Introduction

Much ink has been spilled on the problem of sociology's “Eurocentrism” in recent years. Whether understood as a cognitive myopia resultant from the universalization of the particularities of European social and political development, or as a tendency to narrate Western modernity in endogenous terms, shorn of the constitutive histories of colonial-imperialism and Transatlantic slavery, the critique of Eurocentrism has shed light on how the formation of sociology is a power-saturated process with ongoing historical effects that continue to frame the relations between “the West and the rest” (Hall 1992; Steinmetz 2013; Bhambra 2014; Meghji 2021).

In this chapter, I argue that Zygmunt Bauman's project can be read as an intervention into contemporary discussions about Eurocentrism in the discipline of sociology and the imperative to “decolonize” its canon and operative concepts, even if he did not explicitly frame it as such. In making this argument, I re-tread several paths in Bauman's sociological thinking which, to varying degrees, have been elided in commentaries on and critical appraisals of his work. These are his reflections on colonialism and decolonization, the Jewish experience and interpretation of modernity, and the communist project in east-central Europe and its dissolution.

In my book Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociological of Intellectual Exile (Palmer 2023), I track each of these paths across Bauman's thought as it develops from the late 1960s until his death in 2017. I emphasize the essayistic constitution of Bauman's sociology which, when not sufficiently appreciated, has tended to render his overall contribution to the critique of the West not immediately accessible. Bauman's reflections on colonialism and decolonization, for example, crisscross over the long duration of his work and are not contained in neatly-bound, self-contained tracts. His sociology as a whole constitutes a multiplicity of “forking paths,” to borrow the expression from the Jorge Luis Borges (1964) short story which was hugely influential for Bauman.

Roland Barthes once wrote that “in the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, not deciphered” (Barthes 1977, 147). The disentanglement that I attempt here isolates the forking paths in discrete phases of their unfolding. Over the course of the first and second sections, I outline Bauman's engagements with themes of colonialism and decolonization as developed in his work “before postmodernity,” taken to stretch from the late 1960s into the 1970s, across the twin poles of his exile: Poland and Britain.