Editors’ Introduction: Theory and Society in the Sociological Imagination of Zygmunt Bauman
Tom Campbell, Dariusz Brzeziński, Mark Davis and Jack Palmer

Zygmunt Bauman’s contributions to social theory are renowned. Any reader of sociology is familiar with Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman 1989) and Liquid Modernity (Bauman 2000), but the breadth of Bauman’s work straddles a vast oeuvre that far exceeds these two well-known books. Peter Beilharz (2020: 122) once described Bauman as ‘famously eclectic, intellectually promiscuous even’. Indeed, the breadth of Bauman’s reading encourages such an interpretation. This has made situating Bauman in relation to broader intellectual currents challenging – a difficulty made harder still as his Polish writings remained (largely) untranslated, unknown to the English reader. We have important assessments of his work but the pictures these assessments provide remain partial – a partiality often due to a lack of access to important and foundational Polish texts (Davis 2008; Tester 2004; Beilharz 2000). The character of Bauman’s English-language monographs (at least since the 1980s) is weighted towards the doing of social theory – cultural sociology as praxis – rather than positioning his concepts in relation to the history of ideas. To echo his fondness for metaphor, and as he used to say, Bauman was a bird not an ornithologist (Bauman 2014).

By restoring the intellectual context of his interventions, we hope to make evident that Bauman’s social theory was not one crafted in isolation but, rather, developed from his dialogue with the work of other writers. Within this volume – the third in our series – a number of texts are reproduced in which Bauman is paying tribute to key interlocutors and influences. These texts on other thinkers matter, since they contain some of the most revealing passages about the principles underpinning Bauman’s own thinking. Having now completed work on three volumes that provide access to important but unknown and hard to find writings, including texts previously only available in Polish and previously unpublished manuscripts, we are better able to assess Bauman’s intellectual development vis-à-vis the main theoretical currents of his day.

Bauman was always a voracious reader, a reader of the sociological tradition, of its intersection with its neighbouring disciplines and, of course, with literature. Despite writing on the history of social thought throughout his life, Bauman is not well known as a major commentator on social theory’s intellectual history. The Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman at the University of Leeds, however, is full of correspondence with peers, and pages of personal reading notes on Social Theory’s great works. The archival material illustrates the centrality of dialogue throughout Bauman’s life.1 Bauman practised the art of dialogue through reading and writing. In This Is Not a Diary, Bauman (2012) refers to himself as a ‘graphomaniac’, confessing that a day when he had not written was a day wasted. Reading was entwined with his graphomania, as he recalls in My Life in Fragments (Bauman 2023b): writing and reading found a union in thinking.

Bauman’s standing as a thinker is largely derived from the books he published during the last thirty years of his life and devoted to analysing the contemporary perils of humanity. Throughout his career, there are important interventions dealing with individual thinkers – for example, ‘Antonio Gramsci: or Sociology in Action’, reproduced in English for the first time in this volume (pp. 13–31), and the essay ‘The Phenomenon of Norbert Elias’ (Bauman 1979). Bauman also authored 150 book reviews dealing with significant works in contemporary social theory and studies of the classics (Palmer et al. 2020). As a letter from Richard Bernstein recalls, these review essays were not the most faithful to their subject matter, with Bauman often using the work of others as a platform for his own ideas.2 Nonetheless, Bauman’s powers as a commentator on the history of social thought are underappreciated. This volume attempts to correct this, illustrating how Bauman was in a continuous dialogue with both the history of social thought and its most contemporary practitioners. We suggest he can be better understood as a participant rather than a bystander in certain intellectual debates where his contributions were previously less well known. Bauman was deeply committed to being a humanist, and this commitment characterized how he engaged with the thought of others. In bringing together into a single volume those texts where this engagement takes place, we hope to have cast new light on how Bauman believed the vocation of sociology should be practised.

BECOMING A HUMANIST

Bauman’s academic formation begins in communist Poland after the Second World War. His earliest writings were shaped by the official Marxism of the day, and his membership of Poland’s Communist Party (e.g. Bauman and Wiatr 1953).3 By 1964, culture became the definitive concept of Bauman’s analysis (Bauman 2021a). Across this period, he completed his move from a more traditional Marxist-Leninism towards a revisionist form of Marxism (Brzeziński 2022). This change flowed from his interest in Open Marxism – represented by his teacher and mentor from the University of Warsaw, Julian Hochfeld (Hochfeld 1958) – its central tenet being to maintain a dialogue with non-Marxist thought (Kelles-Krauz 2018). Such an open dialogue with a wide variety of intellectual influences comes to characterize Bauman’s entire career. Stanisław Ossowski, also a professor of sociology at the University of Warsaw, is likewise a key early influence.4 As a critic of Stalinism, Ossowski had been banned from teaching and publishing, but in the wake of the Polish October,5 and the de-Stalinization that followed, Ossowski was reinstated (Brzeziński 2022; Wagner 2020). A humanistic form of sociological inquiry was advocated by Ossowski, which demanded of the intellectual a radical independence, even a ‘disobedient spirit’ (Ossowski 1998; Kurczewski 1988). Bauman’s predisposition to be a disobedient spirit, and his openness to theoretical traditions beyond Marxism, form the spine of his humanism, which was richly added to as he discovered writers with whom he shared this temperament. In the mid-1960s, such figures as Camus, Gramsci and Mills were essential discoveries, having a sustained impact on the ethical heartbeat of his sociology.

Mills visited Warsaw in the late 1950s delivering lectures at the Polish Academy of Science, based on The Sociological Imagination (Mills 2000).6 Encountering Mills is key in the formation of Bauman’s humanism, as Mills becomes a keystone reference for Bauman going forward. Bauman describes this in a conversation with Keith Tester:

In ‘Mills: The Issue of Sociological Imagination’ (1961) (pp. 1–12), Bauman contrasts Mills’s sociology to competing approaches offered by the general theory of Talcott Parsons and the empirical sociology of Paul Lazarsfeld.7 Bauman deploys Mills to critique both perspectives, arguing that sociology should be engaged in debates on the social issues of the day. An early lesson that Bauman takes from Mills is that those engaged in sociology should consider the vocation of the discipline, beyond the day-to-day priorities of the university. Lengthy discussion of Mills appears in other papers reproduced in this volume too – Bauman (1987) (pp. 73–81) and Bauman (2006) (pp. 147–69) – illustrating Mills’s sustained influence upon Bauman.

From the late 1950s, Bauman was associated with the Polish revisionist school of Open Marxism. In the 1960s, like so many Marxist revisionists, Gramsci performed a vital role in the formation of Bauman’s thought. Gramsci showed Bauman that there were other ways of being a Marxist – new paths were found beyond the Stalinist and official Marxist ones of the day. Encountering Gramsci accelerated Bauman’s existing revisionism, and allowed him to hold steadfast to what was precious in Marx’s legacy. In conversation with Tester, Bauman notes:

Mills is deployed by Bauman in contrast to Gramsci vis-à-vis the purpose of sociology. For Bauman, Mills and Gramsci both shared a belief that theory was able to provide a historical orientation. In Mills, Bauman saw the intellectual...