Working through the intellectual legacies of Zygmunt Bauman

Far from being once and for all fastened to the text by the author's intention, meaning keeps changing together with the readers’ world. Of this latter world it is a part, and only inside can it be meaningful. The text the author has produced acquires its own life. (Bauman, 1978: 229)

In one of the examples of life-writing collected in My Life in Fragments, Zygmunt Bauman reflects that in leaving authorial traces of an intellectual life, ‘the first thought is about death’ (2023: 14). These words were penned, though not published, around the late 1980s and they are a reminder that death and intellectuals were central preoccupations for Bauman, substantively as well as existentially. Indeed, when pressed, he named Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (Bauman 1992) and Legislators and Interpreters: Modernity, Postmodernity and Intellectuals (Bauman 1987) as his most prized and personal works, both developed as ‘the products of protracted and often painful soul-searching’. Legislators, he reflected, ‘solved to me the puzzle of vocation’, whereas Mortality addressed ‘the mystery of that short visit to earth called “human life” and of the consequences of that mystery’. ¹ The ‘puzzle of vocation’ and the ‘mystery of life’ come together in the question of intellectual legacy, a question bequeathed to the living by the death of an intellectual. Having died in 2017, aged 91 years old, Zygmunt Bauman's intellectual legacy is now a question for us.

In the English language, one meaning of ‘legacy’ pertains to money, personal effects, sentimental objects, assets and so on, that might be left for living relatives as specified in a will. This is an artefactual legacy, concerning material things that can be passed on. Bauman certainly left a legacy in this sense, insofar as he left behind a physical collection of artefactual traces of his intellectual life accompanied by instructions, the sorts of which were passed to the University of Leeds, the institution that he had been associated with since 1971, which he had entrusted to establish an archive open to the public (see Palmer (2024) for an extended reflection on the archive of Zygmunt Bauman). My work has drawn extensively on the archive at Leeds, a treasure trove for Bauman studies (see Palmer, 2023). Among the written documents can be found draft manuscripts, lecture transcripts and unpublished essays, some of which have been published in a series of selected writings for Polity Press (2021–2024) which I have co-edited with Dariusz Brzeziński, Thomas Campbell and Mark Davis. These books also make available obscure or inaccessible work to anglophone readers, including Polish-language essays previously untranslated. A great advantage to this series is that we can see, in fragments, the development of Bauman's thought as a whole, with writings spanning from 1957 to 2016. The archive also holds a great many documentary materials – autobiographical reflections, notebooks, typescripts replete with marginalia, and so on – which have not been accessed and incorporated into scholarly studies of Bauman's works until recently. There are, for example, significant collections of correspondence, much of which is significant far beyond Bauman. In fragmentary form, it gives us significant insights into the intellectual history of the postwar 20th century. Artefactual legacy work is crucial, then, for what Donald Levine (2015: xxvii) termed ‘custodial’ work in social theory – it clarifies, situates, even saves from oblivion that which the historical process obscures and buries. Those who undertake it, through the writing of books and articles and the organization of conferences and symposiums, enact the role of ‘professional immortality brokers’, in the terms Bauman used in Mortality, ‘who mint the coins of lasting value, administer their hoards and attach value tags of immortality to the lives destined to last’ (1992: 59).

There is, however, another meaning to the word ‘legacy’ in the English language. It concerns the lasting influence of events, time periods, actions, cultural forms, and so on which have been outlived in the temporal process but which exercise some kind of effective history on the present. We can think here of ideational traces of an intellectual, what we might understand as hermeneutic legacy, what is left behind for the living to interpret. Unlike artefactual legacy, hermeneutic legacy is governed by the law of intestacy. Zygmunt Bauman left no formally recorded wishes for his own remembrance, for how we should work with his ideas in his physical absence. It is a matter for us and its assessment can only proceed in uncertainty, especially acute in the case of a thinker like Bauman whose essayistic and metaphorical sociology amounts to a formalization of uncertainty as such.

