Entering a new world as an immigrant is always hard. Gellner clearly had a burning ambition to succeed, but some of his character traits were bound to make this even more difficult than it had to be. There was the rebelliousness that had always marked his personality. Then there was the fact that he had fought in the war, thereby gaining considerable self-confidence. Equally important was his Czech social-democratic background. All of this made it very unlikely that he would fit in easily in his new setting. British upper-class society, exemplified by Oxford and Cambridge Universities, was class-conscious in the immediate postwar years in a way that is not easy to convey, although the novels of Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh and Barbara Pym set within this world can help provide some understanding. Snobbery was anathema to Gellner at all times in his life, and he had to contend with a great deal of it at Oxford. He made much of this a few years later when he was discussing with his friend Norman Birnbaum, the American sociologist, the advisability of the latter’s planned move to Oxford. Gellner noted amongst other things the stupidity of class-based codes of behaviour which prevented the vast majority of Oxford’s male students from taking out ‘shop girls’.1 This chapter records the difficulties he faced in the early 1950s, and describes the birth of a confidence sufficient to take on the idols of the age.
Gellner returned to Oxford in January 1946 just after his twenty-first birthday. Several witnesses attest to the impact that he made at the time. He was extremely handsome, at once lithe and tough, and took up sailing at this time in addition to his interest in canoeing. He rode a motorcycle. He was somewhat intense and enigmatic, at once attracted and attractive to women. He had a long-term girlfriend at this time, but he apparently had an affair at some point with the female undergraduate considered at the time to be the university’s great beauty. He possessed a certain maturity resulting from the complexities of his background and his experience under fire. He was extremely serious, often locked up in his rooms working hard, especially on Kant’s three great critiques – he took tutorials in that subject from Donald MacKinnon in Keble College, a brilliant and charismatic Kantian philosopher capable of giving tutorials from his bath, and probably Tom Stoppard’s model for the character of George in Jumpers, his witty portrayal of Oxford philosophy.2 He remained grateful all his life for this immersion into Kant; it formed a key part of his intellectual equipment thereafter. A certain exoticism was probably partly to blame for his engagement with existentialist thought, at once passionate and critical. Gellner knew Iris Murdoch during the 1950s, and it is possible that one of the characters of her first novel, Under the Net, is based upon him.3 But what surely counted most was sheer brilliance. For one thing, he took an active part in a seminar run by Gilbert Ryle, one of the leading philosophers of the day and the editor of Mind, claiming later to have learnt more from him than from any other Oxford philosopher.4 For another, there was his clear ability to think critically at the highest level, now made visible to us thanks to the preservation of an interesting intellectual exchange that took place during his first year back at Oxford.
Gellner was active in Oxford undergraduate philosophy circles, and sought out Karl Popper when Popper came to give a paper before Easter in 1946. He later recalled sitting and listening to the private discussion that took place after the lecture between Alfred Ayer, Isaiah Berlin and Popper, during the course of which Popper made much fun of the cloudiness of Hegelian language. At Popper’s urging he read The Open Society and Its Enemies, the book which was to influence him more than any other.5 His reactions were recorded in a long letter of 10 August 1946.
As for your book – its problem, if I understand it, is to provide an answer to some widespread doubts of the ‘rationalist’ tradition which had led many of its adherents to desert it: this attempt at re-persuasion, I suppose, is what you meant by your claim that it is a ‘fighting book’. The crisis arose as follows: the rationalists of the 18th century (largely) had two sets of value-beliefs, (1) what you call ‘openness’, the destruction of arbitrary and irrational authority, taboos, etc., and (2) amelioration of mankind’s material state. They also believed, falsely, that the achievement of (2) would automatically follow the achievement of (1), i.e. they were ‘liberals’. The first crisis arose when the 19th century showed the latter belief to be wrong; and this problem was overcome by the replacement of belief in (2) as an automatic consequence of (1), by the belief in (2) brought about by ‘socialism’ or ‘planning’. (1) was still ardently believed in, but no longer as an agent for bringing about (2), but for its own sake only, and it was assumed, usually tacitly, that the process of material amelioration would not hinder (or would even aid!) the achievement of those factors of the Open Society other than material well-being (esp. intellectual freedom). The 20th century has on the whole shown the later rationalists’ (socialists) belief in the absence of an incompatibility between (2) by ‘planning’ and (1) as false as the earlier rationalists’ (‘liberals’) belief in (1) implying (2).
The manner in which the 20th century has shown this to be false is by the tendency of industrial masses to support totalitarianism, at any rate on the continent of Europe. Those of the rationalist tradition, the ‘progressives’ or what-will-you, now had a number of unpalatable alternatives: (a) abandon (1) for the sake of (2), the course of the communists, excused either by saying that (1) isn’t really valuable, or that it will be re-established when (2) is achieved. Both excuses are invalid, though it is difficult to argue against the former; the latter at least is empirical, though it is true that there aren’t enough facts available yet to make its disproof absolutely cogent. (b) To abandon (2) for (1), which on the Continent usually soon meant losing (1) as well, as the active movements opposed to socialism-become-totalitarian were themselves equally totalitarian. In Anglo-Saxon countries it may be possible to escape this dilemma. (c) Attempts to believe both in ameliorism and liberty, either by some neo-liberalism (which, even if it ‘supplied the goods’, doesn’t stand a chance under contemporary economic conditions); or by just staying in the old planning-and-freedom against reason, by a plunge into mysticism like Arthur Koestler’s Peter Slavek; one suspects that those Peter Slaveks who weren’t forced into the ‘mystic plunge of faith’ by accidental circumstances, such as Jewish extraction, compelling them to take one side in the late struggle, usually took the course of passivity or even collaboration.
It was, I take it, to those wavering rationalists, that your book was addressed; your solution having two essential parts; firstly, the making explicit and independent of the liberty-element in the rationalist tradition, which had by socialists been so fatally left tacit and/or considered as having only derived value; and secondly the re-establishing of compatibility between planning and freedom through the distinction between Utopian and piecemeal social engineering.
Against the first point the following objections may be made: that the idea of the ‘Open Society’ is vague, and as such, on the one hand, inadequate in argument, on the other hand liable to abuse (like the pliable vagueness of ideas such as ‘Fascism’ or the equally convenient ‘Anti-Fascism’.) You will no doubt reply that this (i.e. the Open Society), is precisely what cannot be defined, else it would not be Open. This seems, however, rather like Wittgenstein’s paradoxical rule about permissible propositions which you yourself ridicule; for we must make assertions about what exactly the O.S. is if we are to avoid the Closed Society, and anyway you’ve made an assertion in forbidding all others. And moreover, ‘Openness’ (or ‘liberty’) must be more clearly formulated; for there are elements which though prima facie ‘closed’ (you mention friendship as an example), are desirable; and I think the desire for ordering facts in scientific systems has psychologically a similarity to the yearning for a ‘closed’ order. On the other hand, German Fascism, though amongst the masses it no doubt appealed to ‘closed society yearning’, surely has as a part of its philosophical inspiration, at any rate amongst some of its leaders, an intentional and systematic disregard for ‘moral laws’ which is, again, prima facie ‘open’. I think this shows that the idea of liberty6, apart from the problem arising from its relation to social engineering, needs re-formulating; the principle of ‘freedom up to the limit of interfering with others’ freedom’ is perfectly useless, as the decision as to whether a murder interferes with the victim’s freedom to live, or the victim with the murderer’s freedom to murder, can be made only by appeal to norms which are arbitrary and varied from social group to social group; (in the case of murder most men are agreed; but on the important issues both sides can claim that the principle of ‘freedom limited by others’ freedom’ is on their side.)
As for ‘piecemeal engineering’, I’m not clear whether it means engineering not too large-scale, or such s.e. as only removes suffering rather than plans for others’ happiness; or both. But surely the large-scale is inescapable for technical reasons; whilst alleviation of misery and planning for happiness are usually inseparable (rebuilding of slums and reduction of working-time involves also designs for the new houses and provisions for leisure). Some ‘Utopian engineering’ is inescapable.
Thus I don’t think your attitude is a solution, but only a very much clearer re-statement of the problem. Also, surely it isn’t admirable to translate the ‘womb-yearning’ into sociology under the name of ‘yearning for the tribal society’, as an explanatory theory; it is both unverifiable and, by being equally applicable to all striving for order, not useful.
Gellner later noted his naïvety in writing a negative critique, regretting that he had failed to mention how much he admired the book – with whose theses he continued to struggle, as we shall see, for much of his career. Popper’s own notorious inability to accept criticism was, however, suspended on this occasion, for he replied warmly on 15 August 1946.7
I found your letter not only non-boring but really interesting. Your criticism is going to the roots of the matter, and largely valid, even though I think that there are a number of points – probably less fundamental points – in which I might successfully defend myself.
You have in your letter succeeded in looking at my book from an elevated point of view, as it were – looking at my position as a whole, rather than worrying about the details in my reasoning. (You have succeeded, but you should not think that this is the only or the right way of looking at it.) If I may try to do the same in regard to your letter, then I may perhaps say: the fundamental difference between your point of view and that of my book is that you think that I am too optimistic in my belief that we can have (1) ‘Openness’ or ‘Freedom’ and (2) Amelioration. I am just now in a less optimistic mood than when I wrote the book (even though I was not at all sure, when I wrote it, how the war would end), and therefore incline to sympathise with your point of view.
But you must not forget that the book is, and remains, anti-historicistic. My optimism was not the good news that rationalism will win in the end; it was, rather, a mixture of the following:
(1) We have no reason to be frightened out of our wits by the undoubtedly existing difficulties. Although we may never conquer them, this does not show that they are unconquerable.
(2) A statement of those values which, in my opinion, makes the conquest worth an effort: and those include ‘openness’ and rationalism.
(3) A reasoned argument against what I may loosely call competing solutions, by showing, in the main, that they are not worth while, because they sacrifice certain of these values, either because they are incompatible with others, or without even knowing what they are doing.
Surely, more can and should be said about the ‘Open Society’. Why not? This is not the last word about it, rather the first (although it is not really the first, of course). I don’t think, however, that this should take the form of a definition of the Open Society (see chapter 11, section II).8
I was grieved to read in your letter that you consider the principle of ‘freedom up to the limit of interfering with others’ freedom’ as ‘perfectly useless’. Although it is not enough, and although it must be supplemented by other moral ideas. I don’t think you are right; and your arguments in this particular point are, I’m afraid, reminiscent of Hegel’s (who contested the same point against Kant). This is why I am grieved!
You must not forget that, in these matters, as in all others, nothing can be said that is completely water-tight and/or completely precise. The art of talking about such matters is the art of talking with that degree of clarity or precision which is appropriate to the subject matter. Nobody who reads what I (or Kant) says on this subject can doubt that we do not consider the murderer’s and the victim’s freedom as equivalent. Therefore, we must have succeeded, somehow, it [sic] explaining our principle with sufficient precision. Don’t forget that I at least (as against Kant) never try to prove such a principle, but that I am content with demanding that certain things should be done, and others not done.
No reply from Gellner to this letter has survived. But Popper continued to be a lodestone of Gellner’s thought, with the idea that claims to knowledge should in principle be open to falsification – carefully reinterpreted by Gellner in later years – remaining a key and recurring element of open systems of thought.
