Zygmunt Bauman (; Polish: [ˈbauman]; 19 November 1925 – 9 January 2017) was a Polish–British sociologist and philosopher. He was driven out of the Polish People's Republic during the 1968 Polish political crisis and forced to give up his Polish citizenship. He emigrated to Israel; three years later, he moved to the United Kingdom. He resided in England from 1971, where he studied at the London School of Economics and became Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, later emeritus. Bauman was a social theorist, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, consumerism in postmodernity, and liquid modernity.
Bauman was born to a non-observant Polish Jewish family in Poznań, Second Polish Republic, in 1925. In 1939, when Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, his family escaped eastwards into the USSR. During World War II, Bauman enlisted in the Soviet-controlled First Polish Army, working as a political instructor. He took part in the Battle of Kolberg (1945) and the Battle of Berlin. In May 1945, he was awarded the Military Cross of Valour. After World War II he became one of the Polish Army's youngest majors.
According to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, from 1945 to 1953 Bauman was a political officer in the Internal Security Corps (KBW), a military intelligence unit formed to combat the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the remnants of the Polish Home Army; however, the nature and extent of his involvement remain unknown, as well as the exact circumstances under which it was terminated. In an interview with The Guardian, Bauman confirmed he had been a committed Communist during and after World War II and had never made a secret of it. He admitted that joining the military intelligence service at age 19 was a mistake although he had a "dull" desk job and did not remember informing on anyone.
While serving in the Internal Security Corps, Bauman first studied sociology at the Warsaw Academy of Political and Social Science. In 1953, Bauman, already in the rank of major, was suddenly dishonourably discharged, after his father had approached the Israeli embassy in Warsaw with a view to emigrating to Israel. As Bauman did not share his father's Zionist tendencies and was indeed strongly anti-Zionist, his dismissal caused a severe, though temporary estrangement from his father. During the period of unemployment that followed, he completed his M.A. and in 1954 became a lecturer at the University of Warsaw, where he remained until 1968. He prepared his PhD dissertation on the political doctrine of the Labour Party under the supervision of Julian Hochfeld, and defended it at the University of Warsaw in 1956.
While at the London School of Economics, where his supervisor was Robert McKenzie, he prepared a comprehensive study on the British socialist movement, his first major book. Published originally in Polish in 1959, a revised edition appeared in English in 1972. Bauman went on to publish other books, including Socjologia na co dzień ("Everyday Sociology", 1964), which reached a large popular audience in Poland and later formed the foundation for the English-language text-book Thinking Sociologically (1990). Initially, Bauman remained close to orthodox Marxist doctrine; influenced by Georg Simmel and Antonio Gramsci, he became increasingly critical of Poland's Communist government. Owing to this, he was never awarded a professorship even after he completed his habilitation. After his former teacher, Julian Hochfeld, was made vice-director of UNESCO's Department for Social Sciences in Paris in 1962, Bauman inherited Hochfeld's chair.
Faced with increasing political pressure connected with a political purge led by Mieczysław Moczar, the Chief of the Polish Communist Security Police, Bauman renounced his membership of the governing Polish United Workers' Party in January 1968. The 1968 Polish political crisis culminated in a purge that drove many remaining Communist Poles of Jewish descent out of the country, including those intellectuals who had fallen from grace with the Communist government. Bauman, who had lost his chair at the University of Warsaw the 25th of March, was among them. He had to give up Polish citizenship to be allowed to leave the country. In 1968, he went to Israel to teach at Tel Aviv University. In 1970, he moved to Great Britain, where he accepted the chair of sociology at the
University of Leeds. There he intermittently also served as head of the department. After his appointment, he published almost exclusively in English, his third language, and his reputation grew. From the late 1990s, Bauman exerted a considerable influence on the anti- or alter-globalisation movement.
In a 2011 interview in the Polish weekly Polityka, Bauman criticised Zionism and Israel, saying Israel was not interested in peace and that it was "taking advantage of the Holocaust to legitimize unconscionable acts". He expressed that "the mission of the Holocaust survivors is to bring salvation to the world and to protect it from another catastrophe: to expose hidden but still vital evil tendencies in this world, in order to prevent a second disgrace to civilization." In this specific context, he compared the Israeli West Bank barrier to the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, where thousands of Jews died in the Holocaust, but to emphasize that "inflicting suffering degrades and morally destroys those who inflict suffering – and, contrary to belief, does not ennoble the suffering in the least." The Israeli ambassador to Poland, Zvi Bar, called Bauman's comments "half truths" and "groundless generalizations". Janina Bauman, the wife of Bauman, along with her sister Sophie and her mother Alina survived the slaughter of the Jews of Warsaw and the crushing of the Warsaw ghetto.
In 2013, Bauman made his first visit to Israel since leaving the country 1970: he accepted an invitation offered by the Israeli Sociological Society to give a keynote lecture at the ISS Annual Meeting and conduct a seminar with doctoral sociology students. Bauman was a supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation which advocates for democratic reform in the United Nations, and the creation of a more accountable international political system.
Bauman was married to writer Janina Bauman (née Lewinson; 18 August 1926 – 29 December 2009). They had three daughters, painter Lydia Bauman, architect Irena Bauman, and professor Anna Sfard, a leading theorist of education at the University of Haifa. His grandson Michael Sfard is a prominent civil rights activist and author in Israel. After losing his first wife, he married sociologist Aleksandra Jasińska-Kania in 2015. She survived him upon his death in 2017. Bauman died in Leeds on 9 January 2017.
Bauman's published work extends to 57 books and well over a hundred articles. Most of these address a number of common themes, among which are globalisation, modernity and postmodernity, consumerism, and morality.
Bauman's earliest publication in English is a study of the British labour movement and its relationship to class and social stratification, originally published in Poland in 1960. He continued to publish on the subject of class and social conflict until the early 1980s. His last book was on the subject of Memories of Class. Whilst his later books do not address issues of class directly, he continued to describe himself as a socialist, and he never rejected Marxism entirely. The neo-Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci in particular remained one of his most profound influences, along with neo-Kantian sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s Bauman published a number of books that dealt with the relationship between modernity, bureaucracy, rationality and social exclusion. Bauman, following Sigmund Freud, came to view European modernity as a trade off: European society, he argued, had agreed to forego a level of freedom to receive the benefits of increased individual security. Bauman argued that modernity, in what he later came to term its 'solid' form, involved removing unknowns and uncertainties. It involved control over nature, hierarchical bureaucracy, rules and regulations, control and categorisation — all of which attempted to gradually remove personal insecurities, making the chaotic aspects of human life appear well-ordered and familiar.