This book is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the work of Zygmunt Bauman. It contains original conversations with Bauman and a detailed guide to his thought, written by two of his leading commentators. Zygmunt Bauman is one of the most important critics of our times. He has changed the way we think about globalization, the Holocaust, ethics and our sense of self. He came to prominence in the 1980s, when he made sociologists and cultural analysts think seriously about postmodernity. This is when his work started to reach a wide audience. But by that time he already had more than thirty years of publications behind him. He had also lived a life which had been shaped by the main events of the European twentieth century; he had been a soldier against Nazism and an exile from the Communist state in Poland. Bauman before Postmodernity rescues Bauman"s roots from obscurity and shows how they shaped the work for which he became well-known. In this book, Bauman talks for the first time about his emergence as a sociologist and reflects on the times in which he was destined to live. The book also contains the most thorough catalogue of Bauman"s work up to the end of the 1980s, and in-depth discussions of his academic essays from this period.