[Beyond Poland, Dr. Bauman’s theories were a
major influence on the anti-globalization movement. He focused on the outcasts
and the marginalized, describing how many people have seen their chances of a
dignified life destroyed by the new borderless world. As a result, he found a
following in Spain and Italy, where young adults were hit especially hard by
economic dislocation in recent years.]
By Vanessa Gera
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Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in
2010. (Eloy Alonso/Reuters)
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Zygmunt
Bauman, a Polish-born
sociologist who explored the fluidity of identity in the modern world, the
Holocaust, consumerism and globalization, died Jan. 9 at his home in Leeds, England.
He was 91.
A friend, Anna Zejdler-Janiszewska, a
Warsaw-based philosophy professor, confirmed the death.
Dr. Bauman was renowned for an approach that
incorporated philosophy and other disciplines, and he was regarded as a strong
moral voice for the poor and dispossessed in a world upended by globalization.
Whether he was writing about the Holocaust or globalization, his focus remained
on how humans can create a dignified life through ethical decisions.
He wrote more than 50 books, notably
“Modernity and the Holocaust,” a 1989 release in which he differed with many
other thinkers who saw the barbarism of the Holocaust as a breakdown in
modernity. Dr. Bauman viewed the mass exterminations of Jews as the very
outcome of such pillars of modernity as industrialization and rationalized
bureaucracy.
“It was the rational world of modern
civilization that made the Holocaust thinkable,” Dr. Bauman wrote.
In the 1990s, he coined the term “liquid
modernity” to describe a contemporary world in such flux that individuals are
left rootless and bereft of any predictable frames of reference.
In books including “Liquid Times” and “Liquid
Modernity” he explored the frailty of human connection in such times and the
insecurity that a constantly changing world creates.
“In a liquid modern life there are no
permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so
that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when
circumstances change,” Dr. Bauman wrote.
In informing friends in Poland of the death,
Dr. Bauman’s wife wrote that he had gone “to liquid eternity.”
In Poland, he was a controversial figure in
some circles. In 2006, a right-wing historian uncovered documents showing that
Dr. Bauman served as an officer in a Stalinist-era military organization, the
Internal Security Corps, which helped to impose communism on the nation by
killing resisters to the regime.
Dr. Bauman acknowledged belonging to that
unit, but he insisted that he only had a desk job. No evidence has surfaced
linking him to any killings.
Some nationalists saw him as an enemy of the
country.
In 2013, supporters of a far-right
organization disturbed a public debate with Dr. Bauman in the western Polish
city of Wroclaw, whistling and shouting “Shame!” and “down with communism!” and
holding up photos of Polish resistance fighters killed by the communists.
After that, he stopped visiting his homeland.
Beyond Poland, Dr. Bauman’s theories were a
major influence on the anti-globalization movement. He focused on the outcasts
and the marginalized, describing how many people have seen their chances of a
dignified life destroyed by the new borderless world. As a result, he found a
following in Spain and Italy, where young adults were hit especially hard by
economic dislocation in recent years.
“The key thing was that Bauman did not talk
at or down to his audience — when he was talking he was listening, when he was
teaching he was learning. His books and seminars were places where we could
come together and explore together how to be human,” said Keith Tester,
co-author of “Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman” and a former student of Dr.
Bauman’s.
Dr. Bauman was born Nov. 19, 1925, in Poznan,
Poland, into a Jewish family that had suffered poverty and anti-Semitism,
something that inspired his lifelong belief in tolerance and social justice.
Speaking decades later of how he became a
communist, he recalled his family’s poverty, the “blows and kicks” inflicted on
him by non-Jewish children on the playground, and “the humiliations which my
father, a man of impeccable honesty, had to suffer from his bosses to feed his
family.”
He was not yet 14 when Germany invaded Poland
in September 1939 and World War II began. His family survived the Holocaust by
fleeing to the Soviet Union. There, Dr. Bauman, still a teenager, joined a
Polish army unit that formed under Soviet command, earning Poland’s Military
Cross of Valor for his bravery fighting the Nazis.
After the war, he rose quickly in the
military ranks and by the early 1950s had become one of the youngest majors in
the Polish army. During these years he was a communist and a member of the
Polish Workers’ Party.
In 1953, he was abruptly fired from his army
job, apparently the victim of the communist regime’s anti-Israel stance — Dr.
Bauman’s father had been seen making inquiries at the Israeli embassy about
emigrating.
Dr. Bauman studied sociology, then
philosophy, at the University of Warsaw, and was teaching there when the
communist regime waged an anti-Semitic campaign in 1968. He lost his job and he
and his family were expelled from the country along with thousands of other
Polish Jews.
He settled in Britain by the early 1970s and
headed the sociology department at the University of Leeds until his retirement
in 1990. He continued to write prolifically even after his retirement, often
producing a book a year.
Among his numerous honors were the European
Amalfi Prize for Sociology in 1992, the Theodor W. Adorno Award in 1998 and the
Prince of Asturias Award in 2010. The University of Leeds also created the
Bauman Institute in his honor, dedicated to many of his concerns, including
ethics, consumerism, globalization and modernity.
His wife of 62 years, Janina, died in 2009.
He is survived by his second wife, Aleksandra Jasinska-Kania, the daughter of
postwar Polish president Boleslaw Bierut; three daughters; and several
grandchildren.
— Associated
Press
