some aristocratic prejudices against those of the mere
masses and their self-appointed middle-class do-gooder representatives.
Bauman for his part wants no truck with these potentially tyrannical
liberals, but nor will he endorse either the agnosticism or the aristocratic
radicalism of Nietzsche. Too much of Luther's stance remains: we must tell
the truth as we see it. Speaking and judging still count; only there are times
when we speak and judge too endlessly, when silence, or touch and not
words are called for.
We die, each of us, alone, but we are born and live together. In the middle
of our being we may make contingency into destiny. But the problem of
identity, for Bauman, is not always obviously the key problem for post
moderns. Identity, he says is exactly a modern problem, for identity is
identical within itself; identity as we know it is a modern phenomenon, as it
is relatively stable even though it changes. The postmodern problem of
identity is primarily one of avoiding fixation and keeping options open,
or more literally mobile ( 1 995: 8 1). Modern identity, unlike traditional
identity, was creative rather than prescriptive; postmodern identity plays
with recycling, endlessly, involves consumption as production or as creation.

Early modernity gives you the telephone, modernism the payphone,
postmodernity the mobile phone. Movement is central both to modernity
and postmodernity. It is not just identity but the sum total of social relations
that are mobile in time and space, even where the sense of space itself is
reconstructed by the acceleration of time. If identity is constructed by
movement, in turn, then this for Bauman generates particular personality
types or paths of activity in the present, two key of which are the vagabond
and the tourist.
Even if mobility is a postmodern and modernist motif, there of course
remain all kinds of actors who are not mobile every day of their lives. Just
as tradition inhabits the modern which holds up the postmodern, so is
inertia a good part of the human condition in many places and lands, even
where immobility - being stuck - seems to be the worst oppression. Poor or
rich, we can all stroll in the malls, but some of us will always be caught in
the sticks, or on the edges of suburbs that run into vacancy. The vagabond
is distinct in his or her absence of alternatives: these are excluded actors
who are compelled to move on. The vagabond is a familiar character in the
narrative of Bauman's sociology; when masculine, he is the masterless man
of the margin, whose footprints trace the edges of Between Class and Elite
( 1 972) and then later Memories of Class ( 1 982). From the Elizabethan Poor
Laws of the sixteenth century to the caravan under the flyover pass in the
new millennium, the vagabond is always just out of the picture of modern
ity and its predominant social forms. The vagabond is not a nomad; the
pattern of movement which life dictates is less habitual or predictable. The
vagabond is, then, for Bauman, the archetypical stranger. His prospects of
assimilation are always slim, regardless of personal intention or desire; 'he
still smells of other places, of that beyond against which the homestead of
the natives has been built' ( 1 995: 95). Not a nomad, because nomads live
clearly patterned lives, but also because the postmodern propensity for
semantic anachronism is too high; to say that we are all, these days,
nomads, that we are all 'homeless', is to obscure some quite dramatic
distinctions across the differing life-chances available to individuals across
the social scale. Thus Bauman introduces the category of the tourist, in
order to hold open the tension, for tourists are travellers well of heel.
Tourists choose to move; they reflect the restless ethos of modernity, and
they manifest the means available to those who are at home both with the
commodity-form and the money-form. They seek the all-too fleeting
pleasures of new experience per tourist travel, via the amazing plastic card
which opens all doors in the house of consumption. Utopia is Hotel
California; the tourists are inside, or on their way, while the vagabonds lie
outside the city gates, working out how to get in. This is the world
intellectually videotaped for us by Mike Davis in City of Quartz, where it is
evident to all that the way of life of the inmates is entirely dependent on the
exclusion of the outcasts, where the ethical choice about the good society
becomes an aestheticized or rather, sexualized, choice between the body
beautiful and the derelict in rags. The postmodern body, like the city of Los
Angeles, is an artefact, where a mirage, that of perpetual youth, still guides
the image of the perfect face and body, while the face and body of the
Other bring out nothing but offense and repulsion ('we worked for our
money').
The figure of the stranger thus becomes more strange in postmodern
times, not less. We may all be strangers, today, yet there are some strangers
whose attributes are less exotic than repelling. Modernity is not only the
circulation of strangers that Simmel had portrayed; it involves their
accentuation, and not only assimilation. The stranger may well share our
own sense of place, or locality; he or she may in fact have shared this region
with us, or even preceded us here, as Australian aborigines precede all the
other migrants to Terra Australis. The boundaries are new, commodified
boundaries, the lives of distinction drawn by money more than strictly by
patterns of speech, dress or ethnic derivation, though in the margins race
still rules. The restriction of access is an old one: no admittance except on
business. This is the high capitalist face of postmodernity. Modernity thus
maintains its traditionalism, but also pushes hard in its Faustian imperative
of change. This, in turn, makes modernity violent. Modernity is by nature a
frontier civilization; civilization itself depends on growth, extension, on the
barbarism that seeks to expel barbarism in the name of order ( 1 995: 1 4 1).
Violence can routinely be directed against the other, against the outsider,
but it can also be inner directed, against the wolf who remains within
modern man; for there is always in modern eyes a wild man lying in wait
inside every civilized one ( 1 995: 145). The levels of organized violence which
we might associate with the modern state nevertheless remain somehow
invisible, because protected by the aura of legitimacy; violence is something
which in the popular imagination is associated with street culture, or else
perhaps with domestic violence. Bauman's immediate concern is that post
modern violence escalates further and yet at the same time becomes even
less socially visible, thanks to privatization, deregulation and localization
( 1 995: 1 6 1). More, violence is reformed through the never ending assault on
degeneration, disease and deformity. Modernism makes a good fist of this,
exemplified in the eugenic strategies of the Scandinavian Social Democrats
as well as the Nazis and American liberals; postmodernism again turns the
attack inward, so that the imperative of self-reform takes the place of state
sponsored reform programmes ( 1 995: 1 67-73). The self, like the kitchen,
becomes the site of DIY. At the same time, this renewed individualism
plays into neotribalism, the wilful discovery or invention of traditionalistic
forms of identity-behaviour from the stock of the past. Here 'who am I?' is
not the breathless question of modernism, 'who can I be?', but the older,
nostalgic question, 'where did I come from - who was I, what have I lost
that can now be recovered?'
The modern, postmodern obsession with identity thus throws up all the
old definitions of modernism and traditionalism rampant. I cannot be what
I am; I must be more, so I must be either what I was, or what I will be ( . ..
everything). Both these life strategies play into the logic of the social
ostracization of others, for if I am what I was then so perhaps are all the
others - boundaries up! - and if I am everything, then they must be
nothing, lest they cramp my space and style. But these local variations
become really nasty at the level of state power rather than personal
preference. As Bauman argued in Modernity and the Holocaust ( I 989a),
whereas tradition gives you the pogrom it is really only modernity that
produces genocide, for it generates the means alongside the ends. What this
means is that the Age of Enlightenment culminates or ends in the Century
of Camps; yet somehow this tells us little about Enlightenment, far more
about modernity and the will to violence, or about the adiaphorization of
ethics and morality in the modern world: 'Modernity did not make people
more cruel; it only invented a way in which cruel things could be done by non
cruel people' ( 1 995: 1 98). The tactile senses of suffering simply disappear
when we cannot see the face of the other, or else when the face we see looks
like a mask for which we can only feel disgust and repulsion. If human dirt,
too, is matter out of place then we, or the state, must move it. If, as Ellul
says, we discover that we have the means, then we also discover that we
have the imperative to act. But we could also discover that we have the
power to act differently, if we have the ethical imagination. The 'risk
society' - Bauman again endorses the category popularized by Ulrich Beck
here - increases both the sense of threat and the possible horizons of hope
( 1 995: 278-9). Postmodernity both accentuates the possibilities and the
constraints within modernity; which dimension will we, as actors, respond
to? Bauman's own horizons of expectation and limitation shift together
with these sensibilities. Hope persists, even if it does not prosper.
Postmodernity and its Discontents
In 1 997 Bauman published Postmodernity and its Discontents ( l 997a). The

telltale reference to Freud in the title runs along with another message.
Perhaps we jaded moderns are now, already, becoming weary of the
postmodern. Around 1 989 the idea of the postmodern still had the aura of a
modernist mission, to save us from the stultifying past and high certainty
that for Bauman characterizes modernity. Postmodernity seemed to offer so
much; less than ten years later, a decade of living without an alternative,
and the postmodern was beginning to look tawdry, having delivered little
by way of new lives to either intellectuals or especially to vagabonds.
Freud knew, in Civilization and its Discontents ( 1 930), that nothing came
without a price. The cost of civilization was repression; yet the Other would
ever seek to assert itself, to seek to break out of the newly refined state that
modernity offered. There would always be the wolf in man. Freud remained
ambivalent about this condition in a way that violated the founding
Hobbesian sense that coercion was the price to be paid for order and
stability; the alternative, anarchy and chaos, was always thought to be
1 32 Zygmunt Bauman
worse. Bauman does not call for wild nature, or clamour for primitivism
rather than modernism; what we need, apparently, is a third term beyond the
false choice of 'order' and 'chaos', or perhaps which combines them in
something more mixed or ambivalent, like ordinary chaos. Modernity,
however, sought out values such as beauty, cleanliness and order. This, for
Bauman as for Freud, was the modem pact; for Bauman, its cost included
the extremities of the gardening states of Nazism and Stalinism, and the
more civilized repression of minorities and outsiders across the free west.
Today, however, ours is the age of deregulation (Bauman, 1997a: 2). The
conditions of the pact have changed, at least for some; the gains and losses
have changed places: 'postmodern men and women exchanged a portion of
their possibilities of security for a portion of happiness' ( l 997a: 3; emphasis
added). A kind of reversal has occurred across the postmodern divide. The
discontents of modernity arose from the pursuit of a kind of security which
tolerated too little freedom in the hope of individual happiness. The dis
contents of postmodernity, in tum, arise from a kind of freedom defined as
pleasure seeking, at the expense of individual and social security ( l 997a: 3).
Bauman's collection of essays works across this terrain, from security to
aesthetics. He begins with the greatest obsession of modernity, and its most
frightening: the Dream of Purity. Security and aesthetics, indeed, are here
connected: for the modernist obsession with order identifies the two, to the
point at which the need for aesthetic clarity and safety combined in the
final solution. No mess, no fuss; Jews away ( l 997a: 5). As Mary Douglas
famously indicates, with Bauman's agreement, however, dirt or disorder is
really only matter out of place; 'dirt', like 'weed' is not an essential but
a relational or cultural judgement ( 1 997a: 6). 'Dirt', 'weeds' . . . human
weeds . . . strangers. This kind of utopia/dystopia is proverbially pre
modern, in that it elevates simplicity and stasis over complexity and
change. This was the type of a perfect world, still, 'a transparent world . . .
nothing "out of place"; a world without "dirt"; a world without strangers'
( 1 997a: 1 2). Enter Nazism and communism as attempted utopias of purity,
the first of race, the second of class; and the more civilized and modest
democratic capitalist utopia of belonging and citizenship to the exclusion
of all others, state and citizen as husband and wife. But the new, post
modem utopia is different; it has neither subject nor citizen, neither
husband nor wife, only neurotic but risktaking, high adrenalin risktaker
individuals. The new dreck are all the rest, those who refuse to risk life and
limb or who cannot afford to impale themselves on hi-tech consumer
goods; these Bauman calls 'flawed consumers', those who just can't get it
right by the new criteria of conspicuous consumption ( 1 997a: 14). Ours,
today, in this recurring theme, is a world without limits - only the content
of this proposition changes, so that we are no longer driven to Faustian
projects so much as to endless shopping, seeing and being seen. The new
revolutionaries of postmodern times choose Stolichnaya and black leather,
but this is all that they have in common with the Bolsheviks. Modernity,
according to Bauman, declared war (or permanent revolution) against
Touring the fragments 1 33
modernity; postmoderns make permanent revolution a fashion statement

( l 997a: 1 6).
In Postmodern Ethics ( l 993a) Bauman offers a modest, yet ambitious
challenge: that these new times might yet afford us the prospect within which
to recognize the Other. By Postmodernity and its Discontents ( l 997a) the
shine has disappeared off the postmodern, partly because of the excessive
zeal of its intellectual advertising agents, partly because of the looming
commodification process which threatens to gobble up the postmodern as
well. Simmel, as Bauman variously has occasion to observe, is one kind of
intellectual lifeline across this barren terrain, for he was the most post
modern of the early modern social theorists, and the most modern of
postmoderns in his concerns with fragmentation, the metropolis, the
stranger, and money or commodification. Simmel, like Weber, remains ever
in our shadows as sociologists because he insists on asking the most funda
mental of questions about personality: what does this (or any other form of)
culture do to character? What is the relationship between social form or
institutions and soul, or personality? How can we connect the social outside
with the human inside? As I have tried to show for example in interpreting
Modernity and the Holocaust ( l 989a), these remain essential questions and
curiosities for Zygmunt Bauman. For we cannot simply deduce the inner
from the outer, to conclude, say, that all Germans were inner Nazis; and yet
the historic association suggests a stain, or strain, a connection of steel, as
strong as it became later to be fragile and corroded.
The stranger, for Simmel, was a modern personality type. The post
modern stranger is more ubiquitous. The modern stranger, for Bauman,
remained anomalous, ever a potential enemy of the modern State. The
modern State applied those strategies earlier alluded to in order to clean up
these nasty stains: devouring or vomiting, assimilation or expulsion ( l 997a:
1 8). Postmodern state strategies involve something different, licensing an
ethic of personal achievement or personal self-perfection; the new impera
tive is neither any longer to fit in or get out, so long as you keep moving,
and consuming, but fast. If the older, modern utopias valued stasis, the
new, postmodern image demands speed, restlessness, dizziness not as an
end-state (qua Stalin) so much as a way of life. Strangers, here, are our
servants, or our enemies, those parasites who come from elsewhere and
stay, at our expense, and even the otherwise decent communitarians tend to
fall into this logic, where difference signified by race reinstates borders
between us, the original inhabitants, and them, the invaders of our
community, our space. Postmodern tribal particularism now stands in for
the empty universalism of modern times ( l 997a: 32).
The postmodern strangers now either service the privileged, or else are
incarcerated. For as moralism substitutes for ethics, and law for morality,
so does law substitute incarceration for the roving movement of the
unincorporated. As we can no longer 'afford' the welfare state, so do
strangers definitionally transform before our eyes into enemies. With the
privatization of responsibility goes the privatization of prisons ( l 997a: 37).
1 34 Zygmunt Bauman
Those inside the wall project their fear about the Others outside upon them,
resulting in the sense that we must strike first, before the aliens take their
revenge on us. The social logic involved is that of the final solution, even if
the means invoked differ. The enemy is within; they include the ranks of the
flawed consumers and the dangerous classes, those whom we cannot allow
access to the market, for we need our demons all the same ( l997a: 39).
Criminalization emerges as the consumer society's prime substitute for the
fast disappearing welfare state provisions ( l 997a: 59).
Modernity, as Simmel understood, is primarily concerned with motion.
Bauman picks up on this sensibility in 'Parvenu and Pariah'. We are all one,
or other; new, in but not of a place; or else outside, looking in through the
glass ( l 997a: 72). The postmodernist equivalents of these personality-types,
for Bauman, are tourists and vagabonds. Tourists both belong and do not;
they belong in their Hilton Hotels and limos; they choose to travel.
Vagabonds also travel, but because others move them on ( 1 997a: 93). One
of modernity's most cherished illusions was that the pariahs might also
come inside; the postmodern world depends again on the older image of
master and slave, Two Nations, Mark Two. At least modernity still
harboured such illusions.
Modernism, in contrast, saw not only nature but also modernity itself as
a bitch to be whipped. M odernism could never escape from the military
image of intellectuals or innovators as the avant-garde; and the modernist
avant-garde, like its aristocratic predecessors, had little more than contempt
for the aesthetically illiterate masses ( l 997a: 98-9). In this way not just
modernity but modernism itself became a new traditionalism. Yet modern
ist art always reinvents itself, this time as postmodernism, and while the
path of history is continuous, it is not self-identical: postmodern art and
fiction offer us something different. Perhaps these other forms of creation
offer us the sense of critique, creation or utopia which sociology, as a
science, no longer readily can deliver upon ( l 997a: 1 19). But has cultural
activity itself become democratized? We can each of us create, in principle,
only just some of us can be received by others as we write, sculpt, paint,
perform. Bauman returns momentarily in the context of this discussion to
the tutelary legacy of the Enlightenment, symbolized in the kindred French,
German and English notions of civilization, Bildimg and refinement, each
doubly elitist in that they presume that some rather than others are gifted
with what it takes and conclude that this then confers upon them the right
to instruct those others ( l 997a: 1 28). Culture, too, became like health or
industrial commodities, something that was produced in a factory of order.
Though the postmodern mentality still emerges from these pages as more
tolerant than modernity, Bauman's critique of Enlightenment turns rather
into the rejection of humanism, that stream of western intellectual history
which precedes Enlightenment as well as informing it. Various aspects of
the Enlightenment encouraged belief in God, or at least tolerated it; and
belief in God, or the sacred counts here, as it always signals the limits of
Man, or men. Where there is the sacred, there are limits to human activity
or ambition. For humans are best equipped, as in Vico, to take care of

