The role of a public intellectual in a democratic state

Abstract

The argument of this paper is that the intellectual is better placed in society to subject the discourses of tradition and Enlightenment modernity to careful scrutiny, with a view to identifying the inherent ruptures and contradictions which hamper the embrace and pursuance of democratic values in society. The paper draws on a miscellany of theoretical positions which are located globally, but are united by a common thread in their movement away from a world conceived in oppositions, and thus confounding definitions of tradition and Enlightenment modernity and pushing their paradoxes to their limits, and presenting the concept of culture as a temporality. These theoretical positions are used here to shed light on a Malawi case study, as well as to expose the rigidity and hence the tacit violence of both Enlightenment modernity and so-called African tradition.