Jack Palmer

This article reflects on how Zygmunt Bauman's intellectual legacy might be worked with after his death, distinguishing between legacy understood as artefact and legacy understood hermeneutically. Drawing on extensive research in and editorial work on Bauman's archive, his unpublished and lesser-known writings, it examines the opportunities and risks involved in interpretive engagements with a major sociological oeuvre. The article situates Bauman's thought within the hermeneutic tradition of interpretive sociology and argues that dialogue, rather than canonization or free appropriation, provides the most productive orientation to his work. For exemplary purposes, particular attention is given to Bauman's early cultural sociology, his engagement with decolonization and problematization of Eurocentrism, and his theorization of plurality, possibility and understanding across difference. The article suggests that Bauman's legacy lies less in a closed body of doctrine than in an ethos of dialogical, globally attuned social thought.