Gellner was allowed to take a shortened degree because of his war service, and so took his finals in the summer of 1947 after only two and a half years at the university.9 His final papers were in General Philosophy (from Descartes), Logic, the Philosophy of Kant, Moral & Political Philosophy, and Principles of Economics. He received warm feedback from Lindsay on his excellent first-class degree.10 In November of the same year he was Proxime accessit (runner-up) in the John Locke Scholarship in Mental Philosophy – a prize based upon extra exam papers. Ryle wrote warmly to Gellner at this time, admonishing him to watch his style and to treat Russell and Ayer as exemplars of lucid English, and ending by insisting that what was at issue was less the John Locke prize than Gellner’s future contribution to philosophy.11
In those days a first-class degree from Oxford was a sufficient credential to start an academic career, and he had no difficulty in gaining employment. He led a summer seminar in Oxford on the ‘Philosophy of History’, and then in October went to Edinburgh for two years as assistant lecturer in Philosophy; Lindsay’s networking and support were clearly helpful.12 Lindsay also wrote to the Home Office on Gellner’s behalf, helping him to get a work permit. Gellner gained naturalization, that is, became a British subject (rather than citizen), in October 1948, promising as part of the process not to seek to reclaim his Czechoslovak citizenship.13 Edinburgh was a city he came to love, in part because of the resemblance it bears to Prague, but still more because he developed a new passion for mountaineering. Then there was some real intellectual engagement, albeit critical in character, with the philosopher John Macmurray, a profoundly Christian thinker of Calvinist hue.14 Further, one imagines that Gellner’s time in Scotland was responsible for adding to his understanding of Hume and his deeply felt admiration for the Scottish Enlightenment as a whole.15 Beyond all this, however, is the fact that Edinburgh held a very different attraction: Scottish law made it possible to divorce more quickly and easily than was the case in England and Wales.
In his last year at Oxford he had married Lore Edith Herzstein. Her background was Jewish and German, but unlike Gellner she lost all her family in the camps. She was pretty and charming, possessed of a lovely laugh, but she suffered from her troubled background. Several sources suggest that the marriage was essentially quixotic: Lore had convinced him that the emotional stability of marriage would allow her to do well in her final exams.16 This gamble did not pay off. The relationship may have faced practical limitations from the start: a shared home was never created, and Lore soon moved in with Gellner’s parents in Makepeace Avenue while he was in Edinburgh arranging the divorce – they provided this service gladly in the hope that it would restore his chances of a successful career.17 What is clear is that Lore became schizophrenic. Over time her situation deteriorated, so much so that one of her friends, the novelist Nina Bawden, was sufficiently worried for the safety of her own children during visits that she had a watch kept on Lore throughout the night.18 Soon there were long periods of hospitalization, to which Gellner’s parents made some financial contribution, before an early death. Some friends blamed Gellner to some extent, not for causing Lore’s problems, for there was general understanding from the start that she was frail, but for making a romantic gesture that could not be fulfilled. Gellner himself later commented on the difficulty of marriage between two people from such troubled backgrounds, and one suspects that he determined to have a rather different sort of emotional life thereafter.
When this first job came to its natural end in 1949, he moved to the LSE as an Assistant Lecturer in Sociology with special reference to Ethics and Social Philosophy, with a starting salary of £450.19 One reason for his getting the job was utterly accidental. The Director, Alexander Carr-Saunders, had two dominating passions: rock climbing and his belief that the university staff should be involved in extracurricular activities with the students. When Gellner responded to a question asking about his spare time in Edinburgh by saying that he had spent most of it climbing with students, the job was his. But the rather strange title Gellner held points to a second reason, namely the influence of Morris Ginsberg. Ginsberg had worked closely with L. T. Hobhouse and had followed him as the holder of the Martin White chair, the senior position in the department. Both Ginsberg and Hobhouse espoused what might be termed an ethical version of social evolution, purportedly showing that moral development was sufficiently advanced to place harsh and selfish Darwinian struggles to one side. Their position did a great deal to influence the areas in which Gellner had to teach. For a little more than a decade he gave twenty-five lectures a year to undergraduates on ethics, running parallel for many years to Ginsberg’s own course on social philosophy. His lectures concentrated on the ‘main contribution of Greek thought to ethical theory. The problem of modern ethics. Moral sense, conscience and rational intuitionism. The empirical school. Rationalism and ethics’. A further ten more advanced lectures on the same topic for graduates considered Sidgwick, Plato, Aristotle, Butler, Hume, Kant, Mill, Green, and Hobhouse – with C. D. Broad’s Five Types of Ethical Theory serving as a piece of essential reading for the course.20 The fact that he taught ethics should not for a moment lead to the conclusion that he was in agreement with Ginsberg. Uncritical evolutionary optimism of this sort could only deal with the horrors of the twentieth century by ignoring them; it reified its own values rather than investigating the world. ‘The Notes’ record some of Gellner’s feelings:
From the amount of arrogance, hierarchy and confidence about, one would think the most transcendent creativity, the most daring breakthroughs, were taking place. On examination, it turns out the only available theory is the woolly evolutionism, mild and progressive semi-naturalism …
A new subject, like a revolution, must advance or collapse, but Morris Ginsberg managed to endow sociology with the sclerosis of an old subject.
Old philosophy (e.g. Morris Ginsberg) naïve taking of concepts for granted, naïve looking at world from outside with concepts drawn from within it. Linguistic philosophy is better than that.
Facts and values scratching each others’ backs, culminating in ecstasy, of ‘correlated growth’.
Underestimates sharpness of break between science and ‘rationality’ which preceded it, and likewise between industrialism and preceding progress.
The World Spirit at last revealed itself unto itself, and truth stood bare. And lo and behold, the mouthpiece of this truth is unhonoured, and people go talking quite different stuff, taking no heed. At one level he notices this, at another not.
Morris Ginsberg never sees he is only studying his own concepts.
Ginsberg: like a soundtrack half an hour later than the film. The Enlightenment (plus nineteenth century evolutionism) came to him late, and thus had a freshness and a closed-completeness for him. He was not anti-empiricist, but there was not much need for finding out because 1) the main things were known, and 2) his notion of the scholar did not require specific understanding or control (the rabbi neither knows nor cares how the Poles till their fields).
But weighing in against this were the personal and intellectual attractions of his return to London. For one thing, he returned to the family home. For another, London allowed him to develop his climbing career on the European continent. He joined the LSE’s Mountaineering Club and made many trips, usually to the Alps, in order to climb. An account of a three-week trip around Zermatt in August 1952 is in the Gellner Archive, perhaps written by Denis Greenald, an undergraduate at the LSE and later an educational psychologist in London.21 The account makes it clear that Gellner knew the area well, and it gives the impression that he was exceptionally fit – racing ahead on at least one occasion with an ice piton.
There was also much that was attractive about the LSE. The School was utterly different in character from Oxford. It had little of the feel of a finishing school for the upper classes, which lasted for so long at Britain’s oldest universities. The fact that a significant number of colleagues came from Central Europe, many of them with Jewish backgrounds, made things simpler socially – and there was none of the anti-Semitism that was still found within the British establishment. The presence of his intellectual confessor, John Hajnal, certainly mattered. Then there was genuine intellectual exchange. The school was relatively small: meetings were frequent, at tea and at lunch, and there was significant knowledge of work being done in fields outside one’s own. In those years the LSE genuinely was a school for social science. There was one negative feature of the LSE in Gellner’s view, namely the presence of the political theorist Michael Oakeshott, the exception to the rule as, according to Gellner, the theorist of the traditional upper classes. But this negative was, so to speak, positive, in that it forced Gellner to develop the powerful critique of Oakeshott that is considered in the next chapter. In contrast, two other LSE influences were unambiguously positive.
Gellner very much enjoyed the seminars of Isaac Schapera and Raymond Firth, which he attended as soon as he arrived at the school, and appreciated a measure of participation in a lively and genuinely intellectual community.22 His interest was perhaps initiated and certainly encouraged by his friend Paul Stirling, who was then also at LSE. Gellner was a natural anthropologist, as previously noted, an outsider looking in, always curious about local customs and very often amused by the idiosyncrasies of social behaviour. Anthropology, however, had a firm base in social reality, and contrasted utterly, as we shall see, with the abstraction of the philosophy in which he had been trained. He always made a great deal of the seemingly minor matter that anthropology benefited from sustained immersion in the field. Even a moderately gifted student would be able to say something interesting after such immersion. Certainly good descriptive fieldwork was better than bad theory. The contrast with philosophy was very great; so too was the contrast with social science in general. He liked to repeat Poincaré’s joke that natural scientists gathering together discuss results, whereas social scientists argue over methods. Crucially, anthropology provided an appropriate method for the study of social life – which is to say, of course, that its method was powerful because it had a proper sense of the nature of social life. This view is evident in the acknowledgements of the book that made Gellner famous, Words and Things:
I should also express my thanks to the members of the Social Anthropology Department at the L.S.E., who taught me how, without prejudice to its validity, one should see a set of related ideas and practices as a system of mutually supporting, and sometimes conflicting parts, and interpret it in terms of the services it performs and the conditions it requires in the social context of which it is a part.23
Exactly the same point is made a quarter-century later in the acknowledgements to The Psychoanalytic Movement.24 We can see here the impact of Bronisław Malinowski, who had been the leading figure at the LSE, and whose influence was pervasive. Gellner was to write a great deal about the revolution in anthropology pioneered by Malinowski, though he probably learnt quite as much from Radcliffe-Brown’s cementing of that revolution – the latter’s distinction between structure and culture pervades Gellner’s work, most notably that on nationalism. Perhaps the key element of this new style of social anthropology was, so to speak, that social life was a serious business: food production and power relations dictated much of social organization, and ideas are often but a codification of the concrete ways in which a society works. This approach was utterly different from that of James Frazer, which had been dominant prior to that and which was so much concerned with ideas rather than institutions.
The presence of Popper, who had been appointed to the School in 1945 and who enthused to John Watkins at this time about Gellner’s brilliance, was just as significant. Here was someone who took science seriously, and tried to explain how it worked. Equally important was Popper’s attempt to rethink liberalism, and Gellner later regretted that Popper did not continue to work in this area in his later years.25 Nonetheless, there was some distance between the two. Gellner attended Popper’s seminar, but always took great care never to become a member of his inner circle, disliking Popper’s hostility to criticism and noting with some delight the continuing Oedipal revolts by members of Popper’s clique.26 This led to a characteristically sardonic joke, much repeated at the school and often attributed to Gellner, that Popper’s great book should have been titled of The Open Society by One of Its Enemies.27
There was another rather different intellectual benefit to his return to London. He was clearly still close to the wider community of Oxford philosophers by whom he had been educated. He re-sat the papers for the John Locke Prize in Mental Philosophy in 1950, and this time succeeded – again receiving a warm note from Ryle, who continued trying to correct Gellner’s writing style while allowing him to publish reviews and articles in Mind.28 In the early 1950s Gellner regularly presented papers at Oxford, and their style is similar to that of the Oxford philosophy of the time.29 He corresponded with the dominant figures in that scene, including not just Ryle and Murdoch but also David Pears, Elizabeth Anscombe, J. O. Urmson, Isaiah Berlin, and Stuart Hampshire.30 The young Gellner’s status within the world of Oxford philosophy is apparent in several letters from Richard Hare, addressed in a familiar manner to ‘Ernest’, and habitually signed ‘Dick’. Hare arranged accommodations for Gellner when he came to speak at Oxford, and expressed gratitude for a paper Gellner wrote on ethics which distinguished between universalizable and particular doctrines.31 Reading Gellner’s work on Kant and Kierkegaard led Hare to scrap what he had written on the subject and start afresh.32 This was a significant compliment, an important acknowledgement of Gellner’s intellect given Hare’s leading position as an ethical thinker.