As the director of the Bauman Institute, a research centre that bears the name of Zygmunt Bauman and has as one of its functions custodianship of his enormous legacy, I have struggled with the tension between these meanings and modalities, significant in their own right but each containing traps. Treating legacy as artefact, insofar as it entails an emphasis on the historical context of ideas and seeks to preserve them against the ravages of time, can come to treat ideas as if they are held in some sacristy cloistered from the world, through which one is directed to move through in solemn and uncritical reverence. This ecclesiology of ideas in turn causes those ‘in the know’ to think of themselves as a special elect who possess the ‘true’ and ‘certain’ interpretation of them which become frozen in stolid textbook summaries. The hermeneutic approach to legacy – which has its counterpart in what Donald Levine (2015: xxviii) called ‘heuristic’ social theory – has its own traps. Putting ideas to use in contexts for which they were not intended may stretch them beyond recognizability, such that they become something else altogether. But in this approach is contained a dialogical sensibility that is implied in Bauman's own social thought, and more specifically his engagement with the intellectual tradition of hermeneutics. This dialogical approach, I suggest, gives us some guidance for how we should work with his legacy. But it also goes some way to accounting for the globality of Bauman's social thought, and seems to have a substantial amount to contribute in non-western applications. I have given this much thought recently in editing a forthcoming Routledge International Handbook on Zygmunt Bauman, which has contributions ranging from South America, through the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, to East Asia. It is also reflected in the International Affiliate Network of the Bauman Institute. But it especially came to mind in Chengdu, in November 2024, over two days of paper presentations from Chinese scholars. To be sure, much was lost in translation in the live English-language renderings of the Mandarin presentations, despite the heroic work of the translators in the purpose-built booth at the back of the room. But a unifying theme across the papers – and a repeated phrase – was that of a dialogue between east and west for which hermeneutics was a vehicle.

Hermeneutics, systematized principally by Friedrich Schleiermacher in German-speaking Europe during the 19th century, refers to the technique of interpreting written texts, and is especially concerned with how to approach and handle those written in times and places different from an interpreter's own. Further developed by figures like Giambattista Vico and Johann Gustav Droysen, it was developed by Wilhem Dilthey into a foundation for the specifically human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) and, in turn, formed the foundation of the interpretive tradition in sociology, to which Zygmunt Bauman belongs. Alongside the trajectory of interpretive sociology during the 20th century, we can trace the development of philosophical hermeneutics, elaborated most systematically by Martin Heidegger and, later, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Its fundamental principle is that human beings are beings for whom Being is meaningful, ‘ “thrown” into the world as beings who understand and interpret’ (Bernstein, 1983: 113). Understanding therefore occurs from a distinct position arising from our ‘thrown-ness’ in the world, and is shaped by our contingent locatedness and acculturation in space and time. Insofar as hermeneutics constitutes a methodological basis for the human sciences, it is only a radicalization of and systematic reflection on a universal principle at play whenever we understand anything (Gadamer, 2004 [1975]: 267).

It is axiomatic in sociology that we live in social spaces embedded within broader global processes, where time and space have been compressed, and the significance of events is felt in different locales simultaneously. Bauman's social thought has been a major influence for our thinking about this predicament (see Bauman, 1998, 2000). It follows that understanding is not only possible of different historical periods and cultural regions and their embeddedness in a connected world, but that it is a necessity for any avowedly global sociology. Shortly before his death, Bauman regretted that our materially cosmopolitan situation was not matched by an ideational cosmopolitan awareness; the major forces which give shape to social reality operate at a global level but commonsense remains stubbornly local, or national, in its attempt to grasp this reality (Bauman, 2017: 154). This undoubtedly has something to do with the hermeneutic principle that our capacity to understand is filtered through preconceptions of the world created in large part by the accident of our ‘thrown-ness’ in situated locations, historical and geographical, and the resources that are afforded us as a result. But these locational ‘standpoints’ are crystallizations of unplanned, long-term processes, including those of state formation, geopolitical power struggle, colonial imperialisms, and economic globalization. Resultantly, we understand the world and our position in it within specific constellations of asymmetrical power relations. In this sense, it is often argued that the traditional social-scientific concepts that emerged in the West are inextricable from prejudice and not only render understanding of non-western realities impossible but, in fact, constitute the epistemological handmaiden of western imperialism (Dussel, 1993).

However, Gadamer sought to rehabilitate prejudice, or ‘pre-judgements’ as he preferred to say, from the ‘prejudice against prejudice’ that emerged during the age of Enlightenment (Gadamer, 2004 [1975]: 270). Contained in the prejudice against prejudice is the erroneous assumption that it is desirable, or even possible, to break from inherited standpoints. To claim to do so is to deny our historicity. But understanding Otherness is not fatally curtailed by the incommensurability of our prejudgements with the Other to be understood; understanding is not a ‘vicious’ circle. Rather, understanding proceeds via the hermeneutic circle, which entails that ‘any interpretation which is to contribute understanding, must already have understood what is to be interpreted’ (Heidegger, 1996 [1953]: 142). Any scientific investigation always proceeds from everyday, ordinary encounters with the phenomena under investigation and we approach phenomena with questions shaped by inherited ‘fore-understandings’ that are modified in the manner of a dialogue (Gadamer, 2008 [1976]: 38). Our pre-conceptions of the world, therefore, are not obstacles in the way of objective understanding. Rather, by making phenomena comprehensible to us, they are what make understanding possible in the first place, vital tools that are projected onto what is to be understood and which must keep being reworked in the ongoing confrontation with the world (Gadamer, 2004 [1975]: 267).

This dialogical process of understanding – whether a text, a historical phenomenon or another human being – involves, in Gadamer's terms, a ‘fusion of horizons’ (2004 [1975]: 306), a horizon referring to the whole of our background of experience structured by the inherited preconceptions and socio-cultural traditions that make understanding possible. Like visual horizons, an epistemic horizon refers to a ‘range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point’ (Gadamer, 2004 [1975]: 302). These horizons are not insurmountable but move ‘with one and invites one to advance further’ (Gadamer, 2004 [1975]: 245). To possess and recognize a horizon means that ‘one learns to look beyond what is close at hand – not in order to look away from it but to see it better, within a larger whole and in truer proportion’ (Gadamer, 2004 [1975]: 305). Horizons, therefore, are not sealed off and incommensurable with one another. Through its fusion with those of others in the form of a dialogue, our own horizon can thus be broadened.

We find a similar significance attributed to dialogue in the social thought of Zygmunt Bauman. Indeed, Bauman explicitly drew on Gadamer's framing for his late-career reflections on the art of understanding as inhering in a fusion of horizons (see Bauman and Obirek, 2015: 67–80; Davis, 2020). But Gadamer was curiously absent from his earlier exegesis on hermeneutics (Bauman, 1978), perhaps still neglected even if recent scholarship on Bauman has made very clear that his thought of the 1960s and 1970s, set within his exilic transition from Poland to Britain, via Israel, is of considerable importance for the further development of his thought (Brzeziński, 2022; Palmer, 2023; Tester, 2017; Wagner, 2020). Bauman's preoccupation with hermeneutics is set within the development of his cultural sociology of the 1960s and 1970s. It is, suitably, a product of the conditions of the time, an era of possibility in which Cold War blocs vied for supremacy on the international stage, and a ‘third world’ had emerged as an alternative space wherein so-called new nations were achieving independence from European colonial empires. This was the setting for his sociological reading in the late 1960s of Lévi-Strauss' concept of culture, understood as the practical process of reducing the indeterminacy of the world (Bauman, 2018: 251; Brzezinski, 2022), not as an integrative mechanism ensuring the reproduction and equilibrium of social order à la structural-functionalist modernization theory, but as ‘a sharp edge pressed obstinately against what-already-is’ (Bauman quoted in Jacobsen and Tester, 2005: 147).

At the centre of this conception of culture stood an ‘activistic image of man’, consciously distinct from a ‘mechanistic image’, part and parcel of a ‘managerial sociology’ that reduces the human agent to the status of a ‘reactive being … determined by outer forces or inner drives’ and that can become the object of social control (Bauman, 1967: 14; 1999 [1973]: 115). The activistic image, by contrast, emphasizes creativity, and necessitates a semiotic approach to culture, in which culture consists of the continual human process of ‘reducing the indeterminacy of the human world’, the reduction of the probability of some events and the increase in the predictability of others (Bauman, 1973: 68–69; 2018: 71). Human history, he thought, is a storehouse of possibilities which unfold processually, in cultural praxis (Bauman, 1968: 29). ‘Nothing’, he elaborated in Culture as Praxis, ‘but the formal universals of praxis, its “generative rules”, constitutes the tough, invariant core of human history’ (Bauman, 1999 [1973]: 116). Culture is the universal propensity of humanity to impose structures on a structureless world in infinite permutations. Culture, therefore, is the sphere of human possibility:

While encompassing the future in its unique quality of irreducibility to the past, the cultural stance admits a multiplicity of realities. The set of universes it explores in the way the positive sciences investigate the real, contains also the possible, the potential, the desirable, the hankered after, even if as yet improbable worlds. (Bauman, 1999 [1973]: 139)

Bauman's preoccupation with culture was framed within the context of a profound challenge posed to the idea of a universal, proselytizing western culture during an age of decolonization. He argues that ‘culture’ as an evaluative category becomes a particular obsession in ‘expanding civilizations’ as they come into contact with otherness and diversity (Bauman, 1968: 19–20; 2018: 9). An axiological concept of culture, he claims, was born of the ‘encounter between Europe and that part of the world which developed in relative isolation from Europe’, at precisely the time when ‘the ideological basis of European economic and military supremacy was clearly formed’ (Bauman, 1968: 22). Indeed, within the axiological concept, he makes a distinction between the ‘colonialist’ and the ‘romantic’ orientation. The colonialist-axiological concept of culture is hierarchizing and comparative and is the basis of distinctions between ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ cultures. Because of the military and economic might of colonizing Europe, difference was perceived as a lack of culture, as primitiveness. This was exemplified, for Bauman, by the likes of William Strachey and John Wesley, intellectual figureheads of the English conquest of the Americas, who demonstrated how the concept of barbarism served the cause of world conquest as the obverse of culture, providing ‘the fig leaf hoped to hide the ugly and shameful atrocities of imperialism and colonialism’ (Bauman, 2021: 187). Summarizing, Bauman strikes a chord with many later definitions of Eurocentrism:

a statement that our cultural system – the industrial civilization – is superior means no more than that, so far, we have been stronger economically and militarily, that we have been striking at the roots of other cultural systems, and that, in one way or another, we have been remaking them – or have attempted to do so – in our own image. (Bauman, 1968: 22; emphasis added)

The conclusion of the ‘cultural turn’ in Bauman's thought that I have briefly elucidated above – his humanist revision of Marxism, his elaboration of a sociological semiotics and his theory of culture as praxis – is that human beings make or structure their worlds, albeit in historically delimited circumstances, through culture. Culture is processual, instantiated in praxis, and the worlds that humans make are unavoidably plural (Beilharz, 2006). What exists in the here and now is but one possibility among manifold others. The societies which European powers colonized, a process in which recourse was made to axiological-hierarchical understandings of culture, were not lesser forms forever catching up with the West or cultural totalities at risk of dissolution when they came into contact with colonial powers. Rather, they stood for alternative possibilities, and in so doing revealed the essential groundlessness of Eurocentric claims to universal civilization, a groundlessness which became especially apparent in the moment of decolonization. This heralded, Bauman claimed in 1968, a ‘crisis of cultural anthropology’ wherein ‘the European stopped believing in the obviousness’ of their world; where colonized societies had seemed to the western mind ‘frozen in earlier phases of the road leading to our own way of being’; and the imaginary of global history now increasingly took the ‘form [of] a mosaic of diverging paths’ (Bauman, 2018: 15–16). Bauman thus sociologically imagines modernity as a multiplicity, a universal condition which contains a multiplicity of forking and proliferating historical trajectories

A hermeneutic turn in Bauman's thought begins when he considers how cross-cultural and transhistorical understanding and dialogue is possible in these circumstances. Because the plurality of culture generates the problem of alternative and even conflicting meanings, there arises the question of how communication across cultures is possible. The culminating arguments of Bauman's (1978) Hermeneutics and Social Science can themselves be read as a response to the problem of Eurocentrism, which resides in the ‘aristocratic cultural pattern’ of axiology and hierarchy. Here, ‘in the era of the “white man's mission”, when Europe seemed to be gaining worldwide domination fast’, economic and military dominance were confused for the achievement of superior cultural patterns, in the light of which ‘natives’ appeared as infantile forms which European civilization passed and left behind at some stage of its development (Bauman, 1978: 199). If the colonial-axiological conception of culture saw civilizing educational uplift or, at the other end of the scale, genocidal violence as its task, and its romantic counterpart saw its own as the preservation of temporally backward cultural totalities, the task of understanding was based on very different premises. Bauman held that understanding entails ‘sharing in a form of life … about constructing a form of life of a “higher order” ’ rather than the positing of unassailable boundaries between forms of life in the plural; understanding of other forms of life comes not from dwelling in their particularity, and certainly not by disregarding and eliminating their otherness, but by ‘enlarging both the alien and one's own experience so as to construct a larger system in which each “makes sense” to the other’ (Bauman, 1978: 217–218; see also Bauman, 1990: 228–229). This larger system is generated, hermeneutically speaking, in an ongoing dialogue. The task of hermeneutic understanding that Bauman outlined has a clear echo in the social type of the ‘interpreter’, who mediates within and across historically and culturally situated forms of life in the manner of a dialogue, as against those who ‘legislate’ in the name of the universal in the form of a monologue (Bauman, 1987).

