In Culture, Modernity and Revolution a group of distinguished sociologists and social philosophers reflect upon the major concerns of Zygmunt Bauman. Their essays not only honour the man, but provide important contributions to the three interlinked themes that could be said to form the guiding threads of Bauman's life work: power, culture and modernity. Culture, Modernity and Revolution is both a remarkable sociological commentary on the problems facing East-Central Europe and an exposition of some of the key, hitherto neglected, features (...) of the modern cultural universe. (shrink)

This article provides background material to help readers appreciate three speeches printed in this issue, given by Stefan Morawski, Dennis Smith and Hans Joas on the occasion of the presentation to Zygmunt Bauman of a Festschrift in March 1996 in Leeds. The article describes: relevant details of Polish history concerning cultural patriotism, anti-state attitudes, the role of Jews in the communist state apparatus and anti-Semitism, focusing on post-1945; the peculiarities of the indigenous British sociology tradition and the part played by (...) exiles in shaping it; a profile of the `successful outsider'; and the implications of Bauman's recent work on the Holocaust for the Sonderweg thesis about German history and the Historikerstreit, which are also sketched. It concludes that far from being a `homeless intellectual', Bauman has two homes, perhaps reflecting the wider integrating process of Eastern and Western Europe, until recently separated by a gulf. (shrink)

The reception of Zygmunt Bauman in Germany can be understood against the background of the two great public debates that have dominated post-war West German cultural, political and intellectual life, that over the Sonderweg thesis, and the Historikerstreit. This reception is analysed. It was in terms of the questions those debates had raised and the positions taken by the participants in them that Bauman's writings on modernity and postmodernity, and the Holocaust in particular, were received. A universal theme was involved. (...) The legitimate use of historical understanding was at stake, with identity and comparison being central issues for a set of positions, a field of forces in which Bauman is the `odd one out'. Bauman is an outsider to the debates. He is someone with stimulating ideas which sometimes appear paradoxical, and which drove wedges between established ideological alignments. To the Germans, he seems, understandably, an interesting and puzzling figure. (shrink)