things human. Therefore, the sole things that matter to humans are the
things that humans may take care of ( 1 997a: 1 70). In seeking to be as Gods,
humans both reach beyond their own station and, at the same time, neglect
the ordinary rituals and responsibilities of care for the self and the other.
In this interpretation, which Bauman here routes through the work of
John Carroll, the problem with modernity is Humanism, this double sin of
disrespect for the sacred and exaltation of our species. If men would be as
gods, they would be neither; there would be nobody home. Carroll sees this
maniacal missionary zeal as the downfall of moderns. Much of Bauman's
Jeremiad-writing is consonant with this general sense, like that in Heidegger
and negatively in Sartre, where the human propensity to project breeds
monsters. Bauman notes that he follows a different emphasis to Carroll, for
whom humanism is uniformly disastrous in its effects on western civil
ization ( l 997a: 1 7 1 ; 2 1 5, n. 1 2). Humanists may have believed change to be
possible, but they did not therefore believe that anything was possible. Even
the heady romanticism of the young Marx - 'I am nothing and shall be
everything!' - was moderated by the far more balanced sense that if human
subjects in a sense made history, they did so within cultural and historical
constraints over which they had no control. In the subsequent history of
marxism, humanism, in turn, gives way to structuralism, which will hear
more of these changes. If for John Carroll, then, humanism emerges as the
ideological blight which makes for the disaster called modernity, for
Bauman the devil looks more like Faustian man, the inexhaustible, mono
maniacal developer who will stop at nothing, the devil included.
Faustianism is a cultural trend, manifest later in figures like Trotsky, and
like the latter it is also an expression of a personality-type which, as
Spengler had it, is quintessentially modern and decadent (Spengler, 1 922).
This is the human model of creative destruction, where the latter is always
more prominent than the former. All that is solid melts into air, and we are
left awash in detritus as a result, the more progress, the more waste, both
human and other. The frenzied pursuit of change necessarily violates any
momentarily longer sense of constancy. The worst personal crime one can
commit, in this scenario, is to remain the same, to risk missing out. Yet we
need, as sociologists and as citizens, to remain still at least for long enough
to recognize this process for what it is. Speed is a conspiracy against
contemplation of any kind at all.
Having begun this book with Freud, Bauman returns to him in closing,
and to monotheism. Oneness is dangerous: Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fiihrer,
Einheit, one true path or meaning, all this leads to the gallows ( 1 997a: 20 1).
Freedom requires something more than this; and as Bauman claimed in
opening Postmodernity and its Discontents, it depends upon some modicum
of security. Freedom is a social relation, which implies dependence, and
therefore equality and justice, or at least the struggle against inequality and
injustice. It is not Baudrillard who carries out the closing narrative of this
text, then, but the less exotic figure of Beveridge, the radical if aristocratic
1 36 Zygmunt Bauman
liberal whose policy underpinned the postwar British Welfare State ( 1 997a:
205). Baudrillard's influence on Bauman is recognizable, in his passing
discussion of simulacra, in the use of notions such as repression and seduc
tion. Like Levinas, or elsewhere Lyotard or Bourdieu, here Baudrillard is a
stimulant for Bauman, but none of these offers any secret to Bauman's
thinking, or any royal road into his social science.
Baudrillard's books literally sit alongside Bauman's on the theory shelves
of the bookshops; perhaps there is then a connection that is osmotic?
Bauman dedicates a separate essay to Baudrillard in the volume edited by
Rojek and Turner, which turns Baudrillard's playfulness onto Baudrillard
himself: Forget Baudrillard (Bauman, 1 993b). Bauman's line in is the sense
of smell, so everpresent in our lives and yet so marginal or irrelevant in
sociology. For Baudrillard is a sensual writer. He uses words that are tactile
and olfactory, or at least these are the words which call out to readers like
Bauman. The connection is suggestive; for Bauman, modernity declares war
not only on dirt, but also on smells. Smell is transgressive; it respects no
boundaries. The other stinks; natives stink, the poor smell; as Orwell said
earlier, you can smell class. Mortality, death, stench, decomposition,
degeneration, a whole mobile army of metaphors stands ready to assault
moderns equipped to defend themselves with nothing but industrial
strength Domestos and the code-books of hygiene (Bauman, I 993b). The
more common symbol drawn upon by Baudrillard for Bauman is visual,
rather than olfactory - it is the image of simulacra, where commodity
fetishism becomes absorbed in the larger society of the spectacle and our
capacity to differentiate between surface and reality shrinks. Baudrillard's
path out of marxism indicates other kinds of sympathies, or similarities,
across his own path and that of Bauman; there are other associations,
including a fondness for photography, where the visual matters regardless
of how we value it against some other, sociological reality. Only that other,
sociological reality persists far more powerfully in Bauman's work. This is
not, in Bauman's thinking, because the postmodern is only a code word for
the self-indulgent or playful; rather, it reflects the persistence of modernity,
and therefore of capital, in a new world only apparently held up by culture
and its consumption. Where for Baudrillard capitalism disappears, appar
ently, into simulacra, for Bauman simulacra remain the problem to be
explained, perhaps even transformed. Freedom remains possible; and in
sympathy with Beveridge, security remains desirable.
Freedom
To turn directly to the discussion of freedom is, textually speaking, to turn

back ten years, to 1 988, when Bauman published his book of that name.
Freedom is, in a sense, both one of the most important modern concepts and
the most elusive, or overlooked. Everybody knows that we are free to
choose, when it comes to the ways of the marketplace, and yet many of us
sense that we have no real freedom at all, or else that freedom of movement
or action is so unfairly distributed as to be a mockery. The possibility of
freedom remains vital to Bauman; like liberty, it is the third term that makes
up his revised trilogy, together with tolerance and solidarity. As I have
suggested, Bauman is no liberal, though he may look like a liberal against
communitarians, whom he suspects of harbouring too much by way of
traditionalistic prejudices and residues. Libertarian, perhaps; but this merely
reflects the nay-saying sentiment in Bauman, sceptical of power and critical
of those who claim to represent others while cultivating their own power in
smiling silence. Freedom matters, for Bauman, much as does justice - not in
the Rawlsian sense, where magical theorems like the veil of ignorance are
contrived to provide conceptual solutions for practical problems, but as a
counterfactual. Bauman endorses the logic of Barrington Moore's great
work Injustice ( 1 978; Bauman, 1988: 4 1 -2). The hope is not that justice can
ever be achieved, in any absolute sense; rather, justice is a category which is
evoked in struggle whenever justice is denied. It is inequality which outrages
us, as radicals, measured notionally against any non-specific image we might
entertain of a more equal world; and so it is acts of injustice that drive us on
to maintain our enthusiasm for justice. Freedom, as Orlando Patterson
showed later in his magisterial study, is not just a western fig leaf but a kind
of universal value which is asserted transhistorically wherever there is
oppression or, especially, slavery (Patterson, 1 99 1 ) .
Bauman's approach t o freedom i s similar, but distinct; for Bauman, the
idea of freedom passes us directly on to the associated value of dependence.
Dependence is not the opposite of freedom, but its precondition. The fact
that this necessary relationship between freedom and dependence is lost on
mainstream political discussion, which dichotomizes so easily between
liberalism and collectivism, is one reason why contemporary politics is so
hopelessly equipped to deal with the ambivalence that is us. Not that the
prospect of freedom is entirely illusory, but that it is deceptive. For freedom
as we encounter it is formal; it is real, but its consequences may be quite
different to what we hope, or imagine. We who are fortunate inhabit a
culture with a relative absence of hard prohibitions; this is the classical
negative liberalism named by Isaiah Berlin as 'freedom from'. Then there
are positive freedoms, the 'freedom to', but these are the realms where our
intentions may come to nought, or even turn in the reverse direction. Both
these aspects of negative and positive freedom refer us to the other, and to
the social, for while the idea of freedom is often associated with the misty
realms of the abstract individual, freedom of action occurs within socially
formed fields. Sociology, as the critique of modernity born of the critique of
tradition, is the discipline which emphasizes the social, in this case, the
constraints or limits within the spheres wherein we might expect to act
freely. If all our social arrangements are in the first instance artificial, or
legitimized by the ideology or culture which naturalizes them, then it makes
sense that sociologists might focus on problems of 'unfreedom' rather than
freedom; and indeed it is true that much of classical sociology takes exactly
1 38 Zygmunt Bauman
this path, with the marxian emphasis on exploitation, the Weberian trope
of domination, and the less melancholy concern of Durkheim with the
necessity of regulation. 'Freedom' appears especially elusive within the
sociological classics, with their various implications that perhaps earlier
forms of society were more free, at least for some, or at least for the more
noble. To put it more plainly, sociologists simply do not believe in free will,
and consequently they often speak a language much more like determinism
(Bauman, 1 988: 4). The natural, or rather the social bias of sociology is to
refer everything to the social, and often unintentionally to diminish the
potential autonomy of the subject or the individual in the process. Socio
logy veers between the 'cultural dope' or cipher or yes-man and the residual
fantasy that romantic heroes, once painters or poets, now intellectuals or
critical theorists, alone can rage against the machine.
So there is a ton of books on freedom on the library shelves marked
philosophy, and roughly the same weight of books on the shelves in socio
logy on domination. Bauman casts the line of his own book somewhere in
between, to take both the individual and the social into account. Sum
marized in a sentence, his curiosity is in the claim that the 'free individual,
far from being a universal condition of humankind, is a historical and
social creation' ( 1 988: 7). Freedom is contingent, both historically and
socially, but also practically; its effects in everyday life are more provisional
than we would like to think (or are told). So Bauman sets himself the
classical critical task in this book, not to debunk, but to denaturalize the
idea of freedom: to render 'the familiar' strange, not as the explanation of
how we live but as that which needs to be explained. Bauman sets out then
to treat freedom as an anthropologist would, as though it were exotic rather
than normal. For freedom is not universal; it appears, and potentially
disappears, together with a particular kind of society ( 1 988: 7). Freedom is
a result, rather than a precondition; it is not the property of an individual,
but rather indicates an asymmetrical relationship between individuals.
Freedom is not only an individual aspiration; it is also a factor in social
reproduction and not only in ideological terms. This centrality of individual
freedom as a link holding together the individual life-world, society and the
social system has been attained with the recent shift of freedom or claims to
freedom away from the sphere of production and into the sphere of
consumption ( 1 988: 7). Freedom has been reconceived, in recent times, as
the freedom to consume. Together with the weakening of the older social
democratic state, the freedom to consume can be seen as both an expansion
(for some) and a constriction (for others) of freedom into postmodern
times.
Freedom is therefore both an introduction to an idea, and an argument
which runs along the back of Legislators and Interpreters ( 1 987) into Two
Nations: Mark Two. Like Legislators, it relies upon Foucault's rediscovery
of Bentham's panopticon. But it is also, I think, more imaginative than
Discipline and Punish, for the latter is a book that seduces its readers as
much by virtue of its controversy and style as by its argument or message.
Bauman, for his part, begins not with the extraordinary spectacle of the
public execution, but with the plainest explanatory device - a definition,
and some context. What do we need to know about the idea of freedom,
in order to begin to enter the labyrinth? Bauman's insight may seem
Foucauldian to those who come recently to the festival of theory; it could
also be seen as classically sociological in its emphasis on power. Nietzsche
may have named the will to power, but he did not discover it; maybe
Machiavelli did. Here the roseate aura of nobility or heroic resistance takes
on a different hue:
Freedom was born as a privilege and has remained so ever since. Freedom divides
and separates. It sets the best apart from the rest. It draws its attraction from
difference: its presence or absence reflects, marks and grounds the contrast
between high and low, good and bad, coveted and repugnant. (Bauman, 1 988: 9)
Freedom represents a coming-to-be rather than a stable condition or

achievement, a movement rather than a fixity of place. Freedom, that is to
say, emerges conceptually and historically from unfreedom. But more - and
here Bauman anticipates the theme of alterity central later to Postmodern
Ethics ( l 993a) - freedom only begins to make sense in relation to another:
'For one to be free there must be at least two' ( 1 988: 9; emphasis added).
The condition of freedom is unfreedom. Freedom can be an abstract uni
versal, but in concrete terms it is exclusive rather than inclusive: we cannot
all be free all of the time, any more than we can all hope to be happy all of
the time. As Bauman explains,
Freedom signifies a social relation, an asymmetry of social conditions; essentially

it implies social difference - it presumes and implies the presence of social
division. Some can be free only in so far as there is a fonn of dependence they can
aspire to escape. ( 1 988: 9)
Freedom means mobility, the freedom to go anywhere; freedom in this

sense for the tourist is also freedom for the vagabond, even though these
two freedoms are obviously less than identical.
If freedom is a loaded, or ambivalent category, so then is dependence.
The master depends on the slave just as the slave depends on the master;
but this is merely to refer to asymmetrical relations of power which are not
only reproduced but formed without free consent. In our ordinary everyday
lives we also agree to depend on one another, or to offer support, to lovers,
to friends, to significant others. Dependence is also ambivalent, and it is the
failure to register this in mainstream political discourse which allows the
stigmatization of dependence as a 'female' value and the corresponding
typification of independence (or freedom) as a 'male' value, whereas all
human creatures in fact combine both values or positions in different ways.
These are all problems and possibilities that become pertinent in modem
societies; yet it is also a hallmark of modernity that it seeks out order, as the
1 40 Zygmunt Bauman
possibility of the absence of regulation threatens its own cultural sensi

bilities. Conformism is socially encouraged; freedom is reformed as con
formism, the right to fit in, to be included. Enter Foucault, closely behind
Bentham . . . or is he in front?
Bentham's Panopticon is a clever device, well-worked by those modern
cultural pessimists for whom society is nothing more than a prison. Its
presence in much negative critical theory is like the evil eye. We always wait
for the traffic light to turn green - at least when we see the cop across the
street. Is this because we internalize the message to follow rules, or merely
because we know how to behave street-wise? Bauman goes for the inter
pretation which indicates practical credibility: the design of the panopticon
is not concerned with what the prison inmates think, only with what they
do ( 1988: 1 2). A different reading of Foucault would place the emphasis on
internalization, that actors follow the policeman in the head, concluding
therefore that indoctrination is more powerful a factor in social repro
duction than coercion or outright violence. Bauman's image of modernity is
not Orwell's dystopia in 1984, where we need actually to love Big Brother,
and not just pretend that we do. The dimension of pretence or acting out,
rather, is vital to Bauman's choreography of action, where we can never
presume any direct or causal connection between playing along and internal
conviction. Humans routinely play along, even with Nazi or communist
plots; their lips move, sometimes they might even goosestep, but these
externalities tell us little about the life of the mind, or heart, chilling though
the sequence may nevertheless be.
As is evident from works such as Between Class and Elite ( 1972) and
Memories of Class ( 1 982), Bauman knows about British political economy,
and not only about French philosophy or the local antics of its Anglo
enthusiasts. Consequently Bauman discusses Bentham here, more than he
does Foucault. The connection is significant, for while Bauman's book is
shadowed by the dialectic of master and slave developed by Marx out of
Hegel, it is also formed under the influence of his ongoing concern with
'masterless men', those from the victims of the earliest manufactories
through to postmodern vagabonds who can be held up to the inmates as
social scarecrows, to scare the children. The controllers see, but are not seen;
the inmates are seen, but are unseeing: 'The combination of the inde
pendence from and mastery o ver constitutes freedom of the inspectors in
relation to the inmates' ( 1 988: 1 5). Freedom is therefore one side of the
social relationship which has unfreedom or domination as its other, though
neither social partner can be entirely free, as the relationship is what is
mutually constitutive of society writ small. As Marx says in Capital, no
sovereigns without subjects, no subjects without sovereigns. Bentham's
Panopticon is not therefore an image of society, but it may be usefully
viewed as a parable for modern society, where the freedom of some makes
the dependence of others both necessary and profitable, while the unfree
dom of one part of society makes the freedom of another possible (Bauman,
1988: 19). Bauman goes so far as to suggest that within the history of
sociology, Panopticon may be compared to Parsons' social system, with the

singular difference that Bentham leaves culture to look after itself.
Panopticon is an engine that runs on pure power; so here the parallel with
modernity breaks down. Still the overall message to this point is grim: 'In
the light of this analysis, freedom appears as the capacity to rule; as a bid for
power. Freedom is power, in so far as there are others who are bound'
( 1 988: 23).
Yet society cannot be a prison, or else there would be no need for a
separate analysis of the prison as distinct institution in its own right, and
citizens are not just inmates. The whole of modernity cannot be defined even
symbolically by this particular part; freedom cannot be reduced to some
kind of systems-category or institutional by-product. Bauman acknowl
edges this when we take leave of the silent realms of self-flagellation and
enter the historical realm. Having begun with definition and context, via the
Foucauldian narrative, Bauman turns now to history, to the sociogenesis of
freedom. For inasmuch as the idea of freedom relates to activity or to
movement, it also has its own history, this in a special sense; freedom only
makes sense to us as a movement into new spheres of development, even if
these are processes where achievements can also be reversed. This also
serves to remind us of two of the most routine sociological observations
concerning modernity, that it inaugurates new vistas of social and geo
graphical mobility. Freedom as a modern motif is irredeemably caught up
with the image and site of the city which is also the locus of the frustration
of freedom, the emergence of new patterns of servility and entrapment.
Henceforth the city would be the site of modernity's dreams and disillu
sions, that particular place where freedom would be offered to all and made
available to each, according to their credit lines. Still amidst all this sense of
swirling change, the bond between freedom and domination remains:
The effectiveness of freedom demands that some other people stay unfree. To be
free means to be allowed and to be able to keep others unfree. Thus freedom in its
modem, economically defined form does not differ from its pre-modem
applications in respect of its social-relations content. (Bauman, 1 988: 45-6)
The weakness of moderns is their propensity to tell this story through its
good side, as though there were no other, or bad side. The dynamic of
rational mastery is presented as our collective opportunity and fate by the
gushing boosterists of modernity, who are unmoved by charges of deceptive
advertising. The more sober among the classical thinkers, such as Weber,
start from a different premise: even if there were an abundance of social
goods and esteem, there will never be enough to go around; only a social
minority will ever know freedom in its more extensive dimensions ( 1 988:
47). Freedom for some goes together with the dull conformism of bureau
cratic regulation for the rest of us.
Yet freedom is an impulse that will not neatly follow orders, or flow
perfectly through bureaucratic channels. The history of modernity is also
1 42 Zygmunt Bauman
the history of its other movements, of their struggles and consequences. At

the same time, as we witness ongoing forms of collective action, however,
individualism is rechannelled into consumerism, and this is not only a
postmodern phenomenon: sociologists have been fascinated by the spec
tacle of consumption from Veblen through to Bourdieu. This is not only
shopfront, or deception; indeed, modernity democratizes consumption by
formally opening lines of money or credit and by weakening marketplace
ties of ethnic identity or origin. Freedom to consume becomes the letout for
lives lived under so many other forms of domination. More, as Bauman
observes, consumption is no longer closed by monopoly claims to exclu
sivity. Consumer freedom is less a zero-sum game than many others we
play; identities are not scarce goods ( 1988: 63). Yet this simultaneously
devalues welfare, which in its postwar form has not been delivered through
the market in terms of packages directed towards consumer 'choice' ( 1 988:
70). Now the pleasure-principle rules, even in situations where the punters
are unable to afford it.
Little apparent cheer emerges from the closing pages of Freedom; per
haps, paradoxically, part of Bauman's sociological purpose is to encourage
us to consider unfreedom, in order to urge freedom on. The only apparent
choice we face here, in 1 988, prior to the collapse of communism, is con
sumer capitalism on the one hand or what Feher, Heller and Markus ( 1 983)
call the dictatorship over needs on the other, less hidden hand (Bauman,
1 988: 8 8). Symbolic variations on these choices, Bauman suggests, are
offered in the images of Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984 -
dull and brutalized collectivism, or else mindless hedonism; though perhaps

it is the anaesthetized utopia of Rabelais' Gargantua which really captures
the prospect - that place where enjoyment is the only duty, failure to enjoy
the only crime (Bauman, 1988: 9 1 ) . Yet the human need for autonomy is
never sated, not even by the utmost cornucopia of consumer goods and
services. This need for something other can be made manifest only as a
need for abundance and endless consumption; second nature rules. Here
Bauman agrees with Hannah Arendt that such civil privatization
necessarily erodes the strength of the public sphere. Consumerism seems
to bring us the worst of both worlds, in that it expands the influence of
markets and shrinks that of the res publica.
Exit, via Budapest
Bauman's list of stimulating thinkers plainly includes Arendt, as much as on