Nonetheless, Gellner was far from an insider. Giving the eighth annual E. H. Carr Memorial Lecture at Aberystwyth in November 1991 he recalled:
I was not terribly impressed by the conventional wisdom which was then taught [in philosophy, politics and economics] and rather eagerly embraced by my contemporaries, but I lacked the confidence to repudiate and reject it with emphasis, at any rate at once. But the uneasy state of mind this engendered did at least make me receptive to someone who did not display the same faults as did advocates of the then current fashions … E. H. Carr’s mind … clearly was not guilty of that near-total insensitivity to the diversity of historical situations and contexts which otherwise prevailed in the academic world.33
A certain independence of mind was apparent from the start, evidenced by two reviews on existentialist authors.34 The predominant attitude of Oxford philosophers towards existentialism was highly critical, but Gellner expressed measured sympathy for a doctrine centrally concerned with the feelings provoked by the living of life. A central theme of his later thought, eventually used as the title of a collection of essays, that modern cognition undermines moral certainty is already present in the characterization of the French Catholic existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel’s view of life as a predicament rather than a spectacle. But what really mattered was the appearance of a powerful and interrelated series of articles outlining Gellner’s discontent with the philosophical milieu in which he had been educated. Later in life Gellner insisted that he had written the four articles in question merely to gain tenure, with the dearth of publication in the following years partly explainable by summers spent climbing in Europe. This may be so, but it understates the originality of the pieces, most of which were included in the first collection of his essays.
‘Use and Meaning’ attacked in the boldest terms the linguistic philosophy then acquiring hegemonic status at Oxford.35 The insistence by the later Wittgenstein that one should not seek to establish abstract meaning but rather to understand usage was utterly misleading. Language does often function in contextual terms, but Gellner held it to be absurd to see it in those terms exclusively. Language equally serves as a sort of protoscience, providing descriptions which may or may not be correct, that is, which may be falsified by evidence or through the systematic application of consistent standards. This was further stressed in ‘Knowing How and Validity’, in which Gellner took aim at Stephen Toulmin and, to a lesser extent, at Ryle.36 Great skill can be exhibited in learning and manipulating the ‘know-how’ operative at any particular time, but this practical expertise does not establish scientific validity. ‘False or self-contradictory rules of deductive inference may be constructed and people may acquire the skill of operating them and manufacturing fallacies and contradictions’.37 Gellner also emphasized the inherent impossibility of applying the doctrine that one should replace the search for abstract meaning with a careful appreciation of a culture’s customs. A hidden presupposition of this view is that there is a single and consistent set of meanings to be found. But for every language there are people who wish to ‘correct’ and ‘improve’ usage, that is, those who wish language to be usage-independent. To search for some simple and consistent use is akin to seeking a noble savage: bluntly, states of innocence are projections rather than realities.38 Further, many belief systems are riddled with internal contradictions, making nonsense of the view that clarification of use will somehow resolve moral or social conflict. French Jansenists argued that the Pope rather than the Gallican Church should be obeyed – only to be instructed by the Pope to subordinate themselves to the latter; American communists were at one time told by their leaders to embrace capitalism. Gellner is here introducing a rich line of argument, leading to an analysis of the ways in which absurdity and contradiction block social and intellectual development. This argument gained salience in his work thereafter.
‘Analysis and Ontology’ was a superb paper, suggesting that background presuppositions can be found in any philosophy, and that it is only within pre-established terms that philosophy makes sense.39 He noted that Logical Positivism depended upon the assumptions of classical empiricism, whilst linguistic philosophy’s concentration on usage would not have been possible if Logical Positivism had not made the analysis of language seem de rigueur. We are faced, he suggested, with different worlds of ideas, none of them securely grounded.
Gellner’s intellectual interests in the early 1950s are clearly stated in a letter of 27 June 1952, addressed to Professor Frederic Lane of the Rockefeller Foundation, outlining the research that he wished to undertake during his upcoming fellowship in the United States. ‘I wish to do work in logic and ethics, and in their relation, on what may be described as the logic of ethics. To do this I want to improve my command of modern symbolic logic. In this field Professor [Willard Van Orman] Quine is one of the greatest contemporary authorities (if not the greatest), which is the reason for my preference for Harvard.’ It also indicated tastes which opposed the prevailing orthodoxies of his Oxford training. Logic should be broadly understood, Gellner suggested, as ‘relevant to semantics, communication theory and the methodology of the social sciences’. He noted that he was working on three papers in this area, two already given to postgraduate seminars at the LSE, concerning the analysis and classification of ‘philosophies of history’; a discussion of a ‘causal’ model of language as a signalling system; and a critical discussion of certain doctrines in the methodology of social sciences which had been elaborated by Popper and by some of his disciples. He felt that this project was relevant for social science because of the applicability and necessity of ethical theory, and because of the need to investigate the ethical presuppositions of the social sciences. Gellner’s intention was to look as far into the past as the seventeenth century in order to examine utilitarianism and Kantianism, and to relate these to questions of propaganda and control. The relationship between ethics and logic would be discussed in connection with ‘rationalism’ and ‘irrationalism’ in ethical theory.
After visiting Harvard in 1954, Ryle wrote to Gellner to tell him that he was remembered there.40 Gellner had attended lectures and seminars given by Quine, whose work he greatly admired and with which he would engage two decades later.41 He also had meetings with the philosopher Morton White, with the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, who had passed most of the interwar years in Prague, and with Noam Chomsky, then a junior fellow at Harvard. Gellner impressed Norman Birnbaum, who had been educated there, with the depth of his anthropological decoding of Harvard politics.42 The period in America afforded some pleasure: he very much enjoyed New England, particularly the ease with which one could leave Cambridge to ski in New Hampshire. Nonetheless, he did not feel comfortable in the United States. He found most of American academia to be far removed from reality. In philosophy this had not always been the case; he viewed pragmatism as exemplifying American life and admired the thought of William James. But thereafter the subject had become too academic. Philosophy departments worked on a zoo-like principle, whereby each university had to employ one philosopher representing each school of thought. Interestingly, this did not lead to a world of Popperian contention. Gellner explained:
[D]iversity is but skin deep. The cars, houses, wives, divorces, and psychiatrists of a Utah personalist do not differ from those of a New Hampshire Heideggerian or a North Dakota neo-Kantian, or even a Louisiana Austinian. The ideological differentiation, in formal philosophy, seems to mean nothing in the souls or life-styles of the philosophers, or indeed in the society which harbours and sustains them.43
Gellner was a European through and through. His genuinely multicultural background, for all its problems, meant that he found the United States to be homogeneous. But this did not, as we shall see, translate into a crass anti-Americanism.
These feelings were minor compared to the personal crisis that engulfed him at this time. According to John Hajnal, Gellner told him that he had attempted suicide, and that Carr-Saunders knew about this. Both friends were prone to depression, though they could not agree as to whether its cause could be explained rationally or not. The attempted suicide has not been confirmed, and other friends from this period are divided – some think it possible, others that it was very unlikely. But Gellner was clearly deeply troubled. In America he would take long bus journeys and hope that they would never end, for this would mean that he need make no decisions. The fundamental cause of this crisis was intellectual. Gellner felt great self-doubt due to the fact that most clever people in his field were fully convinced by views which he found to be wrong-headed. Was there something that he was missing?
Added to this was surely the fact that his career ambitions, which might be threatened by his opposition to passionately held orthodoxies, were powerfully reinforced by his desire to find his place in a new society. And this was not all. Apparently, his difficulties were related both to a failed love affair and to his self-assessment that he lacked sufficient talent to become a mathematical logician.44 There is clear independent confirmation of a personal crisis. The LSE had granted him leave without pay for a full year from October 1952. The Rockefeller fellowship was ended from June 1953. Carr-Saunders did the honourable thing by his young, pre-tenure member of staff: Gellner was reinstated with full pay from 1 July 1953, two months before the period of unpaid leave was scheduled to end.45 Further, the Gellner Archive contains a 10 November 1953 letter from Gardner C. Quarton, MD, Department of Neuropathology and of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, apparently replying to a message from Gellner which had expressed doubts about the quality of his own work. Quarton noted that it had been hard for them to talk because of Gellner’s own interest in the foundations of psychiatry, an interest which Quarton shared. One can imagine their difficulties, presumably based on infinite epistemological regresses, and only regret that Quarton, unlike Jacques Lacan, the famous French analyst, failed to have his sessions recorded and transcribed. It is worth noting in this connection that Gellner applied to the London Institute of Psycho-Analysis a few months later for library privileges, very probably to gain background for fieldwork on psychoanalysis – a project which Raymond Firth dissuaded him from pursuing. Still, Quarton retained an interest in practical therapy and suggested that Gellner undergo psychoanalysis now that he had recovered from his depression. Finally, Gellner himself wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation in 1954 noting that it had been difficult to write because of his deep depression at the time.
The correspondence with the Rockefeller Foundation is of further interest. In general, he was very critical of the way in which fellows were treated. The stipend had been acceptable to him, and he felt that it would be good to have stipends for more scholars. But he noted that the stipend provided less money than was attached to an average junior university position, and was a far lesser sum than that received by people in comparable positions at American universities. This would have been all right if other conditions had been acceptable. But herein lay the problem: he was very much opposed to the ‘the closeness, pedantry and intellectual level of the supervision of a Fellow’s work’.
I would not wish to argue that people academically working in philosophy or some parts of the social sciences are kinds of poets, to be pampered and left alone in the hope that the wind of inspiration will blow their way sometime; but such a view would certainly be far nearer the truth than the conception of academic work underlying much of American academic practice and some of the procedure of the Rockefeller Foundation.46
This letter was written just a month after the death of his mother, and perhaps he was distracted by this. In any case, he wrote back in November apologizing for his lack of gratitude. ‘I also feel that I should have expressed thanks for the patience shown towards me during the latter part of my illness when indecision may have made me very hard to deal with’.47
One indication of the difficulties that Gellner faced was the fact – extraordinary in light of the productivity of his later career – that he published virtually nothing for four years after the first flurry of articles in 1951. Things changed rapidly thereafter, for recovery proved to be swift and permanent. The full crystallization of Gellner’s thought occurred in the second half of the 1950s, together with the establishment of a self-confidence that allowed him to express his views, which were often in opposition to allies as well as to enemies. At an intellectual level, the importance of the Harvard period was simply the lesson that the Oxford style of philosophy was only one option amongst others, and therefore it was as misguided as he had suspected. Still, he could not have taken the path that he did without the stability of a healthy emotional life.
A fundamental factor in his recovery was simply being back in surroundings that made him feel comfortable. His time in the United States had been marked by continual insomnia; apparently this ceased to be a problem the very first night he returned home. But another, even more important change was involved. His tutor, Tommy Balogh, apparently claimed that Gellner would never manage significant intellectual work until he was settled emotionally. He was lucky enough to find this peacefulness in the person of Susan Ryan. Her father came from a Protestant Scottish–Irish background, but culturally he was a perfect English gentleman, educated at King’s School in Canterbury. He would tell his son-in-law that, as a foreigner, he might not realise that England was a ‘snob country’, and urged him to send his own son to a boarding school – advice which Gellner did not follow. Susan’s mother was from an Anglicized Scottish family, the Impeys, with a tradition of service in India.48 Susan herself clearly had a taste for intellectual life, knowing the LSE statisticians George Morton and Jim Durbin well enough to go on skiing holidays with them. Indeed, it was while skiing with them in the Silvretta mountains in 1952–3 that she first heard about their friend Ernest. The following year, Durbin dropped out of a planned holiday and suggested that Gellner take his place. Gellner had been to the Alps with his sister in the winter holidays of 1953–4, supposedly in order to give her a rest – a notion provoking laughter amongst Gellner’s friends given that at that time his company was potentially exhausting, not least due to his habit of walking very rapidly. An Easter trip to Zermatt was planned, and led to a meeting of Durbin, Morton, Gellner and Susan in a London pub in late 1953. The ski trip took place as intended, with Susan then planning to teach English and work as an au pair for a family in Athens. Just as these arrangements fell through, she received a letter from Gellner asking her to join him in Morocco in the summer of 1954. He had taken a crucial decision. He had turned down the opportunity to go with the LSE Mountaineering Club to the Himalayas in order to perform serious anthropological fieldwork in the Atlas mountains. Hence his first period of real fieldwork was undertaken that summer, supported financially in part by his father. On 30 July 1954 he wrote to his mother, announcing that he and Susan intended to get married when they returned, and possibly even sooner: ‘main reason (only reason really) for this hurry being that it will be more convenient from the viewpoint of working at the Moroccan material if we live together right away’. They wrote to her parents, but he asked his mother to telephone them as well, given that the post was unreliable. A further point was made:
There is no particular secret about all this but there is one thing I don’t want any misunderstanding about – though Susan is doing a lot of useful work here for me, she has come here at her own expense and I am NOT misappropriating research funds for her.
