Zygmunt Bauman and the West

A Sociology of Intellectual Exile

Jack Palmer

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9780228018209
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Zygmunt Bauman was both an outsider of Western modernity and one of its foremost interpreters. He was an exemplary figure in twentieth-century intellectual work on exile who experienced both Nazi and Soviet forms of totalitarianism.The first work to draw extensively on Bauman's personal archive, Zygmunt Bauman and the West argues that the distinctive social thought that sprang from Bauman's lived experiences of exile amounts to a sustained, sophisticated, and hitherto unappreciated problematization of Eurocentrism and the West. Through an overview of the intellectual's thought and his contribution to sociology, Jack Palmer explores Bauman's experience and interpretation of the West and seeks to understand his work in a broader context, outside of the Eurocentric environment from which it was born. Intervening in a resurgent sociology of intellectuals, Zygmunt Bauman and the West re-evaluates the place of the West in social and political thought.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliographical Note
• Introduction: Zygmunt Bauman and the West
• 1 The Exilic Position
• 2 Writing the Multiplicity of Modernity
• 3 Decolonizing Zygmunt Bauman?
• 4 Postmodernity as Jewish Experience and Interpretation
• 5 From Solid Communism to Liquid Post-Communism
• Conclusion: Melancholic Hope
• Notes
• Index