Zygmunt Bauman Morality Monsters Metaphors and Marx January 2017 (original) (raw)

Zygmunt Bauman, the Frankfurt School, and the tradition of enlightened catastrophism

Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust: Heritage, Dilemmas, Extensions, 2022

Zygmunt Bauman's landmark 1989 book *Modernity and the Holocaust* theorised a fundamental problem in thinking about the nature of social catastrophes ‘after Auschwitz’. For Bauman, the Holocaust was not an aberration from the technical progress of modern civilisation but rather a possibility thereafter immanent within all modern societies. While Bauman developed this radical thesis to its furthest extent, his work openly drew inspiration from a number of earlier social theorists, philosophers, and historians, notably Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, and Raul Hilberg. Despite their different and at times conflicting intellectual approaches, these thinkers collectively constitute a strand of critical social theory I call ‘enlightened catastrophism'.

Zygmunt Bauman 2017 Dennis Smith The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman was a man of action, a brilliant persuader, and a stern moralist. As a young communist he acted with sincerity on the maxim that an omelette cannot be made without breaking eggs. He was shocked to discover, twice, in 1953 and 1968, that he was one of the eggs being broken. This paper reviews his subsequent migration West and his career as a public intellectual in the light of these early experiences. His attempt to forge a Marxist sociology, or a sociological Marxism was abandoned after what he believed was the victory of global capitalism, especially after 1989-91. Bauman then devoted his energies to elaborating and adapting themes derived, in part, from Adorno, Arendt and Marx, attuning them to a culture of 'post-modern' (later 'liquid') existence organized as an exercise in mass seduction rather than mass destruction. He was always something of a stranger in the West but he sought to persuade his audience that this condition was universal, a product of capitalist globalization. He established himself as a widely admired guide to the resulting moral and political challenges. Till the end he worried away at the issue of how to achieve and combine moral probity and political effectiveness.

Agency and Structure in Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust

Irish Journal of Sociology, 2014

The article explores how Zygmunt Bauman's work from Modernity and the Holocaust to his liquid turn writings assumes that people live in a deterministic world. Bauman fails to distinguish agency as an analytical category in its own right and as such fails to capture self-determination, agential control and moral responsibility. All of Bauman's work is based upon the assumption that the individual loses their autonomy and the ability to judge the moral content of their actions because of adiaphortic processes external to themselves as individuals giving rise to agentic state in which the individual is unable to exercise their agency. In contrast to the argument in Modernity and the Holocaust this article suggests that the Nazis developed a distinct communitarian ethical code rooted in self-control that encouraged individuals to overcome their personal feeling states, enabling them to engage in acts of cruelty to people defined as outside of the community. In his post-2000 work...

Remembering Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017)

At the time of his death, 9 January 2017, Zygmunt Bauman was one of the foremost social theorists in the world. During an academic career spanning seven decades and several countries, Bauman published relentlessly (more than 50 books) and won several international awards. He was consensually recognised as a commanding voice in debates on ethics, globalisation, modernity, consumerism, and lately on the rise of populism. Although his thinking evolved signi cantly over time, his writings express a continued preoccupation with the moral vagaries of our time and, in particular, with the su ering of the dispossessed and the excluded. As he writes in Globalization: e Human Consequences: “If you de ne your value by the things you acquire and surround yourself with, being excluded is humiliat- ing.” is insight, according to which exclusion is the ipside of the promises and realities of democratic inclusion, a contradiction at the heart of the mod- ern condition, is perhaps the central and most enduring feature of Bauman’s thinking.