The letter continued by saying that they had walked through the whole region, sometimes sleeping in the tents of nomads – Gellner much disliking the way in which goats trampled on him in the night. They had eaten with a local notable, been entertained by dancing girls, and Gellner had forced himself into eating a little chicken after refusing mutton. He had decided to make Zawiya Ahansal the site for future fieldwork. A postscript requested a copy of his divorce certificate. Presumably this was forthcoming, because the marriage took place in Gibraltar on their way home.
The newly married couple soon made their home in the Ryan family house on Langside Avenue, near Putney in South London. Between 1954 and 1962 they had a separate apartment in the house, and Gellner retained a room in the attic for a further six years which he sometimes stayed in after they had moved away from the city. Susan’s parents were welcoming, and perhaps relieved that the nuptials had already taken place since they had just hosted the large wedding of Susan’s sister to William Trevor, the Anglo-Irish writer. Still, a large reception was held in a London hotel, and attended by several of Gellner’s colleagues. Less happily, life in Makepeace Avenue changed dramatically in 1954, when Anna Gellner died of a heart attack – during perhaps the third visit between Susan and her new mother-in-law.
Anna had taught her daughter-in-law how to cook wiener schnitzel (one of the only forms of meat that Gellner would eat, precisely because it was so disguised), and Susan remembers her as a woman with an easy social manner and obvious natural intelligence, especially in her ability to pick up languages. But most of Susan’s knowledge about Anna Gellner came from her husband. He told her that his mother once asked for ‘pity’ on account of her terrible son, something he much resented. Indeed, there was a good deal of bitterness within the family. Ernest had wanted a memorial for his mother, but one was arranged by his sister and father without his knowledge whilst he was in Morocco. Only recently did Susan Gellner discover that Anna’s ashes were buried in the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in Dollis Hill. When Susan Gellner told George Morton, who had a Bohemian Jewish background equivalent to Gellner’s, that the family seemed to be riddled with tensions, he laughed and told her simply that it was a normal Jewish family.
Apparently when Ernest first met Susan – they were alone, in Great Portland Street, perhaps on the way to the pub – he immediately thought that she would be a good wife. Certainly, this marriage was very different from his first, not least in allowing for a measure of entry into his adopted society. But the union was clearly based on love. This was particularly apparent to Youssef Hazmaoui, the Berber interpreter and guide who often worked with Gellner in Morocco.49 On one occasion in the summer of 1954 or 1955 when the Gellners went to Morocco together, a trip was arranged to purchase supplies. On the way back Susan Gellner said she preferred to cross the river directly, rather than via the bridge. Gellner carried her, but dropped her halfway across, losing all their produce. They would climb and swim on the weekends, and explored a great deal. Gellner provided some characteristic details late in life when asked to provide information for a biography of the explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who had visited Gellner and Susan in Morocco in 1955. They went on several climbs, because the unstable political situation meant that travel was not possible. For some climbs the group consisted of Gellner, Thesiger and Thesiger’s companion Colin Pennycuik; on others they were joined by Susan. One such climb, in which Hazmaoui also participated, took them up a gorge near Taria, a feat held by local belief to be impossible. In fact it was relatively easy, and at one wet spot everyone took off their clothes. Thesiger ‘was too gentlemanly to take … a photograph of Susan, to the regret of his audience when he gave a slide show on his return’.50 On this outing Thesiger probably saved their lives, correctly warning that a dangerous flash flood was imminent. They spent at least one night caught in a cave in such intense cold that Hazmaoui feared for their health. In general, Hazmaoui stressed how much fun the Gellners’ visits were for him and other villagers in the High Atlas – the people of Zawiya Ahansal, for example, were amazed by Ernest’s regular climbing exercises, namely abseiling from the window of the house in which he was staying.51 When Saints of the Atlas appeared it was dedicated to Susan. The ‘Acknowledgements’ noted that ‘during the crucial field trips which she joined, she did invaluable work as research assistant, secretary, nurse, cook, psychotherapist and PRO: in the words of my application for research funds, she performed services which, if purchased locally, might have been more expensive and less satisfactory’.52
The Gellner couple’s sense of fun clearly carried over into a very active social life. In London they gave parties, and were friendly with Ralph Miliband, Raphael Samuel, Charles Taylor, Stuart Hall and Julius Gould, and rather more distantly with Anthony Crosland. Many dinners were held at Bertorelli’s, an Italian restaurant in Soho. Several of these were centred on Claude Bourdet, a thinker of the non-Marxist left deeply opposed to French policy in Algeria, whom the Gellners would collect from Heathrow airport usingt the van they had acquired for fieldwork. Gellner himself contributed little to small talk, being both shy and occasionally so lost in his own thoughts as to be almost completely taciturn, but very much liked having friends and family around him. He noted to more than one person his dream of always being surrounded in this way, just as long as people did not talk to him too much. One way he had of dealing with this personality quirk, then and later, was to walk around a party endlessly topping up people’s glasses. Socializing of all sorts continued throughout his life, not least in the two decades that he lived in Hampshire, in his own estimation the happiest years of his life.
The character of their life changed with the birth of their children, David, Sarah, Deborah and Benjamin, between 1957 and 1963. The Gellners purchased a house in the country, intending at first to go there for weekends and holidays. But the move became permanent from 1962 for many reasons, including the fear that drugs were entering London schools. So the children were raised in ‘Old Litten Cottage’ in Hampshire. It was here that some of his most substantial work was accomplished. Deborah has provided a nuanced sketch of how it seemed to his children:
There was no public transport, no shops, not even a village. An unlikely place, perhaps, for an urban central European Jew to put down roots. Yet he was proud of living there, and happy to be away from cultural and intellectual centres. After moving away, to Cambridge in 1984, he loved to reminisce about those ‘twenty golden years’ when he had everything – happily married, four children living in a beautiful place, and sons interested in football. The house itself, a small and somewhat cramped cottage onto which extensions were built, provoked deep and passionate feelings of loyalty in him … he enjoyed playing host in it, and showing it off … I recall my mother cooking, single-handed, lasagna or moussaka, for 12 or 15, the pre-lunch drinks and slightly awkward small talk, and the unlimited supply of red wine thereafter.
The true situation was, in fact, that we lived there, whilst he only did part-time. His work, which was his life, took him constantly to London and abroad. Consequently, I used to argue with him about his (as I saw it) self-indulgent and nostalgic picture, and his claim that those were the years of his greatest contentment. However, now I am not so sure. Possibly, the house where one’s children grow up is, for many people, the most significant place one lives in. And probably all the more so if one’s own childhood is, as his was, unhappy. He would say that he wanted to give us the happy childhood and stable upbringing that he never had. It’s not realistic to expect children to be grateful. He certainly was not an involved, modern, nappy-changing father, and we were not slow to criticize. However, as the years have passed since those times, it has become impossible not to be aware of his commitment to us, his generosity, and the depth of his concern as to how we are doing in our lives. And that is probably why they were the twenty golden years for him; we were happy there, and therefore he was successful in his aim.
There is an interesting postscript to this description of his obsession with Old Litten Cottage … It was only years later when he was looking again at the work of the Czech artist Lada (whose illustrations in children’s and other books had long been familiar to him) that he realized that idealized versions of Old Litten Cottage appeared in so many of Lada’s sentimental paintings of Bohemian village life.’53
The family was particularly friendly with that of an attractive local doctor, Robin Ilbert, dubbed by Gellner the ‘Kennedy’ of the area. Ilbert’s memoir also notes the passage just quoted, and confirms the picture of continual entertainment. Ilbert notes Gellner’s complete freedom from the observance of social niceties. On one occasion, tired after a hot journey from London, Gellner left the dinner table with the water jug, went into the garden, poured it over his head, and returned refreshed. The memoir is as accurate on another facet of Gellner’s personality, namely his extreme distaste for being worshipped or excessively admired. When one ponderous admirer asked him what the Berbers were really like he simply said, ‘Hmph. Randy lot’.54 One final point deserves underscoring. Gellner very much appreciated friends who were not academics, including several of his secretaries: Gaye Woolven (at the LSE and later in Prague), Mary McGinley (in Cambridge) and Vlasta Hirtová (in Prague). Further, his utter intellectuality was balanced by his physicality and appreciation of nature. He clearly felt that academics sometimes lacked much sense of reality, lost in theories that could only be sustained in the study.
But all was not perfect at the country home. The children did not always enjoy the steady stream of visitors, though they were more likely to accept them if they could be forced into playing soccer. The girls apparently felt sometimes that their father was particularly concerned with the careers of David and Ben, both exceptionally bright – David was able to beat his father at chess. What the girls perceived as favouritism was probably in fact his awkwardness with ordinary family affection, and a certain lack of interest in their world. Ironically, he felt himself to be excluded from their lives. Then there were tensions simply because Ernest, secure in his own powers of reasoning, did not always deign to argue – and was anyway rather good at winning arguments when they did take place, sometimes with a cutting phrase. His work clearly had primacy, with few holidays taken during their childhood – their summers were often spent at camps, as Ernest’s were when he was a child.
We gain another insight by considering the dictum from Santayana that Gellner used as a legend to his own book on nationalism: ‘Our nationality is like our relations to women: too implicated in our moral nature to be changed honourably, and too accidental to be worth changing’. This very accurately sums up a part of his emotional life. He seems to have been attracted to other women on more than one occasion. He delighted in flirting, and in making slightly outrageous comments to women he knew well.55 He took considerable interest in, and was greatly amused by, other people’s imbroglios, not least those that concerned his LSE colleague, the Hungarian philosopher Imre Lakatos. These attitudes clearly owed a good deal to his Jewish and Central European background. So too did his sense of irony. When someone made a comment about a gay couple, he casually remarked that sexual preferences mattered not at all for him as sex was ridiculous whichever way one did it. And sex was discussed relatively openly. He remarked to his son David that he had no trouble with sex itself, more with finding people to do it with. He went on to claim that he had never had his fair share, regretting this on the entirely unromantic grounds that only sex and chess could stop him from thinking about work. But there were strict limits to his behaviour. He understood fully that he needed the rock of personal stability, compounded by family and organizational backing, that allowed him to work. In the early 1980s his wife fainted at a theatre; he was visibly shaken by the thought that this might be serious – he had once said that he forbade her to die before him, as he would be helpless without her. The sentimental bond was reciprocal. When I visited Old Litten Cottage at about this time, I was shown a portrait of Gellner by John Bratby. It seemed marvellous to me, a whirling vortex around Gellner’s face capturing some of the passion which clearly motivated him. Susan Gellner did not like it. It did not reflect his endless ability to make her laugh. Many of the people interviewed for this book, notably Steven Lukes, felt that the couple’s relationship was particularly strong.56
This is the appropriate place to describe the health difficulties that plagued Gellner for much of his life. He never let his children know the agonies that he suffered. He never complained about it, and never used his chronic illness as an excuse. The seriousness of his problems can be observed simply by noting the change in his height: in the course of the late 1950s and 1960s he lost more than four inches from an original height of nearly five feet and ten inches. This was the result of osteoporosis, a lack of bone calcium that in his case caused a shrinking of the bones. It may well be that particular difficulty came from the fact that the bones did not all shrink at the same speed. The history of his illness can be briefly told. As early as the mid-1950s he suffered from periodic severe pain in his ankles, and this had meant missed days on the slopes during skiing holidays. Various remedies were tried, including massage, but no real diagnosis was made. The severity of the situation cannot be exaggerated. He travelled with his wife to Tunisia in 1962 only to discover that he was unable to walk once he was there. It was at this time that he began to use a cane. He suffered broken bones with some frequency, most notably a leg when skiing shortly after arriving in the United States at the start of his 1968 sabbatical. Worse still were attacks that left him paralysed in a chair, struggling hard to breathe. Obviously, all this changed his life completely, though he never fully admitted it. He continued to walk in the mountains when he could, purchased a house in Italy that could only be accessed by a very strenuous walk, and for many years replaced climbing with sailing, keeping a boat in Chichester Harbour for many of the years that he lived in Hampshire.
