Review: Izabela Wagner, ‘Bauman: A Biography’
Review of Izabela Wagner’s Bauman: A Biography (Polity, 2020), 452 pages.
Abstract
Bauman made part of a very special generation, which lived the World War II, believed in the promises of Communism, but was deceived by them, and punished by expressing their deceit. This context forges the personality of a deep and engaged thinker. In this remarkable biography, Wagner reviews Polish and English sources difficult to attain for Western readers, and makes the most of her expertise in sociology of the intellectuals to introduce the reader to the frame of mind of one of the most outstanding sociologists of recent times. Specially interesting are her remarks about Jewishness and the experiences of racial discrimination before the war; and the reconstruction of the intellectual environment at the University of Warsaw in the 1950, with the struggle for independence from the authoritarian impositions of the Soviet regime.
Reviewed by Elena Álvarez-Álvarez
The work I’m presenting ascribes to the genre of historical biography. For the purposes I’m preparing to write about, it seems important to underscore that it is not an “intellectual biography”. Taking this into account is important to contextualise better the work: the purpose of its author is not to familiarise the reader with the developments in Zygmunt Bauman’s ways of seeing and interpreting society. It is, on the contrary, to tell the evolution of his life events, contextualising them in places and documents which are sometimes difficult to gain access to. Having lived a long life, and having spent most of it between two countries so different as Poland and the United Kingdom, recomposing the pieces of such a life in order to build a coherent narrative was a laborious task. Izabela Wagner was well prepared to fulfil it, because of her knowledge of Polish and English languages, and because of her former research works about the sociology of the intellectuals (see, for example, Wagner 2011).
These initial remarks want to highlight we are facing a valuable resource for scholars in the fields of Sociology or Social Philosophy, of Bauman’s thought and for historians of the Twentieth Century (see Campbell, Davis and Palmer, 2018). Although Bauman himself used to say his life was not exceptional - being, probably, quite right, as far as many other people suffered similar circumstances - we can also add that such a life almost resumes the whole century, and this fact makes it worth reading. It’s worth noting too that Bauman was part of a generation who suffered under the two totalitarian regimes of the XX Century and moved towards the capitalist side of the world. This enriched his views with experiences, which also were beneficial to his theoretical approaches to society. Keeping in mind the due distinction between biography and social science, it is also true that knowing better the experiences of a sociologist who made of experience a privileged source for knowledge provides a key to better understand the “raw material” from which he formed his social insightful comments (see Bauman 1972; Tester 2006).
The biography is extensive and profound. In the following lines, I will just highlight few aspects that justify my consideration that it is a useful work for the researcher in social thought.
First, it is a remarkable work for the sources accessed. Wagner has attained an unpublished autobiography by Bauman himself, written in 1988 and kept in the Bauman Archive at the University of Leeds. It is a very personal text, contemporary to his wife’s memories, and rich in details about his own infancy and youth. One remarkable aspect of this document is that it stresses the relevance of Jewishness throughout Bauman’s life, particularly at school in Poznan, where he was pointed out and bullied for being a Jew, in his early ascription to Jewish groups, as a teen (Wagner 2020, 34-26); and afterwards, at the end of his military career. It was commonly said that Jewishness had not emerged in Bauman’s though until Modernity and Ambivalence (1991). Considering these documents, this view must be more nuanced.
Wagner’s selection of sources provide to the English-speaking reader some reports about Bauman from the Polish Communist authorities, recovered from Polish Archives and translated into English. They are dated between the end of the war and the beginning of Bauman’s academic career in 1953. Through them, we acknowledge the early stage of Bauman’s dissent: documents show Bauman was engaged with a “soft” socialism under which divisions of class would disappear; he participated in the Army’s counterespionage because of lack of other alternatives; and, in the last instance, he was considered too “soft” or moderated by his supervisors (see Wagner 2020, 96-98, 163). To these documents, we can add personal interviews conducted in Poland and the United Kingdom, among Bauman’s colleagues, friends and students. Last but not least, Wagner includes some translated fragments of the Polish version of Janina Bauman’s second book of memories, A Dream of Belonging. This edition has details that were not included in the final English version of the book, and that add precision to some recalling about the last years of the Baumans in Poland and about the exile.
Many of these sources are difficult to retrieve for English-speaking scholars. The broad selection provided, together with their accuracy, offers the reader a quite complete map of the facts and their meaning for Bauman himself and for his environment.
Having surveyed the sources, now we can focus on the biography's content. The biographer focuses her attention on the less known stages of Bauman’s life before 1968, much before he became a globally renowned scholar. The choice is appropriate, because the life of a famous writer is much easier to understand and in Bauman’s case, because fame arrived at a late stage of his life, when the conceptual frames of mind for his approach to social analysis had three decades of solid research behind. It is important to know well this work to interpret rigorously Bauman’s work (see Tester 2018, Palmer et al, 2020, and Beilharz 2020, 173-174) and the biography provides context to the emergence of that social work. There is also an outstanding reconstruction of Bauman’s later years of life and work in Beilharz’s Intimacy in Postmodern Times, which is a good complement to Wagner’s work.
The condition of Jewishness, in its racial meaning, is stressed all throughout Wagner’s works, in its racial meaning. The first chapters of the biography provide abundant evidence of the difficulty, first, of being a Jew in a small city in a country like Poland, who in the 1920s was building its national identity around Catholicism. The narrative follows to show the difficulty of being pointed out as Jew in a political and military context, when the Soviet Poland regarded the State of Israel as enemy, a situation which extended until the 1960s. Related to this, the biography also insists on the condition of being a refugee in Bauman’s life (an issue to which the author has pointed too in Wagner-Saffray, 2020) and the difficulties of adaptation to new contexts for him and for his family, also at his arrival to Leeds.
