Abstract

This article provides background material to help readers appreciate three speeches printed in this issue, given by Stefan Morawski, Dennis Smith and Hans Joas on the occasion of the presentation to Zygmunt Bauman of a Festschrift in March 1996 in Leeds. The article describes: (1) relevant details of Polish history concerning cultural patriotism, anti-state attitudes, the role of Jews in the communist state apparatus and anti-Semitism, focusing on post-1945; (2) the peculiarities of the indigenous British sociology tradition and the part played by exiles in shaping it; (3) a profile of the `successful outsider'; and (4) the implications of Bauman's recent work on the Holocaust for the Sonderweg thesis about German history and the Historikerstreit, which are also sketched. It concludes that far from being a `homeless intellectual', Bauman has two homes, perhaps reflecting the wider integrating process of Eastern and Western Europe, until recently separated by a gulf.