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).