Bauman's ‘postmodern turn’ impelled sociologists to excavate the processes by which European social and political thought had been shaped by the specific social conditions of colonial imperialism under which it had developed. Like his postcolonial counterparts today, Bauman's thought attends to the disavowed positionality of intellectual statements which, in the colonial era, were passed off as objective and universal, in so doing disentangling the imbrications of knowledge and power. The entangled paths of Bauman's sociological reflections on Jewish modernity and the East-Central European (post-)communism also serve as reminders that the problematization of Eurocentrism can figure and has figured as a form of immanent critique in European intellectual history, especially as a product of the systemic marginalization of the peripheries within Europe itself (see Arnason, 2003: 349–50), a marginality lived by Bauman as a Jew born in Poland, and twice a refugee. His critique of the parochial universalization of western modernity (ergo Eurocentrism), his valorization of the Jewish hermeneutics of estrangement, his analyses of the racist undertones of assimilation discourse and the complicity of the modern state and scientific rationality in racial terror (Bauman, 1989a, 1991) converge in some fascinating – if largely implicit – ways with recent offerings that explicitly discuss the relationships between Judaism, (colonial) modernity and social thought (Slabodsky, 2014). Likewise, Bauman's writing on the 20th-century experience of East-Central Europe, especially Poland, is itself an argument against totalizing and universalizing forms of Eurocentrism, which position Europe in toto as a colonial-imperial power. As Peter Beilharz (2002) has noted, at work in Bauman's sociology is a reckoning with Europe's ‘Other totalitarianism’, Soviet communism, and thus his critical theory of modernity has an eastern basis. Moreover, his position is rooted in an awareness of the imperial dimensions of Soviet-communist modernity, its pretensions to rational mastery and proselytizing tendencies. His extraterritorial ‘liquid’ sociology was first formulated in the wake of the dissolution of the ‘Soviet Empire’ in ‘Postcolonial Poland’ (Bauman, 1989b). It is in this sense that there is manifold opportunity for finding in Bauman's social thought the enabling conditions of inter-civilizational dialogue, across east and west, north and south. Recoverable and usable for us as a legacy within Bauman's social thought is an ethos consisting of an attempt to retain an orientation to the universal experience of the condition of modernity whilst recognizing the specificity of its multiplicitous groundings in time and space.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, I would like to suggest that hospitality is among the most profound legacies of Bauman's thought. Hospitality is often understood as an openness towards the other. Bauman of course adopted this as a major theme of a moral sociology of responsibility (see Bauman, 1993). He used the word a lot, to the extent that it might even be considered a keyword which unlocks the fundamentally humanistic tenor of his thought. He worked in the pursuit of a world that is, to quote from Liquid Times, ‘hospitable to the humanity of its members’ (Bauman, 2007: 107). The dialogical orientation of social thought was ascribed a key role in this pursuit: ‘Never before, in my view, is the metier of sociology as an ongoing dialogue with human experience and its continuous reinterpretation through widening the radius of the ‘hermeneutic circle’ as important as it is now (Bauman quoted in Jacobsen and Tester, 2005: 95).

In much less abstracted language, we might consider engaging dialogically with Bauman's legacy as a means of ‘keeping the conversation going’, extending and expanding his ideas in a context in which, though he is no longer here, they can be made to speak. This means maintaining an ongoing dialogue with Bauman's intellectual project even as its generative constellation recedes. This meaning of legacy is one which, I would like to think, Bauman would approve. As he noted in an interview:

To be sure, dialogue (not to mention the polylogue) is a difficult art. It means engaging conversationalists with an intention to jointly clarify the issues, rather than to have them one's own way; to multiply voices, rather than reducing their number; to widen the set of possibilities, rather than aiming at a wholesale consensus … to jointly pursue understanding, instead of aiming at the others’ defeat; and all in all being animated by the wish to keep the conversation going, rather than by the desire to grind it to a halt. (Dawes, 2011: 143)

This pursuit is now our responsibility. In our own profoundly uncertain horizons, we must develop a world hospitable to the legacy of Zygmunt Bauman.