Communism and Modernity

Abstract

The sociological problem thrown up by the March Events of 1968 was that the public issues emphasised by the intellectuals evidently did not connect with the personal troubles experienced by wider social groups. Zygmunt Bauman’s post-exile sociological work commenced with an attempt to make sense of exactly this conundrum. It was an attempt that he pursued through the 1970s and 1980s and it eventually played a crucial part in the emergence and development of his interrogation of modernity. It is the aim of this chapter to discuss Bauman’s reflections on the nature and the fate of actually existing socialism and then to use that material as a way of beginning to open up a consideration of aspects of his understanding of modernity. In this way the chapter covers debates that are of crucial importance in the development of Bauman’s sociology. His discussion of actually existing socialism can be identified as the chronological and thematic hinge between his particular Polish studies and the more general sociological inquiries for which he became known in the late 1980s and 1990s. In short, in order to understand Bauman’s work on the Holocaust, postmodernity and liquid modernity, it is first of all necessary to spend some time with his essays on Eastern European Communism.