Zygmunt Bauman E-Book

Dennis Smith

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 462

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In this major new assessment of Zygmunt Bauman's work, Smith gives a clear introduction to this controversial and challenging sociologist.

Das E-Book Zygmunt Bauman wird angeboten von Polity und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
book; major new; dennis smith; work; bauman; agenda; zygmunt; introduction; future; clear; discussions; decade; last; distinctive; powerful; age; human; postmodern; condition; dilemmas; moral; political; us; vision; contribution

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Key Contemporary Thinkers

Preface

Part I: Setting the Agenda

1 Living Without a Guidebook

Introduction

Critical perspectives

Sociology plus

What is modernity?

What is postmodernity?

Why Bauman is worth reading

The myth of the cage-dwellers

The rest of this book

2 No Easy Choices

Culture, choice and sociology

Bauman’s vision

Bauman’s career and intellectual influences: a brief overview

3 Who is Zygmunt Bauman?

Faith, hope and charity

The roots of wisdom

Bauman’s agenda

A brief biography

Transitions

Puzzles

Anti-Semitism and Bauman

Neither insider nor outsider

Marx and the art of motorcycle maintenance

4 The Power of the Past

Discovering postmodernity

From priest to prophet

Out of Poland

A sociology for strangers

Part II: The Road to Postmodernity

5 The Road to the West

Keeping on the road

An unexpected discovery

Intellectuals and innovation

Bauman, Galbraith and Mill

Modern times, modern Marxism

Between Class and Elite

Polish peasants and politics

Conclusion

6 The Road to Utopia

Mechanisms of social change

Culture as Praxis

Towards a Critical Sociology

Socialism: the active utopia

Hermeneutics and Social Science

Conclusion

7 The Road to the Berlin Wall

Switching routes

Solidarity

Memories of Class

Freedom

After communism

Conclusion

8 The Trilogy

Three narratives

Legislators and Interpreters

Cruelty, dehumanization and estrangement

Modernity and the Holocaust

Modernity and Ambivalence

Conclusion

9 Bauman’s Vision of Modernity and Postmodernity

Elaborating the vision

Tending the garden

Discipline and sacrifice

The costs of modernity

Contradictions of modernity

The postmodern perspective

The postmodern habitat

The broader context

Three aspects of postmodernity

Postmodernization

Globalization

Seduction and repression

Cognitive, aesthetic and moral space

The stranger

I and the Other

The role of the sociologist

Part III: Dialogue

10 Between Critical Theory and Poststructuralism

The ambivalence of criticism

The journey from modernity to postmodernity

Adorno and Habermas

Foucault and Lyotard

Enlightenment values

11 A Correspondence between Zygmunt Bauman and Dennis Smith

First letter

Second letter

Third letter

Fourth letter

Fifth letter

Bibliography

Index

Copyright © Dennis Smith 1999

The right of Dennis Smith to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1999 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0-7456-1898-7

ISBN 0-7456-1899-5 (pbk)

ISBN 9780-7456-6884-0 (epub)

ISBN 9780-7456-6883-3 (mobi)

ISBN 9780-7456-7825-2 (epdf)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Dennis, 1945–

Zygmunt Bauman: prophet of postmodernity / Dennis Smith.

p. cm. — (Key contemporary thinkers)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7456-1898-7 (alk. paper). — ISBN 0-7456-1899-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2. Postmodernism — Social aspects. 3. Civilization, Modern — 20th century. I. Title. II. Series: Key contemporary thinkers (Cambridge, England)

HM449. S55 2000

303.4 — dc21 99–27526

CIP

Key Contemporary Thinkers

Published

Jeremy Ahearne, Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and its Other

Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–1989

Michael Caesar, Umberto Eco: Philosophy, Semiotics and the Work of Fiction

Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction

Simon Evnine, Donald Davidson

Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Introduction

Andrew Gamble, Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty

Philip Hansen, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History and Citizenship

Sean Homer, Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism

Christopher Hookway, Quine: Language, Experience and Reality

Christina Howells, Derrida: Deconstruction from Phenomenology to Ethics

Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction

Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Post-Modernism and Beyond

Chandran Kukathas and Philip Pettit, Rawls: A Theory of Justice and its Critics

James McGilvray, Chomsky: Language, Mind, and Politics

Lois McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction

Philip Manning, Erving Goffman and Modern Sociology

Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes

William Outhwaite, Habermas: A Critical Introduction

John Preston, Feyerabend: Philosophy, Science and Society

Susan Sellers, Hélène Cixous: Authorship, Autobiography and Love

David Silverman, Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis

Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity

Geoffrey Stokes, Popper: Philosophy, Politics and Scientific Method

Georgia Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason

James Williams, Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy

Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and the Minimal State

Forthcoming

Maria Baghramian, Hilary Putnam

Sara Beardsworth, Kristeva

James Carey, Innis and McLuhan

Thomas D’Andrea, Alasdair MacIntyre

Eric Dunning, Norbert Elias

Jocelyn Dunphy, Paul Ricoeur

Matthew Elton, Daniel Dennett

Nigel Gibson, Frantz Fanon

Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin

Karen Green, Dummett: Philosophy of Language

Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell

Fred Inglis, Clifford Geertz

Sarah Kay, Žižek: A Critical Introduction

Paul Kelly, Ronald Dworkin

Valerie Kennedy, Edward Said

Carl Levy, Antonio Gramsci

Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl

Harold Noonan, Frege

Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read, Kuhn

Nick Smith, Charles Taylor

Nicholas Walker, Heidegger

Preface

This has been a very enjoyable book to write. Zygmunt Bauman’s sustained exploration of the nature of modernity and postmodernity is one of the great intellectual journeys of our times. Zygmunt Bauman was generous with his encouragement and made it clear from the beginning that he would not try to influence what I wrote, or offer approval or otherwise of the interpretations I might come up with. It cannot be a comfortable experience to be subjected to someone else’s interpretation of the meaning of your life and career. I want to thank Zygmunt Bauman for putting up with my impertinent attention.

