Bauman's published work extends to 57 books and well over a hundred articles. Most of these address a number of common themes, among which are
globalisation,
modernity and
postmodernity,
consumerism, and
morality.
Early work Bauman's earliest publication in English is a study of the British
labour movement and its relationship to class and
social stratification, originally published in Poland in 1960. He continued to publish on the subject of class and social conflict until the early 1980s. His last book was on the subject of
Memories of Class. Whilst his later books do not address issues of class directly, he continued to describe himself as a
socialist, and he never rejected
Marxism entirely. The
neo-Marxist theorist
Antonio Gramsci in particular remained one of his most profound influences, along with
neo-Kantian sociologist and
philosopher Georg Simmel.
Modernity and rationality In the late 1980s and early 1990s Bauman published a number of books that dealt with the relationship between modernity, bureaucracy, rationality and social exclusion. Bauman, following
Sigmund Freud, came to view European modernity as a trade off: European society, he argued, had agreed to forego a level of freedom to receive the benefits of increased individual security. Bauman argued that modernity, in what he later came to term its 'solid' form, involved removing unknowns and uncertainties. It involved control over nature, hierarchical bureaucracy, rules and regulations, control and categorisation — all of which attempted to gradually remove personal insecurities, making the chaotic aspects of human life appear well-ordered and familiar. Later in a number of books Bauman began to develop the position that such order-making never manages to achieve the desired results. When life becomes organised into familiar and manageable categories, he argued, there are always social groups who cannot be administered, who cannot be separated out and controlled. In his book
Modernity and Ambivalence Bauman began to theorise about such indeterminate persons in terms of an allegorical figure he called, 'the stranger.' Drawing upon Georg Simmel's sociology and the philosophy of
Jacques Derrida, Bauman came to write of the stranger as the person who is present yet unfamiliar, society's
undecidable. In
Modernity and Ambivalence Bauman attempted to give an account of the different approaches modern society adopts toward the stranger. He argued that, on the one hand, in a consumer-oriented economy the strange and the unfamiliar is always enticing; in different styles of food, different fashions and in tourism it is possible to experience the allure of what is unfamiliar. Yet this strange-ness also has a more negative side. The stranger, because he cannot be controlled or ordered, is always the object of fear; he is the potential mugger, the person outside of society's borders who is a constant threat. One of Bauman's most famous books,
Modernity and the Holocaust argues that the Holocaust was fundamentally enabled by the features of modernity itself—bureaucratic rationality, instrumental reason, and the social production of moral indifference. Drawing upon
Hannah Arendt's books on totalitarianism and the Enlightenment, Bauman developed the argument that the Holocaust should not simply be considered to be an event in Jewish history, nor a regression to pre-modern barbarism. Rather, he argued, the Holocaust should be seen as deeply connected to modernity and its order-making efforts. Procedural rationality, the division of labour into smaller and smaller tasks, the taxonomic categorisation of different species, and the tendency to view obedience to rules as morally good, all played their role in the Holocaust coming to pass. He argued that for this reason modern societies have not fully grasped the lessons of the Holocaust; it tends to be viewed—to use Bauman's metaphor—like a picture hanging on the wall, offering few lessons. In Bauman's analysis the Jews became 'strangers'
par excellence in Europe. The
Final Solution was pictured by him as an extreme example of the attempt made by society to excise the uncomfortable and indeterminate elements that exist within it. Bauman, like the philosopher
Giorgio Agamben, contended that the same processes of exclusion that were at work in the Holocaust could, and to an extent do, still come into play today.
Postmodernity and consumerism In the mid-to-late 1990s, Bauman began to explore
postmodernity and
consumerism. He posited that a shift had taken place in modern society in the latter half of the 20th century. It had changed from a society of producers into a society of consumers. According to Bauman, this change reversed Freud's "modern" tradeoff—i.e., security was given up in exchange for more freedom, freedom to purchase, consume, and enjoy life. In his books in the 1990s Bauman wrote of this as being a shift from "modernity" to "post-modernity". Since the turn of the millennium, his books have tried to avoid the confusion surrounding the term "postmodernity" by using the metaphors of "liquid" and "solid" modernity. In his books on modern consumerism, Bauman still writes of the same uncertainties that he portrayed in his writings on "solid" modernity; but in these books he writes of fears becoming more diffuse and harder to pin down. Indeed, they are, to use the title of one of his books, "liquid fears" – fears about
paedophilia, for instance, which are amorphous and have no easily identifiable reference. Bauman is credited with coining the term "
allosemitism" to encompass both
philo-Semitic and
anti-Semitic attitudes towards Jews as the
other. Bauman reportedly predicted the negative political effect that social media have on voter's choice by denouncing them as 'trap' where people only "see reflections of their own face".
Art: a liquid element? One of Bauman works focuses on the concept of art as influenced by the liquidity of appreciation. The author puts forward the idea that "we desire and seek a realization that usually consists of a constant
becoming, in a permanent disposition of
becoming". In essence, our aim is not the object of our longing but the action of longing itself, and the worst peril is reaching complete satisfaction. In this framework, Bauman explores how art can position itself in a world where the fleeting is the dominant paradigm. Art is substantially something that contributes to giving immortality to virtually anything: hence the philosopher wonders, "can art transform the ephemeral into an eternal matter?" Bauman concludes that the current reality is characterized by individuals who do not have time nor space to relate with the everlasting, with absolute and established values. Art and the relation of people with them, both in creating it and in participating in it, is dramatically changing. Withal, the concept of culture and art can only find a sense in the liquid society if it abandons its traditional understanding and adopts the deconstructive approach. Bauman gives as examples artworks by
Manolo Valdés,
Jacques Villeglé, and
Herman Braun-Vega. Citing
Hannah Arendt, he asserts that "an object is cultural if it persists; its temporary aspect, its permanence, is opposite to the functional ... culture sees itself threatened when all the objects in the world, those produced today and those of the past, are exclusively considered from the point of view of utility for the social process of survival." ==Awards and honours==