Both conditions, which have made genocides possible, are present in modernity only, for they reflect modernity’s dissatisfaction with and transcendence of the present times. Modernity’s anxiety, deep-seated feelings of insecurity and obsession with safety indicate this state of affairs, as Bauman argues. These feelings can be, and indeed have been, exploited for political purposes. “The ghost of the Holocaust,” as Bauman calls them, perpetuates itself, when homes and whole neighborhoods become like “a heavily armed ghetto” (Bauman 1989b: 240). The Holocaust—Bauman argues against the German historian Goldhagen—cannot be explained as the effect of some personal attributes of its perpetrators. Rather, it was a consequence of a modern invention such as rational bureaucracy. Mass murder was mostly committed with “thorough emotional detachment” (Bauman 1989b: 245). No human passions were necessary, and personal feelings were suspended. The killing procedure was routinized and conducted by teams, moral considerations were pushed aside and the victims were depersonalized completely. For the sake of the future, Bauman concludes, it is imperative that the past be not manipulated in such a way, that the future could become “inhospitable to humanity and uninhabitable” (Bauman 1989b: 250).
The Reception of Bauman’s Work
On Bauman’s work there is a sizable secondary literature. Some of it aims to provide a general introduction to this work (see Beilharz 2000; 2001; Blackshaw 2005; Davis 2013; Elliott 2007). Other secondary literature concerns specific themes, with which Bauman has dealt. One of such themes is Bauman’s use of metaphors—in particular, the metaphors of solid modernity vs. liquid postmodernity, tourists vs. vagabonds, gardeners vs. gamekeepers, interpreters vs. legislators. According to a prominent commentator and Bauman expert, the Danish scholar Hviid Jacobsen, Bauman’s methodology makes him “a methodological maverick” that “consciously and consistently blurs the […] dividing line between theory and research methods, between sociology and poetry, between science and art, by way of a multitude of literary, rhetorical and poetic devices” (Jacobsen 2013: 193).
Metaphors are one of such devices, as metaphorical imagery promotes the sociological imagination. Their achievements are remarkable, according to Hviid Jacobsen. For, they make it possible for Bauman to communicate about what is unfamiliar or seemingly trivial, and to cast light on “some of the often most intangible traits and hidden dimensions of the human world (such as inequality, globalization, morality, suffering, love, solidarity and cruelty).” More in general, they have been instrumental “to produce and promote analytical creativity and clarity” (Jacobsen 2013: 205). Hviid Jacobsen has produced not only a typology but also a balanced evaluation of Bauman’s metaphors (Jacobsen 2013: 207–208). As a matter of fact, not all the pertinent secondary literature is eulogistic. Some of it is critical. Hviid Jacobsen himself has remarked that the nature of the ‘liquid’ metaphor is unclear: is it just a metaphor of contemporary society, or does Bauman rather propose an identity between this simile and the reality to which it refers? (Jacobsen 2013: 211).
Appraisals of Bauman may concern his oeuvre in general (see Elliott 2007; Joas and Knoebl 2005: 478–84), his intellectual biography (Best 2013) and the presence of utopianism in all his works (Jacobsen 2007); or they may concern specific aspects of it, such as his interpretation of Weber (Du Gay 1999; 2000); or his consideration of class as no longer a useful sociological tool (Atkinson 2008). This secondary literature will be here touched upon selectively and briefly. Though this literature is often critical, it should be recalled that even critics of Bauman recognize the significance of Bauman’s writings (cf. for instance Joas and Knoebl 2005: 475). As for the general introductions, those by Peter Beilharz are noteworthy not only for their thoroughness, but also because of the author’s remarkable expertise on Bauman. Beilharz is Visiting Professor at the Bauman Institute at Leeds, where Bauman taught in the 1970s and 1980s, and has edited a four-volume collection of Bauman’s writings in addition to authoring the two introductions, which have been previously cited (Bauman 2002a).
In his introductions, Beilharz has endeavored to give a complete presentation of Bauman’s oeuvre; however, he has emphasized Bauman’s persistent ambivalence about modernity, and the “modern forms of enforcement and implementation” (Beilharz 2000: 170). This interpreter lingers, like other interpreters (cf. for instance Best 2013: 65–100), especially on Bauman’s celebrated work on modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman 1989b). Beilharz considers this work “almost certainly Bauman’s most influential book” (Beilharz 2000: 88). Bauman views it, according to Beilharz, “as an accident waiting to happen within the field of possibilities we call modernity” (Beilharz 2000: 91). Bauman himself “is a kind of ambivalent modernist.” “Moderns may shift historically from policies of stigmatization to those of assimilation” (Beilharz 2000: 100–11), “but the task of sociology is to interpret the social and the cultural in order to uncover the specific forms of being in the world” (Tester 2004: 17).
Modernity is for him “the last utopia.” Its obsession with order has paved the way to the Communist and Fascist versions of totalitarianisms (Beilharz 2000: 165). Bauman’s disillusion with modernity results—Beilharz contends—from “his fundamental disappointment in Marxism” (Beilharz 2000: 121). Bauman’s ambivalence regards both modernity and sociology. Postmodernity provides no overcoming of it, for itself “needs to be explained,” rather than being the explanation (Beilharz 2001: 12).
Blackshaw’s introduction to Bauman (Blackshaw 2005) differs from Beilharz’s in some important respects. Unlike Beilharz, first of all, who makes but passing reference to the American philosopher Richard Rorty, Blackshaw deals at some length with him, and suggests that there is a twofold analogy between these two thinkers. Like Rorty, Bauman conceives of the modern world as something which should be experienced and accounted for as a totality rather than as the result of single factors, as it would be in keeping with the “dismembering ideals” prevailing in postmodernism and poststructuralism. Like Rorty, moreover, Bauman rethinks and recombines already existing “theories, ideas and concepts,” in such a way that his originality lies in “his ability to make connections which have not previously been articulated.” A further distinctive contribution of Blackshaw consists in his interpretive thesis that two distinctive periods may be distinguished in Bauman’s oeuvre: in a first period, Bauman was “a cultural Marxist sociologist who died a slow death”; while in the second period, on which Blackshaw focuses, and which follows the publication of his Legislators and Interpreters (1987b), Bauman has shifted to a postmodern and “liquid” vision of modernity (Blackshaw 2005: