Zygmunt Bauman's work has changed contemporary social thought. He has been a major contributor to most of the important debates of recent years on ethics, politics, postmodernity and globalisation. His prize-winning book Modernity and the Holocaust virtually established a new branch of sociology. This book is an original discussion of Bauman's work and significance. It pays full attention to the span of Bauman's academic career; from his first essays in Poland in the 1950s, through to the role he played in opposition to acually existing socialism in the 1960s and the groundbreaking social thought that he has produced since he came to Britain in 1971. The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman is both a uniquely well-informed discussion of the work of one of the most important contemporary social thinkers and a study of the response of an intellectual to his times.