Forumlitfest · CC BY 3.0

Bauman was stripped of his Polish citizenship and driven out of the country during the antisemitic purge of 1968, emigrating first to Israel and then to Britain, where he spent the rest of his career at the University of Leeds. Out of that displacement came some of postwar sociology's most influential ideas, above all "liquid modernity," his description of a world in which institutions, identities, and commitments no longer hold their shape. He also wrote searchingly on modernity's relationship to the Holocaust.