Zygmunt Bauman: Why Good People do Bad Things (Public Intellectuals and the Sociology of Knowledge)

159 Pages·2013·3.514 MB·English

by  Shaun Best

Zygmunt Bauman
Public Intellectuals and the
Sociology of Knowledge
Series Editors
Dr andreas Hess, university College Dublin, Ireland
Dr neil mcLaughlin, mcmaster university, Canada
the sociology of knowledge has a long and distinctive history. Its function has
always been that of attempting to bridge the aspirations of the discursive and
institutional founding fathers of sociology with that of modern attempts to define
the discipline through the study of the emergence, role and social function of ideas.
However, since Mannheim first outlined his program in the 1920s, the sociology
of knowledge has undergone many changes. The field has become extremely
differentiated and some of its best practitioners now sail under different flags and
discuss their work under different headings. this new series charts the progress
that has been made in recent times – despite the different labels. Be it intellectual
history Cambridge-style, the new sociology of ideas which is now gaining strength
in north america, or the more European cultural analysis which is associated with
the name of Bourdieu, this series aims at being inclusive while simultaneously
striving for sociological insight and excellence. All too often modern attempts in
the sociology of knowledge, broadly conceived, have only looked at form while
they downplayed or disregarded content, substance of argument or meaning. this
series will help to rectify this.
Zygmunt Bauman
Why good People do Bad things
SHaun BESt
University of Manchester, UK
First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright © 2013 Shaun Best
Shaun Best has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identified as the author of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Best, Shaun
Zygmunt Bauman : why good people do bad things. – (Public intellectuals and the
sociology of knowledge)
1. Bauman, Zygmunt, 1925– 2. Bauman, Zygmunt, 1925– – Political and social views.
3. Sociology – Philosophy.
I. title II. Series
301’.092–dc23
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Best, Shaun.
Zygmunt Bauman : why good people do bad things / by Shaun Best.
pages cm—(Public intellectuals and the sociology of knowledge)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-3588-4 (hardback)— 1. Bauman, Zygmunt, 1925- 2. Sociology.
I. Title.
HM479.B39B47 2013
301—dc23
2012048043

