Bauman and contemporary sociology

A critical analysis

Ali Rattansi

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526105899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This is the first single-authored critical engagement with the major works of Zygmunt Bauman. Where previous books on Bauman have been exegetical, here an unwavering light is shone on key themes in the sociologist's work, exposing serious weaknesses in Bauman's interpretations of the Holocaust, Western modernity, consumerism, globalisation and the nature of sociology. The book shows how Eurocentrism, the neglect of issues of gender and a lack of awareness of the racism faced by Europe's non-white ethnic minorities seriously limit Bauman's analyses of Western societies. At the same time, it points to Bauman's repeated insistence on the need for sociologists to take a moral stance in favour of the world's poor and downtrodden as being his most valuable legacy. The book will be of great interest to sociologists. Its readability will be valued by undergraduates and postgraduates and it will attract a readership well beyond the discipline.

Part I

The dark side of modernity

The early years of the 1980s were a period of hope for Bauman. The flame of Solidarity was still burning bright in Poland, while Western societies looked as though they were entering a period of crisis that could yet see a renewal of radical impulses pushing towards a more progressive future. Socialism, then, was still an ‘active utopia’, its fires by no means completely extinguished and perhaps even heading for a period of ‘maturation’.

But in the course of Bauman’s writing Memories of Class there was a distinct change of mood. Class conflict of the old type was indeed becoming a memory, an idea etched in the very title of the book. Talk of capitalism in Bauman’s work was beginning to be displaced by a conceptual vocabulary of industrialism and post-industrialism. A discussion of the importance of consumerism had now begun (Memories of Class, 1982: 124).

Very significantly, Memories includes a quote from the Cambridge political philosopher John Dunn which, in hindsight, can be seen as presaging a wholesale shift in Bauman’s perspective: ‘Who now, except an imbecile, can still expect a guaranteed progress?’ (Memories: 125, emphasis in Dunn’s original).

The question of modernity

A radical new answer to Dunn’s question emerges in Legislators and Interpreters (1987), on the very issue of ‘progress’. The startling new conceptual centrepiece of this book is ‘modernity’, and that, too, from an explicitly ‘postmodernist’ viewpoint. This was at a time when most of British and American sociology had not yet registered the fervent debate about ‘modernity’ and ‘postmodernity’, and ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’, that had engulfed Continental Europe and the English and philosophy departments of American universities.

This was not surprising. Little in the preceding years had prepared Anglo-American sociology for what was about to hit them. Marx, Weber and Durkheim, the revered greats of classical sociology, had not used the concept of modernity, although of course they were acutely aware of the novelty of the times they were living in (Ray 1999). Only George Simmel (1858–1918), a relatively little-known figure in mainstream sociology, had discussed ‘modernity’, but in a limited manner, reflecting on the fragmented experience of the modern city or ‘metropolis’ as he called it (Frisby 1986, 2002; Berman 1982: 131–71).

In the 1950s and early 1960s, American sociology, especially that part of it which focused on the newly emerging postcolonial nations, had had much to say about the need for ‘modernization’ in these societies. But the patently ideological character of much of this analysis had led to an early demise of the concept, for ‘modernization’ was a thinly veiled celebration of American society. Modernisation meant progress, and this too towards the good society, but as defined in idealised American terms: individualism, the declining significance of class and the growth of an ever larger middle class, meritocracy, liberal democracy and a benign capitalism. So strongly had this form of what Woodiwiss has called ‘social modernism’ (1993) become the world view of American sociology, and so uncritically had it been embraced by its major representatives, that Daniel Bell, one of the most pre-eminent of these sociologists, was able to proclaim ‘the end of ideology’ in a book of that title in 1960, for there seemed to be no doubt that the main features of the good society were already present in contemporary America and no more serious debate remained (prefiguring the much later ‘end of history’ thesis of Francis Fukuyama in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union). Unprecedented prosperity as well as a conscious attempt to counter the threat of Soviet communism were part of the heady mixture that produced an ideology of American narcissism (Woodiwiss 1993: 5). As Offe points out, as a temper of the times, this viewpoint was prompted by the question of how it was that the US had become so successful; and the answer was ‘modernisation’, more broadly identified with Westernisation (1996:3; see also Habermas, 1984: 2–3). ‘Modernisation’ became, for American sociologists, simply a synonym for ‘progress’.

