Zygmunt Bauman
Zygmunt Bauman
Zygmunt Baumanis a Polish sociologist. He has resided in England since 1971 after being driven out of Poland by an anti-semitic campaign engineered by the communist government of the Polish People's Republic. Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leeds, Bauman is one of the world's most eminent social theorists writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity...
NationalityPolish
ProfessionSociologist
Date of Birth19 November 1925
CountryPoland
self creative way
Capitalism proceeds through creative destruction. What is created is capitalism in a 'new and improved' form - and what is destroyed is self-sustaining capacity, livelihood and dignity of its innumerable and multiplied 'host organisms' into which all of us are drawn/seduced one way or another.
class awful excluded
This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.
insanity madness
Madness is no madness when shared.
imagination lag ruthlessness
I suspect that one of capitalism's crucial assets derives from the fact that the imagination of economists, including its critics, lags well behind its own inventiveness, the arbitrariness of its undertaking and the ruthlessness of the way in which it proceeds.
bridges average pillars
The carrying power of a bridge is not the average strength of the pillars, but the strength of the weakest pillar. I have always believed that you do not measure the health of a society by GNP but by the condition of its worst off.
satisfaction attention found
Human attention tends to be focused on the satisfactions relationships are hoped to bring, precisely because somehow they have not been truly satisfactory. And if they do satisfy, the price of this satisfaction has often been found to be unacceptable.
meaningful past reality
The woe of mortality makes humans God-like. It is because we know that we must die that we are so busy making life. It is because we are aware of mortality that we preserve the past and create the future. Mortality is ours without asking--but immortality is something we must build ourselves. Immortality is not a mere absence of death; it is defiance and denial of death. It is 'meaningful' only because there is death, that implacable reality which is to be defied.
way life-is questioning
Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.
ice skating world
Civilisation, the orderly world in which we live, is frail. We are skating on thin ice. There is a fear of a collective disaster. Terrorism, genocide, flu, tsunamis.
talking silence exclusion
We belong to talking, not what talking is about... Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.
sight tasks helping
The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.
dream phoenix ashes
Like the phoenix, socialism is reborn from every pile of ashes left day in, day out, by burnt-out human dreams and charred hopes.
car should stills
Relationships, like cars, should undergo regular services to make sure they are still roadworthy.
loyalty commitment desire
Ideally, nothing should be embraced by a consumer firmly, nothing should command a commitment till death do us part, no needs should be seen as fully satisfied, no desires considered ultimate. There ought to be a proviso 'until further notice' attached to any oath of loyalty and any commitment. It is but the volatility, the in-built temporality of all engagements that truly counts; it counts more than the commitment itself, which is anyway not allowed to outlast the time necessary for consuming the object of desire (or, rather, the time sufficient for the desirability of that object to wane).