Introduction

The world of sociology is—just as the social world sociologists themselves study— inhabited by many different breeds, forms of life, and creatures. Many years ago, Swedish sociologist Walter Korpi (1990) metaphorically suggested that these different types of sociologists could be captured by the colorful and fairytale-like notions of respectively “pegasuses,” “pegasus-groomers,” “tree-huggers,” “stump-sitters” and “moles”—each with their identifiable features, focus areas and specific modes of working. Korpi defines the first group, the “pegasuses,” as a sort of otherworldly creatures hovering well above the prosaic world, looking down upon it, and describing and analyzing it in comprehensive, theoretically abstract, and almost immortal terms. Like in “phosphorous illumination,” the pegasuses show us “the way things are” by painting the “big picture” and describing the main tenets of the human condition (Korpi 1990, 3). Korpi specifically mentioned the likes of Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, Jacques Derrida, and Pierre Bourdieu as such exemplary pegasuses. However, Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) would indeed also qualify as one of these almost otherworldly “pegasuses” of his discipline, one whose writings will continue to be read, reread, discovered and re-discovered, interpreted, and re-interpreted in many decades to come. The reason for this is first of all that Bauman was a man with what may be regarded as a megalomaniac mission—he wanted to humanize not only the discipline of sociology but also the world he was studying. Bauman's sociology was thus an unmistakable humanistic enterprise if there ever was one. Moreover, Bauman was a general social theorist, not someone concerned with the meticulous empirical exploration of this or that small enclave of society or with piling heaps of detailed statistical material to shed light on a relatively limited section of the world. Instead, his eyes were firmly fixed at “the big picture,” the way the world was organized and how and why it was constantly changing, and with what human consequences.

Bauman—as most of the other aforementioned pegasuses of the discipline of sociology—was a scholar solidly rooted in the great European intellectual tradition from the latter part of the twentieth century. Korpi had claimed that the ratio of “pegasuses” within sociology was much higher in Europe as compared to the United States.