When Ernest Gellner died in November 1995, the flags of the University of Cambridge, where he had taught from 1984 to 1992, were set at half mast. This reflected the status he had achieved in the last years of his life, as a public intellectual able to comment on a very wide range of issues. It did not mean, however, that his views had lost their bite. If Gellner’s name had been made during the scandal surrounding his early attack on Oxford linguistic philosophy, his late essays – not least his attack on Isaiah Berlin as a ‘Savile Row postmodernist’ – were capable of causing just as much outrage.1 Still, many felt affection for Gellner, with whose voice they had become familiar, and to whom they often turned for guidance and insight. All the same, very few people knew what to make of him. He was hard to pin down. For two decades he had the curious title of Professor of Sociology with special reference to philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) – held, it should be noted, in two different departments: first Sociology, then Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method – before taking up the William Wyse Professorship of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He had separate reputations as scholar of Islam, theorist of nationalism, philosopher of history, and historian of ideas. He ended his career in Prague, the city in which he had grown up as a boy, though in his final years he was most interested in developments in Russia. His status as public intellectual rested on this background, that of a multilingual polymath, a modern philosophe. He was sometimes cited as one of the last great thinkers from Central Europe whose Jewish background meant a direct experience of the twentieth century’s horrors.
It is possible to hint at what follows by noting the very particular way in which Gellner fits into this last category. The contours of his formative experiences are clear, and were pungently expressed by Gellner himself when discussing the work of Hannah Arendt. The rise of nationalist sentiment at the end of the nineteenth century created a dilemma for Jews, especially those who had experienced the Enlightenment and an end to anti-Jewish discrimination by the state. Gellner insisted that the return to cultural roots was always an illusion, a piece of pure romanticism he neatly illustrated by noting sardonically that ‘it was the great ladies at the Budapest Opera who really went to town in peasant dresses, or dresses claimed to be such’.2 Illusion or no, the Jews felt the pull of belonging just as much as others did – perhaps even more. But the romantic call to belong affected the minority Jewish community and the demographic majority in two very different ways.
[T]he minority had no illusion of its own to go back to. It only had the recollection of the ghetto, which by definition was not a self-sufficient community or culture at all, but an unromantically (commercially) specialized sub-community of a wider world within which it was pejoratively defined. Although in fact a literary populist nostalgia for the shtetl does exist nevertheless, Jewish populist romanticism is in the end a contradiction in terms …
So the romantic reaction placed the Jews in a dilemma … They were largely deprived of the illusion of a possible return to the roots, an illusion indulged by their gentile neighbours with enthusiasm and conviction. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s Gemeinschaft! But, of course, one does. So what’s to be done? The options which were logically open were either to infiltrate the Other’s Gemeinschaft, or to create a new one of one’s own, whether or not there had been any peasants available for the past two millennia, who could define its folk culture.3
But the desire to enter does not mean that one will be permitted to do so – or, even worse, permitted to remain within, as relatively assimilated German Jews were to discover. In consequence, a third option arose, rejecting the similarly homogenizing forces of assimilation and Zionism, namely that of pure cosmopolitanism. A political version of this cosmopolitanism which had world-historical consequences was that of the Jewish-born activists and intellectuals who became the key stratum of the early Bolshevik leadership, and sought to create a left-wing empire in the East in which they would be safe.4 An intellectual version of this cosmopolitanism that held equal power was Karl Popper’s famous call for an open society, in which tribal yearnings for the womb – including those of Zionists – would not be tolerated.5 Thinkers of this sort were prone to a romanticism of their own, liable to forget that the empires from which they came were sites of ethnic antagonism more often than they were arenas of benign multiculturalism.6 Allegiance to cosmopolitanism could also be demanding, potentially homogenizing into a single model, for all its emphasis on the universality of human values.
