ABSTRACT
In this chapter I take a long-term view of Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology as such, leaving aside the party political dimension.1 I think that establishing the genesis, nature and scientific status of the works of any important sociological thinker is essential for a comprehensive understanding of their writings. This approach enables us to discern not only what their work is but also what it is not. It is a theme of this chapter – contra the tenor of some interpretations of his recent writings (see, for example, Jacobsen 2013; Wolff 2013) – that Bauman has not established a new hybrid discipline or field which blurs the distinction between science and art. In fact, his entire output is a form of social criticism which embodies a mode of thinking and a moral commitment to the plight of outcasts, the stigmatised and the excluded which goes back a very long way in his eventful biography. He applies and reapplies a critique of the deleterious consequences of life in a capitalist consumer society in the name of a radical, socialist alternative. This impetus is not always obvious in his copious and erudite works because of Bauman’s skilful use of diverse modes of persuasion, including ingenious metaphors, archetypes, literary tropes, guilt effects, rhetoric, stylistic switches and dialectical inversions. These devices are deployed in his writings as part of an effort to awaken moral obligations towards outsiders and constitute a continuation of that same calling or mission by different means. The vision of the realisation of a communist utopia of social equality found
in Karl Marx has been decoupled by Bauman from the proletariat and transformed into the standpoint of the deprived and underprivileged generally. This provides him with a stance of permanent political opposition. He avowedly stands on the shoulders of Antonio Gramsci, who stated that since society is created by human praxis alone it was not inevitable that it should be the way it is. There was always the possibility that it could be different. In all of Bauman’s scholarly creation this ‘emancipatory’ moral obligation or ‘critical’ spirit takes precedence over everything else. These Marxian traces in his thinking shape the problems he tries to solve and the parameters of their solution, as well as his scornful attitude towards the sociologists with whom
he disagrees or finds wanting, mostly on political grounds. This side of his work resembles in tone and intent the many other Marxist critiques of ‘bourgeois sociology’ in recent decades.2
