The Polish sociologist, philosopher and essayist, Zygmunt Bauman He was born in the city of Poznan on November 19, 1925 to non-practicing Jewish parents.
After the war he began studying Sociology at the University of Warsaw, where Stanislaw Ossowsky and Julian Hochfeld were professors. During a stay at the London School of Economics, he prepared his main treatise on British socialism which was published in 1959.
Bauman began to collaborate with numerous magazines, including “Socjology na co dzien“(Everyday Sociology, 1964), a very popular publication for the time. Initially, his thinking was close to the official Marxist doctrine, then Antonio Gramsci and Georg Simmel came closer.
An anti-Semitic purge in Poland in March 1968 pushed many of the surviving Polish Jews to emigrate; among them were many intellectuals who had lost the grace of the communist government; Zygmunt Bauman he was one of them: in his exile he had to resign his chair at the University of Warsaw.
At first, he emigrated to Israel, where he taught at Tel Aviv University; he subsequently accepted a Chair in Sociology at the University of Leeds (England), where he occasionally served as Head of the Department. From this moment on, almost all his writing was done in the English language.
The production of Bauman he focused his research on topics such as social stratification and the labor movement, before moving on to more general areas, such as the nature of modernity. The most prolific period of his career began after he retired from the Leeds Professorship in 1990, when he gained a certain self-esteem outside the circle of labor sociologists with a book on the alleged connection between the ideology of modernity and the Holocaust.
Bauman died Surrounded by his family at his home in Leeds, England, on January 9, 2017. He was 91 years old.