Zygmunt Bauman is widely acknowledged as the most interesting and consistent of postmodern sociologists. Yet his work is widely dispersed across a number of fields and his critical interpretation is scattered across a wide array of disciplines. This major four-volume collection draws together these important materials for the first time. The contributions in the four-volume set are organized around themes, as follows:

- biographical

- communism and Eastern Europe

- Modernity and the Holocaust

- Marxism, class and political economy

- sociology: Weber, bureaucracy, Durkheim, the stranger, consumption, work and welfare

- postmodernism

- ethics

- death and dying

- intellectuals and power

- extensions and applications of Bauman's ideas by others, from Japan to Latin America and Scandinavia.

The collection features the work of key commentators and is edited by Peter Beilharz, Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University and Director of the Thesis Eleven Centre for Critical Theory. He is the author of Zygmunt Bauman: Dialectic of Modernity (SAGE Publications, 2000) and editor of The Bauman Reader (Blackwell, 2000).

VOLUME ONE

PART ONE: PROFILES AND SURVEYS

Reading Zygmunt Bauman - Peter Beilharz

Looking for Clues

Modernity, Postmodernity and Ethics - Zygmunt Bauman, Timo Cantell and Poul Poder Pedersen

An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman

The Journey Never Ends - Zygmunt Bauman and Peter Beilharz

Zygmunt Bauman Talks with Peter Beilharz

Gespr[um]ach mit Janina Bauman and Zygmunt Bauman - Janina Bauman and Zygmunt Bauman

Context and Sociological Horizons - Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester

Three Appreciations of Zygmunt Bauman - Richard Kilminster and Ian Varcoe

Bauman's Ways of Seeing the World - Stefan Morawski

Zygmunt Bauman - Dennis Smith

How to Be a Successful Outsider

Identity and the Limits of Comparison - Ian Varcoe

Bauman's Reception in Germany

Modernity and Tough Jews

The Right to Inconsistency - Pieter Nijhoff

Sociology, Postmodernity and Exile - Zygmunt Bauman, Richard Kilminster and Ian Varcoe

An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman

Culture and Power in the Writings of Zygmunt Bauman - Ian Varcoe and Richard Kilminster

Laudatio f[um]ur Zygmunt Bauman - Claus Offe

Zygmunt Bauman - Barry Smart

Demons of Other People's Fear - Janina Bauman

The Plight of the Gypsies

The Walls Tighten around Us - Janina Bauman

A Dream of Belonging - Janina Bauman

My Years in Postwar Poland

A Review of Janina Bauman's Winter in the Morning - Wladyslaw Bartoszewski

Out of the Ghetto - Patrick Wright

A Sad Story - Carole Angier

Endings and Contradictions - Murray Baumgarten

Observations on Holocaust Literature

PART TWO: SOCIALISM AND INTELLECTUALS

Poland and Britain - Julian Hochfeld

Two Concepts of Socialism

The Origins and Significance of East European Revisionism - Karl Reyman and Herman Singer

Polish Revisionism - James H Satterwhite

Critical Thinking in Poland from 1953

A Pleading for Revolution - Leszek Kolakowski

A Rejoinder to Z Bauman

The Social Role of Eastern European Intellectuals Reconsidered - Lewis A Coser

Intellectuals and Modernity - David Roberts

A Postmodern Perspective

VOLUME TWO

PART THREE: THE HOLOCAUST

Bauman in Germany - Hans Joas

Modern Violence and the Problems of German Self-Understanding

Modernity and Totalitarianism - Luciano Pellicani

Modernity, Libertarianism and Critical Theory - Alex Delfini and Paul Piccone

Reply to Pellicani

Genocide, Civilization and Modernity - Michael Freeman

Genocide and Decivilizing Processes in Germany - Jonathan Fletcher

Civilization and Ambivalence - Ian Burkitt

Holocaust Topologies - David B Clarke, Marcus A Doel and Francis X McDonough

Singularity, Politics, Space

The Holocaust and the Modernization of Gender - Ann Taylor Allen

A Historiographical Essay

The Terrorism of Reason in the Thought of Zygmunt Bauman - David Torevell

Sociology, History and the Holocaust - Ivar Oxaal

Race, Ethnicity and the Rational Organization of Evil - John Rex

Modernity, the Holocaust and Politics - Rosemary H T O'Kane

Testimonies and Studies - Edith Kurzweil

The Holocaust, Modernity and Tough Jews - Jack Zipes

Genocide and the Social Production of Immorality - Ruth Jamieson

[um]Uber die Rationalit[um]at des B[um]osen - Zygmunt Bauman, Harald Welzer and Peter Beilharz

