Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman (Poznań, 1925 – Leeds, 2017) was a sociologist and philosopher of Jewish origin, born in Poland and later based in Britain. His work, which began in the 1950s, covers subjects as varied as social class, socialism, the Holocaust, consumerism and globalisation. He is best known for coining the terms "liquid modernity" and "liquid love", which have become common reference points for thinking about contemporary society.

Born in 1925 into a modest, non-observant Polish Jewish family, he was a young boy when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and his family fled east into the Soviet Union. There he joined the Soviet-controlled First Polish Army as a political instructor and took part in the battles of Kolberg and Berlin. After the war he became one of the army's youngest majors. From 1945 to 1953 he served in the Internal Security Corps, a period he later described as a mistake of youth and whose full extent remains unclear. His dishonourable discharge in 1953, following his father's approach to the Israeli embassy, caused a temporary rift with his father.

He taught at the University of Warsaw from 1954 until 1968, when a political purge drove many Polish Jews out of the country. He gave up his Polish citizenship to leave. After a spell teaching at Tel Aviv University, he took up a chair in sociology at the University of Leeds in 1970 and remained there for the rest of his career. From then on he wrote mostly in English, his third language, and his reputation grew considerably.

His thinking moved through two phases. At first he stayed close to Marxism, shaped by Gramsci and Simmel, and studied social stratification and the labour movement. From the late 1980s a trilogy marked a decisive turn towards a critique of modernity. In his best-known book, Modernity and the Holocaust, he argued that the genocide was not a relapse into premodern barbarity but a product of modern rationality itself: the division of labour, bureaucracy and rule-following made the Final Solution possible. Drawing on Freud, he described European modernity as a bargain in which people trade freedom for security. He later coined "liquid modernity" to describe a world in which institutions, identities and bonds change constantly and lose their solidity.

His influence has been strongest in sociology, in debates about globalisation and, from the late 1990s, within the anti-globalisation movement. His concepts remain widely used to analyse precarity, consumption and personal relationships in the digital age. In 2010 he shared the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities with Alain Touraine.