ISBN 9781409435884 (hbk)
ISBN 9781315545974 (ebk)
Contents
Introduction 1
1 How Zygmunt Bauman became Zygmunt Bauman:
History and Biography 3
2 The Unmaking of a Communist Identity 35
3 Modernity and the Holocaust 65
4 The Liquid Turn 101
Conclusion Why Good People do Bad Things 129
Bibliography 139
Index 151
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Introduction
For Zygmunt Bauman, sociology is a product of modernity and, as such, sociology
has never had the conceptual tools to provide a detached or credible evaluation
of the processes of modernisation or the human consequences of modernity.
Given this lack of adequate sociological conceptual tools, since the publication
of Intimations of Postmodernity (1992) Bauman’s sociology has focused on
reformulating the nature of sociology’s theoretical programme, redefining the
discipline’s relationship with modernity, and giving the discipline a new sense
of direction by presenting his own critiques of modernity. In his ‘sociology of
postmodernity’ and in his ‘liquid turn’ writing, Bauman investigates key aspects of
social life on the far side of modernity by the use of metaphor and poetic language.
When Bauman addressed the ceremony for the Prince of Asturias Foundation
prize in 2010, he described his work as a ‘discipline of humanities, whose sole,
noble and magnificent purpose is to enable and facilitate human understanding and
interhuman ongoing dialogue’ (Bauman 2012a: 46).
This book identifies four distinct phases of Bauman’s work: phase one as a
Marxist revisionist, writing about actually existing socialism in Poland; phase two
as a Marxist revisionist, writing about socialism as an active utopia that could
resolve the human problems facing the Western capitalist society; phase three in
which Bauman loses faith in modernity in general and socialism in particular, a
phase in which his work becomes associated with postmodernism, and finally;
phase four as proponent of the liquid turn, in which Bauman distances himself
from postmodernism and engages in an analysis of social change understood by
Bauman as a process of liquefaction. The shift from phase two to phase three of
Bauman’s work marks his transition from intellectual as ‘legislator’ to ‘interpreter’
and the shift from phase three to phase four was when Bauman became a public
intellectual, when he attempted to engage in public rather than academic discourse.
This activity was represented in Bauman’s decision to move away from producing
large academic texts that explored aspects of social theory and analysis for the
consumption of other sociologists to pocketbooks and interviews or conversations
for a wider audience on themes as diverse as education, surveillance and identity,
in which he attempts to present himself as a cultural and social critic. The principal
concern of this book is to demonstrate that there are links between these phases
of Bauman’s theorising and the circumstances in which he found himself and the
decisions he made over the course of his life.
What is knowledge and how is it acquired? There are a number of assumptions
that I have made about this question that underpin the arguments developed in
the book. This means that, unlike Richard Rorty (1998), who attempts to separate
2 Zygmunt Bauman
Heidegger’s ‘life’ from his ‘work’, on the grounds that even though Heidegger
may have been ‘a nasty figure’, this does not affect significantly the content of
his work, I am of the view that life and work are linked. Knowledge is produced
by people in particular historical conditions, grounded in sensory experience,
exercising choice, judgement and reflection on those experiences. Knowledge is
never simply the product of an ideological stamp, dominant ideology, perspective
of a dominant group, a reflection of the social structure, a product of symbolic
violence or reducible to power relations or structural effects. Knowledge is
plastic and pliable in the hands of the human agent. The agent can decide that
some ways of viewing the world or some knowledge is better or worse than the
known alternatives. Contributions to knowledge are constructed by the agent
with resources available to them on the basis of criteria decided by the agent
themselves as significant. The standpoint of the agent will shape their own
analysis, making knowledge historically situated but not determined, something
that is an achievement derived from a process of active and informed reflection.
The knowledge constructed by the agent is never disinterested or objective, it will
always be a point of view reflecting what is important to the agent who produced
the knowledge.
Chapter 1
How Zygmunt Bauman became
Zygmunt Bauman: History and Biography
Zygmunt Bauman is one of the most talked about academic social commentators
in the world today. His books and papers are widely read within the academic
community and he contributes regularly to quality newspapers and other
publications. In terms of his approach, when Bauman addressed the ceremony
for the Prince of Asturias Foundation prize in 2010 he described his work as a
‘discipline of humanities, whose sole, noble and magnificent purpose is to enable
and facilitate human understanding and interhuman ongoing dialogue’ (Bauman
2012a: 46).
Tony Blackshaw has described Zygmunt Bauman as an intellectual superstar,
a global phenomenon who has produced a new theory of social change and
modernity with the concept of ambivalence at its centre. Blackshaw insists that
Bauman is one of those sociologist whose work operates at ‘an intuitive level
that does not require them to explain why they have done something “this way”
rather than another’ (Blackshaw 2005: 20). Unlike Blackshaw, I am one of those
sociologists who do expect authors to give such an explanation. Bauman is not
a postmodernist states Blackshaw, but rather his work should be regarded as a
‘sociology of postmodernity’ that has much in common with Lyotard, Baudrillard
and, in particular, Deleuze and Guattari. Blackshaw describes life in liquid
modernity as ‘rhizomatic; it is in a constant state of becoming’ (2005: 93).
Whatever one thinks of about the work of Zygmunt Bauman, he has led a life
that cries out for biographical interpretation. Refugee, former communist, former
member of the Polska Robotnicza (the Polish Workers’ Party) (PPR), Soviet
‘political instructor’, member of the Korpusu Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego
(KBW) an organisation that helped to establish Stalinism in Poland by ethnic
cleansing, former secret police officer who fought against the Polish resistance
army, academic driven out of Poland by an anti-Semitic campaign in 1968, who
migrated to Israel despite his anti-Zionist leanings, and migrated to the capitalist
West despite his communist leanings, and whilst in Leeds made the academic
transition from Marxism and via a postmodern turn to liquid modernity and life as
a respected and influential public intellectual and political commentator.
All of Bauman’s commentators and, indeed, many of his critics assume that
Bauman’s intellectual output is a product of his individual genius, this stance is
found in both the edited volumes (Kilminster and Varcoe 1995; Beilharz 2000;
Elliott 2007; Jacobsen and Poder 2008) and in the sole-authored commentaries
(Smith 1999; Beilharz 2000; Tester 2004 and Blackshaw 2005).