He must have felt that an early death was possible, and said in later years that he worked fast because his eye was on the clock. The move to Hampshire brought a certain measure of salvation. Robin Ilbert took an interest in Gellner’s case and had him referred to various specialists. But it was Ruth Glass, the wife of his senior colleague David Glass (celebrated for his pioneering work in social mobility), whose help led to the breakthrough. She encouraged him to go to University College Hospital to see a physiotherapist, who rapidly realized the seriousness of the case and sent him to Professor Charles Dent, the world expert in osteoporosis at that time. Gellner’s condition was fully stabilized only in the late 1960s, after being hospitalized for a month in London so that every trace of every substance and liquid that entered and left his body could be examined. While in hospital he once read through his medical notes with a student and was amused to discover the facile way in which several previous consultants, unable to come up with a diagnosis, had considered his pain to be merely psychosomatic. He would spend the rest of his days living with pills, largely containing calcium that arrested further bone loss. But the pain remained, although this too was partly eased by a double hip replacement in the mid-1980s. Still, in the early 1990s, when sharing a room with Jiří Musil, he paced all night because of the pain.
Gellner registered for doctoral work in anthropology under the supervision of Raymond Firth shortly after his return from America.57 The decision to work in Morocco proved to be a turning point in his life. The choice of Morocco had a good deal to do with his love of mountains. But there were other reasons as well. A predecessor at the LSE, the Finnish anthropologist Edward Westermarck, had also worked there.58 Further, he felt that the creation of Israel would set up ‘a dramatic, tragic, perhaps insoluble confrontation with the Muslim world’ that needed to be understood.59 And he also insisted that the choice was altogether more personal:
In the Prague of my youth, I was indeed aware of the difference between the people I knew best and could communicate with easily – urban, cerebral, mobile, rootless and uneasy intellectuals – and ideal man as conceived by the populist romanticism which was dominant in literature, art, even politics and philosophy. This confrontation was far stronger and sharper in the lands of Habsburg after-taste than it was in England, and it culminated in Nazism. But it stayed with me and played a major part in the decision to do field work, and the decision concerning where to do it. When I first saw Berber villages of the central Atlas, each building clinging to the next, the style wholly homogeneous, the totality crying out that this was a Gemeinschaft, I knew at once that I wanted desperately to know, as far as an outsider ever could, what it was like inside. I knew I had the motivation to undergo whatever hardships the inquiry would bring.60
There are very early descriptions of the work he wished to undertake, written even before his first visit. They describe his desire to work not just with the Berbers in the mountains but also with those who had become sedentarized in the plains, possibly by studying a small village community. This suggests that his initial desire was to contribute to the sociology of development in the broadest terms. The failure to do so probably reflects both his underestimation of the time commitment that such comparative work would have demanded, and the intensity of his fascination with the High Atlas. In any case, between 1953 and 1961 he made seven extended trips as part of his doctoral research (Christmas 1953–4, summer 1954, Easter–summer 1955, summer 1956, Christmas 1957–8, summer 1959 and Easter 1961).61 The second and third trips seem to have been the most important: an untitled paper, probably given to the LSE Department of Anthropology seminar in the academic year 1956–7, contains many of the findings that would characterize Saints of the Atlas a dozen years later.62 The fieldwork was extremely successful, leading first to a doctorate in 1961, and then to the publication of Saints of the Atlas, a classic of British social anthropology.63 The boxes of field notes in the Gellner Archive at LSE attest to the depth and rigour of the research.64 His understanding of Islam became a central pillar of his thought, and insights from the Muslim world affected his philosophy of social science as well as his views on nationalism and the pattern of the past. The immediate task here is to describe the fieldwork, leaving until later, in chapter nine, an assessment of both the fieldwork and the general sociology of Islam to which it so greatly contributed.
The baselines for Moroccan history can be identified in terms of the interplay between different ecological zones. The fundamental contrast is that between the Bled al-makhzhen and the Bled al-siba, that is, between the settled, governed city life of the plains and coast on the one hand, and the stateless situation of the tribes of the mountains on the other hand.65 Gellner insisted against the obvious popular view, perpetuated by French colonial rule, that the tribes live in a condition of anarchy. To the contrary, a measure of order and trust prevails, the mechanics of which are at the centre of Gellner’s study. Equally, there is no truth to the notion that these tribesmen are independent: they depend on cities, both to sell their produce and to purchase goods that their pastoral existence makes it impossible for them to produce for themselves. This last point is one of the central insights of The Muqaddimah of the late-fourteenth-century diplomat-scholar Ibn Khaldun. Gellner had discovered his work whilst working on his doctorate, and it became ever more important for him.66 He pays immediate attention in Saints of the Atlas to the tragic contrast drawn by Ibn Khaldun between civilization and social cohesion, according to which the solidarity and trust created by the harsh conditions of pastoral life stand utterly opposed to the selfish asociality of urban life. This forms the basis of Ibn Khaldun’s theory of the tribal circulation of elites, according to which a tribe can provide government representatives for the city for only the three generations during which tribal solidarity endures in the face of urban influences.
Though Gellner was interested in the way that Morocco managed its government after independence in 1956, his own study concerned the anthropology of religion. The ‘great tradition’ of Muslim society was seen in the religious style of the city, represented by learned ulama, who stressed scripturalism (and so literacy), puritanism, strict monotheism, egalitarianism, and the absence of mediation through ritual in the relations between God and man. Gellner suggested a Weberian inner coherence to this social world. Townspeople are proto-puritan: they are literate, and prefer a religion of the book which underscores their natural identity. In contrast, the ‘little’ or ‘folk’ tradition of Muslims outside the cities depended much more upon the vagaries of nature. In this social world, rituals abound; monotheism is known but adulterated, not least by nature worship; and frequent recourse is shown to living saints possessed of holiness, making this form of Islam hierarchical rather than egalitarian. It was this latter world which Gellner chose to study. He felt that he was engaging in a situation utterly opposite to that of the European tradition. The puritans in Islam occupy centre stage, those, in Gellner’s words, addicted to ritual occupied the margins; in contrast, the puritans of Europe objected to the hagiography and moral corruption enshrined at the heart of the main tradition. His focus on this contrast never led Gellner to ignore the obvious complexities. For one thing, he always paid attention to the mystical, intensely ritualistic tradition of urban sufism.67 For another, Ibn Khaldun’s views on the circulation of elites, which Gellner so emphatically endorsed, depended upon occasional bursts of puritanism among tribesmen.
The political and intellectual context within which Gellner undertook his study must be appreciated. The tribesmen of the Atlas are Berber, whilst the inhabitants of the plains are Arab. Berber was an oral rather than a written language when Gellner was in the field, lending the local social hierarchy a curious resemblance to that of early-nineteenth-century Austria: in both cases social mobility was associated with the adoption of the language and culture of the more advanced group. The Berbers, despite numbering perhaps five million, lacked a sense of national identity in the early 1950s, thereby demonstrating that not every ethnicity becomes a nation.68 But nationalism was certainly present in the country. The French established a protectorate in 1912, and were finally able to subdue the tribes in 1933. They did so either by making use of local ‘big men’, or caïds, or by sending their own administrators into the mountains.69 But the promulgation of the Dahir Berbère in 1930 meant that tribal custom was, with certain exceptions, to be respected.70 This decree triggered Moroccan nationalism. It was interpreted as an attempt to divide and rule, and perhaps as a first move to convert the Berbers from Islam.71 Furthermore, the support of the great caïds was seen as likely to ensure backwardness through the creation of a feudal class.72 Nationalist indignation led to independence, with the support of workers in the towns. Interestingly, the colonial power lost control of the areas that states had historically ruled successfully; in contrast, the tribes were at last manageable, and many supported the French until it was obvious that the Protectorate was coming to an end.
Gellner learnt a great deal from the local theorists of nationalism. ‘The Struggle for Morocco’s Past’ presents two such theories. On the one hand, ben ‘Abdallah’s Les Grands courants de la civilisation du Maghrib was representative of the complex emotions felt by intellectuals in developing states as a result of contact with Western power. This led at once to an insistence on the achievements of local culture, together with an uneasy awareness that reforms were needed. In fact, ben ‘Abdallah suggested that things were about to change during the constitutional crisis of 1908, implying that the seeds of progress were present locally. A somewhat similar point is made by Lahbabi’s Le Gouvernement marocain à l’aube du XXe siècle, although here the analysis is markedly leftist in character. Tribal dissidence was interpreted as a form of proto-democracy by means of emphasizing the doctrine of consent. Once again the kernels of development were held to be present locally. Gellner noted that ‘emergent countries have a particular need of guiding historical ideologies’, but this did not for a moment mean that he felt that either of these views contained much good sociology.73 Rather they were myths, charters for development. This was perhaps especially clear in the case of Mehdi Ben Barka, the leftist political leader whom he had met in Paris and who provided a preface for Lahbabi’s volume. Ben Barka was a typical product of the city, who had accordingly been much offended by the scenes of rural ‘licentiousness’ he had observed when held as a prisoner of the French amongst the Ait Hdiddu.74 Admiration for the theory of consent did not mean that tribes would have been left to themselves – if Ben Barka had come to power, that is, rather than being assassinated in Paris by the security services of independent Morocco.75
What mattered to Gellner much more for his actual fieldwork were the ideas of French scholars. The most prominent such scholars had occupied a role utterly different from that of their British counterparts, as active administrators for the French state. Gellner took care to obtain a report of a Capitaine Ithier on his own fieldwork site, and later visited this soldier when the captain had retired. But two other figures were of greater importance.