However, the struggle for the basic civil rights of African Americans, protests against America’s war in Vietnam, student uprisings, the development of the counter-culture among the post-1960s youth, the discovery of poverty in the midst of plenty and growing awareness of the biting observations of Galbraith about the ‘private affluence but public squalor’ of American cities (Galbraith 1958) soon undermined the complacency with which the 1960s had started. Sociologists re-read their Marx and Weber and soon questions of class conflict and the future of capitalism became centre stage in the discipline, especially in Britain.

Bauman was thus well ahead of his time. While debates raged in the 1980s between Marxist and neo-Weberian sociologists about class and capitalism, Bauman had begun to go beyond what seemed to him a narrow family quarrel among broadly left sociologists who were united more than they were divided. Although Bell had moved on to discuss post-industrialism (1973), and had begun to worry about what he called ‘the cultural contradictions of capitalism’ in a book of that title (1978, first published 1976), Bauman, captivated by developments in Continental Europe, began to paint on an even broader canvas. Like Lyotard, who had published his ground-breaking The Postmodern Condition in French in 1979 (with an English translation in 1984), which I shall discuss in Part II of this book, Bauman had ‘modernity’ in his sights. And this from a firmly ‘postmodernist’ perspective, a notion, as I have pointed out, foreign to most British and American sociologists.

Modernity and the Enlightenment

It is arguable – and indeed Woodiwiss (1997) has advanced a plausible case for just such an interpretation – that the supposedly new concept of ‘modernity’ that became the subject of heated debate in the 1980s and 1990s had more than a passing resemblance to the notion of modernisation, with its underlying conception of modernity, than is often realised. But there is one fundamental difference that prevents any assimilation of the ‘modernity’ at play in the two discourses: while modernisation celebrated modernity, the new perspectives problematised modernity. Far from seeing in modernity the basic contours of the good society, postmodernists sought to debunk its claims. And in this critique, the Enlightenment movement that flourished in eighteenth-century Europe became a key focus of contention.

The Enlightenment is of paramount importance in Bauman’s self-proclaimed postmodernist critique of modernity in Legislators and Interpreters. I will discuss Bauman’s views on postmodernity in Part II. Here I shall focus on Bauman’s analysis of modernity and, to begin with, his interpretation of the relationship between modernity and the Enlightenment as presented in Legislators. Both Legislators and Modernity and Ambivalence (1991) contain much on Bauman’s perspective on postmodernity too, but I shall postpone an exposition and critique of Bauman’s interpretation of postmodernity and postmodernism until Part II, where I will be able to give them the attention they merit.

Bauman on the Enlightenment and modernity

It is highly improbable that by the time he came to compose Legislators and Interpreters Bauman had not read Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, which had, after all, kick-started the debate about modernity in the social sciences. However, although there is no mention of Lyotard in the book, Bauman was pursuing a parallel project: a wholesale critique of the universalist pretensions of the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.

Intellectuals and the Enlightenment

The originality of Bauman’s approach is not in doubt, for he analysed the Enlightenment and indeed the whole of Western modernity and postmodernity from a perspective that focused on the changing status of intellectuals in relation to the state. Indeed, the very emergence of intellectuals as a separate and special social category is said by Bauman – although he is not alone in this view – to be inextricably tied to the Enlightenment. The book is sub-titled ‘On Modernity, Postmodernity and Intellectuals’.

The emergence of general intellectuals in the eighteenth century, Bauman argues, was a specific product of what he called the new ‘power/knowledge syndrome’ of modernity, with more than a nod to the writings of the French historian and social philosopher Michel Foucault (Gordon 1972, 1980). Modernity and intellectuals were part and parcel of two major new phenomena that began to flourish during the eighteenth century: the simultaneous emergence of a form of state power with the will and resources to mould society according to a pre-conceived plan; and the development of relatively autonomous groups of people, collectively called les philosophes in France, able to articulate sets of discourses and plans which in turn enabled the creation of blueprints for the state to follow. At its inauguration, modernity for Bauman was a period in which intellectuals and the state had a common project and co-operated to implement it. ‘Postmodernity’, as we shall see, signifies a period when the marriage of intellectuals with the state is dissolved and both undergo major transformations.

