Modernity and the Holocaust

Modernity and the Holocaust PDF Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745638090
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Sociology is concerned with modern society, but has never come to terms with one of the most distinctive and horrific aspects of modernity - the Holocaust. The book examines what sociology can teach us about the Holocaust, but more particularly concentrates upon the lessons which the Holocaust has for sociology. Bauman's work demonstrates that the Holocaust has to be understood as deeply involved with the nature of modernity. There is nothing comparable to this work available in the sociological literature.

Modernity and the Holocaust

Modernity and the Holocaust PDF Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745638090
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Sociology is concerned with modern society, but has never come to terms with one of the most distinctive and horrific aspects of modernity - the Holocaust. The book examines what sociology can teach us about the Holocaust, but more particularly concentrates upon the lessons which the Holocaust has for sociology. Bauman's work demonstrates that the Holocaust has to be understood as deeply involved with the nature of modernity. There is nothing comparable to this work available in the sociological literature.

Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust

Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust PDF Author: Jack Palmer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100056827X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust is a decisive text of intellectual reflection after Auschwitz, in which Bauman rejected the idea that the Holocaust represented the polar opposite of modernity and saw it instead as its dark potentiality. Bringing together leading scholars from across disciplines, this volume offers the first set of focused and critical commentaries on this classic work of social theory, evaluating its ongoing contribution to scholarship in the social sciences and humanities. Addressing the core messages of Modernity and the Holocaust that continue to sound amidst the convulsions of the present, the chapters situate Bauman’s volume in the social, cultural and academic context of its genesis, and considers its role in the complex processes of Holocaust memorialisation. Offering extensions of Bauman’s thesis to lesser-known and undertheorised events of mass violence, and also considering the significance of Janina Bauman’s writings in their own right, this volume will appeal to scholars of sociology, intellectual history, Holocaust and genocide studies, moral philosophy, memory studies and cultural theory.

Modernity and Ambivalence

Modernity and Ambivalence PDF Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745638112
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
Modern civilization, Bauman argues, promised to make our lives understandable and open to our control. This has not happened and today we no longer believe it ever will. In this book, now available in paperback, Bauman argues that our postmodern age is the time for reconciliation with ambivalence, we must learn how to live in an incurably ambiguous world.

Moral Blindness

Moral Blindness PDF Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074566962X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
Evil is not confined to war or to circumstances in which people are acting under extreme duress. Today it more frequently reveals itself in the everyday insensitivity to the suffering of others, in the inability or refusal to understand them and in the casual turning away of one’s ethical gaze. Evil and moral blindness lurk in what we take as normality and in the triviality and banality of everyday life, and not just in the abnormal and exceptional cases. The distinctive kind of moral blindness that characterizes our societies is brilliantly analysed by Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis through the concept of adiaphora: the placing of certain acts or categories of human beings outside of the universe of moral obligations and evaluations. Adiaphora implies an attitude of indifference to what is happening in the world – a moral numbness. In a life where rhythms are dictated by ratings wars and box-office returns, where people are preoccupied with the latest gadgets and forms of gossip, in our ‘hurried life’ where attention rarely has time to settle on any issue of importance, we are at serious risk of losing our sensitivity to the plight of the other. Only celebrities or media stars can expect to be noticed in a society stuffed with sensational, valueless information. This probing inquiry into the fate of our moral sensibilities will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the most profound changes that are silently shaping the lives of everyone in our contemporary liquid-modern world.

Wasted Lives

Wasted Lives PDF Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745637159
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
The production of ‘human waste’ – or more precisely, wasted lives, the ‘superfluous’ populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts – is an inevitable outcome of modernization. It is an unavoidable side-effect of economic progress and the quest for order which is characteristic of modernity. As long as large parts of the world remained wholly or partly unaffected by modernization, they were treated by modernizing societies as lands that were able to absorb the excess of population in the ‘developed countries’. Global solutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally produced overpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached the furthest lands of the planet, ‘redundant population’ is produced everywhere and all localities have to bear the consequences of modernity’s global triumph. They are now confronted with the need to seek – in vain, it seems – local solutions to globally produced problems. The global spread of the modernity has given rise to growing quantities of human beings who are deprived of adequate means of survival, but the planet is fast running out of places to put them. Hence the new anxieties about ‘immigrants’ and ‘asylum seekers’ and the growing role played by diffuse ‘security fears’ on the contemporary political agenda. With characteristic brilliance, this new book by Zygmunt Bauman unravels the impact of this transformation on our contemporary culture and politics and shows that the problem of coping with ‘human waste’ provides a key for understanding some otherwise baffling features of our shared life, from the strategies of global domination to the most intimate aspects of human relationships.

Bauman

Bauman PDF Author: Izabela Wagner
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509526897
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
Global thinker, public intellectual and world-famous theorist of ‘liquid modernity’, Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) was a scholar who, despite forced migration, built a very successful academic career and, after retirement, became a prolific and popular writer and an intellectual talisman for young people everywhere. He was one of those rare scholars who, grey-haired and in his eighties, had his finger on the pulse of the youth. This is the first comprehensive biography of Bauman’s life and work. Izabela Wagner returns to Bauman’s native Poland and recounts his childhood in an assimilated Polish Jewish family and the school experiences shaped by anti-Semitism. Bauman’s life trajectory is typical of his generation and social group: the escape from Nazi occupation and Soviet secondary education, communist engagement, enrolment in the Polish Army as a political officer, participation in the WW II and the support for the new political regime in the post-war Poland. Wagner sheds new light on the post-war period and Bauman’s activity as a KBW political officer. His eviction in 1953 from the military ranks and his academic career reflect the dynamic context of Poland in 1950s and 1960s. His professional career in Poland was abruptly halted in 1968 by the anti-Semitic purges. Bauman became a refugee again - leaving Poland for Israel, and then settling down in Leeds in the UK in 1971. His work would flourish in Leeds, and after his retirement in 1991 he entered a period of enormous productivity which propelled him onto the international stage as one of the most widely read and influential social thinkers of our time. Wagner’s biography brings out the complex connections between Bauman’s life experiences and his work, showing how his trajectory as an ‘outsider’ forced into exile by the anti-Semitic purges in Poland has shaped his thinking over time. Her careful and thorough account will be the standard biography of Bauman’s life and work for years to come.

Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought

Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought PDF Author: Chad Alan Goldberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022646055X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The French tradition: 1789 and the Jews -- The German tradition: capitalism and the Jews -- The American tradition: the city and the Jews

Mobile Modernity

Mobile Modernity PDF Author: Todd Samuel Presner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
"Treating the German railway as both an iconic symbol of modernity and a crucial social, technological, and political force, Presner advances a groundbreaking interpretation of the ways in which mobility is inextricably linked to German and Jewish visions of modernity. Moving beyond the tired model of a failed German-Jewish dialogue, Presner emphasizes the mutual entanglement of the very categories of German and Jewish and the many sites of contact and exchange that occurred between German and Jewish thinkers." "Rather than a conventional, linear history that culminates in the tragedy of the Holocaust, Presner produces a cultural mapping that articulates a much more complex story of the hopes and catastrophes of mobile modernity. By focusing on the spaces of encounter emblematically represented by the overdetermined triangulation of Germans, Jews, and trains, he introduces a new genealogy for the study of European and German-Jewish modernity."--Jacket.

Evil and Human Agency

Evil and Human Agency PDF Author: Arne Johan Vetlesen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139448840
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Evil is a poorly understood phenomenon. In this provocative 2005 book, Professor Vetlesen argues that to do evil is to intentionally inflict pain on another human being, against his or her will, and causing serious and foreseeable harm. Vetlesen investigates why and in what sort of circumstances such a desire arises, and how it is channeled, or exploited, into collective evildoing. He argues that such evildoing, pitting whole groups against each other, springs from a combination of character, situation, and social structure. By combining a philosophical approach inspired by Hannah Arendt, a psychological approach inspired by C. Fred Alford and a sociological approach inspired by Zygmunt Bauman, and bringing these to bear on the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, Vetlesen shows how closely perpetrators, victims, and bystanders interact, and how aspects of human agency are recognized, denied, and projected by different agents.

Liquid Modernity

Liquid Modernity PDF Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074565701X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a 'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity to a 'light' and 'liquid', software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history. This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life - emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community - and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning. Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.