The publication of Theory and Society in 2024 bought to conclusion a three volume collection of The Selected Writings of Zygmunt Bauman. Preceded by Culture and Art in 2021 and Politics and History in 2023 (all published by Polity Press) these volumes presented essays which either had never been published before, were being made available in English for the first time, or had previously been published but were not well known. The books were hugely influential contributions for scholars of Bauman, who now had access to new texts, in some cases ones which encouraged some rethinking of his project, as well as scholars in social theory, the history of sociology and the themes of each volume. All the volumes were edited by four scholars, three of whom joined me for this podcast: Dariusz Brzeziński, Tom Campbell and Jack Palmer (Mark Davis makes up the team) to discuss the series, including an in-depth discussion of Theory and Society.

As we discuss in the episode, the availability of these texts, especially the translations from Bauman’s pre-exile works in Poland encourage us to look at Bauman’s work as one continuous project founded around a project of humanism and what the editors term the ‘Camus-Gramsci-Mills axis’ which defines his work. But, it also opens new ways of placing Bauman as, for example a scholar of futures and the history of sociology and social thought. We also discuss the significance of the translations of Bauman’s work (performed by Katarzyna Bartoszynska), how the opening of the Janina and Zygmunt Bauman papers at the University of Leeds provided a prompt for this project and the relation between Bauman’s work and life circumstances. I also ask the editors to pick their favourite essay from the series.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and is the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan), among other books.

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Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp (U Nebraska Press, 2024) utilizes testimonies, oral histories, and recollections from Jewish, German, and Polish witnesses to create a holistic representation of the Treblinka death camp during its operation. This narrative rejects the historical misconception that Treblinka was an isolated Nazi extermination camp with few witnesses and fewer survivors. Rather than the secret, sanitized site of industrial killing Treblinka was intended to be, Jacob Flaws argues, Treblinka’s mass murder was well known to the nearby townspeople who experienced the sights, sounds, smells, people, bodies, and train cars the camp ejected into the surrounding world.

Through spatial reality, Flaws portrays the conceptions, fantasies, ideological assumptions, and memories of Treblinka from witnesses in the camp and surrounding towns. To do so he identifies six key spaces that once composed the historical site of Treblinka: the ideological space, the behavioral space, the space of life and death, the interactional space, the sensory space, and the extended space. By examining these spaces Flaws reveals that there were more witnesses to Treblinka than previously realized, as the transnational groups near and within the camp overlapped and interacted. Spaces of Treblinka provides a staggering and profound reassessment of the relationship between knowing and not knowing and asks us to confront the timely warning that we, in our modern, interconnected world, can all become witnesses.

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The opening of classified documents from the Soviet era has been dubbed the "archival revolution" due to its unprecedented scale, drama, and impact. With a storyteller's sensibility, in Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and Their Challenges (Stanford University Press, 2024), Cristina Vatulescu identifies and takes on the main challenges of reading in these archives.

This transnational study foregrounds peripheral Eastern European perspectives and the ethical stakes of archival research. In so doing, it contributes to the urgent task of decolonizing the field of Eastern European and Russian studies at this critical moment in the region's history. Drawing on diverse work ranging from Mikhail Bakhtin to Tina Campt, the book enters into broader conversations about the limits and potential of reading documents, fictions, and one another. Pairing one key reading challenge with a particularly arresting story, Vatulescu in turn investigates Michel Foucault's traces in Polish secret police archives; tackles the files, reenactment film, and photo albums of a socialist bank heist; pits autofiction against disinformation in the secret police files of Nobel Prize laureate Herta Müller; and takes on the digital remediation of Soviet-era archives by analyzing contested translations of the Iron Curtain trope from its 1946 origins to the current war in Ukraine. The result is a bona fide reader's guide to Eastern Europe's ongoing archival revolution.

Cristina Vatulescu is Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, New York University and the author of Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police Archives in Soviet Times (Stanford, 2010).

