Preface

      When I visited Zygmunt Bauman for the first time, I was astonished by what seemed a contradiction between the person and his work. Arguably the most influential European sociologist, someone whose anger about the state of the world can be felt in his every line, Bauman enchanted me with his wry sense of humour. His charm was disarming, his joie de vivre infectious.

Following his retirement from the University of Leeds in 1990, Zygmunt Bauman had published book after book at an almost alarming pace. The themes of these books stretch from intimacy to globalization, from reality TV to the Holocaust, from consumerism to cyberspace. He has been called the ‘head of the anti-globalization movement’, the ‘leader of the Occupy movement’ and the ‘prophet of postmodernism’. He is read the world over and considered a truly exceptional scholar in the field of the humanities, whose fragmentation into separate, sharply delineated and jealously protected areas of research he ignored with the insatiable curiosity of a Renaissance man. His reflections do not distinguish between the political and the personal. Why we have lost the capacity to love, why we find it hard to make moral judgements: he investigates the social and personal aspects of these questions with the same thoroughness.

      It was this epic view of the world that fascinated me when I began to read his books. It is impossible to remain indifferent to what Zygmunt Bauman writes, even if one does not agree with one or other of the points he makes – or, indeed, even if one disagrees with him altogether. Whoever engages with his work comes away viewing the world, and him- or herself, differently. Zygmunt Bauman described his task as that of making the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar. This, he said, is the task of sociology as such.

      This task can only be approached by someone who has the whole human being in view and who moves beyond his or her particular discipline and into philosophy, psychology, anthropology and history, art and literature. Zygmunt Bauman is not someone for minute details, statistical analyses and polls, figures, facts or projections. He draws his pictures with a broad brush on a large canvas, formulates claims, introduces new theses into discussions and provokes disputes. In terms of Isaiah Berlin’s famous typology of thinkers and writers – based on the dictum of the Greek poet Archilochos that ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’ – Zygmunt Bauman is both hedgehog and fox.¹ He introduced the concept of ‘liquid modernity’ to describe our present times, wherein all aspects of life – love, friendship, work, leisure, family, community, society, religion, politics and power – are transformed at unprecedented speed. ‘My life is spent recycling information’, he once said. That sounds modest until one appreciates the amount of material involved.

In a time marked by fear and insecurity, when many people are being taken in by the simple solutions offered by populism, critical analysis of the problems and contradictions in society and the world is needed more than ever. Such analysis is an essential precondition if we are to be able to think about alternatives, even if these are not within easy reach. Zygmunt Bauman, erstwhile communist, never stopped believing in the possibility of a better society, despite all the dreams that have failed. His interest was never in the winners, but in the losers, the uprooted and disenfranchised, the growing numbers of the underprivileged – not only poor people of colour in the Global South, but also members of the Western workforce. The fear that the ground that seemed rock solid during the good old post-war years is giving way is today a global phenomenon, and the middle classes are not spared from it. In a climate that asks you to accept the given and to understand the world, following Leibniz, as the best of all possible worlds, Zygmunt Bauman defends the moment of utopia – not as a blueprint for some future castle in the air but as a motivation to improve the conditions under which we live here and now.

      Zygmunt Bauman welcomed me to his house in Leeds, England, for four long conversations on his life’s work. The enchanting front garden, with its moss-covered chairs and its table overgrown by shrubs, borders on a busy road, as if to illustrate that it is only through contradiction that things become fully clear. At 90 years of age, Zygmunt