Making the Familiar Unfamiliar: A Conversation with Peter Haffner
This book is the record of several days of conversation between the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and the Swiss journalist Peter Haffner, conducted shortly before Bauman’s death. It is not a treatise or a systematic work of sociology but an extended interview: Haffner questions, prompts and occasionally presses, and Bauman answers by drawing together the personal and the political. The result is a retrospective in which Bauman’s life and his ideas are treated as inseparable, each illuminating the other. The title names the intellectual habit that runs through the whole book: the effort to interrogate received wisdom and common sense, to make the familiar unfamiliar so that it can be seen anew.
The conversation moves through ten themed sections, each pairing a broad topic with a pointed question.
Love and Gender
The opening conversation takes up the question of choosing a partner and asks why people are losing the capacity to love. Bauman treats love as a fragile, ambivalent human bond rather than a simple emotion, and connects the difficulty of sustaining it to the wider conditions of contemporary social life, in which relationships are approached with the same mixture of desire and wariness that marks other areas of experience.
Experience and Remembrance
Here the theme is fate — how we make the history that makes us. Bauman reflects on the interplay between individual biography and historical circumstance, on how a life is shaped by events larger than the person living it, and on what it means to remember and to give an account of one’s own past.
Jewishness and Ambivalence
This section turns to adaptation and to the question of why Jews were attracted to communism. Bauman speaks from his own position as a Polish Jew, exploring Jewishness as a condition marked by ambivalence rather than simple belonging. The discussion is rooted in his personal account of the political and social upheavals of twentieth-century Poland and the pressures and possibilities those upheavals created for Jews.
Intellect and Commitment
The subject is sociology, and the argument that it should not separate objective analysis from personal experience. Bauman insists that the thinker’s own life is not an obstacle to understanding but a resource for it; the intellectual and the committed person cannot be cleanly divided.
Power and Identity
Modernity is the theme here — the compulsion to be no one, or to become someone else. Bauman examines how modern conditions press on identity, making it something to be constructed, chosen and continually remade, and how power operates through that pressure.
Society and Responsibility
This conversation concerns solidarity and asks why everyone becomes everyone else’s enemy. Bauman considers the erosion of collective bonds and the way social arrangements can set people against one another, undermining the ground on which responsibility for others might rest.
Religion and Fundamentalism
Taking up the end of the world and the importance of believing in a God who does not exist, Bauman reflects on religion, fundamentalism and the human need to confront uncertainty. The discussion connects belief and unbelief to broader questions about how people live with contingency and insecurity.
Utopia and History
The image here is time travel, and the question of where “the beyond” is today. Bauman considers the fate of utopian imagination, the loss of confidence in a better future, and the way history and the possibility of imagining alternatives to the present have changed.
Present and Future
Bauman returns to one of his central preoccupations: human waste, and the question of who the witches of modern society are. The conversation concerns exclusion, the casting out of people deemed superfluous, and the human costs of a society that produces waste and looks for someone to blame.
Happiness and Morality
The final section asks what the good life means, figured as taking off shoes that are too tight. Bauman reflects on happiness, morality and the good life, drawing the threads of the conversation together around the question of how one might live well and responsibly.
Throughout, Bauman gives personal accounts of the historical events on which his social and political insights rest: his upbringing in Poland, his military service in the Red Army, his work for the Polish secret service after the war, and his expulsion from Poland in 1968. These recollections are offered not as autobiography for its own sake but as the lived ground of his thinking about history, identity, Jewishness, morality, happiness and love. The book’s time span is that of the conversation itself, looking back over the twentieth century and forward to the anxieties of the present; it stops where the dialogue stops. What emerges is a portrait of a thinker restating, in his own voice and in dialogue with a persistent questioner, the concerns that animated his work: the fragility of human bonds, the ambivalence of modernity, the erosion of solidarity, and the moral demands placed on individuals by the societies they inhabit.
The book’s dialogic form is central to its content. As an extended conversation, it does not build a system but follows the movement of thought as it is provoked by questions. Haffner’s interventions keep the discussion from settling into familiar formulas; Bauman is repeatedly asked to explain, qualify, and connect. This makes the book a performance of the intellectual operation named in its title: the familiar—whether a concept like identity, a social practice like exclusion, or a value like happiness—is made strange enough to be examined anew. The result is not a summary of Bauman’s sociology but a demonstration of it in action. It shows thinking as a responsive, unfinished activity, and it lets the reader overhear a mind at work rather than receive a set of conclusions. The book’s significance lies in this combination of retrospect and enactment: it looks back over a lifetime of concerns while remaining open to the uncertainty of the present, and it treats conversation itself as a form of sociological inquiry.