While Bauman does provide the outlines of what he takes to be the modern condition, he does not delve into the origins of the term itself; so it is worth adding some brief remarks to Bauman’s account, as otherwise the impression remains that the term originates with the Enlightenment itself. While it is not possible to be certain about this, a variety of scholars have suggested that ‘modern’ derives from the fifteenth-century Latin usage modernus, from the adverb modo, meaning ‘recently’ or ‘just now’, which was used to define the emergence and establishment of the Christian era, differentiating it from the pagan, Roman epoch. It marks a new approach to the notion of time, away from, especially, a cyclical view (Calinescu 1987: 13; see also Habermas 1983: 3–4; Smart 1990: 17). Modernity as seen through the eyes of the Enlightenment proclaimed the period beginning in the seventeenth century and flowering in the eighteenth as distinctive by virtue of its opposition to religion and superstition, enthroning, instead, the reign of reason over human affairs. Not surprisingly, the Enlightenment period is often dubbed the ‘Age of Reason’ by historians, and Bauman retains this interpretation of the Enlightenment.

At this stage it is also worth noting that the idea of ‘the Enlightenment’ as some sort of unified social era is of more recent provenance, emerging in the late nineteenth century, although contemporaries had used versions of the ‘enlighten’ metaphor, as in Kant’s Was ist Aufklärung? (What is Enlightenment?), and the notion of les lumières was also used by contemporaries in relation to the intellectuals of the period.

The term ‘intellectual’, Bauman points out, is a twentieth-century French invention. So in what sense did the Enlightenment exist and how can the philosophes be considered to have some unity? For Bauman, both were to be explained by unique historical circumstances, and for him it was only in France, and that too for only a brief period, that a unique coincidence between knowledge and power existed, which made it possible for us now to talk of ‘the Enlightenment’, although he is not consistent in restricting the implications of his analysis to France. In a superb exercise in the sociology of intellectual development, Bauman cites six conditions which in France ‘short-circuited knowledge and power’ (Legislators: 25). First was the emergence of absolutist power in the hands of the French monarchy; second, the demotion of the nobility from its previous dominant status; third, the vacuum left by the demise of aristocratic power; fourth, unlike what happened in Germany, where intellectuals held positions in universities or the civil service, in France a group emerged that was unhampered by such commitments, and so could develop as ‘freelance’ commentators who could imagine that they had a commitment to the whole of society; and fifth, there existed a network of clubs and salons in which they could meet. Finally, with the collapse of the old order, the emergence of a huge number of social problems required rapid and determined solution by the new centralised power-the perfect setting ‘in which power needed, and sought knowledge’ (Legislators: 25–6).

One among many major problems that confronted the monarchy in the new post-aristocratic society was that of the ‘poor’, who had previously been offered some relief by noble landowners. To keep an eye on landless vagrants and others, the state began forms of surveillance that soon began to expand into an apparatus that took on more and more administrative functions. A whole host of new laws were promulgated, colonising what was seen as ‘an empty land’. But this was a novel task which no one had attempted before, requiring a new skilled elite not tied by patronage to the older aristocratic elites (Legislators: 29). The despot needed enlightening, and a new breed of intellectuals was there to provide this; so was born the age of Enlightened Despotism. The state might lay claim to absolute power, but in many senses it was also relatively powerless against growing uncertainty, especially that posed by the new marginal groups of beggars, vagabonds and others (Legislators: 38, 41). A new sort of centralised state was coming into being, and with it a new form of power that could regain control.

The old system of power did not penetrate into the lives of those on whose labour the nobility depended for its sustenance and wealth; the peasants organised their own work routines, only being required periodically to hand over a ‘surplus’ to those who owned the land. This system of oversight was not equal to the task of overseeing a population that was rapidly freeing itself from the feudal system and crowding into ever-growing towns.

At this point Bauman’s narrative relies even more heavily on Foucault’s analysis, this time in Discipline and Punish (1984), of the new disciplinary power embodied in the design of Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’ in which a single watchman could survey below him all of the inmates of a building, but who themselves could never be sure when and how they were being watched. Moreover, now the whole of the life of the inmates could be subject to a rhythm and regimentation devised by those in power, penetrating into the very bodies of the inmates as they were forced to internalise new habits of conduct. And, equally significant, those occupying the new positions of surveillance over the majority required a novel expertise, they had to be skilled practitioners of a new art.

A new system of power/knowledge was emerging, and expertise was crucial to it. Bauman points out, as Foucault had emphasised, that the social sciences were born of this moment, later providing the scientific ‘objectivization’ of ‘human objects into categories amenable to statistical processing’ (a theme prefigured in his earlier work, especially Towards a Critical Sociology).

The meaning of modernity: the gardening metaphor

Bauman, following the lead of Ernest Gellner, now draws upon a metaphor that was to be a defining feature of his conception of modernity in this period of his intellectual development. Modernity, he argues, can be seen as a garden as opposed to wild land. Gardens need cultivation; they require constant vigilance and swift a...