Zygmunt Bauman. Wikimedia Commons/Forumlitfest. Some rights reserved.“Eminent sociologist has recycled 90,000 words of material across a dozen books, claims paper” – thus the Times Higher Education on 20 August. A newly published paper by two scholars from Cambridge University has demonstrated that Zygmunt Bauman, a prominent sociologist and theorist of modernity, has reused significant quantities of material from his own published works – extracts sometimes many thousands of words long – in the many books he has published since his retirement.
At bottom the concern in this particular case seems to be with originality, the fact that Bauman’s repeated material is not ‘new’. This is a sin against capitalism, one of whose doctrines is that there must always be new things to sell so that the consumer can buy with confidence. Therefore, as the THE reports Bauman’s critics to say, “by failing to indicate that substantial parts of his newly authored works are not in fact new, in any conventional sense of the term, but are instead copied from his earlier works, Bauman deceives his readers”. The key question is therefore whether Bauman is properly exercising the responsibility he has to his publishers/distributors and readers/consumers in respect of his intellectual property. The dark suspicion is that he’s ‘plagiarizing’ himself.
Music, my own field, has a long history of what today’s capitalist legal lexicon calls ‘plagiarism’ but which used to be called ‘borrowing’. The difference in terminology adverts to an important shift between two conceptions of property. The first conception is a (never realized) ideal that ideas, including intellectual or artistic ones, are held in common, or at least could pass between people without lawsuits. This is what happens when a friend lets me ‘borrow’ a book: even though I’ve sometimes taken years to return them, no friend has (yet) sued me over it. The second conception – the one we have now – is one in which ideas, including intellectual or artistic ones, are privately owned and traded.
