Zygmunt Bauman was born in 1925 – it is now almost 100 years since his birth. His career in sociology almost spanned six decades and culminated in more than sixty published book titles not to mention the many book chapters and academic articles. In many ways Bauman’s work straddled the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, providing us with a multitude of insights into the main changes and transformations characterizing these two centuries – what he metaphorically defined as ‘solid modernity’ and ‘liquid modernity’. This edited volume will illustrate the continuing interest in Bauman’s work through a number of chapters each dealing with the important aspects of his work and shedding light on some new angles and perspectives on his life and work.

Without aiming at any exhaustive account of Bauman’s life and work, the volume seeks to position Bauman’s within the field of sociology and to provide some examples of his lasting contribution to and relevance in this discipline.

As mentioned, Bauman’s ideas – his research topic, his extreme intellectual productivity and his imaginative approach to doing and writing sociology – – remain a source of inspiration for many scholars and researchers working within a variety of different fields and sub-fields, appealing equally to empirical work and theoretical elaboration. This book contains ten chapters, and all chapters are devoted to the presentation and discussion of themes and ideas that were characteristic of Bauman’s way of doing and writing sociology.

The purpose of this volume – as with the other volumes published in the Anthem Press Companion to Sociology series – is to provide a comprehensive overview of Zygmunt Bauman’s continued importance within the field of sociology and related social science disciplines. The book will engage with some of the major themes and continuing concerns of Bauman’s sociology. The chapters included in the book will explore different sides and dimensions of Goffman’s work, for instance, Bauman’s work, Bauman’s position and perspective within the social sciences (his combined Marxist and Weberian insights as well as inspiration from Sigmund Freud), his work on modernity and the Holocaust, the difference between the reception of his work respectively in Europe and the United States, Bauman’s writings on Western modernity, his work on death and immortality, his turn to the topic of nostalgia towards the end of his career, his many ‘conversational books’ written particularly throughout the final decade of his life and finally his engagement with ambivalence. Although it is impossible to ‘cover all angles’ of Bauman’s comprehensive work, it is nevertheless the overall aspiration behind the book that it will be found useful in teaching and research contexts alike, keeping the spirit of Zygmunt Bauman alive and kicking within sociology and related disciplines.

Michael Hviid Jacobsen is a professor of sociology at Aalborg University, Denmark.

Anthem Companions to Sociology

Acknowledgments; Contributors; Introduction- Zygmunt Bauman’s Sociological Thought: Bridging the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, Michael Hviid Jacobsen; Chapter One- Zygmunt Bauman: Weberian Marxist?, Peter Beilharz; Chapter Two- A Freudian without Psychology: The Influence of Sigmund Freud on Zygmunt Bauman’s Sociology, Matt Dawson; Chapter Three- Modernity and the Holocaust: Exploring Zygmunt Bauman’s Contribution to the Sociology of the Holocaust, Adele Valeria Messina; Chapter Four- Zygmunt Bauman and the Continental Divide in Social Theory, Stjepan G. Meštrović, Michael Ohsfeldt, and Jacob Hardy; Chapter Five- Zygmunt Bauman on the West: Re-Treading Some Forking Paths of Bauman’s Sociology , Jack Palmer; Chapter Six- Death as a Social Construct: Zygmunt Bauman and the Changing Meanings of Mortality, Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Nicklas Runge; Chapter Seven- Zygmunt Bauman and the “Nostalgic Turn”, Dariusz Brzeziński; Chapter Eight- Bauman on Borders: The Role of Our Door in the Construction of the Stranger, Shaun Best; Chapter Nine- Seeking Windows in a World of Mirrors: Zygmunt Bauman’s Difficult Art of Conversation, Mark Davis and Elena Álvarez-Álvarez; Chapter Ten- Ambivalence (Not Love) Is All Around: Zygmunt Bauman and the (Ineradicable) Ambivalence of Being, Michael Hviid Jacobsen; Index