Bauman, Zygmunt (1925—2017) A UK-based, Polish-born sociologist. Bauman grew up in Poznan, Poland, but moved to Russia as a youth with his family to escape the German invasion. He fought with the Polish army, rising to the rank of major, but was sacked in 1953 because of his Jewishness. He then turned to academia, but was persecuted by anti-Semites within the academy, so he decided to leave Poland. He moved to the UK via brief stints in Tel Aviv and Canberra. A prolific writer, he was the author of over fifty books, dealing with a wide variety of topics, but principally focused around the issues of modernity, postmodernity, and the Holocaust. His major works include: Modernity and the Holocaust (1991); Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (2003); Postmodernity and its Discontents (1997) and Globalization: The Human Consequences (1998). As this brief list of titles indicates, Bauman’s work is primarily focused on three questions: What constitutes modernity? What are its effects? And what follows modernity? He charted the movement from what he characterized as ‘solid’ modernity to the present situation of liquid modernity in which the strong social bonds of family, religion, and country, but also the economic certainty of full employment, social security, and public healthcare, have been dissolved by the deterritorialization effects of capital, and precarity has become the norm. This theme gave rise to a veritable stream of books: Liquid Modernity (2000), Liquid Love (2003), Liquid Life (2005), Liquid Fear (2006), and Liquid Times (2006). From liquidity Bauman progressed, logically enough, to disposability, in Wasted Lives (2004). Like Baudrillard, Jean, Bauman argued that consumption and consumerism have overtaken the place of work as the main organizing principle of both the economy and social life. As a consequence, he argued, social cohesion has been reduced to what he calls ‘cloakroom’ groups, i.e. groups which come together over a specific issue such as an anti-war rally only to disperse again when the event is over. This loss of cohesion is further exacerbated in his eyes by the premium late capitalism places on the individual. Somewhat damningly, but on good evidence, he argued that modernity has not delivered its promise of emancipation. Following a similar line of argument to postmodern and Horkheimer, Max’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Bauman linked the social transformations wrought by modernity to the Holocaust in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), arguing that the technology that underpinned the economic growth that spurred modernity also facilitated the mass killing unleashed by the Nazi regime. For Bauman, then, the Holocaust was effectively a kind of murderous Fordism. Further Reading: P. Beilharz Zygmunt Bauman: Dialectic of Modernity (2000). T. Blackshaw Zygmunt Bauman (2005). D. Smith Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity (2000). K. Tester The Social Though of Zygmunt Bauman (2004).