While writing the book, I kept the following quotation by my desk as a constant reminder of the limits against which I was pressing:

The text the author has produced acquires its own life. True – the text derives its meaning from the setting in which it has been conceived. In this setting, however, the author’s intentions are just a factor among others; and surely the factor of which we know least. No less significant are those other constituents of the setting which the text absorbed, and those the text could absorb but did not: the absence is as vociferous as the presence.

On the other hand the reader is no more free than the author in determining the meaning of the text … He understands as much as his knowledge allows him … If the author sends his signals from an island whose interior he has not and could not explore in full, the reader is a passenger who walks the deck of a sailing ship he does not navigate. The meaning is the instant of their encounter. (Zygmunt Bauman, Hermeneutics and Social Science, p. 229)

I have gained a lot from conversations with Ulrich Bielefeld of the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, with John Rex of the Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations at Warwick University and with Richard Kilminster and Ian Varcoe, both of the School of Sociology and Social Policy at Leeds University. I owe thanks to others also. Janina Bauman was kind and tolerant when I rang or came to call. Val Riddell suggested the theme of this book but, sadly, did not live to see it published. Evelin Lindner gave me detailed and valuable comments on several chapters and has made the book a better one. Caroline Baggaley at Keele University has been a good friend. Tanya Smith has provided insight, wit and a sense of proportion. Aston Business School has a long-standing tradition of encouraging research in the social sciences and it is a pleasure to have the support of colleagues such as Henry Miller, Reiner Grundmann, John Smith and Helen Higson. The ‘invisible college’ of social scientists at Aston University crosses departmental boundaries and includes Sue Wright and Dieter Haselbach of the School of Languages and European Studies.

Presentations drawing upon the book’s argument at various stages of its development were given at Leeds University, Sheffield University (at the kind invitation of Sharon Macdonald), Aston Business School and the British Sociological Association’s Annual Conference at Glasgow. I have benefited from the comments of many colleagues and hope they find the final result interesting and worthwhile. If not, I do not expect them to share the blame.

Part I

Setting the Agenda

1

Living Without a Guidebook

Introduction

If you are new to the hotly raging debate about modernity and postmodernity, start by reading Zygmunt Bauman. He is one of the most interesting and influential commentators on these aspects of our human condition.

Zygmunt Bauman has brilliantly described humankind’s trek through modernity during the past few centuries. He has also drawn a vivid map of the new world coming into being as modernity turns postmodern.

Bauman is part of the story he tells. He can be found on the map he draws. Born in 1925 in Poland and educated in Soviet Russia, Bauman fought with the Red Army against the Germans during World War II. He emigrated from Poland to the West in 1968. Since then he has published a new book every one or two years.

Critical perspectives

This book presents an overview of Bauman’s work between the 1960s and the late 1990s, and it also provides a critical perspective on that work. I have tried to get ‘behind’ the texts themselves in order to understand why they were produced and what they were intended to achieve.

Bauman wants to awaken people to their creative potential and to their moral responsibilities. That is not difficult to discover, since he is quite explicit about it. However, the way Bauman defines his objectives changes over the decades. So does the way he tries to achieve them. Bauman does not announce these alterations of definition and direction. They have to be reconstructed through the kind of critical analysis I have carried out in the first part of this book, where I trace the main outlines of Bauman’s life and career as a young refugee, a wartime soldier, a military bureaucrat, a revisionist intellectual and an émigré.

Analysis of this kind asks ‘why this agenda?’ and ‘why this change of agenda?’ Our response to a specific text is altered if we are able to see it as part of a larger constellation of writing, especially if that larger constellation tells its own story. I say ‘tells its own story’ as if the process were unproblematic, a matter of simply downloading a file. In fact, it requires a concentrated effort of interpretation, in the course of which one has to keep the imagination under tight control, avoid unwarranted assumptions, try to avoid going too far beyond the evidence, but, at the same time, not ignore the evidence that exists.

These are, I assume, the working practices of a good detective, although I must say straightaway that I am not looking for a ‘conviction’. I am in broad sympathy with Zygmunt Bauman’s objectives. My curiosity comes out of fascination, not suspicion.

This first part of the book, ‘Setting the Agenda’, sets out my understanding of the long process that led from Bauman’s search for a ‘modern Marxism’ in the 1960s (Bauman 1969: 1) to his evocation of ‘postmodernity and its discontents’ in the 1990s (Bauman 1997). In the second part of the book, entitled ‘The Road to Postmodernity’, I show how Bauman’s major works in English can be understood in the light of the interpretation developed in part I. In particular, I trace the genealogy of Bauman’s vision of modernity and postmodernity, and explore its intellectual content.