Robert Montagne knew Morocco as a naval intelligence officer, in which capacity he produced Les Berbères et La Makhzen au Sud du Maroc: Essai sur la transformation politique des Berbères sédentaires (groupe Chleuh), a book Gellner considered a classic of social science.76 Montagne argued that there was a pattern of oscillation between rule by great caïds and a balance of power system amongst egalitarian tribes – two poles which, not surprisingly, were mirrored in the two approaches of the French to the Berbers. Gellner accepted the theory of oscillation, and endorsed Montagne’s view that the caïds were not feudal. He considered his own fieldwork to be the amplification of a casual observation by Montagne himself, namely that rule by saints created stability, thereby avoiding the oscillation to which tribes were otherwise doomed. Nonetheless, Montagne was mistaken in one crucial respect. Montagne had explained the relative stability at the tribal end of the spectrum in terms of what Gellner dubbed ‘chequerboard’ politics, that is, the balance that resulted from each tribe possessing a segment of land, a leff or moiety, in a series of valleys comprising a larger territorial unit. Gellner was so impressed that he went into the field in search of such moieties.77 He rapidly changed his mind.78 Gellner discovered that a respectable measure of order characterized social life within the squares on the chequerboard just as much as between them. He was able to explain this order once he had discovered the theory of segmentation present in the anthropological studies of Edward Evans-Pritchard, both amongst the Nuer of the upper Nile and the Sanusi of Cyrenaica.79
The second figure was Jacques Berque, whom Gellner came to know well, even though he was fifteen years older.80 Berque had been born of pied-noir parents in Algeria, then learnt Arabic and served as an agronomist in the western High Atlas before eventually becoming an academic in the Collège de France.81 Gellner enthusiastically welcomed his study of the Seksawa tribe, Structures sociales du Haut-Atlas, which appeared in 1955.82 Berque was far less interested – in Gellner’s view, perversely disinterested – in the political sociology of the Berbers, but he was an absolute master of micro-sociology, in particular of the relation of land to clan, and the rituals of daily life. French intellectual life did not issue any edict against historical reconstruction – a view which Gellner found refreshing, as long as it was tied to clear appreciation of the importance of social structure.83 As it happens, Berque’s next book, Al-Yousi: problèmes de la culture marocaine au XVIIème siècle, was to furnish material for an alternative view of North African society which Gellner would thereafter dispute.84
With the exception of his critical commentary on the notion of leff, Gellner argued that the studies of Montagne and Berque were superb ethnographies whose conclusions he did not wish to contest. His own interest lay in a particular type of government, that of rule by saints. He wished to understand the role of living saints, that is, of iggurame – or marabouts, the French word following Arabic rather than Berber – held to possess baraka (charisma or holiness). Accordingly, his fieldwork concentrated on a centre of living saints, Zawiya Ahansal, and on surrounding saintly sites, all in the Central High Atlas. The saints were themselves members of a kin group, most of whose members were laicized, and so prone to indulge in characteristic tribal behaviour such as feuding. This was an area where pastoral tribes met; as the pastures of the lowlands dried up, transhumant pastoralists brought their sheep to the longer-lasting grazing lands of the mountains. Saints of the Atlas portrays the role of saints within a larger society of which they were a part. The fieldwork started a mere twenty-one years after the final pacification of the tribes, making it possible to reconstruct the workings of a social system not decisively influenced by a foreign presence.85 Memories were strong, and the fact that the French had preserved local custom meant that the essential workings of the traditional order were still in place, although Gellner took care to note changed conditions when appropriate.
The absence of government in this area of the Atlas ought to have resulted in a Hobbesian situation of genuine anarchy. There were no local big men, let alone feudal lords, to provide order in the absence of the state, and relative egalitarianism characterized life amongst Berber pastoral nomads. Further, these tribesmen had a high ‘military participation ratio’: they were mobile, used to protecting their sheep and well trained in the use of firearms.86 While order was neither complete nor always present, the fact of the matter was that relatively settled relations were maintained. Gellner explained this by the ability of different segments, defined through kinship terminology, to balance each other so that a measure of stability was created. Tribesmen are mobilized according to the level of threat that they face and by means of a tree of kinship relations. Thus all the descendants of a putative distant ancestor may mobilize when a serious common threat is faced, while at a lower level the descendants of two brothers may establish equilibrium.
Gellner suggests that four principles make a segmentary system work.87 First, division and balance are the only organizational principles at work in society, suggesting that their presence must explain the maintenance of order. Second, in principle there can be no conflict of loyalty since the tree-like kinship system rules out crosscutting allegiances. Third, segmentation is most likely to rest on unilineal kinship. The crucial consideration here is that there must be one form of descent, for any more complex pattern might create conflicting loyalties. Fourth, every level of every group is ‘monadic’ – in the sense that its structural principle is the same as every other group. The introduction of this principle allowed, in his view, for key improvements on French ethnography: order could be explained within any particular leff; the search for the real group, to which French studies had been prone, could be abandoned; and the notion of leff could itself be seen as more flexible, occasionally referring to nothing more than mere political alliance.88
The practice of the collective oath neatly illustrated the way in which order was achieved.89 When an accusation was made, the allegedly guilty party could clear his name if his kinsmen – defined in terms of inheritance rights, in numbers according to the seriousness of the offence – stepped forward to swear to his innocence at a holy site according to a prescribed ritual. If a co-juror failed to turn up, guilt was established, and fines were imposed on the absent kin member. On the face of it this practice might seem bound to increase conflict: the system seems to allow the defending kin groups to triumph in all situations, thereby surely leading to an ultimate escalation of conflict. In fact, co-jurors were prepared to let down a kin member whose behaviour was a continual nuisance, even if this meant that fines had to be borne. The absence of state authority means that the only way to maintain order within a group is by by the threat that the delinquent may not be able to rely on his kin on some other occasion. Care is taken to reintegrate the offender by making him pay the fine, thus maintaining the strength of the unit. One advantage of the system was that it allowed some room for justice. But Gellner suggests that there was another benefit. When very solid tribal cohesion is displayed, might does indeed triumph – but this is an advantage since it prevents the outbreak of asymmetrical conflicts, which the weaker party would be sure to lose.
These Berbers’ segmentary system, based on patrilineal descent, was especially pure – so much so that in later years Gellner referred to it as a ‘masterpiece’ of this form of social organization.90 Complex realities interfered with the perfection of the model, but most of the deviations did not undermine the workings of segmentation. A first deviation – that ‘ancestors are not multiplied beyond necessity’91 – is clearly more of an exemplification than a contradiction. The fact that genealogies are not accurate, rarely tracing back more than six generations, demonstrates the impact of segmentation – as well, perhaps, as showing realism on the part of the tribesmen themselves. Fusion does take place, for example, when someone leaves or is expelled by his kin. But this does not destroy the system. To the contrary, it is vital for someone without kin to join another group lest he be utterly defenceless. This could lead to the adoption of the kin terms of the new group, again a sign for Gellner of how realism is given priority over consistency. Quoting Gellner directly provides a clear sense of the view of human behaviour that he gained from fieldwork:
We find that policy decisions do not necessarily follow the cleavages of the segmentary structure. Nothing would be more erroneous than to see the tribesmen enslaved in thought and deed to their clans, unable to weigh consequences or to act independently. But it would be equally wrong to disregard the ordered hierarchy of tribal groups as some kind of decorative elaboration, without weight when the moment of political decision comes. The segmentary organization displays a set of alignments, ratified not merely by custom, sentiment and ritual, but more weightily by shared interests which provide the baseline for alliances and enmities, for aid and hostility, when conflict arises. Calculation, feeling, new interests, diplomatic ingenuity, may at times cause the final alignments to depart at some points: but the initial and fairly strong presumption is that allegiances of tribe and clan will be honored, and that other inducements must have been operative if they were not honored.92
It was from fieldwork that he became convinced that the late Wittgenstein was wrong, that human beings are more than ‘concept-fodder’.93 A further example of the same point was provided when Gellner asked what would happen when twins were faced with filling the last position of a ten-man posse. The laughter of the tribesmen indicated a measure of infidelity to their rules and concepts, an ability to adapt them according to the necessities of their daily lives.94 Nonetheless, the manipulative realism of human beings did not automatically allow a transition to a different social order. Humans could be discontented, but they were normally trapped within social structures from which they could not escape.
The living saints might seem to be a further deviation from the model of pure kinship. They were certainly a distinct oddity in being themselves pacific. Montagne saw that the oscillation between tribal republics and the rule of caïds, characteristic of the south of the Atlas, did not apply to the saintly world of the Central High Atlas.95 The stability of this more egalitarian system resulted from the presence of a hierarchical element; the presence of the saints weakened society’s impulse towards the rise of the caïds. The division of labour in this society was remarkable, and something of a refutation of characteristic Weberian (and Marxist) expectations: the possessors of military might were dependent upon those who had renounced violence. How was this possible?
The saints performed a series of services for the tribesmen, enabling their society to work effectively.96 The practice of trial by collective oath has already been mentioned, but not the fact that the oath-taking was arranged by and took place before a saint. Elections of imgharen, the tribal chiefs, depended still more on the saintly presence. The ideal-typical practice was, according to Gellner, that voting rights would be reserved for the segments of a tribe that the candidate did not belong to. Such a system was designed to rule out the possibility of permanent power: chiefs were instant lame ducks as they held power for only a year, and their status anyway depended upon the provision of hospitality that might well deplete their resources. Given these circumstances, together with the absence of a formal vote and the need for final decisions to be unanimous, saints played a crucial role in finding a hidden consensus amongst the assembled tribesmen. Just as important were the various ways – by serving as the court of final appeal, by offering mediation – in which the saints regulated disputes over pasture rights. This was really, in Gellner’s eyes, the key to the whole situation. The main centre of the saint system was situated precisely where conflicts over summer pastures were most intense. Offshoots from this centre were found where new ‘frontiers’ had opened, that is, at new places where tribes came into contact in their searches for pasture.97 Beyond these three crucial roles, saints also provided a series of smaller services, from the provision of sanctuary to the placement of those leaving a kin network, and from the provision of information to the protection of trade and travellers. The practical, even materialist quality of the functionalist explanations that Gellner offered did not mean for a moment that he denied the spiritual service provided by the saints, the linking of tribesmen to a large spiritual world. To the contrary, he concludes his treatment by stressing the enthusiastic quality of their belief in Islam, referring to the role of the saints as ‘spiritual lords of the marches’.98 Still, Gellner came to be puzzled by the degree of tribesmen’s allegiance to the norms of a civilization which regards their form of Islam as heretical, especially given the lack of any coercive apparatus available to the keepers of the great tradition.
The largest part of Saints of the Atlas is devoted to the lives of the saints. It is necessary to note the fundamental fact that saints, so to speak, multiply beyond necessity. The relatively fixed number of openings for the positions of saintly mediators means that some selection procedure is required, especially given that the saints themselves, in part because of their pacific nature, produce an excess of children. The local belief is that the possession of true baraka is the result of divine favour. Gellner felt certain that, in this case, vox populi was vox dei. This was not because of his own reluctance to admit the powers of any divinity; rather it was easy to identify the mundane mechanisms at work. A very subtle and continuous process of selection was applied to members of saintly lineages, the key principle of which was that success tended to breed still greater success. Baraka was recognizable, for example, in the ability to provide hospitality – but that ability in turn led to the very gifts which provided them with the resources to exhibit their status.
But it would never do to have this overtly conceptualized: if baraka were merely the consequence of the decisions of the lay tribesmen, it could not claim authority over them. What is in reality a choice – albeit not one made by an individual and not on any one occasion, but by many and over a long time – appears not as a choice but as the recognition of an objective and indeed transcendental fact. This ‘objectivity’ of the allegedly recognized characteristic has the social consequence of absolving him who ‘recognizes’ it from the responsibility for it, which would attach to such an act if it were seen to be a choice.99
Social life depends, to adopt Sartrean terminology, upon bad faith. But Gellner’s morality is not that of Sartre: one feels at all times in his account an admiration for the way in which truth is not sought at the expense of social efficacy.
