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Zygmunt Bauman Quotes
1925–2017 Poland
Zygmunt Bauman (19 November 1925 – 9 January 2017) was a Polish sociologist and philosopher born in Poznan. Bauman was a social theorist, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity.
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Man is in his short sojourn on earth equal to God in His eternity.
Avoid the crowd, avoid mass audiences, keep your own counsel, which is the counsel of philosophy—of wisdom you can acquire and make your own.
Marcus Aurelius appoints personal character and conscience the ultimate refuge of happiness-seekers: the only place where dreams of happiness, doomed to die childless and intestate anywhere else, are not bound to be frustrated.
As Christopher Marlowe’s Faust learned the hard way, wishing for a moment of bliss to say “the same” indefinitely is guaranteed to procure indefinite commitment to hell instead of indefinite happiness. … A state of rest would not be a state of happiness but of boredom.
The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.
We live in a world of communication - everyone gets information about everyone else. There is universal comparison and you don't just compare yourself with the people next door, you compare yourself to people all over the world and with what is being presented as the decent, proper and dignified life. It's the crime of humiliation.
[On the Polish government in the 1950s] My analysis was that the only wish of Communism was the need to stay in power.
The Republic is the only alternative to the blind, elemental, erratic, uncontrolled, divisive and polarizing globalization forces. We need political institutions effective in the planetary scale equivalent to that of transnational powers.
A good society is a society which believes that it is not good enough; that it is the task of the collectivity to insure individuals against individually suffered misfortune; and that the quality of society is measured by the quality of life of its weakest, just like the carrying power of a bridge is measured by its weakest pillar.
Our vulnerability [to ressentiment], is unavoidable (and probably incurable) in a kind of society in which relative equality of political and other rights and formally acknowledged social equality go hand in hand with enormous differences in genuine power, possessions and education; a society in which everyone “has the right” to consider himself equal to everybody else, while in fact being unequal to them.
A powerful case for that refurbished, secularized response to individual mortality was constructed and extensively argued by Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern sociology. He strove to insert and settle “society” in the place vacated by God and by Nature viewed as God’s creation or embodiment—and thereby to claim for the nascent nation-state that right to articulate, pronounce and enforce moral commandments and command the supreme loyalties of its subjects; the right previously reserved for the Lord of the Universe and His anointed earthly lieutenants.
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