Tony Judt was especially astute when it came to linking history and intellectuals. One strand of thought in his collection of essays, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, is a critical engagement with several twentieth-century thinkers associated with Marxism (and sometimes anti-Marxism), including Althusser, Kołakowski, E.P. Thompson (briefly), Raymond Aron (briefly), and Eric Hobsbawm. With …
Do norms and moral attitudes change over generations?
Moral philosophers have often written of ethical obligations, principles, and theories as if they were timeless and unchanging. Kant, for example, argued that moral obligations follow from the structure of rationality itself. The utilitarians -- Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick -- held that moral obligations are defined by the principle of maximizing happiness -- whether in the …
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Evil and the philosophy of history
images: Two residents of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) Vast numbers of words have been written about the atrocities of the twentieth century -- about the Holocaust, about Stalin's war of starvation against Ukraine's peasants, about the Gulag, and about other periods of unimaginable and deliberate mass suffering throughout the century. First-person accounts, historians' narratives, sociologists' and psychologists' studies …
The Warsaw experience of Janina Bauman
Janina Bauman, along with her sister Sophie and her mother Alina, miraculously survived the slaughter of the Jews of Warsaw and the crushing of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in April, 1943. Born in 1926, Janina was only thirteen when the German army invaded Poland and besieged Warsaw. Her remarkable 1986 memoir, Winter in the Morning: A …
Guest post by Izabela Wagner on Zygmunt Bauman
Izabela Wagner, author of Bauman: A Biography, is Professor of Sociology at Collegium Civitas (Poland) and fellow at Institute Convergence Migration (Paris). Thank you, Izabela, for this invaluable and insightful guest post! The Sociological Imagination of Zygmunt Bauman By Izabela Wagner Thank you, Dan Little, for your inspiring comment and questions. I want to mention a couple …
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Kołakowski on Stalinism and reform
A recent post featured the evolution of the thought of Zygmunt Bauman. There I mentioned a comparison with his Warsaw contemporary, Leszek Kołakowski, and suggested that Kołakowski's break with Stalinism was earlier and more profound than Bauman's. I am not able to find a full-length biography of Kołakowski, but his history parallels that of Bauman. …
How Bauman became Bauman
Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) was an influential voice in the world of sociological theorizing. In the second part of his career -- following his expulsion as a dissident and a Jew from Poland in 1968 -- he came to be recognized as a non-conventional thinker about "modernity" and the modern world. His idea of "liquid modernity" …
Did the Iliad have an author?
Did the Iliad have an author? Since this is probably the best known text from the ancient Greek world, one might find the question a puzzling one: of course the Iliad had an author; it was Homer. But it turns out that this answer is no longer accepted by experts in classical literature -- and hasn't been for at …
Decision-making for big physics
Big science is largely dominant in many areas of science -- for example, high-energy physics, medical research, the human genome project, and pandemic research. Other areas of science still function well in a "small science" framework -- mathematics, evolutionary biology, or social psychology, for example, with a high degree of decentralized decision-making by individual researchers, …
The Holocaust “comparability” debate
The question of how to understand the Holocaust has troubled historians since the first knowledge of the war of extermination against the Jews of Europe became widespread in the 1940s. Is the Holocaust unique in human history? Can the crimes of the Holocaust be compared to other periods of genocide in the twentieth century? Is …
Understanding Society 