The role of the saints was particularly evident when the French protectorate and the newly independent state increased and extended the power of government. For one thing, a dispute broke out – a War of the Dance – between the traditionalists of Zawiya Ahansal and rivals whose puritanism reflected the fact that they were on the very edge of the plain, and therefore were forced to deal with clients ever more aware of the heterodoxy of traditional Berber practice.100 For another, the saints of Zawiya Ahansal played a complicated game during the period of French advance, keeping lines of communication open to both sides. What might seem at first to be craven behaviour was best understood, Gellner stressed, in entirely traditional terms: the saints were merely dealing with a new frontier, that between the French and the tribesmen as a whole. Despite all this, Gellner did recognize that the role of the saints was very definitely coming to an end. The key consideration was very basic. The ability of the state to finally provide order diminishes the attractiveness of pastoralism. In the absence of the state, kin were welcomed when they arrived to use summer pastures – for this would contribute to the tribal cohesion necessary for survival. When feuding is ruled out, handing over valued pastures to transient arrivals is far less appealing. Land deeds tended to be discovered and validated, allowing sedentarization to take place.101 Gellner had few illusions in this matter. He recognized a beauty in both the elegant economy of the social system and in the vernacular architecture, yet realized that it could not be preserved. But the social scientist could preserve an accurate record of what would be lost.
It is worth underlining how much Gellner gained from his experience in North Africa. A leader such as Ben Barka wished to build a new society. Such social engineering would involve, Gellner argued, the creation of a schooling system which would allow a common culture, probably puritanical in character, on the basis of which modernization could take place.102 This meant that Gellner had a real appreciation of the problems of development, and of their link to nationalism. Of course, this appreciation is scarcely surprising: he was open to this intellectual matter because his childhood experiences had made him aware of the move from country to city, from agrarian to industrial conditions. He would soon teach, with Tom Bottomore and Ron Dore, his colleagues in the sociology department at LSE, an exceptionally stimulating seminar on the Sociology of Development.103 This general interest led him to travel very widely throughout the developing world in the 1960s, seeking to observe how problems of development were playing out in the Islamic world. Crucially, his own positive social philosophy would be constructed around the basic fact of development. This was apparent in a comment Gellner made a few years later, revealing critical distance from Popper. He could not accept Popper’s admiration for the Greeks, the turning of Periclean Athens into a myth appropriate for the open society:
[A]part from the slightly embarrassing matter of slavery, and the lower material standard of living (which one might accept), the Greek miracle was far too precarious to tempt emulation today. We might wish for the miracle, but not at the price of such precariousness. A modern society yearns for the security springing from the affluent contentment of its citizens. This is perhaps a weakness of a work such as Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, in as far as its image of ‘the transition’ is too much inspired by the Greek miracle. There may have been many breakdowns of tribal societies, most of them not very fertile, and all precarious. They can hardly now provide us with our crucial myth.104
Gellner wanted to do rather better in his search for the terms by which we would live.
The late nineteenth century created the tension between ethnonationalism and cosmopolitanism which structured the ideas of a generation of thinkers from Jewish backgrounds. One way to deal with the contradictions between the Popperian closed and open societies was by moving to one or the other polar position. Gellner did not take this route, insisting that there were elements of both truth and error in these contrasting poles. The tensions generated by history could only be amplified for Gellner by his foundational intellectual allegiances. For there is a great deal of truth to the somewhat stereotypical view that anthropology is necessarily relativist, valuing as it does the distinctive value systems of varied societies. In contrast, Popper’s world was one which stressed concrete knowledge, the cognitive power of modern science – in Popper’s case based on absolute admiration for the ideas and persona of Albert Einstein. One cannot know whether Gellner’s choice of research area reflected an awareness of these tensions, or whether his decisions made it harder for him to imagine any easy escape from them. But his choices would certainly make his life more complicated, and much richer.
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1The expression is that of Norman Birnbaum, interviewed in February 2008.
2MacKinnon also played a particularly important role for Iris Murdoch (P. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life, New York, 2001).
3The novel was first published in 1954. When Murdoch wrote to Gellner on 26 November 1959 to apologize for a harsh review of Words and Things, she resisted Gellner’s attribution to her of the views of Hugo Bounderby. She also asked if he was planning to go to one the meetings that led to the creation of the New Left Review in 1962.
4Gellner to Ryle, 3 December 1959.
5‘The Rational Mystic: Review of Karl R. Popper, In Search of a Better World’, New Republic, vol. 16, 1993.
6Which I presume is synonymous with ‘openness’.
7Popper’s reply first became generally known when it was published as an Appendix in I. Jarvie and S. Pralong (eds), The Open Society after Fifty Years, London, 1999.
8Popper’s reference is to his ‘anti-essentialist’ arguments against the hunt for definitional exactitude.
9He had ‘shortened’ registration obligations ‘owing to service with the armed forces of the Crown or to some other approved form of National Service’, University Registry, Oxford, copy of Gellner’s certificate, 13 December 1947.
10Lindsay to Gellner, 25 July 1947.
11Ryle to Gellner, 2 December 1947.
12In his letter of congratulations on Gellner’s First, Lindsay expressed the hope that he would get the job in Edinburgh, and mentioned that he had spoken to Professor Macmurray.
13The Certificate of Naturalization, dated 21 October 1948, noted that his parents were already British.
14Tom Nairn in personal correspondence notes that Macmurray ‘believed that the Jewish story was essential to modern Western attitudes’, suggesting further that he would surely have been deeply interested in Gellner.
15In 1992 a small conference on the Czech-Slovak split was held in Edinburgh, co-organized by the Centre for the Study of Government in Scotland and the Centre for the Study of Nationalism. Tom Nairn recalls Gellner lecturing the Czech and Slovak participants at dinner on the importance of ‘the Paris of the North’.
16Evidence on this point came from Gellner himself, from his sister Marianne Sigmon (interviewed February 2003) and from Michael McMullen (interviewed February 2003).
17The divorce was finalized on 3 August 1949. Lore’s address is cited as that of Gellner’s parents. Gellner was the defendant – identified as ‘Ernest (otherwise Arnošt) André Gellner’.
18Interview with Nina Bawden, May 2003. Not surprisingly, these visits stopped, with Nina Bawden choosing instead to travel to visit Lore. Lore’s character may be at work in Bawden’s Anna Apparent, London, 1971. Bawden attended Oxford at the same time as Gellner, and they became friends. He provided ethnographic information about Morocco that features in one of her novels, A Woman of My Age, London, 1991.
19There may have been some possibility of him continuing in Edinburgh. No confirmation on this point is available, but it may be that he somehow, undramatically, blotted his copybook. He admitted later to his son David that he had taught Mill’s Utilitarianism without having read it. He was sure that he had not been a good teacher in this first job, and was surprised to receive a letter later from one Edinburgh student praising his teaching. He was promoted to a full Lectureship in 1951, with a salary of £600, to undergo review in five years, ‘tenure-track’ in today’s language (Carr-Saunders to Gellner, 31 May 1951).
20In later years R. Hare’s The Language of Morals and C. H. Waddington’s Science and Ethics were also listed as key reading matter. There were slight changes in the lectures offered, such as five offered in 1959–60 dealing with Concepts and Society: ‘Alternative general views of society and man’s place in it will be discussed, with special reference to their methodological and ethical implications’.
21Denis Greenald was to marry Gwen Guntrip, whose father was the well-known psychoanalyst Harold Guntrip. Gellner knew Guntrip and his work is dealt with harshly in The Psychoanalytic Movement: The Cunning of Unreason, second edition, Oxford, 1993, pp. 165–6.
22J. Davis, ‘An Interview with Ernest Gellner’, Current Anthropology, vol. 32, 1991, p. 66.
23Words and Things: A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology, London, 1959. The same acknowledgements declared that his ‘greatest individual debt’ was to John Hajnal.
24The Psychoanalytic Movement, p. xxxii.
25This is made especially clear in a letter reprinted in Jarvie and Pralong, The Open Society after Fifty Years, addressed to participants at a conference on Popper’s work that Gellner planned in 1995 but did not survive to attend.
26He enjoyed telling stories about these mutinies, and kept an occasional file of squabbles amongst the core of Popperians, now in the Gellner Archive.
27There is no evidence that Gellner claimed the joke as his own.
28Ryle to Gellner, 9 February 1952. Ryle’s injunctions contained some excellent editorial advice, against the use of parentheses and italicization, together with characteristic Oxford prejudices against the use of footnotes, colloquialisms and the citing of one’s own work.
29Something of the flavour of the Oxbridge philosophical milieu in the 1940s and 1950s is captured in D. Edmonds and J. Edinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument between Two Great Philosophers, London, 2001.
30He claimed to have kept clear of John Austin at all times, finding his intellectual technique intimidating and question-begging (see ‘Poker Player’ in The Devil in Modern Philosophy, London, 1974).
31‘Ethics and Logic’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 55, 1955, reprinted in The Devil in Modern Philosophy.
32Hare to Gellner, 12 May 1955. Hare’s reply, ‘Universalisability’, was read on 6 June 1955, and published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 55, 1955.
33‘Nationalism and the International Order’, in Encounters with Nationalism, Oxford, 1994, p. 21. Carr’s Nationalism and After was the sole book on nationalism on the reading list for Gellner’s first course on Social Philosophy at the Extra-Mural Department of the University of London (c. 1949–50).
34‘Review of G. Marcel, Being and Having’, Mind, vol. 59, 1950; and ‘Review of C. Astrada, K. Bauch, et. al., Martin Heidegger’s Einfluss auf die Wissenschaften’, Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 1, 1951.
35‘Use and Meaning’, Cambridge Journal, vol. 4, 1951.
36‘Knowing How and Validity’, Analysis, vol. 12, 1951, reprinted in The Devil in Modern Philosophy.
37Ibid., p. 98. This general attitude also underscored ‘Maxims’, which appeared in Mind in 1951, reprinted in The Devil in Modern Philosophy. The formal purpose of this article was to show the compatibility of Kant with Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind. Even if one accepted Ryle’s critical attack on ‘the ghost in the machine’, that is, the view that mental states were occurrences which caused actions, there remained room for a Kantian-inspired concern with maxims or rules of action. At a purely phenomenological level Gellner noted a difference between ‘he hit him because he was angry’ and ‘the glass broke because it was brittle’:
You can alter a person’s anger by conveying information to him; but talking to glass notoriously makes no difference … Though it may be true that ideas and states of mind are not occurrences, it is extremely important to note those of their features which differentiate them from things such as that of brittleness. These features are: the fact that some of them are true or false and dependent on evidence, and that all of them can be verbally quoted by the agent as justifications of his action, and that events, i.e. actions, can be influenced by the presentation of evidence or arguments relevant to the ideas involved in the rule … The causal connexion between the noticing of evidence and action is part of what we mean by such psychological terms as ‘conversion’ and ‘conviction’ (The Devil in Modern Philosophy, p. 71).
38‘Use and Meaning’, p. 760.
39‘Analysis and Ontology’, Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 1, 1951.
40Ryle to Gellner, 1 December 1954.
41The Gellner Archive contains a file of papers on Quine, clearly maintained for many years.
42Birnbaum joined the Department of Sociology at LSE whilst Gellner was at Harvard; they became close after his return.
43This passage is drawn from a 1973 essay (‘Reflections on Philosophy, Especially in America’, in The Devil in Modern Philosophy, p. 37), but ‘The Notes’, written from the late 1950s, already expressed similar sentiments.
44Interview with John Hajnal, June 1998.
45Carr-Saunders to Gellner, 8 July 1953.
46Gellner’s report on his fellowship, sent in a letter dated 26 October 1954.
47Gellner to Miss Elderton, 22 November 1954.
48Elijah Impey was impeached with Warren Hastings. The family still has an Indian photograph album.
49Hazmaoui was interviewed by Brendan O’Leary in Marrakesh on 22 December 2005. He had started life as a shepherd, before becoming a guide and interpreter for a series of anthropologists of Morocco including Vincent Crapanzo, Ross Dunn and David Hart.One revelation, made without prompting and to O’Leary’s surprise, was that Gellner became fluent in Berber. O’Leary queried this because he recalled another anthropologist’s claim that Gellner could not speak the language and remembered Edward Said’s assertion (discussed below, in chapter 11) that he could not speak any local language. Youssef firmly insisted that, as a Berber, he knew when someone could speak the language. David Gellner bears witness to his father’s proficiency in Berber, having been present when his father had a conversation in the local tongue with a boy in Algeria (despite the difference in Berber dialects). Hazmaoui consistently stressed the intelligence of Gellner, and stated on several occasions that he missed him a great deal. Gellner was apparently appreciated during his visits to the Atlas mountains, always prepared to tell amusing stories.
