Post by ck4829 on Jan 14, 2017 16:57:17 GMT
Polish-born Jewish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has died in his home in England at age 91, the Washington Post reported today.
Bauman lived in England since 1971 after he was driven out of Poland by a purge engineered by the communist Polish secret police. Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leeds, Bauman was one of the world’s most revered social theorists, publishing 57 books and well over a hundred articles. Most of these address common themes: modernity and postmodernity, consumerism, morality, and the sociology and political culture of fear.
In his early writings, Bauman largely wrote on issues of class and social conflict, before shifting to a focus on modernity, bureaucracy, rationality and social exclusion in the 1990s. In the era of Trump, his insights seem more relevant than ever.
Bauman viewed modernity as a project where individuals surrender freedoms in exchange for security. Modernity, in what he came to call its “solid” form, involved removing unknowns and uncertainties through bureaucratic order and the proliferation of categories and theories, whether scientific or pseudo-scientific. The achievement of control, security and order is doomed to fail, however, due to the impossibility of imposing such order on life. This is particularly volatile when it comes to the impossibility of controlling and ordering minorities and foreigners — those outside of one’s social group.
Bauman’s most famous book, “Modernity and the Holocaust,” argues that the Holocaust should be seen as deeply connected to modernity and its order-making efforts. In Bauman’s analysis, the Jews became ‘strangers’ par excellence; the Final Solution was an extreme example of the attempt to attain security by eliminating the undigestable and threatening “other.” Bauman contended that the same processes of attempted exclusion and elimination are happening today.
In the last two decades of his life Bauman came to focus on the metaphor of “liquidity” to describe post-modern society, arguing that key elements of our lives such as evil and love have become “liquid,” unstable and undefinable, producing a pervasive and dangerous sense of anxiety which can lead to moral indifference, irrationality and violence. His 2016 book “Strangers At Our Door” is an analysis of the European refugee crisis, which Bauman saw as emblematic of many of the key ethical and political issues of our time.
Together Bauman’s key ideas offer a harrowing picture of unstable, liquid societies haunted by fear and uncertainty, unable to form lasting bonds of love within or to welcome the stranger from without.
In November Bauman said in an interview with L’Espresso that he feared that the election of Trump harks to a new era where these anxieties bring about a shift from post-WW2 inclusivism to a new “exclusivism,” the era of “expulsion.”
forward.com/culture/359462/renowned-sociologist-zygmunt-bauman-heard-echoes-of-world-war-ii-in-trump/
Bauman lived in England since 1971 after he was driven out of Poland by a purge engineered by the communist Polish secret police. Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leeds, Bauman was one of the world’s most revered social theorists, publishing 57 books and well over a hundred articles. Most of these address common themes: modernity and postmodernity, consumerism, morality, and the sociology and political culture of fear.
In his early writings, Bauman largely wrote on issues of class and social conflict, before shifting to a focus on modernity, bureaucracy, rationality and social exclusion in the 1990s. In the era of Trump, his insights seem more relevant than ever.
Bauman viewed modernity as a project where individuals surrender freedoms in exchange for security. Modernity, in what he came to call its “solid” form, involved removing unknowns and uncertainties through bureaucratic order and the proliferation of categories and theories, whether scientific or pseudo-scientific. The achievement of control, security and order is doomed to fail, however, due to the impossibility of imposing such order on life. This is particularly volatile when it comes to the impossibility of controlling and ordering minorities and foreigners — those outside of one’s social group.
Bauman’s most famous book, “Modernity and the Holocaust,” argues that the Holocaust should be seen as deeply connected to modernity and its order-making efforts. In Bauman’s analysis, the Jews became ‘strangers’ par excellence; the Final Solution was an extreme example of the attempt to attain security by eliminating the undigestable and threatening “other.” Bauman contended that the same processes of attempted exclusion and elimination are happening today.
In the last two decades of his life Bauman came to focus on the metaphor of “liquidity” to describe post-modern society, arguing that key elements of our lives such as evil and love have become “liquid,” unstable and undefinable, producing a pervasive and dangerous sense of anxiety which can lead to moral indifference, irrationality and violence. His 2016 book “Strangers At Our Door” is an analysis of the European refugee crisis, which Bauman saw as emblematic of many of the key ethical and political issues of our time.
Together Bauman’s key ideas offer a harrowing picture of unstable, liquid societies haunted by fear and uncertainty, unable to form lasting bonds of love within or to welcome the stranger from without.
In November Bauman said in an interview with L’Espresso that he feared that the election of Trump harks to a new era where these anxieties bring about a shift from post-WW2 inclusivism to a new “exclusivism,” the era of “expulsion.”
forward.com/culture/359462/renowned-sociologist-zygmunt-bauman-heard-echoes-of-world-war-ii-in-trump/