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THEORY AND EPISTEMOLOGY
The Bauman Reader, edited by Peter William. Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. 365 pp. $27.95 paper. ISBN: 0-631-- 21492-5.
Anthony Giddens recently observed that when he worked with Norbert Elias at Leicester in the mid-1960s, Elias comported himself as if he were a world-famous scholar, even though he was not. Sure enough, though, by the late-1970s as Elias turned 80, world fame rushed his way with the translation of The Civilizing Process, first published in 1939. Zygmunt Bauman's reputation has followed a similar, if less dramatic, trajectory, a fact of which he is probably quite aware. Interestingly, Bauman himself referred to "the burst of prominence and overnight success of Elias's presentation of the civilizing process" (p. 241) as a prelude to arguing against this general view (and in favor of Giddens' theory of increasing violence via the nation-state).
Born in Hungary in 1925, Bauman came to wide attention only after 1989 when his Modernity and the Holocaust appeared. There he made the then novel assertion that genocide should be viewed as a logical, even predictable outcome of modernity's bureaucratic way of organizing social and mental life, and not as some aberrant throwback to a more barbaric time. Whereas Elias thought interpersonal violence has systematically declined since the Middle Ages, Bauman interpreted the Holocaust-reminiscent of Horkheimer and Adorno's startling remarks in 1944-as the inevitable fruit of wholesale societal rationalization. The fact that Elias lost his mother in Auschwitz...