50Gellner to Asher, 9 January 1993. C. M. Asher, Thesiger: A Biography, London, 1994.
51In 1956 Gellner was still climbing, in New Hampshire in the United States. His report to the Mountaineering Club made much of his limited capacities, but he was critical of the extensive American use of pegs and pitons (‘The Brown Spot: A Letter from America, 1956’, reprinted in the LSE Fiftieth Anniversary Booklet). But his climbing activities, which he loved so very much, would soon come to an end as a result of the drastic decline in his health that will be discussed below.
52Saints of the Atlas, London, 1969, p. xiv.
53Deborah Gellner, ‘Life at Old Litten Cottage’, Cambridge Anthropology, vol. 19, 1996–7, pp. 100–1.
54R. Ilbert, An Autobiography, privately printed, pp. 274–77.
55Steven Lukes (interviewed by Brendan O’Leary, 27 February 2001) stressed the playful nature of this behaviour.
56Ibid.
57Admission to the programme was given in 1954, but it was backdated to 1953. Paul Stirling soon became a co-supervisor. Stirling was modest about his impact on a man whom he admired and ‘whom he may have slightly influenced in the 1950s’. His interest in social anthropology long preceded Gellner’s. As he put it: ‘In the late summer of 1947, I consciously decided not to try to become an academic philosopher, but instead to join social anthropology. I never even dreamt, like Ernest, of doing both.’ Paul Stirling, ‘Ménage à Trois on a Raft’, Cambridge Anthropology, vol. 19, 1996–7, pp. 59–69.
58Westermarck’s key works are Marriage Ceremonies in Morocco, London, 1914; Moorish Conceptions of Holiness, Baraka, Helsinki, 1916; and Ritual and Belief in Morocco, London, 1926. Gellner’s view of Westermarck’s status is noted below, in chapter 11.
59Davis, ‘An Interview with Ernest Gellner’, p. 66. John Hajnal suggested in an interview in June 1998 that this was a later rationalization. If this is so, the rationalization at least came many years before this interview.
60‘Reply to Critics’, in J. A. Hall and I. C. Jarvie (eds), The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner, Amsterdam, 1996, pp. 679–80.
61‘Notes on Method’, Saints of the Atlas, p. 303.
62The paper was given as part of a series dealing with social control. It opens with interesting thoughts on informality and formality, suggesting counterintuitively that rule-bound organizations may be subject to informal control and informal organizations to formal controls.
63‘Organization and Role of a Berber Zawiya’, PhD Thesis, London University, 1961. Saints of the Atlas appeared in French, Editions Bouchene, Paris, 2003, with a superb introduction by Gianni Albergoni.
64The notebooks themselves are hard to read, but their subject matter can be spelled out. They concentrate on legal struggles, local legends, kinship, the precise wording of such rituals as the collective oath, visits to varied saintly centres and interviews with particular individuals. Some incidents in the notebooks were also recorded by his research assistant. Further, a large cache of letters in the Gellner Archive from the American anthropologist of Morocco David Hart give a vivid account of the general conditions of fieldwork in the late 1950s. Hart employed the same research assistant, Youssef Hazmaoui, and checked a very large number of ethnographic details for Gellner; the few surviving letters of Gellner to Hart show him both supplying detailed information and discussing rationales for specific theoretical positions.
65Gellner notes (Saints of the Atlas, pp. 3–4) that a model stressing three circles – an inner core of the city guarded by watch dogs; a contado of sheep, that is, of sedentarized tribes subject to taxation; and a periphery of tribal wolves – is in fact more accurate. Nonetheless, emphasis is always on the basic opposition, on the grounds that the ‘sheep’ lack agency within the social formation as a whole.
66He was discouraged from making use of Ibn Khaldun when undertaking his doctoral research, on the ground that this was exactly the sort of speculation about origins that the Malinowskian revolution had attacked (‘Origins of Society’, in his Anthropology and Politics: Revolutions in the Sacred Grove, Oxford, 1995, p. 27). But the great Muslim scholar makes an early appearance in Saints of the Atlas, and later, when combined with the religious sociology of David Hume, stands at the centre of the general theory of Islam. Gellner reviewed a number of books about Ibn Khaldun, and made much of the publication of Ibn Khaldun’s report of his encounter with Tamerlane in 1401 (‘Talking with Tamerlane’, Times Literary Supplement, 19 September 1980). He hoped that the report on North Africa that Ibn Khaldun wrote for Tamerlane might yet be found, and longed for a Shavian treatment of the meeting between conqueror and scholar.
67‘Sanctity, Puritanism, Secularisation and Nationalism in North Africa’, first published in 1965 and then reprinted in Muslim Society, Cambridge, 1981, and ‘Flux and Reflux in the Faith of Men’ (written some fifteen years later and the central essay of Muslim Society), pp. 48–51.
68‘Berbers of Morocco’, Quarterly Review, vol. 294, 1956, p. 218.
69Gellner spent a good deal of time in Marrakesh, and his review of G. Maxwell’s Lords of the Atlas, London, 1966, in Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 6, 1970, reveals substantial knowledge of the Glawa of Marrakesh.
70Blood feuds and slavery were exceptions (Saints of the Atlas, p. 14).
71Saints of the Atlas, p. 19.
72‘Morocco’, in C. Legum (ed.), Africa, London, 1961, p. 35. French Marxists also interpreted local big men in terms of feudalism. Gellner went to considerable lengths, largely through citing the research of Robert Montagne, to demonstrate that this appellation was mistaken. On this see ‘The Sociology of Robert Montagne 1893–1954’, in Muslim Society, especially pp. 187–8.
73‘The Struggle for Morocco’s Past’, Middle East Journal, vol. 15, 1961, p. 89.
74Gellner recounts this story in a review of Wolfgang Kraus’s later study of this tribe (Social Anthropology, vol. 1, 1993, p. 163).
75‘Independence in the Central High Atlas’, Middle East Journal, vol. 11, 1963, p. 249.
76Paris, 1930. This book also introduced Gellner to Émile Masqueray’s Formation des cités chez les populations sédentaires de l’Algérie: Kabyles du djurjura, chaouïa de l’aouras, beni mezab, Paris, 1886, but it was only later that Gellner worked out the intellectual provenance of French North African studies. Gellner began to correspond with Montagne, but the latter’s death in 1954 meant that they never met.
77‘Reply to Critics’, pp. 642, 645. One of his supervisors, Paul Stirling, informed Wolfgang Kraus in 1996 that Gellner initially had no idea of the relevance of Evans-Pritchard’s work, as is noted in W. Kraus, ‘Contestable Identities: Tribal Structures in the Moroccan High Atlas’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, vol. 4, 1998.
78The initial statement of his criticism was made in a review of J. Berque, Structures sociales du Haut-Atlas, Paris, 1955 (‘The Far West of Islam’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 9, 1958, pp. 76–7). The most complete statement of the disagreement, stressing empirical as well as theoretical matters, is in Saints of the Atlas, pp. 65–7. A distinction is drawn between two meanings of leff in his introduction to Gellner and C. Micaud (eds), Arabs and Berbers, London, 1973.
79The Nuer, Oxford, 1940; and The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, Oxford, 1949.
80Berque expressed reservations about Gellner’s use of segmentary theory both in his L’Intérieur du Maghreb, Paris, 1978, and in the 1978 expanded edition of Structures sociales du Haut-Atlas; these reservations were repeated in his critical but appreciative review of Muslim Society, ‘The Popular and the Purified’, Times Literary Supplement, 11 December 1981. Gellner’s obituary for Berque, ‘A Fighter for Arab Culture’ (Guardian, 11 July 1995), considered him a lesser figure than Masqueray and Montagne, but great appreciation was shown for the depth of his understanding of the encounter between the West and the Arabs.
81Perhaps it was through Berque that Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie – who made use of Saints of the Atlas in his famous Montaillou – became familiar with Gellner’s work.
82‘The Far West of Islam’. Berque’s material did not lend support to Montagne’s oscillation theory, as is made especially clear in ‘The Sociology of Robert Montagne’, p. 190.
83‘The Far West of Islam’, pp. 80–1.
84Paris, 1958. This book is not cited in the bibliography of Saints of the Atlas. The dispute is discussed below, in chapter 9.
85‘Reply to Critics’, p. 656.
86Levels of military participation had been theorized by S. Andrzejewski (later Andreski) in Military Organisation and Society, which Gellner enthusiastically reviewed in ‘Reflections on Violence’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 5, 1954.
87Saints of the Atlas, pp. 41–9.
88Ibid., p. 88, footnote 3.
89Gellner used this illustration himself on many occasions, including ‘How to Live in Anarchy’, Listener, vol. 59, 1958; ‘Trust, Cohesion and the Social Order’, in D. Gambetta (ed.), Trust, Oxford, 1988; and ‘Tribal and International Law, Between Right and Might’, in M. Heiberg (ed.), Subduing Sovereignty, London, 1994.
90For example, ‘Reply to Critics’, p. 642.
91Saints of the Atlas, p. 38.
92Ibid., p. 63.
93Those British members of parliament who lack independence and influence are often referred to as ‘lobby-fodder’. Gellner liked the term ‘concept-fodder’ as an accurate characterization of the view that humans are simply slaves to the norms of their culture.
94Saints of the Atlas, p. 127. Gellner makes use of his ethnographic material to dig at his linguist philosophical enemies at a number of points. One further example is worth recalling:
A stereotype of the tribesman, popular among laymen, notably philosophers, is of a man totally enslaved to the rules within his in-group, and totally amoral outside it. This is doubly wrong. Segmentary societies are very common. Tribesmen within them cannot be enslaved to rules within them, for there is no absolute ‘within’: what is an in-group for one purpose, is an out-group for another. Secondly it is not the case that universal, open, impersonally formulated rules of morality are not present … (p. 45, footnote 1)
95Montagne, Les Berbères et le makhzen au sud du Maroc, p. 411. Gellner notes how remarkable it was that Montagne saw the exception so clearly when no European had as yet visited the region (Saints of the Atlas, p. 65). He described his own study as filling in the details of Montagne’s observation.
96A full list of such services, only some of which are discussed here, is offered in Saints of the Atlas, p. 78.
97Ibid., pp. 168–9, 230.
98Ibid., pp. 297–301.
99Ibid., p. 151.
100Ibid., pp. 246–50.
101Ibid., pp. 171–2.
102Gellner first identified the two tenets of what he termed in Thought and Change ‘the modern social contract’, that is, industrialism and nationalism, in ‘From Ibn Khaldun to Karl Marx’, Political Quarterly, vol. 32, 1961. In ‘Independence in the Central High Atlas’ he argued that the younger educated generation looked set to inherit the benefits of independence. His changing views on Moroccan development, the early expectation of radical change replaced by explanations for a remarkable degree of continuity, are noted in chapter 9.
103One participant was Robin Blackburn, who attests that he never again found such a stimulating atmosphere.
104Thought and Change, London, 1964, p. 159. Gellner’s knowledge of tribal society also led him to reject Popper’s view of it as the exemplar of a closed society, of a world freed from conflict over values: ‘I have myself worked in a tribal society which is “structurally” of a very simple kind, and moral dilemmas of this kind – choice between alternative sets of values – not only occurred, but were for certain reasons an essential part of local life’ (p. 84).