[1][2] Bauman's most famous book, Modernity and the Holocaust, is an attempt to give a full account of the dangers of fear of "the stranger".
Drawing upon Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno's books on totalitarianism and the Enlightenment, Bauman developed the argument that the Holocaust should not simply be considered to be an event in Jewish history, nor a regression to pre-modern barbarism.
[9][non-primary source needed] The Final Solution was pictured by him as an extreme example of the attempt made by society to excise the uncomfortable and indeterminate elements that exist within it.
Bauman, like the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, contended that the same processes of exclusion that were at work in the Holocaust could, and to an extent do, still come into play today.
He concluded that despite some issues, the book "represents an important contribution to contemporary sociological thought".