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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The Destruction of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland (Academic Studies Press, 2024) in Poland offers a comprehensive examination of the history of Jewish cemeteries in Poland, shedding light on an overlooked aspect of Holocaust history. Beginning with the settlement of Jewish communities in Poland, the book covers the establishment and subsequent destruction of over 1,200 Jewish cemeteries within the country's present borders. Krzysztof Bielawski draws on meticulous research and firsthand experience to explore the complex dynamics behind the destruction, exposing the roles played by various actors. Through a detailed analysis of texts, iconographic sources, and archival materials, the book not only documents the destruction but also seeks to identify the perpetrators, challenging common misconceptions and offering a nuanced perspective on this dark chapter in history.

You may support the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage, where the author works, at www.fodz.pl.

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How to Love a Child and Other Selected Works (Vallentine Mitchell, 2018) is the first comprehensive collection of Korczak's works translated into English. It contains his most important pedagogical writings, journal articles, as well as private texts. Volume 2 starts with extensive excerpts from two pedagogical treatises written for young readers. These are: Rules of Life, which explains the intricacies of human relationships. Next follows a selection of journal articles presenting topics from social problems, pediatrics, developmental psychology and special pedagogy. This is followed by a collection of unpublished writing including private letters exchanged between him and his former wards. The final section is his diary - a unique documentation of Korczak's last weeks of life. Korczak's writing is characterized by uncompromising views, acute observations, subtle reflection, and, above all, love for children.

For more on Korczak, visit The Janusz Korczak Association of Canada.

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Nazi Germany, Annexed Poland and Colonial Rule: Resettlement, Germanization and Population Policies in Comparative Perspective (Bloomsbury, 2023) examines Nazi Germany's expansion, population management and establishment of a racially stratified society within the Reichsgaue (Reich Districts) of Wartheland and Danzig-West Prussia in annexed Poland (1939-1945) through a colonial lens. The topic of the Holocaust has thus far dominated the scholarly debate on the relevance of colonialism for our understanding of the Nazi regime. However, as opposed to solely concentrating on violence to investigate whether the Holocaust can be located within wider colonial frameworks, Rachel O'Sullivan utilizes a broader approach by investigating other aspects, such as discourses and fantasies related to expansion, settlement, 'civilising missions' and Germanisation, which were also intrinsic to Nazi Germany's rule in Poland.

The resettlement of the ethnic Germans-individuals of German descent who lived in Eastern Europe until the outbreak of the Second World War-forms a main focal point for this study's analysis and investigation of colonial comparisons. The ethnic German resettlement in the Reichsgaue laid the foundations for the establishment and enforcement of German society and culture, while simultaneously intensifying the efforts to control Poles and remove Jews. Through this case study, O'Sullivan explores Nazi Germany's dual usage of inclusionary policies, which attempted to culturally and linguistically integrate ethnic Germans and certain Poles into German society, and the contrasting exclusionary policies, which sought to rid annexed Poland of 'undesirable' population groups through segregation, deportation and murder. The book compares these policies - and the tactics used to implement them - to colonial and settler colonial methods of assimilation, subjugation and violence.

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Writing in the 1920s, Winston Churchill argued that the First World War on the Eastern Front was "incomparably the greatest war in history. In its scale, in its slaughter, in the exertions of the combatants, in its military kaleidoscope, it far surpasses by magnitude and intensity all similar human episodes." It was, he concluded, "the most frightful misfortune" to fall upon mankind "since the collapse of the Roman Empire before the Barbarians." Yet Churchill was an exception, and the war in the east has long been seen as a sideshow to the brutal combat on the Western Front. Finally, with The Eastern Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918 (Norton, 2024)--the first major history of that arena in fifty years--the acclaimed historian Nick Lloyd corrects the record.

Drawing on the latest scholarship as well as eyewitness reports, diary entries, and memoirs, Lloyd moves from the great battles of 1914 to the final collapse of the Central Powers in 1918, showing how a local struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia spiraled into a massive conflagration that pulled in Germany, Russia, Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria. The Eastern Front was a vast theater of war that brought about the collapse of three empires and produced almost endless suffering. As many as sixteen million soldiers and two million civilians were killed or wounded in enormous battles that took place across as much as one hundred kilometers. Unlike in the west, where stalemate ruled the day, the war in the east was fluid, with armies embarking on penetrating advances. Lloyd narrates the repeated invasions of Serbia as well as the great battles between Russian, German, and Austrian forces at Tannenberg, Komarów, Gorlice-Tarnów, and the Masurian Lakes. All along, he takes us into the strategy of the generals who decided the war's course, from the Germans Ludendorff and Hindenburg to the Austro-Hungarian chief, Conrad von Hötzendorf, to the brilliant Russian Brusilov.

