BAUMAN, ZYGMUNT

BAUMAN, ZYGMUNT (1925– ), sociologist. Born in Poznan, Poland, to assimilated Jewish parents. At the start of World War II Bauman escaped to the Soviet-occupied zone, where he fought in a Polish division of the Red Army. After the war, he entered the University of Warsaw and rose to the rank of professor of sociology. In 1948, Bauman married a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto. Following a wave of antisemitism in 1968, they left Poland for Israel and in 1971 Bauman became professor of sociology at the University of Leeds, U.K. A leading, prolific, and iconoclastic scholar in contemporary social thought, Bauman is best known for his theories of postmodernity, which he applied to the study of the Holocaust in his work Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). The book provoked considerable controversy as Bauman argues that the Holocaust was a result of modernity, that is, technology and bureaucracy, rather than specific German nationalism. While critics believe that his thesis absolves National Socialism of its responsibility, Bauman counters that blaming Germany exclusively – though clearly National Socialism is to blame – absolves all others who were complicit in adopting and promoting ideas such as eugenics, which were popular with well-respected thinkers at that time in both Europe and the U.S. Professor emeritus at the University of Leeds from 1990, Bauman continued to write about the human condition in the postmodern age. (Beth Cohen (2nd ed.)