Interview mit Zygmunt Bauman

Modernity and the Holocaust - A D Moses

Overall Interpretations - Yehuda Bauer

Zygmunt Bauman, Jeffrey Herf, Goetz Aly

Historicizing the Holocaust - Dominick LaCapra

Genocide and the Social Production of Immortality - Andrew Charlesworth

Towards a Geography of the Shoah - R Kilminster and I Varcoe

The Critique of Instrumental Rationality - Robert Fine

PART FOUR: THE POSTMODERN

Zygmunt Bauman's Postmodern Turn - Douglas Kellner

Postmodern Ethics - Scott Lash

The Missing Ground

Zygmunt Bauman - George Ritzer

From Modern to Postmodern

Zygmunt Bauman - Steven Seidman

Modernity, Postmodernity and the New Middle Ages - Dennis Smith

VOLUME THREE

PART FOUR: THE POSTMODERN (CONTINUED)

The Discontented Epoch - Tim May

Freedom and Security in Bauman's Postmodernity

Inter Putatorem et Vastitatem - Michael Crozier

The Ambivalences of the Garden Metaphor in Modernity

The Consequences of Alterity - Gillian Robinson

Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and Ambivalence

Zygmunt Bauman - Shaun Best

Personal Reflections within the Mainstream of Modernity

Closed Spaces Restricted Places - Angus Bancroft

The Resurgence of Politics in the Work of Zygmunt Bauman

Review of Liquid Modernity - Robert Campain

PART FIVE: ETHICS

Why Does Proximity Make a Moral Difference? Coming to Terms with a Lesson Learned from the Holocaust - Arne Johan Vetlesen

Business Ethics and Bauman Ethics - Ren[ac]e Ten Bos

Postmodernity and the Ethics of Care - Ross Abbinnett

Situating Bauman's Social Theory

An Ethics of the Ephemeral? The Possibilities and Impossibilities of Zygmunt Bauman's Ethics: A Review of Some Recent Books by Zygmunt Bauman - Alan Latham

Making Moral Citizens - Keith Tester

On Himmelfarb's De-Moralization Thesis

Durkheim, Morality and Modernity - Chris Shilling and Philip A Mellor

Collective Effervescence, Homo Duplex and the Sources of Moral Action

In Defence of a Dialectical Ethic beyond Postmodern Morality - Mark Mason

Zygmunt Bauman's Poisoned Gift of Morality - Matthias Junge

PART SIX: DEATH AND RELIGION

Review of Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies - Robert Bocock

Death, Medicine and the Right to Die - Thomas F Tierney

An Engagement with Heidegger, Bauman and Baudrillard

Modernity, Mortality and Mystery - Anton A van Niekerk

Death. So What? Sociology, Sequestration and Emancipation - Hugh Willmott

Postmodernity, High Modernity and New Modernity - James A Beckford

Three Concepts in Search of Religion

PART SEVEN: SOCIOLOGY AND MARXISM

Society under Suspicion - Nigel Dodd

Bauman and Rorty

Creativity and the Rise of Social Postmodernism - Gerard Delanty

Foucault, Lyotard and Bauman

Against 'Modernity' - Anthony Woodiwiss

A Dissident Rant

Is Bauman's Bureau Weber's Bureau? A Comment - Paul du Gay

The Stranger and Social Theory - Vince Marotta

McFascism? Reading Ritzer, Bauman and the Holocaust - Peter Beilharz

VOLUME FOUR

PART SEVEN: SOCIOLGY AND MARXISM (CONTINUED)

Counting Memories? Revisiting Bauman, Reading Wright - Peter Beilharz

Review of Memories of Class - Maurizio D'Entr[gr]eves

Dead Indians, Flawed Consumers and Snowballs in Hell - Trevor Hogan

On Zygmunt Bauman's New Poor

After the Poor - Geoff Sharp

A Future with a Past

Consumers, Identity and Belonging - Alan Warde

Reflections on Some Theses of Zygmunt Bauman

Consumption, Identity-Formation and Uncertainty - Alan Warde

Bauman, Intellectuals and Modernity - Ian Heywood

PART EIGHT: EXTENSIONS

Transcending Modernity? Individualism, Ethics and Japanese Discourses of Difference in the Postwar World - John Clammer

Hybridity Globalization and the Stranger - B[um]ulent Diken

The Impertinence of Intellectuals - Joanildo A Burity

Democracy and Postmodernity in Latin America

On Communism, Post-Communism, Modernity and Postmodernity - Leslie Holmes

Introduction to Organizing Modernity - John Law

Privileged Nomads - Dick Pels

The Color of Jews - Jon Stratton

Jews, Race and the White Australia Policy

The Feminization of Stigma in the Relationship between Israelis and Shoah Survivors - Ronit Lentin

Cannibalism and Bulimia - Jock Young

Modernity and Behaviour Control - Nils Christie

The Utopics of Modernity - Kevin Hetherington

Authoritarian High Modernism - James C Scott