Perhaps the most radical aspect of the struggle in the east was that the violence was not confined to combatants. The Eastern Front witnessed calculated attacks against civilians that ripped the ethnic and religious fabric of numerous societies, paving the way for the horrors of the Holocaust. Lloyd's magisterial, definitive account of the war in the east will fundamentally alter our understanding of the cataclysmic events that reshaped Europe and the world.

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Waitman Wade Beorn's book Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) tells for the first time the history of the Janowska camp in Lviv, Ukraine. Located in a city with the third-largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe, Janowska remains one of the least-known sites of the Holocaust, despite being one of the deadliest. Simultaneously a prison, a slave labor camp, a transit camp to the gas chambers, and an extermination site, this hybrid camp played a complex role in the Holocaust.

Based on extensive archival research, Between the Wires explores the evolution and the connection to Lviv of this rare urban camp. Waitman Wade Beorn reveals the exceptional brutality of the SS staff alongside an almost unimaginable will to survive among prisoners facing horrendous suffering, whose resistance included an armed uprising. This integrated chronicle of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders follows the history of the camp into the postwar era, including attempts to bring its criminals to justice

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At the end of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was asked whether we have a republic or a monarchy. He replied “A Republic…if you can keep it.” In The Specter of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling of Presidential Power (Stanford UP, 2021), David M. Driesen argues that Donald Trump's presidency challenged Americans to consider whether the Madisonian system of checks and balances could robustly respond to a president claiming extensive executive power and disregarding traditional processes such as the peaceful transition of power. Driesen notes that Benjamin Franklin and many men in the “founding” generation observed tyrannical government in Europe – and they explicitly included safeguards in the U.S. Constitution to prevent extensive executive power in the United States.

In this tradition, Driesen analyzes the chief executive's role in the democratic decline of Hungary, Poland, and Turkey. He argues that an insufficiently constrained presidency is one of the most important systemic threats to constitutional democracy. Driesen urges the U.S. to learn from the mistakes of these failing democracies. Specifically, he sees the United States Supreme Court as enabling the expansion of executive power. Specter of Dictatorship highlights how the Supreme Court’s reliance on and expansion of the legal approach called unitary executive theory threatens the separation of powers in the U.S. Driesen recommends a less deferential approach in which the judiciary checks the executive. The Supreme Court has been acting a if policing presidential power is the threat to democracy – but the real danger for constitutional democracy lies in expansion of executive power. For Driesen, judges and justices should give substantial weight to concerns about democratic erosion. Because autocracy is spreading abroad and presidential power is expanding in the US, Benjamin Franklin’s concern about maintaining democracy is relevant in 2024.

Professor Driesen is the thirteenth University Professor at Syracuse University where he teaches constitutional and environmental law. He is a graduate of the Yale Law School and has published several books and numerous articles with leading academic publishers and law reviews.

From the podcast:

Correction from Susan – the two dissenters in Roe v. Wade were appointed by John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. The justices voting in favor of reproductive rights were 5 men appointed by Republican presidents (Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon) and 2 men appointed by Democratic presidents (Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson).

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Jack Palmer’s Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023) invites us to reconsider a figure who sociology thought it knew well. Presenting Bauman as occupying an ‘exilic’ position as ‘in, but not of, the West’ Palmer presents a number of paths through Bauman’s sociology which speak to contemporary concerns with the decolonial critique, Eurocentrism, imperialism and the Jewish experience. In doing so, Palmer draws across Bauman’s published works and his newly available archive to argue that the distinctive social thought that sprang from Bauman’s lived experiences of exile amounts to a sustained, sophisticated, and hitherto unappreciated problematization of Eurocentrism and the West. 

This outstanding book also asks us to look again at Bauman’s mode of writing, with the centrality of the essay being both a reflection of Bauman’s exilic position and also a key to the continuing value of his sociological project. This is a book which those who know Bauman, but also those unfamiliar with his work, will find richly rewarding. Our discussion covers all these themes and ultimately asks the question of how do we remember intellectuals?

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