On Bauman: Power, ethics and social hermeneutics

Abstract

Zygmunt Bauman is acknowledged in particular for his contribution as a theorist of postmodernity (Rattansi, 2017; Smith, 1999). He is described as a public intellectual, a traditional public sociologist (Aidnik, 2015), thus a thinker who sees his role as service to society and human wellbeing achieved through the medium of critical sociological commentary that is accessible to both sociologists and the general public. Bauman’s public contribution is particularly strong in his late work, several books from Liquid Modernity (2000) to Retropia (2017), published posthumously. Those who study his work point to his sociological imagination and the moral tenor of his sociology (Dalglish, 2014), expressed as a critique of the globalized consumer society together with the particular attention paid to the question of postmodern ethics (Campbell & Till, 2010). Although Bauman is not without his critics (Best, 2013; Rattansi, 2017), his position and contribution to the elucidation of the “diverse challenges that face globalized human societies at the start of the 21st century” (Davis & Tester, 2010, p. xi) is widely recognized.