totalitarianism as on the separation of values. It seems to me that while the
association is less than total, it is connections of this kind that are ultimately
more suggestive than, say, those between Bauman and Baudrillard. One
consequence of this is an apparent sympathy across the work of Bauman
and that of Agnes Heller, which is addressed in Bauman's celebration of
Heller in the essay 'Narrating Modernity' ( 1 994). Bauman shares Heller's
concern with the human condition in modernity. Where Arendt is the

classicist and Heller the modernist, Bauman is the postmodernist. This
human condition is an historical product, but it is not necessarily historically
conditioned. To view modernity in this way is already to take a step beyond
modernity, so that Heller's, like Bauman's, is a self-consciously postmodern
story. Postmodernity is not a type of society but a way of responding to
modernity: it is a type of historical consciousness, itself bound up with a sense
of movement, of moving beyond (Bauman, 1 994: 98). At this point, some
differences emerge, of emphasis at least, between the two thinkers. Heller
wants to insist that modernity both cultivates and frustrates difference, at the
same time. Bauman's response is that modernity breeds difference unhappily,
unintentionally as it were, or at least without enthusiasm ( 1 994: 99). Heller,
in contrast, is both sceptical and optimistic; she expects little of our moment,
and is delighted to be surprised by the unexpected. As Bauman puts it, she
revisits the house of modernity where the social sciences dwelled for most of
their history, all the more wise for what she has seen in her travels; but she
meets the residents on their own terms ( 1 994: I l l ). She asks the question,
where are we at home? and answers that this, like much else in our lives, is
increasingly mobile, both in a practical and an existential sense. As Bauman
confides, Heller's work is like a postmodern supplement to Arendt's analysis
of the human condition ( 1 994: 1 1 6).
Our lives, on this shared account, remain contingent, laden with possi
bilities which may never be realized, but rich for this nonetheless. Heller's
own path took her from Budapest to Melbourne, to New York to take up
Hannah Arendt's chair, now back to Budapest. The student of Lukacs, she
managed to take the best, to avoid the stranger parts of his baggage.
Zygmunt Bauman's path also took him via Australia, momentarily, back to
Europe, to the culture of tolerance we still call England. He was barely
touched by Lukacs, as the Hungarians hardly were by Gramsci. When I
asked him in conversation about the influence of Lukacs he told me that he
had entered that room through the wrong door; his way in was via The
Destruction of Reason, which Heller calls a two volume pamphlet connect
ing irrationalism and Nazism, a position beyond credibility to the author of
Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman, 1 989a). Heller's general emphasis, I
think, falls upon the bright side of modernity, the possibilities which remain
before us; and Bauman finds this attractive as a symbol of hope within the
scenario of a postmodern constellation which surpasses modernity only in
its relative distance from the bestiarium. We cannot dwell for ever looking
into this abyss; to ignore it, on the other hand, would be the kind of folly
that only incurable optimists or modernist idiots could commit.
The image of entering the same room by different doors is one that recurs
in Bauman's conversation and self-understanding. Perspective, accident,
timing, contingency: they all matter. More closely aligned, what we call the
modern and the postmodern together blur into one. Located outside of the
enthusiasm for modernism, Bauman's perspective suggests something
different. Postmodernity, in this view, cannot be judged by the moderns any
1 44 Zygmunt Bauman
more than marxism can be held against Marx. All those years after the
Marx Renaissance across Eastern Europe, its messages still haunt us, as our
voices collide with theirs and bounce back, like the echoes of a postmodern
humanism, hopes smaller but surviving.
6 Following the Human Condition
The journey never ends; we never understand until it is too late. Perhaps
this is the single most powerful self-understanding that modernity and its
modernisms forgets, or destroys. Change will always elude us, as will
understanding and the prospect of perpetual peace. Yet nothingness is what
waits after life; the types of abyss into which we peer along life's journey
together with Zygmunt Bauman are human and manufactured more than
ontological or theological. The faces we confront in the street are not those
of our own mortality, but those of our fellows, those we have allowed to
suffer, those our forebears have killed or allowed to die. Death and
suffering are constant presences in our lives, only we needs must push them
away, just as we differently feel the compulsion to push the other away, to
avert the gaze, keep on walking, don't look back. These are some of the
themes that link the books grouped together in this chapter, on death,
globalization and its figures - heroes and vagabonds - and on the prospect
once again of opening the public space in which a politics might emerge
that could encourage us to recognize our others, to deal better with the
living even if we cannot escape our dead. Mortality, Immortality and other
Life Strategies ( 1 99 1 b) is a peculiar book, in the context of Bauman's work,
for it is more like a corridor that leads nowhere in particular than it is a
bridge or door. This book enters the realm of death and then leaves it, with
no obvious connection on, as say, Modernity and the Holocaust ( 1 989a)
leads to Modernity and Ambivalence ( 1 99 1 a) and that other windowless
room of human precondition in Postmodern Ethics ( 1 993a). The other
books discussed here follow rather the pattern of thinking which otherwise
characterizes Bauman's strategy of connecting rooms or entering the same
room by different openings. In Search of Politics ( l 999b) is the reply to
Globalization: The Human Consequences, or perhaps is its extension from
sociology into the political. Yet there are also echoes across these works,
not least those suggested by the occasional cartoon in the newspapers which
sees us all disappearing under the mountainous detritus of endless con
sumer goods while the devil looks on, smiling. For if culture is something
we use to push death away, then consumer culture is the latest counter
memory device forced upon us, to help us cope, symptomatically, with the
future.
1 46 Zygmunt Bauman
Mortality and Immortality
When, in conversation, I asked Zygmunt Bauman what his favourite

among his own books was he answered without hesitation: Mortality,
Immortality and Other Life Strategies ( 1 991 b). I remember being unsure as
to what I expected him to say, but I did not expect him to say this, and I
wondered whether perhaps this was, so to speak, the unloved child. For if
Bauman is popularly imagined mainly as the author of Modernity and the
Holocaust or perhaps of Postmodern Ethics, then this smaller, more difficult
book has indeed been overshadowed or forgotten by his readers in the rush.
Mortality and Immortality is almost certainly Bauman's most difficult
book. Dense, abstract and demanding both in form and content, it also
takes on a field which is almost impossible, for it is by definition beyond us.
It is a work of great courage and originality. The intellectual strategy which
informs Mortality and Immortality is similar to that in Modernity and the
Holocaust, for this is a book about death which is not a study in the
sociology of death and dying ( 1 99 I b: I ). Its object is not ritual, or the life
path, nor even that of the changing vision of death pioneered by Phillippe
Aries. It does not address the cultural institution of death and dying. Its
purpose, rather, is to blow the whistle on the marginalization of death
within disciplines like sociology. Just as the Holocaust is sidelined out of
sociology, into Jewish or German Studies, or else is pushed away as
barbaric, a premodern residual, non-modern and therefore not our prob
lem, so is the presence of death in sociology dealt with as though it is
merely the area specialization of its own devotees. Bauman wants to argue,
rather, that the presence of death is central to culture and therefore to
modernity and its discipline, sociology. Death, therefore, is a kind of absent
presence. It will not stay in its place, in the hospital or bedroom, in the
cemetery or splattered on our television screens in the spectacle of
accidents. The purpose of Mortality and Immortality is therefore to unpack
the conscious or repressed knowledge of mortality in those human institu
tions, rituals and beliefs which in their own understandings have nothing to
do with death ( 1 99 I b: 2).
Death is difficult, difficult even to imagine. It is the absolute other of
being, an unimaginable other, but it is not by virtue of that opacity actually
so distant from us. Death is beyond comprehension, for it involves absolute
nothingness; modernity's claim to be everything already therefore speaks to
eternity. The cult of life itself necessarily rests on the denial of death. Death
is an impossible puzzle inasmuch as the only death we can really intimately
know, our own, is beyond communication. My death is subjective, not
intersubjective in its most intimate sensibility. More, humans are the only
creatures who not only know this, but also know that they know ( l 99 1 b: 3).
Nothingness hangs before us from the first moment of its realization. But
these are not only personal fears or nemeses. As Bauman argues, the whole
purpose of culture is, as Freud indicated, prosthetic; it is the artificial limit
or artifice with which we push away not only savagery but also the prospect
Following the human condition 1 47
of death. Culture ultimately concerns transcendence and it relates to sur

vival, not just to smug middle class concerns with proper speech, etiquette
or decent aesthetics. If culture often is taken to reflect a whole, or larger
way of life, then it also subsumes into it a whole pattern of obsession with
death, or impermanence. Every waking moment of our lives, then, we
struggle against death. We struggle to make a living, to make money, to
leave a written or concrete legacy, to leave children, or students to follow us
and therefore immortalize us. Bauman summarizes in characteristically
direct prose: 'Without mortality, no history, no culture - no humanity'
( 1 99 1 b: 7).
The power of death is most powerful when it does not appear under its
own name: this is Bauman's claim, and this is what makes the book
difficult. More elusively than the strategy in Modernity and the Holocaust,
which asks us to think from one historically and geographically specific
experience into the field called modernity, Mortality and Immortality
reminds us of Pascal's invitation to look under the plank that we find
ourselves suspended upon. Bauman is looking under this plank, and urges
us to join him; we do not know what we are looking for, and the demand to
look death in the face sociologically is on first glance impossible. Though
this approach has its existential aspects, it is not only a personal challenge
that Bauman is issuing. The point is not only that God laughs at us,
pathetic specimens, as we struggle to push away the inevitable. The creative
point at issue is that in this process we together generate culture, and the
nature of the challenge is such that this is a process without end. Meaning,
therefore, is less impossible than it is contingent; culture is not merely a
buttress, but a daily activity ( 1 99 1 b : 8). Mortality, and immortality there
fore become approved and practised life strategies ( 199 1 b: 9).
The postmodern enters into this discussion only marginally, as a matter
of emphasis. For Bauman wants to suggest that there is a difference between
modem and postmodern life strategies, where the first attempts to push
away death by declaring medical war against it, while the postmodern
substitutes disappearance for the final irreversibility of death. The larger
field of vision, however, is neither modem nor postmodern so much as it is
sociological, for as Bauman emphasizes, his curiosity is not about the
specialized discipline of death and dying so much as it is in sociological
theory in general. As far as the postmodern is concerned here, it represents a
query over the forms in which these problems manifest themselves socially:
We do not live, after all, once in a pre-modem, once in a modem, once in a

postmodem world. All three 'worlds' are but abstract idealizations of mutually
incoherent aspects of the single life-process which we all try our best to make as
coherent as we can manage. ( I 99 I b: I I)
Mortality and Immortality, then, is based upon a shocking gesture, like

that which holds up Bauman's approach to the Holocaust, and, differently,
1 48 Zygmunt Bauman
like that which informs Postmodern Ethics ( l 993a). The shock in Postmodern
Ethics is more in the noun than in the adjective, this not least for a genera
tion of sociologists who have been taught to imagine ethics as a matter of
filling in forms before committing research upon human subjects. But ethics
is less shocking because it is incomprehensible in pedestrian terms - ethics?
After all, what is all the fuss about? Bauman's attempt to foreground death,
in Mortality and Immortality, is more phenomenologically successful in
shocking us - we can smell a problem here. Whereas ethics is somebody
else's problem, the Grim Reaper has his uncomfortable habit of catching up
with all of us. But as with the Holocaust, Bauman here demands of us that
we peer again into the abyss.
So why should death matter as a central problem for sociology, and not
only for us as itinerant individuals, whether tourists or vagabonds? Theor
etically speaking, death is the greatest affront because it is the ultimate
defeat of reason. Reason cannot 'think' death, let alone shift it ( 1 99 1 b : 1 2).
As Bauman argues elsewhere, modernity not least in its humanist or
Faustian furies recognizes no limits; but here, there is one. Bauman quotes
Edgar Morin, whose work on the 'sociology of the present' he visited earlier
in Towards a Critical Sociology ( 1 976b: Ch. 3) - 'the idea of death is an idea
without content', and Freud - 'it is indeed impossible to imagine our own
death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact
still present as spectators' (Bauman, 1991 b: 1 3). Again, to connect back,
say, to the theses of Legislators and Interpreters ( 1 987), Bauman's under
stated critique is devastating: everything about modernist culture identifies
knowledge and resolution. If we cannot 'know' death, we will be powerless
to resolve it. If to know means to do, then we are done. Death is the
scandal, the ultimate humiliation of reason. But this can never be con
tained, as though it were a cerebral issue. The practical consequences are
powerful: 'Notoriously, societies are arrangements that permit humans to
live with weaknesses that would otherwise render life impossible' ( l 99 I b:
1 7). Societies are not only symbolic, but also practical agencies of prosthetic
care for our others. Culturally, three larger patterns emerge.
If death is absurd, then it is for Bauman open to denial. The first
dominant pattern of denial is to be found in transcendence, whether
religious or tribal; I may be mortal, but my god or my people both precede
and outlive me, making my life meaningful as a link in the longer chain of
being. The second, more modern response is in romantic love, where I
identify with my chosen other, and project eternity upon my partner or
upon our love. The third, high modern approach is less to deny than to
launch a military-medical attack on death, denying it by desegregating it
into various disease-conditions which can be treated individually. Death
here is turned into illness, or illnesses; nobody just dies anymore, every
body dies of a particular diagnosable symptom or set of symptoms or
diseases. The medicalization of death thus represents yet another case
of classificatory imperialism, as per Bauman's critique in Modernity and
Ambivalence ( l 99 I a). The easiest way to deal with the ambivalence of
Following tfle fluman condition 1 49
everyday life, for specialists, is to drive it away. And of course there now
remains the fantasy-possibility of medical transcendence, best expressed in
the realm of cryonics, where Faust's head can now be transplanted onto
the cadaver of the Frankenstein monster ( 1 99 I b: 25-6). Bizarre though the
proposition may seem, we moderns still live entranced by the dream of
eternal youth.
The more modest levels upon which we live through culture indicate
something less disturbing - simply that culture works against the memory
of death. Culture allows us to forget by placing us more emphatically in the
past or future than in the present ( 1 991 b: 3 1 ). Later in the text Bauman
quotes Schopenhauer, to emphasize the same point, for happiness: 'always
lies in the future, or else in the past . . . consequently, the present is always
inadequate but the future is uncertain, and the past irrecoverable'
(Schopenhauer, in Bauman, 1 99 1 b: 90). The modernist fury at this sense
of limits expresses itself in what Bauman, following Norman Brown, calls
the Oedipal project, though it could also be called the Faustian temptation:
humans feel compelled to behave as though they are autogenetic, either
killing God or the father or else assaulting the mother, destroying the earth
in order to remake it ( 1 99 1 b: 35). The lust for autogenesis succeeds however
in bringing its own nemesis in the form of iatrogenesis.
The more modest approach, as signalled later in Postmodern Ethics
( I 993a), is simply to acknowledge that if I can only recognize myself in
others, then this ought to inspire being for each other and not only being
with each other ( l 99 1 b: 40). Sociology, in this sense, is properly the realm
of the other. But this will not relieve me of the responsibility to look
inward, nor can it resolve the pain of existential solitude. One can tell about
one's existence, but one cannot share it. Being with others does not relieve
us of existential singularity. Proximity refers us outwards, rather than
inwards ( 199 1 b : 42), though here, as in Postmodern Ethics, Bauman will
only sit for so long with Levinas before returning to the social. For even
eternity, and mortality, are asymmetrically distributed. Those who have the
time or means to worry are more likely to value eternity; for the rest of us,
our days are in the first and last place as a shadow. Eternity - Bauman
quotes Valery - is a form of leisure, so that the more cultured classes
consume more of it than those who are daily preoccupied with keeping
mind and body together ( 1 99 1 b: 65). Culture therefore means different
things to different people, and so Bauman revisits the social history of how
it came to be that high culture was pitted against mass, or vulgar culture;
only the cultured will be truly immortal, memorialized in public monument
as local heroes or flashed for 1 5 minutes of video fame.
Yet in one sense we are all existentialists. As Bauman puts it,
One of the most painful prices humanity paid for the comforts of modernity was
the discovery of the absurdity of being. There was no room for the perception of
absurdity as long as the monotony (experienced as normality) of being lasted.
( l 99 1 b: 94)
1 50 Zygmunt Bauman
The emergence of the unexpected as a normality of sorts generates a new

kind of existential insecurity. New problems throw up new pretenders with
putative solutions: with modernity there emerges a whole array of special
ists with watches and clip-boards. Bauman quotes Gellner, who suggests
even more powerfully than Foucault that
at the base of the modern social order stands not the executioner but the pro
fessor. Not the guillotine but the (aptly named) doctorat d 'etat is the main tool
and symbol of state power. The monopoly of legitimate education is now more
important, more central than is the monopoly of legitimate violence. (Gellner, in
Bauman, 1 99 1 b: \ 00)
The people, the citizens have to be made; they have not always existed; and
this story is coextensive with the process of nation-building and modern
state building. This is central to Bauman's concerns here because cultures
have to be constructed as prostheses of differential kinds, as do nations; all
three, nation, state and culture, are necessarily intertwined. To be more
explicit, the nation-state becomes the dominant form of collective tran
scendence. The nation-state is the modern expression of group immortality,
expressed symbolically in the new ideology of nationalism ( 1 99 1 b: 1 05).
Nationalism is, as the cliche has it, the religion of modernity, which for
Bauman means that it is the racism of the intellectuals ( 1 99 1 b: 1 09). For
nationalism is based on the older prejudice, that what binds us together is
not negotiable solidarity but firmly fixed affinity, with intellectuals as
legislators acting as the proven spokespeople of these great discoveries. The
immortal nation thus has its own immortal representatives, its poets and
historians, servants and scientists, national saviours all. The point, then, is
not for Bauman simply that nations are imagined, or invented, that tradi
tions are new rather than somehow miraculously primordial; his concern is
with the social dynamics of this process, with identifying its immediate
middle-class agents and its victims, and with prising open the issue of its
internal dynamics, for the pursuit of collective immortality is part of this
vain rehearsal of death. Every sign of construction, moreover, is also
evidence of destruction; for it was not only the case that men (and women)
had forged into citizens ready to slaughter their ex-neighbours across the
other side of the newly-drawn boundaries, but this process also involved the
destruction of other forms of sociation which preceded them ( l 99 1 b: 1 14).
Citizens then must be taught norms by us, the educated, once they have
been stripped of their old understandings by science; luckily for all, how
ever, second nature does not always run deep, and our new citizens learn
how to play the game without giving too much away.
Now that we have lost our histories, we have to be told in turn what our
history is, as monument, as museum, as 'heritage' ( l 99 1 b: 1 2 1). History
becomes the legitimation of state power. History is immortality. If socio
logists become the chief reformers of Durksonian bent, then historians
become the guarantors of civic identity, the genealogists of the present who
Following the human condition 151
can tell us who we are by virtue of where we have come from. So we are
faced by new storytellers, or institutional hermenueuts who give us the
authorized goods, alongside medical specialists dispensing doctor-induced
disease and sociologists tempted to ease our burden through the propaga
tion of eugenics. Contrary to the earlier, notorious indication that societies
are arrangements which help carry our disabilities or our disabled, it now
begins to look like a good idea to dump them, while we reconstruct our
selves ( 1 99 1 b: 1 46-7). So far so bad, but all this is compounded by the
adiaphorization of death itself: for while we seek to kill death medically, we
also at the same time normalize it by emptying it out, so creating a world
where television or video-game heroes are wiped out only to rise again
unaffected, or where our children lose a pet (or a friend) only to expect
immediate replacement. So do we lose our ability to mourn, or to face up to
the abyss when it opens nearby us. Big Brother no longer watches us . . . we
watch Big Brother, and have difficulty deciphering what the fuss is about
( l 99 1 b: 1 95). Our culture has indeed become Faustian, when we collectively
travel to hell together for demanding that the moment of our enchantment
should last for ever; and this is the backhander in Marx's curious specu
lation in the Grundrisse, that modernity shows us the key to the anatomy of
what went before, for civilization cuts both ways, and high modernity
accentuates not only its spectacular senses of gain but its tragic sense of
losses ( l 991 b : 1 2 1 ).
Yet the quality of modernity, or of postmodern times is such as to
display banality just as well as decline. So the phrase which holds together
Bauman's postscript to Mortality and Immortality is one we would identify,
thanks to the wicked talents of our advertising hermeneuts, with the
pleasures of chocolate: 'to die for . . .' ( 1 99 1 b: 200). Beyond these cleverly
manipulated aromas of Belgian flavour, Bauman's own conclusion is at
once more simple and more moving, that the readiness to die for the other
is the only truly ethical attitude, where ego and other face, where mortality
and immortality fuse and we are back, momentarily, in the Gulag, or in the
Ghetto ( l 99 I b: 207).
Mortality and Immortality is a great book, perhaps Bauman's most
original and for that reason his most difficult. For while Bauman happily
agrees with Wittgenstein that in principle there is much that we can or
ought leave unspoken, part of the purpose throughout his writing is also to
indicate taboo, where it matters. Ethics is taboo, for sociologists, whose
general working banner is rather 'business as usual'; the Holocaust is out of
bounds for working sociologists, too local or marginal to their concerns in
other times and places beyond its shadow; and death is simply too difficult,
while it is at the same time imagined by us as part of our private worries
rather than as constitutive of our public lives. Bauman's case is just that, as
freedom depends on servitude, so social life and culture depend on death
and its consequences, that all of our achievements across the civilizations
make sense only in the context of culture as prosthetics. Like second nature,
like the phantom limb, this culture becomes part of the routinized
repertoire with which we carry on. We must push death away, by the
artifice of culture, we can do no other; yet we also need the sense of self
detachment sufficient to recognize ourselves in this process.
Globalization
Some of Bauman's work is of this nature, that is it is as it were solitary,

preconditional, the result of that self-imposed isolation which allows con
templation and insight into problems of social being which in a sense precede
sociology or critique. Across Bauman's work Mortality and Immortality
( l 99 1 b) and perhaps Postmodern Ethics ( l 993a) are most like this, after
words that really are prefaces. Other books, like Between Class and Elite
( 1 972) and Memories of Class ( 1 982), analyse particular social configurations
of domination, though they too pursue the question of how these devel
opments are formed within and exert influence upon the life of the mind and
its inhabitants, we intellectuals. Some of Bauman's work follows Simmel's
curiosity about the relationship between social forms and personality or
character-types, tourists, vagabonds, strangers, lovers. Other books take on
the tasks of bringing messages from some sociological cultures to others;
here we might include Towards a Critical Sociology ( 1 976b), Culture as
Praxis ( l 973a) and Hermeneutics and Social Science ( 1 978), or of intro
ducing sociological narratives to altogether new audiences, as in texts such as
Freedom ( 1 988) and Thinking Sociologically ( 1 990). Some interventions are
more reactive, as in the contributions on the postmodern, or additive, as in
the sociology of intellectuals in Legislators and Interpreters ( 1 987), though
the same codas apply; in one sense the reactive embrace of the postmodern is
an attempt to register the possibility of a third nature, after modernity and
its no longer convincing attempt to close on second nature, after modernism
as the end of history no longer closed. Modernity and the Holocaust ( l 989a),
Modernity and Ambivalence ( l 99 1 a) and Postmodern Ethics ( l 993a) from a
different perspective make up a triptych of their own; the logic which holds
these arguments together is more continuous, as though they were instal
ments of a larger imaginary book or project entitled Critique of Order.
Now in his autumnal years, still a frenzy of writing activity while at the
same time an amiable conversationalist as chef in the kitchen, walking or
drinking Scotch, the emphasis of Zygmunt Bauman's style has shifted more
directly into the urgency of social and political affairs. His more recent
triptych is held together less immediately by theoretical continuity than by
style and voice: these are short, direct political interventions or contri
butions, less fur ewig than to upset the happy complacencies of British
sociologists who after the long night of Thatcherism can do nothing more
imaginative than apologize for New Labour. This political triptych consists
of Work, Consumerism and The New Poor ( l 998b), linked here in Chapter I
to Memories of Class ( 1 982), as its reprise, Globalization ( l 998a) and now In
Search of Politics ( l999b).
Globalization, like the postmodern, rapidly became flavour of the month

or of the decade. Plainly the two are in some ways connected, at least in the
public and scholarly imagination. The larger themes connect; sociology
goes together with modernity and the nation-state, the postmodern gives
you something after sociology and whatever comes after the age of nation
building, in our case globalization. Perhaps we should not be surprised that
Bauman opens Globalization: The Human Consequences ( 1 998a) with pre
cisely these problems - the usual, for sociologists, for they involve
questions of the extent of change and the extent to which nomenclature can
stretch to discover the distance. But sociologists at the same time are always
ahead of themselves, anticipating results yet to be shown, discovering new
societies where others, more cautious, will merely discern emerging patterns
or trends, whether postindustrial, postmodern or postnational. Yet the
critical or interpretative challenge remains, for if we are well advised to
associate new social trends with the desire of their self-appointed analysts,
we ought also take our leave of those who, on the contrary, refuse to
acknowledge change even as it bites them on the leg.
As Bauman recognizes, to begin, one initial difficulty here is that both the
idea of a process of globalization and the word itself have become reified,
and at the same time bipolarized. Globalization is either the problem or the
solution, depending on who or where you are. And certainly this is one
aspect of its reception, enthusiastic or cynical, for as Bauman writes,
'Globalization', the hybrid term used to keep open the sense of tension
between the global and the local, may indeed distribute its benefits so
asymmetrically that in result it means globalization or high mobility for
some, and localization or domestic exile for others. But to begin with the
word, Bauman evidently takes it seriously, yet also is dubious about its
substitution for thinking:
All vogue words tend to share a similar fate: the more experiences they pretend to
make transparent, the more they themselves become opaque. The more numerous
are the orthodox truths they elbow out and supplant, the faster they tum into no
questions-asked canons . . . 'Globalization' is no exception to that rule. (Bauman,
1 998a: I )
The problem i s recurrent, built into the habitual nominalism we inhabit,

where the identification of a problem is taken for an explanation. This is the
bad side of culture, or more particularly of theory as prosthetic, where the
word cancels out the problem. Bauman's purpose is to get the other side of
the word, to the social roots and consequences of the globalization process.
So Bauman begins from the premise that if globalization is widely encoun
tered as something caught up with the modern or postmodern experience, it
will nevertheless be encountered differentially, for these are problems that
are caught up with time and space or region and class, gender or ethnicity,
and globalization can be expected to divide as much as it unites (Bauman,
1 998a: 2).
1 54 Zygmunt Bauman
These are among other things old marxian wisdoms, that the pattern of
industrial development since the Industrial Revolution encourages social
and geographical mobility, but more for some than for others. Some can
choose desirable regions or commute between cities, while others are locked
into specific pockets or else like vagabonds are compelled to leave one
limited location for others even worse or at best mixed in their conse
quences. As Bauman puts it, in this context, 'Being local in a globalized
world is a sign of social deprivation and degradation' ( l 998a: 2). Those who
travel freely do so at the expense of those who are corralled into particular
areas; the latter either are physically excluded, or else service the rich. A
new form of 'absentee landlordship' emerges, whereby the privileged are no
longer tied to place or to those of their inferiors who are stuck there. The
global elites are responsible to no one. Consequently the residual aspects of
noblesse oblige which informed the modern welfare state are eroded;
obligation to the social other is reduced by the absence of any proximity
other than circumstantial ( l 998a: 3). This is the global version of tourists
and vagabonds, for 'being on the move' has radically different, indeed
opposite meanings for those at the top and the bottom of the new hier
archy. Those among the victims of the system who cannot be compelled to
move on are instead institutionalized; the alternative to compulsory
mobility, for those at the bottom of the pile, is criminalization, incarcera
tion: the prison again replaces the welfare state (or more literally, the
school).
Bauman's hope here is not at all to solve these problems, but to act as
one messenger among others who bring the mixed news. As he puts it, in
sympathy here with Castoriadis, the trouble with the condition of our
contemporary civilization is that it has stopped questioning itself; more
directly, its own forms of social evanescence mean that we risk becoming
immune to the suffering of others. Our political obligation first of all is to
question, just as our moral obligation is to care for the other ( 1 998a: 5).
Globalization is one of those spheres of activity wherein the tradi
tionalism of modernity stands exposed, and strong. The nation-state,
Fordism, the welfare state all-together exploited the working class, but it in
principle included them, and offered them the possibility of citizenship. In
ordinary language, national capital was open to the claims of local loyalty;
in Australia, for example, one of the few slogans which drew capitalists and
workers together over decades was 'Buy Australian'. The threat of inter
national capital historically was that it could and would go elsewhere; but
now all major capital flows are global, and such loyalty as exists is to the
peak shareholders, wherever they be, not to employees or suppliers, let
alone the locality where a firm is housed or originates ( l 998a: 6). The
formal or contractual bonds of reciprocity are undermined: whoever is free
to walk away from the locality is free to walk away from the consequences.
The whole idea of duty or responsibility is further weakened; not even the
immediate producers benefit from reciprocity, let alone those outside pro
duction, the younger or weaker; the interests of future generations are even
less pertinent. The nature of these shifts is historic, for the prospect of
proximity to the face of the other is radically transformed by movement, by
that fact of mobility which earlier alerted Marx and Tonnies and later
Spengler and Schumpeter to the fundamentally corrosive power of modern
ity. Capitalist modernism is indeed a process of creative destruction;
creation, or innovation for some, indicating destruction of the living con
ditions of others ( 1 998a: 14). Change, put simply, is destructive, perhaps
especially when its rate accelerates beyond our capacity to cope collectively
or individually. This is not, of course, as Bauman repeatedly emphasizes, to
return to the cosy call for more of the old Gemeinschaft; but it is, at least, to
query whether the necessity of change coincides with the extent and nature
of the specific changes that are foisted upon us, on risk of our own
obsolescence. What worse threat is there than the idea of being left behind?
(It all depends, I suppose, on the company and the context we find our
selves in.)
To summarize: Bauman's opening ambit is that rather than homogeniz
ing the human condition, the technological annulment of temporal-spatial
distances tends to polarize it ( 1 998a: 1 8). The sterile enclosures of Apolline
protected space in the yuppie fortress go together with 'no-go' areas where
creative disorder of Dionysius reigns; and as we know by this point,
Zygmunt Bauman is not much impressed by this Get Smart choice between
order and chaos ( 1 998a: 22). For what is worse in this process of social
segregation is the disappearance of the hope that we used to call the public
sphere ( 1 998a: 25). There is no longer any space within which politics can
occur; it is not just that we cannot agree and disagree together, but worse,
that the ground of such possible meeting has gone.
The politics of struggle over resources does not only involve money and
power; it also crosses over time and space. Obviously the politics of indus
trialism, as sketched in say Memories of Class ( 1 982), is deeply implicated
within the control of the working day and that space within which it is
performed. This kind of micropolitics goes together with a more extensive
series of struggles over space, which is apparent for example in regionalism
and the battles of separatists against the consolidation of the nation-state as
sovereign. The nation-state claims to control not only time, or memory, but
space: mapping and naming is the first historical act of invaders and
expeditionaries. The newly emerging agencies of the modern state cultivate
their power by maximizing the extent to which they are the source of lesser
units' uncertainties ( 1 998a: 34). Not only Panopticon, figuratively speaking,
or national mapping but especially city-design works out these principles
( 1 998a: 34-5). Here it is our old fellow travellers, our friends the utopians,
who again lead the way; for the utopianism of city-design itself embodies the
early modern horror with the sprawling chaos of the spontaneously
emerging cities (which were also planned, after their own manner). Uni
formity and regularity were cardinal design-principles for utopians such as
Morelly, as Bauman reminds us; there is a direct line, in effect, from Morelly
to Corbusier. These utopians, however, thought of order as something that
was unique within their own heads; like all natural tyrants, they could not
recognize that disorder is a form of order, and therefore that there is always
a plurality of orders both in other people's heads and within their lives.
The vital connection between utopia and space is as powerful as that
connecting utopia and time, even if it is less well observed. Utopia in the
strong sense is beyond time; it calls out stasis, which is its greatest flaw. But
utopia also has a necessary relationship to space; so that the idea of utopia
as 'no place' is misleading; most responsible utopians have a place in mind.
The concrete social link binding together utopia and modernity, notwith
standing the essential romanticism or traditionalism of most utopian argu
ment, is the city form and the art or science of architecture. Bauman quotes
Baczko's radiant study Utopian Lights, where we are captives of 'a double
movement: that of the utopian imagination to conquer urban space and
that of dreams of city planning and of architecture in search of a social
framework in which they can materialize' (Baczko, in Bauman, 1 998a: 37).
More, the image of the transparent city space held together by legislators
and intellectuals, political actors and philosophers, is a kind of transitional
programme at once practical and theoretical. All of which makes one
wonder at the level of Foucauldian fury directed towards medicos, lawyers,
sex-reformers and educationalists, while the architects of our lives seem
largely to have escaped scrutiny. Perhaps at the end of the day, we have
somehow second naturalized architecture as the way the world is, enabling
its agents to remain invisible as the ur-designers of the physical institutions
within which all these other abominations have been allowed to occur.
Perhaps we have simply excluded architecture from the critical gaze because
its practitioners do not immediately resemble all these other reformers and
do-gooders; architecture, after all, at least looks like a natural science, and
has always occupied a liminal zone between science and art. Sex, and law
are rather as Durkheim instructed us the objects of social construction
rather than of physical construction; it is as though architecture has slipped
off these cognitive maps, becoming peripheral, like death, to our main
stream.
Yet all this seems impossible, for we know and readily acknowledge that
alongside modernism as a radical literary form, the postmodern arrived
semantically through architecture, as modernism itself was powered not
only by image or form but by Bauhaus, where cleanness of line, simplicity
and order prevail. Bauman saves Bauhaus from attack here; both, perhaps,
set out as builders of alternative orders. Corbusier offers the more ade
quately erratic example of architectural modernism run amok. The archi
tects of Bauhaus, like those of Critical Theory, identified modernism with
radicalism of the left; their flight from Nazi Germany to America indicates
some shared sympathy. Corbusier was happy to work with any tyrants,
propagating modernism at any ideological price; for tyrants, too, were
modernizing across this period. Plainly Corbusier lacked the destructive
enthusiasm of a futurist like Marinetti. The spirit of function was more
important, but some sympathy of spirit is apparent all the same; as though
we, the urban reformers, could start all over. The Radiant City of the
Future would mean the death of the past and all that went with it, including
the street: streets for cars, boxes for persons ( 1 998a: 42). All the paranoia
of Corbusier was appropriate, for like Fourier, he spent too much of his
life on paper, waiting for the financial blessings of rich patrons, and like
Fourier, he was a romantic, as later enthusiasms for the organic in
Ronchamp show. Others again, like Oscar Niemeyer, took on the futurist
baton, and built Brasilia, capital of Brasil, a monumental error that makes
other utopian Ikea capitals like Canberra or Washington DC look like
cities. The utopian echoes are powerful; Brasilia, after all, is in the middle
of nowhere, the perfect location to start from scratch, while Sao Paulo and
Rio de Janeiro go on their own way, ramshackle and high modern at the
same time ( l 998a: 43). Brasilia was built for those who cannot live outside
Brave New World, that there should be no people in it. For ultimately the
agora is not a place, but an expression of culture. You cannot build a space
for politics and then expect something political to happen in it, like spon
taneous combustion. Postmoderns would rather do politics somewhere else,
like at home, or perhaps especially in the academy, where they anyway have
little enough else to do.
Ah! The social engineers, aspirant or actual: they long for nothing better
than to help other people be good. They cannot interpret without beginning
to legislate in their own heads, and if at all possible in other people's lives, and
all for the sake of their own ideals. Bauman here implicitly aligns Corbusier
with Robert Moses, the redeveloper of New York City, for these are
Faustians all, some more of word, some of deed. Against these cerebralists,
victims of their own abstract commitment to rational planning, Bauman pits
the views of recalcitrants such as Jane Jacobs and Richard Sennett, against
the megalomaniacs who visit havoc upon 'the lives of real people for the sake
of realizing some abstract plan of development or renewal' ( l 998a: 45). We
are back, therefore, in terms of Bauman's own work not only with Memories
of Class ( 1 982) and Legislators and Interpreters ( 1 987) but with the concerns
of order and ethics. The good society, like the good city, cannot be pre
packaged, for the punters to sort out later under the rule of the planners or
the philosopher-kings. Neither politics nor ethics can be conferred upon the
people, as a gift. If the idea of social harmony is to be aspired to, then the fact
of conflict first has to be recognized and creatively learned, for the canons of
modem civility teach us only to disagree politely, which is probably one
reason for existing levels of violence; civility in the seminar room (more or
less), punchups in the carpark. Utopia here stands as the refusal of ambi
valence and uncertainty, born of difference and variety ( l 998a: 46-7). The
problem, for Bauman, is a familiar one: uniformity breeds conformity; the
enemy now lurks within the city walls, rather than outside as was originally
the case.
The city air no longer makes us free, as was earlier thought to be the case
as the victims of the closed frame of Gemeinschaft escaped to the new, open
prisons of Gesellschaft. Nor is this radically altered by the communications
revolutions which offer, yet again, to make us all free, or at least connected.
This is yet another case of middle class, intellectual projection where
our own enthusiasms for Internet or whatever are narcissistically expanded
as though all global citizens could use them all the time, whereas most of
them are preoccupied with more pedestrian tasks such as feeding their
families. The immediate effects of globalization may well be more direct
and negative than this techno-euphoria suggests. To undo the nation-state,
practically or symbolically, is also directly to deconstruct those social
democratic forms of solidarity developed especially after the Second World
War. The attack on the nation-state is also an attack on the welfare state
which, however capable of reproducing domination, also helped to alleviate
some of its negative effects. To erode the welfare state in order to replace it
with nothing more than rhetoric about market provision is a retrogressive
step, not necessarily because we value the welfare state highly, any more
than we still harbour roseate images of Gemeinschaft, but because to
deprive people of its support is to force new life-strategies upon them
without notice. All of this is more disturbing, in the late 1 990s, because we
have now had time enough to observe some of the effects of the new world
disorder. Tourists and vagabonds loom large in Moscow as well as in
Middletown. The new, postmodern principle of openness cuts both ways;
just as we as individuals feel no responsibility towards the other, so does the
sense of political responsibility for social problems weaken. Bauman agrees
with Offe, his constant companion in the critique of the political economy
of the welfare state, that the state's capacity to make collectively binding
choices and to carry them out has become problematical ( l 998a: 68).
Reminding us again of Michel Crozier's theorem in The Bureaucratic
Phenomenon, that the politics of domination always seeks to maximize
room for manoeuvre of the dominant and constraint for the subordinate,
Bauman proceeds to explain political fragmentation and economic global
ization as symbiotic. Integration and parcelling out, globalization and
territorialization are mutually complementary processes ( 1 998a: 69).
Globalization both opens the world, for some of us, and imprisons its
others.
Just as violence is the other face of civilization, so is poverty the reverse
side of prosperity. Bauman quotes Jeremy Seabrook:
Poverty cannot be 'cured', for it is not a symptom of the disease of capitalism.

Quite the reverse: it is evidence of its robust good health, its spur to even greater
accumulation and effort. (Seabrook, in Bauman, 1 998a: 79)
Just as freedom rests upon dependence, so is poverty a permanent sign,

rather than a residual, of modernity's achievement. If postmodernity is a
matter of modernity without the older illusions, then perhaps we have lost
some of the more necessarily consoling illusions among them; illusions, for
example, that poverty could be overcome. The new illusions of postmodern
consumerism include the idea that we all inhabit the same universe of
Following tne numan condition 1 59
possibilities. If there are no longer class cultures or subcultures in the earlier

sense highlighted by British cultural studies, then we all, rich and poor
alike, participate in the same fantastic race after surplus material satis
faction. The difference, these days, is that if we longer pursue different
goals, then that race is nevertheless stacked against the poor. Vagabonds
and tourists, in other words, all seek the same satisfaction of the same
longings ( 1 998a: 96-7), and as with the old class system random change can
occur so that this tourist can become a vagabond, or that vagabond might
arrive as a tourist, without the structure of the dichotomy being at all
destabilized. The difference, again, is that where, as Marx put it, the
proletariat sought money for survival and the bourgeoisie sought capital for
investment, the aspiration today is uniform: it is the shared utopia of
endless consumption. A world without vagabonds becomes the utopia
of tourists, but the utopia of the vagabonds is not one without tourists, but
the fantasy of tourism for all, this in a world where clearly the illusions of
the tourists are held up by the endless works of the vagabonds ( l 998a: 97).
In Search of Politics
Globalization: The Human Consequences ( l 998a) is not a particularly

cheerful book. It closes with a discussion of criminalization and the new
prison system, as close perhaps as we get to the Gulag or Auschwitz in
California. The messages are necessarily mixed; whereas those genocidal
institutions stood for two paths into early high modernity or modernism,
the substitution of prisons for schools represents in budgetary and symbolic
terms an early postmodern phase where mobility for some is bought at the
expense of incarceration for others, a group of victims not racially or
ethnically defined except by default. Just as it is Bauman's strategy
to compel us to glimpse into the abyss, so does he step back, in order to
remind us that this abyss is of our own making. So follows the next book,
and the final in our survey of Bauman's work, a spin back into the
feasibility of change, for as Castoriadis says, we have changed at least once
before and may therefore change again.
In Search of Politics ( l 999b) is the call and return to the more distressing
themes canvassed in Globalization. The text opens with an expression of
political ambivalence about that which sociologists typically subsume to
the 'structure/agency problem': how is it that we can be so obsessed with
our own freedom, and yet feel so powerless in the face of change? Every
where we are free and yet in chains, not least in the consumer democracies
of the centres. In the terms of classical politics, the problem is that we have
lost the agora, that space neither fully private nor entirely public, the space
where private problems meet in a meaningful array. To leap millennia
and therefore to change vocabularies, what we lack is some third space
where we can develop what C. Wright Mills called the sociological imagi
nation, that realm which creatively might connect the self and the other,
1 60 Zygmunt Bauman
private worries and social issues, individual identity and the public good
( I 999b: 1 3).
Today we suffer, according to Bauman, from a condition best called
Unsicherheit, that German term which rendered into English would cover
not only uncertainty and insecurity but also unsafety ( 1 999b: 5). This
generalized sense of heightened middle class anxiety is doubtless what
Ulrich Beck cornered so successfully into his book on Risk Society, timed
brilliantly to coincide with the fall of the Wall which itself so nicely
captured that sublime sense of freedom and horror generated by ruptural
change. Ours is indeed the age of anxiety, where the prospects of both
potential threats and possible rewards seem clear, and high. Only if we are
afraid and uncertain, then we are hardly free to act, or at least to act
positively or openly. Only these are more than personal problems. On the
wider horizon, political institutions seem hopeless because they reduce
Unsicherheit to safety; they cannot or will not help us against insecurity.
And 'safety', as Bauman argues in unfolding his book on Globalization, can
as easily result in criminalization as anything else. More, politics becomes
banal, for there is not only an absence of citizenship but a striking absence
of agency. When politics ripples out through civil society, in response say
to civil rights infringements, the environment or the drug problem, the
messages somehow become lost, for parties and unions are unable or
unwilling to mainstream them. The widely observed problem in political
sociology, then, is not that politics does not happen but that it happens
outside what we have grown accustomed to calling political institutions, so
that one kind of politics fails to meet up with the other.
Such is the plot of In Search of Politics the problem of where politics
-
happens and how, how the existing agencies miss the boat, and how a new
(or old) vision might be rearticulated for the project of an autonomous
society. Though Bauman sits comfortably in his director's chair, it is as
though the play rests on the idea that Mills meets Castoriadis, perhaps with
Claus Offe as the third term. For while Bauman's own social theory works
habitually and comfortably at the level of vision, he also wants to touch at
least upon problems to do with policy. How might an autonomous society
be achieved, if it cannot be engineered or gifted to others? So, once again,
we are in the company of our old friend, utopia. At least one rendition of
the postmodern also is postideological or posthistorical, and to this extent
postutopian ( 1 999b: 8). Yet to be postutopian is, absurdly, to be ahead of
ourselves, and therefore despite ourselves to remain utopian. If Bauman
after all these years is unable to escape from utopia, then perhaps utopia
remains behind us as well as ahead; that, or else it is our carapace, as
moderns, our shell against all historical possibilities either side of us. We
can never be behind what is always ahead of us.
If political institutions or organizations fail us, however, then this is not
the extent of the matter; for to argue in this direction with too much
conviction would be to argue like a populist Trotsky, that the masses
were like the steam waiting for our appropriate piston. The conduct of
Following the human condition 161
social politics, as contrasted to state politics, is no great cause for self

congratulation. As Bauman argues, moralizing tends often to substitute for
politics, as in the victim/offender bashing which makes particular individual
criminals into public celebrities as objects of hatred and stigma. Televisual
lynch mob justice is what results from this, expressing fear rather than
hope, or manifesting the sense of personal anxiety rather than the possi
bility of social hope. In short, there are for Bauman deep problems in
politics which reflect fundamental problems in community. Communities,
however, generate all kinds of results, some positive and enabling, others
negative and stigmatizing. The larger problem is that increasing volumes of
world-citizens are expelled from labour-markets, leading to the bizarre
speculation that in the longer term only something like 20 per cent of the
population will be required to keep each major national economy 'work
ing'. The problem, however, is less one of counterintelligence than of
running against the current:
One can think (and many do) of the ways to reverse, arrest or at least slow down
the trend - but the major issue today is no more what is to be done, but who has
the power and the resolve to do it. ( I 999b: 20)
Glossy globalization brings with it the direct political imperative, that

national sovereignty is no longer possible. Flux replaces certainty of any
kind, including the idea that I might still have a job tomorrow, or that my
job specification might be the same next week as it is this week. Just as Beck
captured the mood of the moment by popularizing the slogan of 'risk
society', so in a previous moment of emerging anxiety did Marshall Berman
rediscover Marx's idea - itself borrowed from Carlyle and others - that our
deceptively solid realities melted around us into air. Flux, flow, liquefac
tion, plasticity, flexibility, all the buzzwords of our epoch point to the image
of the sublime, promising us titillation with the sense horror submerged, or
occasionally celebrated, for there is a fine line between pleasure and pain, at
least within this optic. Consequently postmodern love of mobility replaces
the modernist curiosity about personal direction; the important thing is to
keep moving, not to wonder why or where we might be headed ( I 999b: 20).
These various themes anticipate Bauman's next, and 'final' study, Liquid
Modernity (Bauman, 2000).
All of this is politically problematical, not least because a political culture
rests among other things on some time for consideration, even contem
plation. To do or even just to think politics takes time, rather than space,
and time has become our enemy. The active society demands of us that we
keep moving, keep consuming, experience everything, travel, work as good
tourists more than act as good citizens, work, shop and die. To keep
moving is the only way left in our cultural repertoire to push away death, or
meaning, for we now live our lives (those of us who are lucky enough)
according to two axioms - that the self is indeterminate, any self is possible;
and that the process of self-creation is never finished ( 1 999b: 22). Faust has
become our God, but our realities are more tawdry: when we are told and
shown that everything is up for grabs, then endemic human insecurity is the
only non-perishable result ( 1 999b: 23). The prospects, and forms of social
solidarity available to us shrink before our eyes.
Bauman therefore agrees with various social liberals such as Titmuss and
Beveridge that security is one precondition of the idea of the good life. His
entire project, from Between Class and Elite ( 1 972) through to this study 30
years later, however, is also informed by the marxian scepticism - it could
also be weberian - concerning asymmetrical distribution of goods and of life
chances. When do we witness the positive-sum, win-win outcomes promised
us by rational choice economists? Bauman adheres rather over the years to
the fact of scarcity as a starting point in any talk of political economy. No
matter how exponential the generative capacity of capital, itself also much
applauded by Marx, there will never be enough to go around. One tourist's
gain is another vagabond's loss, once we accept the general scenario in which
inclusion, employment and citizenship all go together.
Advocates and warriors of flexibility are not after freedom of movement for all,
but after exhilarating lightness of being for some, rebounding as unbearable
oppressiveness of fate for the rest; the right to avoid the consequences for some,
the duty to bear the consequences for the others. (I 999b: 26)
After all these years fighting those totalitarianisms delivered by the state, we
are now faced by the effective totalitarianism of the Market. For we now
face a discursive monopoly of claims to value, where only the market counts,
and other kinds of value are for losers. Perhaps only the hope of romantic
love survives as a life strategy against mortality, though it, too, has been
colonized as ruthlessly by Hollywood as has thirst (or reality) by Coca-Cola.
None of which is to say that humans have no place any longer in this world;
the question, rather, is what kind of room for manoeuvre they, we, have, and
whether this is really the only, best, possible way for us to live.
And so Bauman returns to the theme of mortality and our incapacity to
look it in the face. We know that we are going to die; we know we know; we
know that there is no escape from death. The fleeting prospect of eternity
now becomes a frenzy, as though everincreasing levels of hyperactivity will
drive this wolf away from the door. For the old, modern prostheses are no
longer so readily available to us. They were, as Bauman summarizes here,
nation and family, a perfect couple when it came to dealing with the
prospect of modern mortality, the larger community and the smaller nesting
within it. Nation-building, of course, was also a particular strategy of
family-building; both conferred identity, local and larger together. But both
are now porous, threatened with redundancy as intermediate circles or
forms held between the individual and the globe. Our new globalized world
offers to free us of these restrictions, so that there will only be the heroic
individual (me, or you?) astride the cosmos ( 1 999b: 35). Of course, nation
building and family building were also destructive processes, and in more
ways than one; both units destroyed what went before, and both claimed
lives as a cost of their consolidation. Yet they also conferred meanings of
kinds which the new order can barely recognize, heteronomies as well as
autonomies, all bound up. If this modern life strategy offered the possibility
of immortality through nation or family, then the postmodern equivalent is
miserable in comparison - the individual can either be everything, para
noiac, or nothing, obliterated ( l 999b: 38). God, contrary to Durkheim, is no
longer the community or the social but the self, or the world-system. We no
longer simply die alone; we are also compelled now to live alone. Solidarity
(is gone) for ever.
This is a worst-possible scenario, the result of staring into the distance as
far as we can. The bleakness of the picture rests on its sense of the absolute
erosion of all alternative forms, and social alternatives. The blackness of the
diagnosis is what also makes utopia possible, desirable and necessary.
Bauman talks his way out of this picture in the company of John Carroll, as
he is occasionally wont to do. Where Carroll's Humanism left little stand
ing, his more recent work, Ego and Soul perhaps resonates more powerfully
with Bauman's present predicament, as it balances the gravity of analysis
with a more optimistic sense of ordinary human intelligence and per
spicacity. Carroll reminds us that once killed, gods tend to be reborn as
diseases; psychopathology is the modern form of illness. The self
absorption of ego today stands in for the soul ( 1 999b: 42). Body, too,
replaces soul as the machine we think we can perfect, pushing away death
through the struggle of physical self-development:
Doctors proclaim with pride that fewer people 'die of natural causes': at the
horizon of the autonomous strategy looms the vision of such life as may come to
the end only because of the self's neglect of duty, so that the self-contained and
self-centred life-policy with the care of the body firmly placed at its centre could
truly become an adequate and sufficient source of life-meaning. When there are so
many means to attend to, who would waste time to examine the ends? (I 999b: 43)
We are back again, with Ellul, or with Adorno: why bother worrying about
which value to choose, when we already know that there is a multitudinous
variety of smaller, closer things to be going on with? Why worry about the
goal, when we already have the instruments? These days we seem to know
how to fix our problems, even when we are uncertain what they are.
Today we inhabit a confessional culture. The 'public' in the meantime
has been emptied of its own separate concerns; it has been left with no
agenda of its own, it is now nothing more than an agglomeration of private
troubles, worries and problems ( l 999b: 65). Instead of the agora, we have
Oprah, or worse, the televised shame culture of Jerry Springer. The
Enlightenment's promise, that there was nothing which the human species
on its own could not accomplish, has been like so much else privatized. The
hope of the freedom of mankind has been cashed in for the freedom of each
of its individual members. The big banknote has been exchanged for a
barrelful of pennies, so that all individuals may carry some coins in their
1 64 Zygmunt Bauman
pockets ( 1 999b: 68). Deregulation does not end regulation, it merely shifts it
away from political institutions and towards the hidden hand of the state.
Only just as the market is both everywhere and nowhere, so is the prospect
of politics dispersed in the process. Politics also becomes adiaphoric, that is,
of no interest to the political authorities ( 1 999b: 74). The idea that the
sphere of freedom has expanded therefore misses the point, unless it
ideologically interprets the decline of the welfare state as part of the attack
on negative freedom. The point is that the individual has been transformed
from prospective political citizen into would-be market consumer ( I 999b:
78). The political citizen knows both how to aspire to freedom and where to
acknowledge that the value of freedom is impertinent, as in the conduct of
routines of habit where the citizen also serves. The image of absolute
freedom takes us back to another world, that of Faust; there is not enough
space here for us mortals. The prospect of the autonomous society rather
has to recognize and build upon uncertainty, yet its very possibility depends
at the same time upon the critical reflection and therefore on the relative
security of its enthusiasts ( l 999b: 85).
The theme of totalitarianism so central to Modernity and the Holocaust
( 1 989a) resurfaces here, not least because Bauman's reconsideration of the
question what makes up a good society returns him to Arendt, and more
explicitly here to Castoriadis. Totalitarianism as we have known it is
primarily an attack on the private sphere, on the very idea that there can be
or ought to be anything outside the state or its ideology. Yet totalitarianism
is also an attack of the most ruthless kind on the very idea of politics itself;
for where there is a state claim to truth, backed up by the monopoly of
violence, legal or illegal, there can be no politics. More, as Bauman reminds,
the avant-gardism of the modernist movement was also a kind of totali
tarianism, and not only because of its various passing infatuations with
dictators like Mussolini. For the modernist vanguard was also Faustian,
hungry for change of almost any kind, especially if it were at the expense of
others ( l999b: 92). Ultimately the avant-garde also suffered from that kind
of projection so repeatedly characteristic of middle class intellectuals; they
could not tell the difference between aesthetics and politics, and imagined
that reorganizing urban forms on paper or the colours on their palettes was
no more or less harmful than the prospect of frogmarching the great
unwashed masses into a violent new world. The old world was stupid,
cowardly, inert. The modernists sought powers mighty enough to match the
size of their own ambitions; only the political extremes of communism or
fascism seemed up to the challenge ( I 999b: 93). In the blackshirted nights of
the 1 930s, all liberals were made to look pathetically grey.
After Order
These were the self-appointed saviours that we have lost; now we have no
leaders at all, for as Bauman explains it, there is nothing a politician now
fears more than an outbreak of politics. The ideologies, however, still
inhabit the agora, now speaking again the language of populism for which
the aesthetic vanguard had nothing but contempt. For the avant-garde is
both the proponent and the victim of modernism; the revolution devours its
children, but also its artists, and we end up with the farce called 'socialist
realism', populism reborn, the art of praising the rulers in terms they can
understand ( 1 999b: 95). The state colonizes the agora; this is how the
romance of modern intellectuals with totalitarian power comes to an end.
In the meantime, however, the problem shifts, towards the domination of
the agora by the market. The agora is invaded again, this time by the
market. The Greeks, too, knew about difference; contrary to the conceits of
developmental sociology, it sometimes looks as though modernity becomes
more simple, or identitarian in its logic. So market leaders, or owners,
become political leaders by default; even the idea of the autonomy of
politics today looks ridiculous. As Offe and others then explain, the prac
tical problem emerges that there is no ground to sustain the institutions or
agencies that might take formal responsibility for different social sites or
spheres of our existence. The prospect of collective action shrinks as the
identity of actors, parties, associations and unions is collapsed into prin
ciples of global economic growth. The agora is in effect closed to its
previous inhabitants, while the real actors become invisible; there is no
international agora. This is the down-side of the end of the modern project.
Indeed, on this account modernity is the last utopia; globalization is not a
project, but an ideology. The integration and reproduction of the new
'global order' takes on the guise of the hidden hand, presents itself as a
spontaneous and self-propelling process. The great novelty of modernity,
according to Bauman, was rather to present the creation, preservation and
continuity of 'order' as a task. 'But order-making is not seen as a task
anymore' ( 1 999b: 99) - to the contrary, alternative, purposeful action
becomes subversive of the global imperative.
This is potentially a shift of the same order as that indicated by the
Enlightenment. What became, in the twentieth century, an obsession with
making order, has now shifted (or is shifting) completely to a post-brave
new world where everything is left to its own. This shift is more potentially
powerful than anything we might associate with the idea of the post
modern, though the problem-complexes crossover. The postmodern,
Bauman argued in Legislators and Interpreters ( 1 987), represents not only
the belated, sceptical tum in the self-understanding of the intellectuals; it
also reflects the social ramifications of this change in the sociology of
intellectuals. To have intellectuals step back from their Faustian illusions is
a great and positive thing; only now the forces of world transformation
take on a life of their own, exactly as in the Goethe story. The sorcerer's
apprentice only starts the story, which outlives him (though Mickey Mouse
seems immortal). Having stepped aside from this passion play, the intel
lectuals find themselves less now to be interpreters, than to be functionally
useless in systemic terms. Having sought earlier to rule the world, they are
now back to translating for friends and relatives. For now:
1 66 Zygmunt Bauman
there is no need for knowledge classes to assume the role of the intellectuals - the
spiritual guides intending to make people different from what they now are by
teaching them things they would not learn themselves and teaching them first of
all that learning such things is worth their while. There are no big tasks, and so
there is no use for big ideas. (1 999b: 1 00)
Perhaps we should all then cultivate our gardens, return to those incomplete
novels in the bottom drawer, or learn to write biography. Bauman picks up
a cue from Umberto Eco to suggest that the choices are stark - the choice is
that between insiders and outsiders, intellectuals today can either be
'integrated' or 'apocalyptic'. The integrated carry on with the tasks of the
day, business as usual; they may be privately critical of social trends or
cultures, but it is beyond their remit to say so. The others, like Bauman, free
of the immediate need to please their masters, can take more than the
occasional snap at the hands that claim to feed them. In the meantime,
however, the actual availability of such hands has much diminished; the
postmodern outsider needs to sell enough copies of each instalment of
apocalyptic critique in order to keep bread on the table, or vodka in the
freezer. Given the modern restlessness, given our propensity to romanticism,
our incapacity ever to fully embrace the world we inhabit, and given the
presence of any decent, thriving cafe culture, a new, small economic cycle
has been set up; some intellectuals can still make a living out of telling
yuppie punters what they want to hear, that everyday life today is
impossible, even if we never want really to go 'back'. Theory becomes less
like education, more like therapy. Only the risk remains, that the apo
calyptic intellectuals are bemoaning the departure of what is already long
gone. There is little concern with the disappearance of politics in their texts,
which perhaps are more like movies than books. We no longer believe in
missionaries, but our universities have mission statements. Intellectual life
becomes televisual. Public intellectuals are televisual intellectuals; they no
longer get 1 5 minutes, only 1 5 second grabs, and must needs simplify; as
well as purring appropriately to the camera. As Bauman argues, the
pragmatics of television and of intellectual work differ sharply. Television is
ruled by ratings, and speed; but mass audience and high velocity are enemies
of thought, complexity, ambiguity, ambivalence ( 1 999b: 1 05).
So perhaps there is some social space for ideologists, if not for intel
lectuals (or for intellectuals as ideologists). As Bauman indicates, the
successful career of the idea of globalization already tells us that whatever
else has expired, ideology is alive and well. Yet the idea of ideology also has
a life of its own, as Bauman reminds, sketching out its path through the
French Revolution, with Destutt de Tracy's positive definition of ideology,
Marx and Engels' attack on that species of rationalism as idealist, and its
final arrival in the twentieth century first as a nasty (fascism as an ideology)
and finally as a non-entity (the 'end' of ideology) (1 999b: 1 1 3) with a last
marxist hiccup in the scientism of Louis Althusser (science good, ideology
bad). This is a parallel path to that which Bauman essayed earlier in
Hermeneutics and Social Science ( 1 978), where critical intellectuals figure as

ideologues rather than as hermeneuts. Ideology, of course, becomes the
object of critique inasmuch as it misrepresents the particular as the general;
as Marx indicates, the bourgeoisie falsely universalizes its own interests, as
though it represents all. Only Marx, too, in tum falls into the path of
ideological thinking as he explicitly universalizes the proletariat as the
people, and implicitly makes man stand for woman. What is striking about
this universalistic fallacy, in Bauman's critical argument here, is that it also
necessarily indicates the local orientation of the intellectuals who generated
such ideologies. It is not only that nationalism, or national particularism,
became one dominant modem ideology, where all 'humans' were made to
look like Englishmen, French or Germans. More, the very content and
context of ideology-making were locally grounded; so intellectuals were
national intellectuals, even as they professed cosmopolitanism. The knowl
edge classes worked with, and sought to educate, particular national
audiences. Now globalization reenters, for it is not only capital that is freed
of local bonds. Capital and knowledge have both been emancipated from
their local confinement ( 1 999b: 1 22). Some intellectuals can enter the
system, make themselves useful as managers or technicians; some few might
still act as the ideologues or advertisers of glossy globalism. Some even find
their way out of the periphery, into the centres on these newly established
networks of influence. But others will have nothing left to sell, for the
institutional matrices of their earlier existences have disappeared or been
rebuilt without them. Cultural capital, at the end of the day, is still a
metaphor; critical intellectuals have little left to sell in a consumer culture
where fast food prevails. Utopia is a hamburger.
What an extraordinary outcome for the intellectuals, for the new middle
class which constructed a project of its own between the original, historic
classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat. As Bauman puts it, the intellectuals
staked their claim to power, to reform, to educate, to plan and to engineer,
on the fact of their self-production: it was the vocation of the middle class
to be a 'cIass-producing-c1ass' ( 1 999b: 1 28). Self-production also meant self
promotion; and now, if the middle class missionaries have lost their
constituencies, then they cannot face up to the task of representing them
selves. What marks off most conspicuously the present-day thought of the
knowledge classes is its self-referentiality, its acute preoccupation with the
conditions of its own professional activity and an increasingly non
committal stance taken towards other sectors of society ( l 999b: 1 29).
Once again, however, Bauman recognizes that there is no point asking
now for a return to the old order, which is disappearing before our eyes.
Instead he mounts a case for the recovery of tradition, as opposed to habit.
Habit is effectively areflexive, whereas traditions suggest choices between
repertoires of thought and action. All traditions are invented; the idea of
'invented tradition' (Hobsbawm) is nothing new, it only refers to particular
instances where the inventors were caught in the act. The idea of post
traditionalism (Giddens), similarly, exaggerates its own novelty; for all that
1 68 Zygmunt Bauman
it really identifies is the plurality or surplus of traditions from which we can

now choose ( l 999b: 1 23). Our existential fate still a century later does not
differ radically from that identified by Max Weber: we have to choose our
own gods, knowing always that we have made the choice. Our choices need
not be final, that is to say; we do not become traditionalists, mere followers,
once we choose this tradition over that, for our practices are neither so rule
governed nor so final. Even if we seek to close on our images of the past, we
cannot sign up as life-time members in advance for particular hopes of the
future.
Conclusions: Crisis and Critique
Where does this leave us? In crisis, and so Bauman turns to the idea of crisis
and its opportunities. He returns to Habermas, the great hope and sub
sequent disappointment of Critical Theory. Twenty years ago we read
Legitimation Crisis with enthusiasm, before Habermas used it as filler upon
which to build the monument of Theory of Communicative A ction. Already
in those distant days some detected the slippage to systems theory within
Legitimation Crisis; all the same, that book had a sense of urgency, indeed,
a mission, to connect up economic and cultural crisis and critique, to gaze
into the present as though it were still open, for 'crisis' still then suggested
choice, rather than the regime of permanent chaos which we now seem to
think of as crisis. Contrary to Habermas, however, Bauman wants to
suggest that the idea of crisis is first of all experiential, rather than systemic.
The sense of the normal does not generate that of crisis; the idea of crisis
rather makes us wonder about the norm. Inasmuch as crisis indicates
transience or transition, crisis is in fact the norm in any case. Crisis means
nothing more than living with ambivalence, an idea we have still not got
used to, at least not in the streets or in our kitchens rather than in the study.
Crisis is the ambivalence we have to learn to live with, which suggests in
effect that the idea of crisis is redundant, which in tum makes sense because
it is everywhere and nowhere.
We could, then, embrace crisis, or contingency, and make of it a virtue;
for there is little enough sense otherwise of room to move. What visions
might then be available to us? Bauman has no patience for neo-tribalism,
and is ambivalent at best about the nation-state. The image of the agora,
and the radical classicism of Castoriadis' work resurface here, as does the
image of the republic as an antidote to the nation-state; Castoriadis'
enthusiasm for the Greeks has always been open to the criticism that
something else happened (by way of scale and complexity) on the way to
modernity. Nationalism demands loyalty, my country right or wrong; the
idea of republicanism, in contrast, puts critical inquiry at the heart of
community membership. Globalization therefore undermines not only the
fact of the nation-state, but also the possibility of the project of repUblican
ism. The project of republicanism, in tum, depends upon the forms of the
welfare state. The result of globalization is less that there will be no nations
than that there will be no (welfare) states. The precondition of any possible
advance, for Bauman, however, is provision, for we need to have some kind
of hold on the present before we can begin to take on the future. The
present political economy of uncertainty returns us to habits of survival,
not extension or revision ( 1 999b: 1 73). Populations made 'redundant' are
hardly likely to push themselves forward as willing candidates to remake
the world. Poverty therefore emerges as the central issue today:
Lifting the poor from their poverty is not just a matter of charity, conscience and
ethical duty - but an indispensable (though only preliminary) condition of re
building the republic of free citizens out of the wasteland of the global market.
( 1 999b: 1 77)
The poor are the local Other of the frightened consumers; the deprived are
turned into the depraved, the internal, infernal enemy at the door. Yet even
for those in work, work today is like a daily rehearsal for redundancy
( 1 999b: 1 79). We need to help the poor, not only because they are there or
because we may at any moment join them, but also because their presence
makes the very idea of social progress a mockery. We all together need
some kind of existential security if we are even to think again about making
politics. This means, in the meantime, that we must revisit the policy idea
which also did the rounds in the time of Legitimation Crisis, and of Offe's
pioneering work in radical social policy: basic income, guaranteed adequate
income, income decoupled from labour market participation.
Politics follows existence; provision will not generate citizenship of itself,
but may well be its necessary condition. This, indeed, is exactly Bauman's
concern here. It is ethical to care for the other, that is one issue; another,
larger issue has less to do with the quality of life in common than with its
political significance ( 1 999b: 1 83). Basic income is not just good or just
social policy, it is the chance to open ethical debate about human value,
and potentially it offers the space for the revival of participation. The more
immediate problem, itself political, involves the absence of an actor or will
to-power sufficient to introduce basic income. The old hands of radical
social policy might in turn now deride the argument as old hat. Bauman's
reply, through the haze of his pipe-smoke, is obvious; we need first of all to
set out in search of politics. In Search of Politics opens the door; if it barely
begins the journey, then this is to pass the puzzle on to others in all its
contingency. At the least, we are back, with Bauman, with questions, and
with big questions. Not the arrival, but the journey matters; and this is a
journey that never ends. No critique without crisis; no crisis without
critique - at this point, having tracked the human condition, he hands on
the baton.
Epilogue: Mediations
What is it then, in conclusion, that Bauman hands on to us, to use and to

extend? This is a good question, and it is difficult to begin to answer. Bauman
is, among other things, a cultural messenger between us and his own peers,
and between us and the classics of social theory. The larger field in which he
operates is plainly that which we still today call critical theory, starting with
Marx, out through the work of the Frankfurt School and into its French
parallel paths, via Foucault. Inasmuch as critical theory in this ecumenical
sense is primarily concerned with the critique of modernity, it therefore
follows that Bauman's work, too, is necessarily a contribution to the critique
of modernity. The specific inflection of Bauman's critique of modernity is as
a critique of order; it is this which places Modernity and the Holocaust ( l 989a)
and Modernity and Ambivalence ( 1 99 1 a) at the centre of his project. Structure
is the hardest illusion; order is the harshest imperative, once added to modern
forms of enforcement and implementation. Yet Bauman remains ambivalent,
rather than unremittingly negative, about the world we thus generate. Ours
is a dialectic of modernity. Modernity, or modernism crushes ambivalence,
yet fosters it; the modernist urge to control is deeply superstitious, and in
this sense modernity remains traditionalistic rather than innerly modern.
Bauman's formal enthusiasm for the postmodern, in this context, responds
to the in-principle possibility that the postmodern might expand the space
available for ambivalence. It is not the case that modernity cannot abide
difference, or ambivalence; rather, the problem is that high modernity
combines the political will and the technological means to reinforce con
formism, at least outwardly. Bauman's concern is that humans are, and
ought to be ambivalent, at least sufficiently uncertain to remain open to the
world, to both value differing traditions and to remain open to the possibility
of change. Human ambivalence is the precondition of social change.
In all this we remain creatures of second nature, creatures of our own
collective creation. Second nature, this idea posited by Hegel and developed
by Marx, becomes via Critical Theory something more like history, or the
social. Here we can see Bauman operating both as messenger and as medi
ator, or innovator. As Marx explained in scattered passages across his
manuscripts, from the German Ideology to the Grundrisse, that new problem
complex which he calls capitalism (and we call modernity) naturalizes itself.
Capitalist activity universalizes itself, reinventing history as the history of
capitalism and individualism, leaving no public place for citizens to enquire
into whence private property or commodification came. Capitalist modern
ism radically reduces the spaces within which we can think outside its
Epilogue: mediations 171
imaginary. In the 1 970s, marxists responded to this problem mainly in terms

of ideology-critique. The problem with modernity, in this optic, was that
capitalism reproduced itself through ideology; only ideology, in these forays,
often looked like something fogged up on capital's spectacles, rather than
part of our being, or nature. As Adorno wrote in Negative Dialectics,
however, ideology is not superimposed as a detachable layer on the being of
society; it is inherent in that being (Adorno, 1966: 354). The abstraction
from difference is built into the value-form, as Marx showed in his
masterwork, Capita/. The natural growth of capitalist society is real, and at
the same time is semblance. We are both authors of this world and its
victims, for these illusions become as hard as steel. Having driven God out of
the temple, we praise the commodity, instead, in the hallowed space of the
shopping malls, for these are what we are left with, the cathedrals of
capitalism.
But this is an anthropological problem, and not only one to do with
commodification or even objectification. As Adorno and Horkheimer wrote
in Dialectic of Enlightenment, civilization is the victory of society over nature
which changes everything into pure nature (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1 944:
1 86). This in tum becomes especially difficult, because all perception is based
on projection. Modernity is the social regime of projection par excellence.
Yet European civilization is simultaneously another story. Europe has
two histories: a well-known, written history and an underground history
(Adorno and Horkheimer, 1 944: 23 1). Modernity moves by its dark side;
this is why the experience and image of the Holocaust remain so central for
us, generations on, even in far-flung places.
What a challenge it is, all the same, to remain both historically located
and intellectually open. We are, indeed, creatures of our pasts, though
sometimes our pasts, real or imagined, also become intellectual safe houses;
we often feel the need to be who we think we came from, rather than to be
what we are. As Alain Finkielkraut shows in his extraordinary book The
Imaginary Jew ( 1 994), yet another of Bauman's various stimulants, keeping
the Holocaust alive after the fact both risks disservice to the event and
potentially misplaces us, as actors in a world after that fact. Likely the
living will never escape the nightmares of the past; the problem is how to
seek out the balance, both to recognize and remember and to take on the
present, even the future.
If the figure of Marx stalls and recedes in all this, what happens, then, to
Heidegger? Bauman makes clear his distance from Heidegger, as from
romanticism; modernity is deeply problematical, but the only possible way
out is forward. In any case, notwithstanding the presence of some appar
ently Heideggerian motifs in Bauman's work, it seems to me rather to be
the case that Bauman's Heidegger is mediated through the brilliant but
often critical work of Heidegger's Jewish students, Jonas, Arendt, Levinas
and Marcuse.
The difference indicated by this mediation is crucial; whatever else he
was, critic of modernity as technology, theorist of framing, Heidegger was a
1 72 Zygmunt Bauman
Gentile and a Nazi. The defining attributes of his followers were sharply
distinct, both Jewish and in different ways, radical. We have observed
various echoes and sympathies in Bauman's work with the projects of these
thinkers. Bauman agrees with Jonas, in the spirit of this argument con
cerning second nature, that we become the objects of our own fabrications.
Our means become ends, our prostheses become our culture; but innerly?
some other chance remains, for second nature is second chance. Bauman's
sympathies with Arendt are abundant, not least in that Arendt both
maintains the classical dedication to politics and the republican enthusiasm
for democratic forms of political participation. And then, of course, there is
the debt which any book like Modernity and the Holocaust ( 1989a) must
owe to Arendt's great study of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Bauman's
connection to Levinas is obvious in the party of two that goes to make up
much of Postmodern Ethics ( l 993a). The presence or influence of Marcuse
is different, more opaque. While there are some well-observed parallels
between Marcuse and Foucault, it is the latter whose critical work arrives at
the significant moment in Bauman's journey, between Memories of Class
( 1 982) and Legislators and Interpreters ( 1 987). Yet there are ongoing sym
pathies of a looser kind between Marcuse and Bauman, as there is a kind of
undeclared dialogue between Bauman and Adorno and, in a different
register, between Bauman and the early Habermas - the Habermas of
Theory and Practice, before the Durksonian turn.
The figure of Habermas remains enigmatic here, not because of this turn
so much as due to the question of his unresolved relationship to Heidegger.
Habermas' political rage against Heidegger's refusal to confront his Nazi
past has served to leave the question of Habermas' debt or parallel path
to Heidegger undisclosed. Reading the work of the later Habermas, it is
difficult not to sense that his grand theory has a place for virtually every
Western thinker apart from Heidegger. And yet the legacy of the Critical
Theory of the Frankfurt School is nothing, if not the critique of technology.
Jonas, Arendt, Levinas, Marcuse . . . there is one figure missing from this
list of influential mediators between Heidegger and Bauman: Karl Lowith.
Lowith is a striking absence not least because, as I indicated above,
Lowith's lasting contribution to Critical Theory was, following the clue in
Lukacs' 1 923 History and Class Consciousness, to seek better to align Marx
and Weber as philosophical critics of modernity in his 1 932 essay, Max
Weber and Karl Marx. Probably there is little in Heidegger for sociology
that a sensitive reader could not find in Weber's work, in its Nietzschean
pathos, not least in the emerging critique of technical rationality. Bauman's
most brilliant engagement with Weber's Protestant Ethic is with its own
component of projection; sociologists are suckered by the image of the
Puritan, the upright, disciplined, hard-working citizen . . . sounds just like
us. Bauman passes on the opportunity to engage more directly with those
last several pages of The Protestant Ethic, where Weber outlines his
anxieties about the future, the infamous problem of the 'iron cage' . Yet at
the same time, much of Bauman's work reads something like a dialogue
Epilogue: mediations 1 73
with the ghost of Weber. In Simmel he has little to disagree with. Weber's
presence, I think, remains more discernible in the margins.
For the closing passages of The Protestant Ethic also rehearse an argu
ment concerning something like second nature, and its vicissitudes. There
Weber discusses the 'light cloak' which we moderns fabricate for ourselves,
and speculates about the way in which it becomes a casing as hard as steel,
the 'stahlhartes Gehiiuse' which the young Talcott Parsons mischievously
translated as the 'iron cage'. Weber contrived this image of society as the
casing as hard as steel in 1 904/5, some years before Kafka published
Metamorphosis, though they seem in some way possessing of affinity.
Weber's housing is a carapace, a house like a rod that we make for our
backs but which we possibly can bear, as the snail or crustacean makes its
way carrying its habitus. It protects, even as it insularizes, this self
constructed house or prison, constructed by our predecessors, taken on by
us as natural, as second nature. Perhaps, then, the horror image of Kafka,
like the prison-image of society taken out of Foucault, is more provocative
than persuasive as an intellectual device; no house, no home. Second nature
hardens, and limits us, but it also serves to mediate between us and the
world. If there is anything in this way of thinking, then it would follow that
our challenge is less to escape from this box than to be vigilant against the
perils of conformism which habit prescribes, and tyrants encourage upon
us. On this view, there is no life we can know or imagine outside of our
institutions; what we forget, rather, is that instituting is an activity, not only
a result, and that organizations do nothing; actors do. This is the message
which Bauman passes on to us, to interpret sufficiently well to know how
and what in our surroundings to value; to criticize what in them is
destructive, and to remember that ordinary intelligence and intuition can
enable us to live decent lives within second nature, for there is nothing else
beyond modernity than this basic challenge of the human condition.
References
Note: The most comprehensive bibliography of Bauman's work, to 1 995, is available

in Kilminster and Varcoe ( 1 996: 248-60). Entries marked with an asterisk (*) below
are included or excerpted in Beilharz (2000).
Amason, J.P. ( 1 993) The Experiment that Failed, London: Routledge.

Adorno, T. ( 1 966) Negative Dialectics, London: Verso, 1 979 edn.
Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. ( 1 944) Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York,
Continuum, 1 973 edn.
Adorno, T., with Frankel-Brunswick, E., Levinson, OJ. and Nevitt Sanford, R.
( 1 969) The Authoritarian Personality, New York: Norton.
Bauman, J. ( 1 986) Winter in the Morning, London: Virago.
Bauman, J. ( 1 988) A Dream of Belonging, London: Virago.
Bauman, J. ( 1 998) ' Demons of Other People's Fear: The Plight of the Gypsies',
Thesis Eleven, 54.
Bauman, Z. ( 1 968a) 'Modern Times, Modem Marxism', Social Research, 34.*
Bauman, Z. ( l 968b) ' Marx and the Contemporary Theory of Culture', Social
Science Information, 7, 3.
Bauman, Z. ( 1 972) Between Class and Elite, Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Bauman, Z. ( 1 973a) Culture as Praxis, London: Routledge.
Bauman, Z. ( 1 973b) 'The Structuralist Promise', British Journal of Sociology, 24, 1 .
Bauman, Z. ( l976a) Socialism: The Active Utopia, London: Allen and Unwin.·
Bauman, Z. ( 1 976b) Towards a Critical SOciology, London: Routledge.
Bauman, Z. ( 1 978) Hermeneutics and Social Science: Approaches to Understanding,
London: Hutchinson. ·
Bauman, Z. ( 1 982) Memories of Class: The Prehistory and After-Life of Class,
London: Routledge.'"
Bauman, Z. ( 1 984) 'Dictatorship Over Needs', Telos, 60.·
Bauman, Z. ( 1 987) Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity and
Intellectuals, Oxford: Polity.·
Bauman, Z. ( 1 988) Freedom, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Bauman, Z. ( 1 989a) Modernity and the Holocaust, Oxford: Polity.·
Bauman, Z. ( 1 989b) ' Hermeneutics and Modern Social Theory', in D. Held and J.
Thompson (eds) Social Theory of Modern Societies: Giddens and his Critics,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bauman, Z. ( 1 990) Thinking Sociologically, Oxford: Blackwell.
Bauman, Z. ( 1 99 1 a) Modernity and Ambivalence, Oxford: Polity.·
Bauman, Z. ( 1 99 1 b) Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies, Oxford:
Polity.
Bauman, Z. ( 1 992) Intimations of Postmodernity, London: Routledge.·
Bauman, Z. ( l 993a) Postmodern Ethics, Oxford: Polity.·
Bauman, Z. ( 1 993b) 'The Sweet Scent of Decomposition', in C. Rojek and B. Turner
(eds) Forget Baudrillard?, London: Routledge.
Bauman, Z. ( 1 994) 'Narrating Modernity', in J. Burnheim (ed.) The Social Philo
sophy of Agnes Heller, Amsterdam, Rodopi.
References 1 75
Bauman, Z. ( 1 995) Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality, Oxford:

Polity. *
Bauman, Z. ( l 997a) Postmodernity and its Discontents, Oxford: Polity.*
Bauman, Z. ( I 997b) 'Giddens In Defence of Sociology', Thesis Eleven, 5 1 .
Bauman, Z . ( I 998a) Globalization: The Human Consequences, Cambridge: Polity.*
Bauman, Z. ( l 998b) Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, London: Open
University. *
Bauman, Z. ( l 999a) Culture as Praxis, London: Sage (2nd edn).
Bauman, Z. ( 1 999b) In Search of Politics, Oxford: Polity.
Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity, Oxford: Polity.
Beilharz, P. ( 1 987) Trotsky, Trotskyism and the Transition to Socialism, London:
Croom Helm.
Beilharz, P. ( 1 992) Labour's Utopias: Bolshevism, Fabianism, Social Democracy,
London: Routledge.
Beilharz, P. ( I 994a) Transforming Labor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Beilharz, P. ( I 994b) Postmodern Socialism: Romanticism, City and State,
Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Beilharz, P. ( 1 997) Imagining the Antipodes, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Beilharz, P. ( 1 999) 'McFascism? Reading Ritzer, Bauman and the Holocaust', in B.
Smart (ed.) Resisting McDonaldization, London: Sage.
Beilharz, P. (ed.) (2000) The Bauman Reader, Oxford: Blackwell.
Beilharz, P., Considine, M. and Watts, R. ( 1 992) Arguing About the Welfare State,
Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Berman, M. ( 1 984) All That is Solid Melts Into Air, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Calhoun, C. (1 982) The Question of Class Struggle, Oxford: Blackwell.
Castoriadis, C. ( 1 9 8 1 ) Devant la Guerre, Paris: Fayard.
Castoriadis, C. ( 1 987) The Imaginary Institution of Society, Oxford: Polity.
Davidson, A . ( 1 977) Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography, London:
Merlin.
Durkheim, E. ( 1 959) Socialism, London: Routledge (first published 1 894/5).
Feher, F., Heller, A. and Markus, G. (1 983) Dictatorship over Needs, Oxford:
Blackwell.
Finkielkraut, A. ( 1 994) The Imaginary Jew, Lincoln: Nebraska University Press.
Goldhagen, D. ( 1 996) Hitler's Willing Executioners, London: Little Brown.
Gouldner, A. (1 975) The Two Marxisms, New York: Seabury.
Habermas, J. ( 1 962) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Boston:
M IT, 1 989 edn.
Herf, J. ( 1 984) Reactionary Modernism, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kilminster, R. and Varcoe, I. (eds) (1 996) Culture, Modernity and Revolution: Essays
in Honour of Zygmunt Bauman, London: Routledge.
L6with, K. ( 1 982) Max Weber and Karl Marx, London: Allen and Unwin (first
published 1932).
Lubasz, H. ( 1 976) 'Marx's Initial Problematic', Political Studies, 24, I .
Lukacs, G. ( 1 97 1 ( 1 923]) History and Class Consciousness, London: Merlin.
Marshall, T.H. ( 1 950) Citizenship and Social Class, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Moore, B., Jr ( 1978) Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt, London:
Macmillan.
Moscovici, S. (1 996) The Invention of Society, Cambridge: Polity.
Musil, R. ( 1 995) The Man Without Qualities, New York: Knopf.
Patterson, O. ( 1 99 1 ) Freedom, New York: Basic.
Prawer, S.S. ( 1 978) Karl Marx and World Literature, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
1 76 References
Rundell, J. ( 1 994) 'Gadamer and the Circles of Hermeneutics', in D. Roberts (ed.)

Reconstructing Theory, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Seabrook, J. ( 1985) Landscapes of Poverty, Oxford: Blackwell.
Sebald, G. ( 1 998) The Rings of Saturn, London: Harvill.
Smith, B. ( 1 996) 'Two Meanings of Art', Thesis Eleven, 44.
Smith, B. ( 1 998) Modernism's History: A Study in Twentieth-Century Art and Ideas,
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Smith, T. ( 1 993) Making the Modern, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Spengler, O. ( 1 9 1 8, 1 922) The Decline of the West, London: Allen and Unwin 1 926,
1 928.
Theory, Culture and Society ( 1 998) 1 5, 1 .
Touraine, A . (1 987) The Workers' Movement, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
,
Touraine, A. ( 1 992) 'Is Sociology Still the Study of Society? in P. Beilharz, G.
Robinson and J. Rundell (eds) Between Totalitarianism and Postmodernity.
Cambridge, MA: M IT Press.
Triado, J. ( 1 984) 'Corporation, Democracy and Modernity', Thesis Eleven, 9.
Index
adiaphorization 3 1 , 1 14, 1 3 1 , Bollomore, T. 6 1 corporatism 1 3, 1 6-2 1 , 1 1 8, 1 20

1 5 1 , 164 Bourdieu, P . 1 36, 142 craftsmen 7-8
Adorno, T. 69, 98, 108, 163, bourgeoisie 8, 1 5, 6 1 -4, 83; order crime 26, 3 1
1 7 1 -2 1 67; socialism 1 1 6 criminalization 1 34, 1 54, 160
alienation 37, 38 Brentano, F. 6 crisis 1 68-9
alterity 1 39 Brezhnev, L. 1 16 critical sociology 46
Althusser, L. 32, 39, 166 British Museum 1 1 3 Critical Theory 19, 38, 40, 50, 66;
Amalfi Prize 88, 105 Brown, N. 149 architecture 1 56; crisis 168;
ambivalence 1 05 � 1 2, 148, 1 57, Browning, C. 93 ethics 1 27; fragmentation 140;
168, 170 Budapest School 62 mediations 1 70, 1 72;
Anderson, P. 9 bureaucracy 1 5, 63, 76, 92, 96-9; utopianism 87
architecture 1 55 - 7 ambivalence 105, 107; ethics Crozier, M . 1 58
Arendt, H. 94, 1 02, 142 �3, 1 64, 1 04; freedom 1 4 1 ; sociology cryonics 149
1 7 1 -2 101 culture: ambivalence 108;
Aries, P. 146 Burnham, J. 15 consumption 145; death
aristocracy 8, 1 0 146-52; elitism 1 34; freedom
Aristotle 34, 1 23 Calhoun, C . 50 1 4 1 ; language 70 -2, 106;
art 5 1 , 1 34 Camus, A. 38, 100 sociology 34-57
assimilation 39, 40, I I I, 1 1 2- 1 5, Carlyle, T. 24, 1 6 1 Culture as Praxis 34-40
125; fragmentation 1 29; Carroll, J . 46, 8 1 , 1 35, 163
postmodernity 1 33 Castoriadis, C. 14, 22-3, 32, 39, Dadaism 5 1
Alllee, C. II 46; crisis 168; culture 74; ethics Davis, M . 1 29
Auschwitz 9 1 , 95 -6, 1 06, 1 22, 1 04; globalization 1 54; death 146-52, 1 6 1 -3
1 59 legislation 79; morality 1 27, deconstruction 66, 70, 1 58
authorization 92 1 28; politics 1 59, 1 60, 1 64; dehumanization 92, 96, 98, 1 04
autonomy 2 1 -·2 socialism 1 1 9 demonization 3 1
Chadwick, E. 1 6, 24 dependence 1 37, 1 39- 40, 1 58
Bacon, F. 59 chaos 1 07, 1 1 3, 1 1 9, 1 3 1 -2, 1 55, Derrida, J. 1 1 0
Baczko, L. 1 56 168 Descartes, R. 89
Bakunin, M. 1 5 Chicago School 48 -9, 50 deskilling II
Barthes, R . 36, 47 Cioran, E.M. 1 27 ��8 determinism 1 38
Bateson, G. 47 class structure 4-33 Dewey, J. 42
Baudrillard, J. 4, 14, 5 1 , 79, classification 107, 1 1 0 dialectical materialism 40
1 35 -6, 142 Clinton, B. 1 8, 1 1 4 Dilthey, W. 67
Bauhaus 5 1 , 1 56 Cole, G.D.H. 1 2 disciplines 44, 52
Bauman, J. 1 .. 2, 88� 9 1 , 98, 1 1 2 collectivism 1 37 Disraeli, B. 8, 24, 83
Baxter, R. 8 Columbus complex 49 division of labour 96, 1 04
Beck, U. 56, 1 3 1 , 1 60, 1 6 1 communications revolution Djilas, M. 1 5
Bellamy, E. 60 1 57-8 Doctors' Plot 2
Benjamin, W. 1 08 communism 10, 25, 59, 1 1 6- 19; Douglas, M. 37, 38, 92, 1 32
Bentham, J. 1 6, 24, 78, 1 38, freedom 140, 142; politics 1 64; Durkheim, E. 10, 27, 36, 40-· 3;
140 I postmodernity 1 22 -3, 1 32; culture 46, 49; death 1 50;
Berlin, I. 1 37 sociology 1 1 9 ..20 ethics 1 04, 1 27; freedom 1 38;
Berlin Wall 4, 50, 160 communitarianism 124 -5, 1 33, globalization 1 56; mediations
Berman, M . 79, 1 6 1 1 37 172; morality 1 0 1 ; politics 163;
Bernstein, E. II Comte, A. 4 1 postmodernism 86; sociology
Beveridge, W . H . 1 35 -6, 1 62 conformism 4 1 , 1 00 - 1 , 1 04, 1 23; 48-9, 50, 55, 1 0 1 -2, 103;
Bildung 7 1 , 72, 1 34 ethics 127- 8; freedom 140 utopias 59, 60- 1
Birmingham School 38 conscience collective 103 Durksonianism see Durkheim;
Blair, T. 27, 50 consumerism 73, 8 1 , 85-6, 1 22; Parsons
Bland, H . I I freedom 142; globalization dystopias 58-·9, 86, 1 32, 140
Boas, F. 72 1 58 - 9; politics 164
Bolsheviks 4, I I , 60, 65, 93; consumption 1 7- 20, 22-·32, 48, Eastern Europe 1 5, 39, 40, 1 / 2,
postmodernity 1 1 8, 1 32; 52 �5; crisis 1 69; culture 145; 1 1 8, 1 44
utopias 62, 63, 66 fragmentation 1 29; freedom eclecticism 5 2
Booth, C. 1 14 1 38, 142; postmodernity 132 Eco, U. 166
Borges, J.L. 35 Corbusier 1 55, 1 56- 7 Elias, N. 47, 49, 97
1 78 Zygmunt Bauman
Eliot, T.S. 109 Germany 1 0- 1 1 , 50, 68, 90- 2; India 6

elites 8- 12, 27, 1 34, 1 54 ambivalence 1 07, 1 09; indoctrination 140
Ellul, J. 97, 1 06, 1 3 1 , 163 assimilation 1 1 2; industrial revolution 6, 77,
Enclosure Acts 1 4 fragmentation 1 34; Holocaust 1 54
Engels, F. 72, 1 07, 1 6 6 97, 103, 1 1 9 information technology 97
Enlightenment 16, 43, 72, 75, Giddens, A. 49, 50, 5 1 , 1 67 intellectuals 5, 1 5, 38, 58-87, 1 3 1 ;
77 -8; adiaphorization 1 3 1 ; gifting 47 communications revolution
ambivalence 1 05, 1 08; globalization 22-3, 28, 53, 73; 1 58; freedom 1 38; order 1 67;
communism 1 19, 1 20; ethics crisis 1 68 -9; human condition politics 164-6; second nature
104; Holocaust 95; order 165; 145; order 166, 167; politics 41
politics 163; postmodernity 1 6 1 , 162 intentionality 42
1 24, 1 34; socialism 1 1 9; Globalization: The Human Internet 1 58
utopianism 86 Consequences ix, 1 52-9 Intimations oj Postmodernity
enmity 109 Goethe, J. W. von 72, 165 5 1 -6
epistemology 67, 69, 76, 84 GotTman, E. 42, 47, 99
ethics 23, 27, 56, 68, 8 1 ; death Goldhagen, D. 9 1 , 98 Jacobinism 60, 66, 86
148, 1 5 1 ; Holocaust 98-9, Gorbachev, M. 1 1 6 Jacobs, J. 1 57
1 0 1 - 5 ; human condition 1 57; Gorz, A. 64 Jameson, F. 5 1
postmodernity 1 22 - 3 1 Gouldner, A. 1 5, 74 Jews 65, 78, 1 03, 105;
ethnomethodology 68 Gramsci, A. 4, 62-6, 74, 143 ambi valence 1 07, 1 1 2;
Etzioni, A. 100 guilds 6-·7, 1 7 assimilation 1 1 2, 1 1 3;
eugenics 1 09, 1 30 Gypsies 92, 1 1 2 Holocaust 88-94, 98, 1 00;
exclusion 1 07, 1 25, 1 29; see also postmodernity 1 32
outsiders; strangers; Habermas, J. 38, 43, 49, 66; crisis Jonas, H. 125, 1 7 1 , 1 72
vagabonds 168; hermeneutics 69;
existentialism 42, 1 0 I , 1 28, mediations 1 72; Kafka, F. 173
149-50 postmodernism 85; sociology Kampuchea 4
eye contact 47 50 Kant, I. 33, 76, 78, 1 04, 123
Halimi, S. 29 Katyn massacre 89
Fabian, J. 124 Hall, S. 38, 39, 73 Kautsky, KJ. 32, 62, 65, 83
Fabians 9 - 1 1 , 1 6, 109 Hardie, K. II Kelman, H . 92
fascism 58, 62, 93, 97-9; Hegel, G.W.F. 1 40, 170 Keynesianism 20, 26-8, 55
Holocaust 1 1 3, 1 1 8; order 1 66; Heidegger, M. 67-8, 1 35, 1 7 1 -2 Khruschev, N. 25
politics 1 64; postmodernity Held, D. 49 Klemm, G. 72
122; society 1 00; sociology Heller, A. 16, 39, 40, I I I ; Kolakowski, L. 74
1 1 9-21 communism 1 14, 1 1 7, 1 1 8; Konrad, G. 1 5, 1 6
Faustianism 79 freedom 142-3 Kulaks 65, 95
Feher, F. 1 6, 1 1 7, 1 1 8, 142 Henderson, A. 10
Feuerbach, L. 1 6 Herf, J. 93 labour 4-33
Final Solution 92, 1 32, 1 34 hermeneutics 77, 8 1 , 1 5 1 , 167 Labour Party 10, 1 2
Finkielkraut, A. 1 7 1 Hermeneutics and Social Science laissez-Jaire 1 1 7
Fordism 1 8, 22, 84, 95, 1 54; 66-70 language 70- 1 , 1 06
Holocaust 9 1 ; sociology 1 20 Herodotus 35, 36, 1 24 Lasch, C. 1 27
Foucault, M. 4, 14, 16, 1 8, 47; heterophobia 94, 95 Lasswell, H. 1 5
culture 5 1 ; domination 1 1 9; Hilberg, R. 93 Le Bon, G. 4 1
freedom 1 38-9, 140, 1 4 1 ; Himmler, H. 103 Levi-Strauss, c. 35, 39-40, 67;
globalization 1 56; legislation Hitler, A. 1 00, 1 1 3 culture 70, 72-3; ethics 1 25
77 -8; mediations 1 70, 1 72, Hobbes, T. 42, 1 27, 1 3 1 leadership 65
173; utopianism 75 Hobsbawm, E . 1 67 legislation 68, 1 57
Fourier, F.M .C. 1 57 Holocaust 57, 77, 88- 1 2 1 ; death Legislators and Interpreters viii,
France 10, 1 26, 1 34, 140 146-8, 1 5 1 ; ethics 1 24, 1 26, ix, 75-86
Frankfurt School 1 1 3, 1 70, 1 72 1 28; mediations 1 7 1 ; Lenin, V.I. 62, 63, 65, 83, 1 1 6
Franklin, B. 8 postmodernity 122- 3 Levinas, E. 103, 1 25, 1 27, 1 36;
free will 1 38 Horkheimer, M. 69, 108, 1 27, 1 7 1 death 1 49; mediations
Freedom 1 36- 42 humanism 1 35, 148 1 7 1 -2
French Revolution 166 Hungary 40 Liberal Party 1 0
Freud, S. 1 7, 47, 97, 1 0 1 ; H usserl, E. 42, 68 liberalism 9- 1 0, 1 09, 1 30, 1 37
assimilation 1 1 3; culture 146; Huxley, A. 58, 142 Life in Fragments ix, 1 26·-3 1
death 148; postmodernity Hyndman, H.M. 10 London School o f Economics
1 3 1 · 2, 1 35 (LSE) 2, 4
friendship 1 09, 1 1 0 iatrogenesis 149 Liiwith, K. 68, 1 72
future generations 1 54-5 identity 128-9, 1 30, 142 Lubasz, H. 1 4
futurism 1 57 Illich, I. 1 1 3 Lukacs, G. 3 2 , 74, 84; freedom
ILP see Independent Labour 143; mediations 1 72; utopias
Gadamer, H.-G. 67, 68, 69, 8 1 Party 1 19
Gaitskell, H. 1 1 , 24 imperialism 6, ix lumpenproletariat 30
Geertz, C. 35 In Search oj Politics ix, 1 59- 64 Luther, M. 8 1 , 1 28
Gellner, E. 78, 1 50 Independent Labour Party (ILP) Luxemburg, R. 1 1 , 74
genocide 95, 97, 1 09, 1 3 1 , 1 59 9, 1 0 Lyotard, J.F. 5 1 , 1 36
Index 1 79
Macdonald, D. 98 Moscovici, S. 1 0 1 political economy 19, 22, 43, 67;

MacDonald, R. II Moses, R . 1 57 freedom 140; postmodernity
Machajski 1 5 multiculturalism 39 162
Machiavelli, N. 1 39 Musil, R. 26, 96 political parties 9
Maeterlink, M. 89 Mussolini, B. 62, 1 64 Poor Laws 129
Malinowsky, B. 72 Myrdal, G. 3 1 Popper, K. 69
managerialism 50, 74 positivism 43
Mannheim, K. 68 nationalism 47-8, 1 50, 167, Post Fordism 22, 23, 28
mapping 1 55 1 68 postmarxism 122, 127
Marcuse, H. 1 8- 19, 38, 64, 1 1 3; Nazis 4 1 , 65, 78, 103, 105; Postmodern Ethics ix, 123-6
ethics 1 27; mediations 1 7 1 -2 ambivalence 109; ethics 123, postmodemity 1 6, 22, 24-5, 28;
marginality 37, 38 1 30; freedom 140, 143; ambivalence 1 10- 1 1 ;
Marinetti, F.T. 1 56 Holocaust 88- 93, 95- 1 0 1 , assimilation 1 14- 1 5; culture
Markus, G. 1 1 7, 1 1 8, 142 1 1 9; mediations 1 72; 38, 39-40, 73; death 147, 1 5 1 ;
Marshall, T.H. 19 postmodemity 1 32-3; social globalization 1 53, 1 56, 158;
Marx, K. 4, 6, 8·-9, 14, 16; engineering 1 1 3; socialism 1 1 6; hermeneutics 69; legislation
assimilation 1 1 3; class 32; sociology 120 75-6, 77, 80; mediations 170;
culture 7 1 -4, 83; death 1 5 1 ; neoliberalism 27 politics 1 6 1 , 163; second
ethics 1 24; globalization 1 55; neotribalism 1 30 nature 4 1 ; socialism 1 1 8;
hermeneutics 66-9; history 57; New Deal 29, 1 1 6 sociology 44, 5 1 -6, 1 20;
Holocaust 89; labour New Labour 49, 50, 5 1 , 1 52 unemployment 85
movement 19, 2 1 , 27-8; New Prince 60, 62 Postmodernity and its Discontents
legislation 77, 79, 8 1 ; master Niemeyer, O. 157 ix, 1 3 1 -6
slave dialectic 140; mediations Nietzsche, F. 79, 127, 1 29, 1 39 poststructuralism 66
170, 1 7 1 , 172; order 166-7; Nisbet, R. 46 postutopianism 160
political economy 43; politics power 1 39, 1 4 1 , 167
1 6 1 ; postmodernity 8 1 , 1 1 8, Oedipal project 149 Prawer, S.S. 72
144; romanticism 1 35; Offe, C. 20, 27, 32, 1 60; crisis praxis 34-40, 74
sociology 49, 53, 10 1 -4; 165, 1 69 primitivism 77
utopias 60, 62, 64 oligarchy 8 prisons 1 33-4, 1 4 1 , 1 54, 159, 173
marxism 59, 6 1 ··3, 65- 6; culture order 65, 7 1 , 92, 105, 122; proletariat 8, 1 4- 1 5, 18, 28;
84; legislation 79; mediations ambivalence 107, 1 09; human ambivalence 107; culture 38,
1 7 1 ; postmarxism 122; condition 1 55-7; mediations 83-4; order 167;
postmodemism 1 1 8, 1 1 9; 1 70; perfect 88- 1 2 1 ; postmodemity 122;
postmodemity 144; socialism postmodernity 123, 1 3 1 -2, utopianism 60; utopias 62
1 1 6; sociology 1 19- 2 1 ; 1 64-8; socialism 1 19 Protestant Ethic 8, 16, 23, 8 1 , 85
structuralism 70-5 Orwell, G. 58, 1 36, 140, 142 Puritanism 8 1 , 85, 172
master-slave dialectic 140 Ostjuden 1 1 2, 1 1 5
Mayhew, H. 24, 1 14 Other see exclusion; outsiders; Rabelais, F. 142
Mead, G.H. 42, 47 strangers; vagabonds racism 94-5, 1 1 3
Memories of Class viii, 1 3-22 outsiders 1 8 , 20, 24, 3 1 , 37; Radin, P. 77
Michels, R. 8, 10, 37 ambivalence 1 07, 1 09; Rawls, J. 137
middle class 9- 10, 1 2 , 19, 28-9; assimilation 1 1 1 - 12; culture Reagan, R . 18
communications 1 58; order 47; order 94, 1 66; reciprocity 1 54
1 67; politics 1 64; radicals 80 postmodemity 1 30, 132; see republicanism 168
Milgram experiments 98- 1 00 also exclusion; strangers; responsibility 10 I , 103
millenium prospects vii vagabonds revisionism I I
Mills, C.W. 12, 159, 160 oversocialization 10 I Ricardo, D. 24
mobility 1 29, 139, 143, 1 55, 1 59, Ricoeur, P. 68
161 Palestine I Riis, lA. 1 14
Modernity and Ambivalence ix, panopticon 16, 25, 78, 138, risk society 56, 1 3 1 , 1 60, 1 6 1
105 - 1 2 140- 1 , 1 55 Rizzi, B. 1 5
Modernity and the Holocaust vii, Parsons, T. 41 -3, 46, 68, 74; Rojek, C . 1 36
ix, 88, 89, 9 1 - 1 00 death 1 50; freedom 1 4 1 ; romanticism 72, 1 35
money 26 mediations 172-3 Roosevelt, F.D. 29
monotheism 1 35 Pascal, B . 146 Rorty, R. 49, 8 1 , 86, 1 1 2
Montaigne, M.E. de 69, 72, 124 Patterson, O. 1 37 Rousseau, J-J. 72, 78
Montesquieu, c.L. de S. 1 0 1 pauperization 20 routinization 92
Moore, B . 1 37 perfect order 88- 1 2 1 Russia 63
moral panics 30 petty bourgeoisie 7 Russian Revolution 64
morality 32, 100-5, 1 26-3 1 ; phenomenology 1 1 3
assimilation 1 1 4; Plato 59 Saint-Simon, Comte de 60
postmodemity 123-6 pleasure-principle 142 Sartre, J-P. 37, 38, 92, 1 35
Morelly 1 55 pluralism 100, 109 Saussure, F. de 70, 7 1
Morgan, L . H . 72 Plutarch 7 1 Scandinavia 1 30
Morin, E. 148 pogroms 92, 1 3 1 Schaff, A. 74
Morris, W. 10 Poland 59, 74, 75 Schleiermacher, F. 67
Mortality, Immortality and Other Polish Film 2 Schopenhauer, A. 68, 127, 1 49
Life Strategies ix, 145, 146- 52 Polish Workers' Party I Schumpeter, J. 28, 1 55
1 80 Zygmunt Bauman
Schutz, A. 42, 47, 68 Sophocles 1 04 Unsicherheit 160

scientism 166 Soviet Union I, 25, 58, 63-4; unskilled workers 6, 9
Seabrook, J. 20, 85, 1 58 order 1 04, 1 1 3; postmodemity urban life 47
Sebald, W.G. 1 1 7 1 22; sociology 1 1 8-20 utopianism 1 5, 58-66, 1 09;
second nature 40- 1 , 43-5, 173 species-being 1 1 9 freedom 142; globalization
self-management 1 28 Spengler, O. 93, 1 35, 1 55 1 5 5-6; order 1 14- 1 5, 167;
self-preservation 1 04-5 Springer, J. 163 politics 1 60; postmodemity
self-reflexivity 58 Stalin, J. 2, 1 00, 1 1 6, 133 129, 1 32, 1 34; socialism 1 19
selfishness 1 1 5 Stalinism 4 1 , 95, 1 20, 132
semiology 36, 70-5 strangers 94, 109- 1 1 , 1 24-5; vagabonds 129, 1 3 1 , 1 34; culture
Sennett, R. 50, 8 1 , 1 27, 1 57 postmodemity 1 29-30, 1 32-3; 1 39-40, 145; death 148;
Shakespeare, W. 72 see also exclusion; outsiders; globalization 1 54, 1 58-9;
shareholders 1 54 vagabonds politics 162; see also exclusion;
Shelley, P.B. 66 structuralism 35-6, 39, 66- 7, outsiders; strangers
Simmel, G. 37, 47, 52, 73; 70-5 Valery, P.A. 1 49
ambivalence 1 10; assimilation surrealism 5 1 , 8 1 Veblen, T.B. 142
1 1 3; culture 8 1 ; ethics 1 24; surveillance 78
Vico, G.B. 69, 1 3 5
Holocaust 94; legislation 79; systems theory 7 1 , 168
violence 26, 3 1
mediations 173; Szelenyi, I. 1 5, 1 6
postmodemity 85, 1 33-4;
Warsaw Ghetto I , 88, 92
sociology 10 1; strangers 1 30 technology 106
Webb, B. 1 09
simulacra 1 36 Thatcher, M . 27, 1 52
Webb, S. 1 0
skill levels 48 Thinking Sociologically 44-5 1
Weber, M . 6 , 8, 1 0- 1 1 , 14, 16;
skilled workers 6-9, 1 1 Third Reich 92
ambivalence 107; bureaucracy
slavery 1 6 Third World 19, 54
1 5; culture 48, 73; ethics 1 04,
smells 1 36 Thompson, E.P. 4, 5, 14, 49
1 24; freedom 1 38, 1 4 1 ;
Smiles, S. 8 thrill-seeking 26
hermeneutics 6 7 , 68;
Smith, A. 6 Titmuss, R. 27, 162
Holocaust 99; legislation 76;
Smith, B. 72 Tocqueville, A. de 46, 50
mediations 1 72 -3; order 168;
Social Democratic Federation 9 Tiinnies, F. 6 1 , 1 55
postmodernity 8 1 , 1 33;
social engineering 95, 100, 109, totalitarianism 95, 99- 100;
sociology 1 0 I, 102;
1 1 3, 1 1 7, 1 57 human condition 162; order
unemployment 85; utopias
socialism 9, 1 1 , 34, 1 14 - 1 6, 1 1 9 103, 105, 1 1 9; politics 164
1 19; work 24
Socialism: The Active Utopia Touraine, A. 16, 1 8 , 39, 53
Weimar Republic 92
58-66 tourists 1 29, 1 34, 1 39, 148;
socialization 103 welfare state 1 1 - 1 2, 20, 26-7;
globalization 1 54, 1 58-9;
sociation 109-10, 1 50 politics 162 crisis 1 69; culture 1 34, 1 36,
society 100-5, 1 1 7, 125; Towards a Critical Sociology 1 54, 1 58; middle classes 28 -30;
crimina1ization 134; death 148; 40-3 politics 1 64
freedom 1 38, 140; tourists Tracy, D. de 166 welfarism 95
129-30 tribalism 56 Wells, H.G. 109
sociology: ambivalence 1 06; Trotsky, L. 65, 79, 84, 1 1 6; Wesley, J. 72
assimilation 1 1 3- 14; culture Faustianism 1 35; politics Winter in the Morning 88-9 1 ,
34-57; death 146-52, 1 5 1 ; 160 98
ethics 103; freedom 1 37-8, Turner, B. 1 36 Wittgenstein, L. 6 1 , 1 5 1
1 4 1 , 142; globalization 1 53; Wood Laws 1 4
hermeneutics 67, 67-8; underclass 20, 30- 1 Work. Consumerism and the New
Holocaust 89-91 , 9 1 , 98-9, unemployment 84-5 Poor 23-32
105; intellectuals 87; unions 6-7, 9, 10, 1 2 working class 5-9, 1 2- 1 3, 17;
legislation 75, 76, 79; morality United States (US) 24, 29, 49; ambivalence 107; culture 83,
10 1; politics 1 59-64; culture 50- I , 54; ethics 130; 84; labour movement 30, 32
postmodemity 44-6, 5 1 -6, hermeneutics 68
8 1 - 3, 1 23; self-reflexivity 58 University of Warsaw 2 Zimbardo experiments 100

Zygmunt Bauman - Dialectic of Modernity

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First published 2000

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SAGE Publications Ltd

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SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

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ISBN 0 7619 6734 6

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Typeset by Mayhew Typesetting, Rhayader, Powys

Class and Labour 4

2 Culture and Sociology 34

3 Intellectuals and Utopians 58

4 The Holocaust and the Perfect Order 88

5 Touring the Fragments 1 22

6 Following the Human Condition 1 45

Does sociology have a future? In one perspective, Zygmunt Bauman might

- Culture, Modernity and Revolution: Essays in Honour of Zygmunt Bauman

The work of Zygmunt Bauman has a curious presence in English-language

My children, my grandchildren beware. There is no fair play in the game of

Modernity and Ambivalence ( l 99 1 a), and the associated problems of

Between Class and Elite

movements, this being an analytical starting point to a more general theory

institutions which sought to construct cultures of occupation out of the

in the idea of elite; partly it expresses the difference between an unskilled

the German revlSlonist dispute between Rosa Luxemburg and Eduard

Bauman refers to as an increasing standardization of the economic situ­

'Memory is the after-life of history'. So opens Memories of Class, its

two, connected but separable stories, one concerning the historiographical

impossible, for the older medieval sensibilities and institutions cannot be

proletarian, then the imaginary resources available to the labourers often

Hungarian, with Konrad and Szelenyi, or with Polish resonances, in

could be nothing to disagree about, just a representative range of snouts

configuration o f political economy. The immediate postwar situation was

goodness of people and their strivings, the degradations of consumer culture

the historically conditioned tendency to perceive the structure and dynamic

here, which is at risk for Bauman. Returning momentarily to the earlier

If autonomy is that which is lost, it must in turn be sought again. Politics

Work, Consumerism and the New Poor

The need for work - for advancement, motion, progress, development - is

could be ridiculed as old hat. Mere 'traditionalism' was but an obstacle on

Money becomes the passport in modernity, to link into another Bauman

material provision which might promote it. In fact, Bauman's appraisal of

could not imagine the possibility of capitalism without labour, or at least

confidence as it is a sober reflection of the fact that the alternatives to self­

meaning o f underclass, then, i s politically driven and transient. For as

Moral impulse can never be shifted completely; and here Bauman's

Ufe After Class

closer sense, to domination or especially exclusion as the work progresses.

How do we know how to go on practically? And, how can we understand

by addressing this very ambiguity in the concept of culture. Culture is an

an activity of varying impact and durability than as a firm result: 'The

Since cultural ordering is performed through the activity of signifying - splitting

Human praxis or activity therefore consists in turning chaos into order, or

Coming towards the end of the book, it is as if Bauman is adding a fourth,

the Introduction to the second edition is assimilation. The path of Bauman's

by the universe of the interpreter, then postmodern hermeneutics needs to

Towards a Critical Sociology

Bauman refers to as an increasing standardization of the economic situ

confidence as it is a sober reflection of the fact that the alternatives to self

Consequently, in theoretical or interpretative life, it all depends; struc

Janina and Zygmunt Bauman are a couple whose companionship is intel

which is inserted into it. Certainly bureaucracy, and bureaucratic con