Jewishness and exile, which is the most dramatic face of migration, lead to other hermeneutical keys to Bauman’s thought, which he also shares with Adorno (1978, 33-34). This is the category of the intellectual as a stranger. In Bauman’s rendition, an intellectual is “one that lives for justice and truth in no regard of its consequences […] inhabits the eternal, and the eternal inhabits in him” (Bauman 1992, 77). As such, the intellectual shares with the stranger the critical sense, independence of judgement, mainly towards the interests of power in any of its political or civil forms (see Bauman 1991, 92-93; 2000, 205-206). What the biography contributes to confirm is that Bauman himself was personally a committed intellectual. All along his academic career, and even before, he was committed to the project of building a world hospitable to all human beings and to his position alongside the weakest members of society. As such, he always was reluctant to compromise with a particular school of thought, and always considered himself as an “outsider” in the capitalist world he criticised in depth.
The defence of the cause of freedom and equity requires the emancipation of those who are most constrained in societies. From the intellectual point of view, the task needs independence and creativity. Wagner’s biography shows how Bauman learned to preserve both, under the pressure of authoritarian control, in the reconstruction of the dynamics of research promoted by Julian Hochfeld at the Warsaw University (Wagner 2020, 207-219). And it also illustrates how a conversational style of researching is beneficial for publishing. The members of Hochfeld’s circle submitted research to other colleagues to hear their comments, in a way of working really together. It subsisted under difficulty after Hochfeld’s premature passing away in 1966. Indeed, the Polish Communist Secret Service intensified surveillance over this group of scholars, including Kolakowski, Bauman and Morawski, among others, from 1962 to 1968, forcing them, finally, to exile (Wagner 2020, 258-286).
This practice, learnt in Warsaw, was the modus operandi that Bauman brought with himself to the School of Sociology at the University of Leeds (Wagner 2020, 314-364). Dialogue was essential to Bauman’s thinking, and it is possibly one of the sources of his intellectual creativity. At the University of Leeds, Bauman established a system of collaboration among scholars, with frequent seminars and informal encounters, in which each one discussed their own projects and received feedback. This is a way of working that is still operative among his former students, now leaders of the Bauman Institute, and among the visitors of this research centre. This way of working, that Wagner classifies as “craft-style”, explains also Bauman’s progressive emphasis on a “conversational style” in writing, whether in his essays to the broad public, or in his late books in dialogue with other thinkers. As the biography finally stresses, readers of Bauman’s writings are, too, in debt with the “first readers” to which, through the years, the Polish sociologist asked for advice before publishing: the most standing among them was his first wife, Janina; then former students and colleagues, like Tester and Beilharz; then his second wife, Aleksandra; and the editors of Polity Press.
For the current academic division of sciences, this way of working seems original. From a philosophical point of view, though, dialogue is essential to thinking from its inception, in the Platonic dialogues. In any case, this conversational style is a source of creativity in thinking. In consonance with it, Bauman understood thinking as opposed to the fixation of social structures and always invited his students and readers to oppose to what he used to call the “TINA rule”, standing for “there is no alternative”. The rule makes people believe they must follow certain habits or mores, because they are the only existent ways of living. Bauman, instead, make tireless efforts to disclose alternative possibilities for human freedom. This gives shape to a thought-provoking work, frequently disturbing for power. But, when Bauman reflects about power and contests it, it seem important to note that he is someone who has known well the two sides of the relationship, someone that has been purged, then exiled, because of his deeper convictions (see Davis 2021). This biography is a deep contribution to the historical roots of the way of thinking of one among the most prominent social thinkers of the last decades.
References
Adorno, T. W. (1978). Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged Life. London: Verso.
Bauman, J. (1988). A Dream of Belonging. London: Virago.
Bauman, Z. (1972). Culture, Values and Science of Society. University of Leeds Review 15/2 (1972), 185-203.
- (1991). Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity.
- (1992). Mortality, Immortality and other Life Strategies. Cambridge: Polity.
- (2000). Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
Beilharz, P. (2020). Intimacy in Postmodern Times. A friendship with Zygmunt Bauman. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Campbell, T.; Davis, M.; Palmer, J. (2018). Hidden Paths in Zygmunt Bauman’s Sociology. Theory, Culture and Society 35(7-8), 1-24.
Davis, M. (2020). Hermeneutics contra fundamentalism: Zygmunt Bauman’s method for thinking in dark times. Thesis Eleven 156(1), 27-44.
Palmer, J.; Brzeziński, D.; Campbell, T. (2020). Sixty-three years of thinking sociologically: Compiling the bibliography of Zygmunt Bauman. Thesis Eleven 156(1), 118-133.
Tester, K. (2006). Intellectual Immigration and the English Idiom (or, A Tale of Bustards and Eagles). Polish Sociological Review 155, 275-291.
- On Repetition in the Work of Zygmunt Bauman. Thesis Eleven 149(1), 104-118.
Wagner, I. (2011). Becoming a Transnational Professional. Kariery I mobilność polskich elit naukowych. Warsaw: Naukowe Scholar.
Wagner-Saffray, I. (2020). Bauman as a refugee: we should not call refugees ‘migrants’. Thesis Eleven, 156(1), 102-117.
Elena Álvarez-Álvarez obtained her PhD at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross (Rome), with a dissertation about the relationships between Eastern and Western frames of thought in Late Antiquity. From then on, her research project has moved to the understanding of different keys for interpretation and understanding between different frames of mind in our plural world. As part of this project, she is analysing the work of Zygmunt Bauman from the perspective of the moral concepts. She is Teacher of Contemporary Philosophy at the International University of La Rioja (Spain).
