The Anthem Companion to Zygmunt Bauman

Without aiming at any exhaustive account of Bauman’s life and work, the volume seeks to position Bauman’s within the field of sociology and to provide some examples of his lasting contribution to and relevance in this discipline.

As mentioned, Bauman’s ideas – his research topic, his extreme intellectual productivity and his imaginative approach to doing and writing sociology – – remain a source of inspiration for many scholars and researchers working within a variety of different fields and sub-fields, appealing equally to empirical work and theoretical elaboration. This book contains ten chapters, and all chapters are devoted to the presentation and discussion of themes and ideas that were characteristic of Bauman’s way of doing and writing sociology.

The purpose of this volume – as with the other volumes published in the Anthem Press Companion to Sociology series – is to provide a comprehensive overview of Zygmunt Bauman’s continued importance within the field of sociology and related social science disciplines. The book will engage with some of the major themes and continuing concerns of Bauman’s sociology. The chapters included in the book will explore different sides and dimensions of Goffman’s work, for instance, Bauman’s work, Bauman’s position and perspective within the social sciences (his combined Marxist and Weberian insights as well as inspiration from Sigmund Freud), his work on modernity and the Holocaust, the difference between the reception of his work respectively in Europe and the United States, Bauman’s writings on Western modernity, his work on death and immortality, his turn to the topic of nostalgia towards the end of his career, his many ‘conversational books’ written particularly throughout the final decade of his life and finally his engagement with ambivalence. Although it is impossible to ‘cover all angles’ of Bauman’s comprehensive work, it is nevertheless the overall aspiration behind the book that it will be found useful in teaching and research contexts alike, keeping the spirit of Zygmunt Bauman alive and kicking within sociology and related disciplines.