Thinkers of Jewish background lived the tension between cosmopolitanism and ethnonationalism in a variety of ways, and their ambivalence was in many cases intensified by the creation of the state of Israel. The uniqueness of Gellner’s thought derives from his acceptance of this tension, acknowledging each position’s weaknesses, whilst continuing to recognize both the power of universalism and the importance of nationalism. Accordingly, Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose thought Gellner had disliked from the start, became the great ‘bête noire’ in the book he was writing at the time of his death. The Austrian philosopher had moved from a total endorsement of universalism to the uncritical acceptance of a völkisch relativism, thereby, in Gellner’s view, being utterly wrong twice.7 The particularity of Gellner’s intellectual achievement can be further illustrated by the briefest of comparisons with Popper, the contemporary thinker who influenced him the most. The immediate contrast concerns nationalism: Gellner took this protean force much more seriously, principally by empathizing with its proponents and attempting to understand its emotional appeal. A childhood in interwar Prague rather than Vienna helps to explain this, but far more fundamental differences are at issue. Gellner did not think that nationalism could simply be usurped by cosmopolitan ideals. For one thing, good ideas alone were unlikely to have that much power. For another, Gellner differed from Popper and other liberals in believing that Enlightenment values were not fully grounded, that universalism could not justify itself in purely philosophical terms. Consider his views on Julien Benda’s famous argument that modernity had witnessed a ‘trahison des clercs’.8 One might well expect a thinker with a Central European Jewish background, all too aware of Bolshevism and fascism, to heartily endorse the thesis of a betrayal by intellectuals of their heritage. But Gellner did nothing of the kind. To the contrary, he turned the tables on Benda – choosing to speak of ‘la trahison de la trahison des clercs’. For Gellner, a thinker such as Nietzsche had not betrayed intellectual values: rather, his honesty and rigour were almost unbearably painful to observe, and certainly worthy of the highest moral approbation. Gellner instead saw Benda as the traitor, because of his unjustified complacency about the solidity of liberal and rationalist values. The liberal’s position is in many ways precarious rather than secure, and to deny this is to falsify modern intellectual history.
Gellner’s own strategy was to ground his thought – partially yet powerfully – in a particular outcome of historical development, namely that of the higher standard of living and increased life expectancy brought about by modern science. But that is only one half of his position. Philosophical considerations are equally useful for understanding the nature of modern society. Gellner is thus the philosopher of industrialism and the sociologist of philosophy – a very particular mix of a highly integrated mind. This is reflected in his intellectual toolbox. Key themes, figures and ideas appear in rather different contexts. Thus Weber is seen as the sociologist of the rise of the West, but also as the best guide to modern epistemology. Hume has centre stage when the theory of knowledge is under discussion, but his arguments about enthusiasm and superstition are used as a key to understanding European development and the sociology of Islam, and as a vital clue to the genealogy of civil society. Gellner’s mind was equipped with a broad range of intellectual resources, the versatility of which was surprising and elegant. It is crucial to stress as forcefully as possible that he was, to use the well-known opposition made famous by Isaiah Berlin, a hedgehog, even though his contributions in different fields made some think of him as a fox.
What concerned Gellner most was simply the nature of modernity. His son David once suggested that his father wanted to produce a philosophy of modernity. This is helpful, but it misses something. Gellner’s brute definition of modernity, industry and nationalism, established an agenda: his concern was not just to explain the emergence of ‘soft’ and rational society and the contours of feeling that it allows us, but also to ask whether it might spread beyond the particular location in which it originated. He joined normative to social-scientific concerns. He did not merely define modernity, but also sought to defend and even to extend it.
This is the appropriate point at which to explain my own personal connection with Gellner. In the academic year 1972–3, as a young graduate student at the LSE, I attended twenty lectures by him on ‘Modern Ideologies’, effectively drawn from Legitimation of Belief (1974). It was a thrilling experience. For one thing, nothing less than a new model of the world, with its central ideas and institutions specified and analysed, was on offer, challenging the listener to accept or to reject it. Quite simply, this provocation made me think for myself for the first time. Later on, from about 1977, I came to know Gellner personally. I gave classes at the LSE to supplement his lectures in social philosophy during the years when he was a member of its Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method. Subsequently I taught at the Prague campus of the Central European University in Prague, to which Gellner moved after the collapse of communism – an experience which allowed me to gain some sense of his background and what it meant to him. I found him to be an exceptionally attractive human being: witty, extremely kind, modest, and blessed with a genius for creating something of a tribe around himself, cemented by an endless stream of postcards – sent, one felt, to counteract a sense of loneliness. Despite my warm feelings for the man, this book is not a hagiography, which he certainly would have hated. Due perhaps to his influence I share some of his dislikes, but I do not accept all of his positive arguments or normative stances. Differently put, I am no self-appointed guardian of his life and thought, and so I take care to point out where his theories and arguments are, in my judgement, problematic or wrong. More generally, I seek to explain the pattern of his thought, to place it within the context already noted, rather than simply to list and describe every argument that he made.
