ABSTRACT
In this chapter I shall examine Zygmunt Bauman’s treatment of the question of justice in terms of the basic constitution of all human cultures. I shall argue that he legitimately extends a Marxist understanding of the shaping of history by ‘technology’, broadly understood, by emphasising the crucial role in this process of elites who claim to possess knowledge and rest their claims to power upon this basis. However, I shall also contend that his suspicion of this role is ambivalent. On the one hand he embraces a dialectic of enlightenment that would subject a new secular priesthood to the same deconstructive scrutiny as the old. On the other he remains committed to a purged, truly emancipating enlightenment whose possibility necessarily assumes the role of a purified secular priesthood. This, I shall argue, is for various reasons impossible. A sheerly secular priesthood is necessarily oppressive. Therefore, if Bauman is right to see that the role of ‘knowers’ or of a clerisy is indispensable to any human culture, the only hope for the realisation of a just culture must lie, as Plato correctly saw, in the emergence of a purified religious priesthood. The post-Renaissance project of the technological deployment of unleashed natural forces should not be abandoned, but in keeping with the more mystical aspects of the Renaissance legacy, experiment must be brought back within the sway of ritual. Only ritual offers a technology to control itself. And only such ritual control can permit a fusion of experts with popular wisdom in a manner compatible with justice.
