The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Bauman. An Appreciation of Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017)

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.