Still, this personal link allows me at times to draw on my own memories. Though there may be dangers in this, in the end it is an advantage. For the materials available to a biographer are severely limited. Gellner was able to publish most of his thoughts. The Gellner Archive deposited at the LSE does contain some material, notably: a manuscript on ‘Conservatism and Ideology’; a huge mass of detailed fieldwork notes from Morocco; short pieces from the world-transforming year that Gellner spent in Moscow watching perestroika and glasnost open the doors to the strange and sudden death of the Soviet Union; some important correspondence, notably an exchange of views with Noam Chomsky; and, above all, what will be termed ‘The Notes’, written from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, in which he worked out his central intellectual positions, often by means of distilling his thoughts into aphorisms. In addition, the LSE kindly allowed me to examine another useful source, Gellner’s personnel file. This, in combination with nearly all of his passports, now in the possession of his family, allowed me to reconstruct his movements with a fair degree of accuracy.
It is a great pleasure to be able to acknowledge a great deal of support from very many quarters. The Gellner family has allowed me to quote from his papers, and its members have always been available for discussion and sometimes simply to look after me. Still, this book is not official in any sense and I am responsible for what it says, although I hope that Gellner’s relations find its portrait veridical. Scholars of central Europe – Jiří Musil, Peter Bugge, Malachi Hacohen, Anatoly Khazanov and Roman Szporluk – were generous with their advice. I have also learnt a great deal from comments provided by Wolfgang Kraus, Al Stepan, Dominique Colas, Perry Anderson, Aviel Roshwald, Dominique Arel, Tom Nairn, Pierre Birnbaum, Siniša Malešević, Lilli Riga and Bill Kissane. At one time the book was to have been written with Brendan O’Leary. Though his other pressing concerns in Northern Ireland and Iraq prevented joint authorship, there are many traces of our discussions in what follows; his comments on a final draft of this book were invaluable. Another major debt is owed to Ian Jarvie, not least for his marvellous complete bibliography of Gellner’s works.9 I have reminisced about Gellner with many people since he died, and thank them all – especially those who gave the formal interviews noted in the text. I am grateful to Noam Chomsky for letting me cite his letter to Gellner, in chapter eleven, and to Mrs Melitta Mew for permission to cite two letters from Karl Popper, in chapters two and five. Csaba Szilagyi, librarian of the Central European University, helped locate material related to Gellner’s years with that institution. Research was vitally supported by a STICERD Fellowship at the LSE, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Social Science, a Fowler Hamilton Fellowship at Christ Church College, Oxford, a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, a Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities, and by my own university.
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1‘The Savile Row Postmodernist’, Guardian Weekly, 19 February 1995.
2Nations and Nationalism, Oxford, 1983, p. 57. He went on to say that ‘ethnic’ gramophone records were consumed in the Soviet Union by sophisticated urban dwellers.
3‘Accounting for the Horror’, Times Literary Supplement, 6 August 1982, reprinted as ‘From Königsberg to Manhattan (or Hannah, Rahel, Martin and Elfriede or Thy Neighbour’s Gemeinschaft)’, in Culture, Identity and Politics, Cambridge, 1987, p. 79.
4L. Riga, ‘Ethnonationalism, Assimilation and the Worlds of the Jewish Bolsheviks in Fin de Siècle Tsarist Russia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 48, 2006.
5M. Hacohen, ‘Karl Popper in Exile: The Viennese Progressive Imagination and the Making of The Open Society’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, vol. 26, 1996.
6M. Hacohen, ‘Dilemmas of Cosmopolitianism: Karl Popper, Jewish Identity and “Central European Culture”‘, Journal of Modern History, vol. 71, 1999.
7Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma, Cambridge, 1998.
8‘La trahison de la trahison des clercs’, in Encounters with Nationalism, Oxford, 1994.
9This is available online at http://www.yorku.ca/jarvie/ErnestGellner.htm. Many of Gellner’s essays have been collected, and my citations are to those volumes unless changes to dates or names are significant, in which cases the original version is noted.