Citation

Milbank J. Theory Cult. Soc. 2010; 27(6): 107-124.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/0263276410382025

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Invoking Zygmunt Bauman’s acute exposition of a left-critical hesitation between intellectuals as saviours and intellectuals as oppressors, this essay argues that while Bauman reveals this hesitation as crucial and symptomatic, nevertheless he leaves it unresolved. The essay shows how the human nature/ culture distinction (which is also a continuity) is, in fact, constitutive of human culture as such; moreover, the essay argues that this constitutive distinction reproduces itself within culture in terms of reciprocal hierarchies of social division — intellectual/non-intellectual, shamanistic/folk, aristocratic/popular. This pattern of vertical reciprocity is precisely what the purely horizontal axis of capitalist-bureaucratic liberalism excludes, collapsing the hierarchical axis of political culture into the horizontal false-binary of ‘left’ versus ‘right’. In this way the essay argues that the crux of an authentic resistance to capitalist-bureaucratic liberalism will involve not a triumph of the ‘left’ over the ‘right’ , but the retrieval of the dynamic paradox of the vertical axis of the hierarchical communion of guiding excellence fused with popular spontaneity. The hierarchical yet dynamically educative interplay between innovators and those being constantly innovated is the organic root of human culture and the means of the authentic practice of human justice.