Thought and Change is an extremely ambitious book, aiming at nothing less than to provide a social philosophy for modern times. The treatise sought to find a middle way between two dangerous positions. On the one hand, Gellner accepted the need to avoid millenarian views, that is, those promising to provide absolute truths along with plans for human perfectibility. He was at one in this regard with Berlin and Oakeshott. On the other hand, he insisted that meaningful thought was still needed, that one could not react to the recent history of total ideologies, of Bolshevism and fascism, by presuming, as had Oakeshott and Berlin, that all was well, that local traditions were acceptable and in fine order. Monistic standards were needed, but they needed to be held in a critical spirit.
‘The Notes’ had made it quite clear that for Gellner the grounding of thought was a personal necessity, the attempt to find some mooring for someone whose identity, never fully formed, had fallen further into question as a result of historical events. But the claim of the book, in effect, is that his personal experience was representative of something much larger. The world as a whole is being transformed by the possibility of development. Gellner illustrated what he felt was involved with reference to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in which a man wakes to find himself turned into a beetle.
[The loss of] fixed identity … constitutes the very paradigm of a moral problem. Interesting moral crises are not those in which the question is simply whether individual or group will or will not succeed in maintaining or attaining some given and assumed standard – a kind of moral weight-lifting – but those in which the aims or criteria, the identity of the solution, are themselves in serious doubt.1
The approach of the late Wittgenstein suggested that it was impossible to find general criteria. Gellner admitted the difficulty, but insisted that the situation of being lost, of being thrown into the sea and needing somehow to swim, meant that ‘must implies can’, especially since linguistic philosophy in any case had a wholly implausible implicit sociology.2 Gellner’s strategy – or, rather, the only strategy he claimed to be available – was to specify the values that followed from or were allowed by the sociology of the modern world, properly understood. If pure and absolute truths could not be found, values could nonetheless be found ‘as fellow-travellers, second-class, of new ways of conceiving the world, new ways which impose themselves by their superior truth, accuracy, and controlling and predictive power’.3 The claim that grounding was possible, even if in this backhanded manner, made this an optimistic book. ‘The book is meant to be a continuation of The Open Society’, he noted, ‘but related to the post-war world, and more sociological’.4 This is an accurate description, not least in seeing the book as part of a postwar world. He was to become anxious as that context changed.
A few observations about Thought and Change can usefully be made before turning to Gellner’s justification for his historicist take on industrialism. An arresting stylistic feature of the book was the presence of striking aphorisms – ‘Philosophy is about industrialization’, ‘Or, if you like: philosophy is about the failure of 1789’ – culled from ‘The Notes’.5 At a substantive level, the most impressive element of the book, welcomed by many, was its discussion of nationalism, so powerful that it eventually set a new agenda for this important topic. Then there was the blunt and basic claim of the book, that two phenomena – industrialism and nationalism – must be present if a polity is to gain legitimacy in contemporary circumstances. This might suggest a sort of brute simplicity to the book. Nothing could be further from the truth. For one thing, systematic attention was given to the philosophy of science. Industry depends upon science, and its character affects our ethics and our identity. For another, Gellner had a great deal to say about political liberty, consciously excluded from his definition of the modern social contract. All of this can be put in a nutshell: we were offered a general view of the world. By the time he was forty he knew where he stood; the book foreshadows nearly all his later work.
Gellner took particular care in the opening of the book to specify the way in which validity could be based upon an interpretation of time. The account was initially negative. The first general notion attacked was that concentration on a fundamental episode, often that of a social contract, held to mark off a prior condition of backwardness from our modern and superior condition. There was a logical problem with this position: a contract changing everything would only be attractive to and adopted by people already possessing advanced normative standards.6 Gellner argued that such episodic theories tend to be sociologically thin. Most episodic theories have been concerned with the questions that obsess political theory, namely, those that deal with political obligation and the conditions of liberty. The drama of our age, in Gellner’s eyes, concerned development.
In contrast, he showed much greater sympathy to theories of social evolution. One great attraction of this view was its habitual use of a much more plausible sociology. We do not suddenly, by an act of will, become modern: to the contrary, this is a long and specifiable process. A second benefit was the fact that this perspective assumed the unity of mankind: differences between human beings were merely the result of societies being at different stages of development. There was no need within this paradigm to talk of ‘the savage mind’: to the contrary, many primitive thought-styles were ‘proto-rational’. Still more important, thirdly, was the philosophical coherence of this approach. The idea that one can somehow step outside of society so as to judge it is somewhat comical. Evolutionists were logically consistent because they did not try to escape the naturalism they preach.7 Despite all this, Gellner firmly rejected grand evolutionist theory. On the one hand, there was a further sociological problem, though of a different kind. Those at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder were in effect being told to suffer through a series of stages in order to reach the favoured end point. Such a view suggested that change is inevitably gradual. But this was emphatically not the way people in the developing world experienced social change in the twentieth century. Stages were skipped because there were models to copy – and, very often, external forces which dictated national patterns of development.8 On the other hand, Gellner saw evolutionary theories, at least in their pure form, as empty.9 The central problem was that mere serialism, that is, the identification of the requisite stages of development, told us nothing about the motor of social change. Ironically, once a particular mechanism was posited or established, then the stages themselves lost much significance.
Another criticism has often been levelled against evolutionist theories, namely that they are morally craven in encouraging us to jump on the bandwagon of projects aiming to promote historical progress. To imagine that morals can be justified in this way, rather than in their own terms, was to commit the naturalistic fallacy – or, to use the equivalent Popperian term, to be historicist. This criticism gained power and plausibility when the two great bandwagons of twentieth-century Europe ended in the horrors of Nazism and Marxism-Leninism. Nonetheless, Gellner admitted to being historicist.10 At a purely philosophical level he suggested that cravenness was more or less unavoidable, for morals were always likely to be influenced by any social formation that seems viable.11 But Gellner’s historicism was particular and limited. The sociological and ethical claim he wished to put forward was neo-episodic.12 The transcendence he sought was not universal, but referred to specific features of social life – poverty, disease, short life expectancies – that were everywhere in the historical record but were now made avoidable by modern industrial society. Very simply, this involved the privileging of industrial society, of a social formation allowing affluence and longer life, yet free from any promise – or, rather constitutionally unable – to create heaven on earth. Gellner claimed that it was possible to choose a reliable bandwagon, that of the industrial mode of production.
He was deeply influenced by Raymond Aron. The great French social scientist’s principal use of the term ‘industrial society’ would help to detect similarities and differences between liberal capitalism and state socialism, a choice of subject matter that naturally appealed to Gellner given his own background. But Aron had a sense of our place in history, and Thought and Change noted one ