Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman (born November 19, 1925, Poznań, Poland—died January 9, 2017, Leeds, England) was a Polish-born sociologist who was one of the most influential intellectuals in Europe, known for works that examine broad changes in the nature of contemporary society and their effects on communities and individuals. He focused primarily on how the poor and dispossessed have been affected by social changes.

Bauman and his family escaped to the Soviet Union in 1939 after Germany invaded Poland, and during World War II he fought in a Polish army unit under Soviet command. He also was a member of a Stalinist organization dedicated to extinguishing resistance to communism. Bauman returned to Poland after the war ended, and in the 1950s he studied sociology and philosophy at the University of Warsaw, where he later became a professor of sociology. He was forced from his job and home by a 1968 anti-Semitic campaign, and he then moved to Israel, briefly teaching in Tel Aviv and Haifa, before taking a position in 1971 at the University of Leeds, from which he retired in 1990.

His most-celebrated books included Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), in which he argued that modern industrial and bureaucratic paradigms made the Holocaust imaginable and that the machinery of industrialism made it possible to carry out, and Liquid Modernity (2000), in which he examined the effects of consumption-based economies, the disappearance of social institutions, and the rise of globalization. His other notable publications included Culture as Praxis (1973), Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), Postmodernity and Its Discontents (1997), Globalization: The Human Consequences (1998), The Individualized Society (2001), Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (2003), and Strangers at Our Door (2016).

Bauman was honoured with the 1989 European Amalfi Prize, the 1998 Theodor W. Adorno Award, and a 2010 Prince of Asturias Award for communication and humanities.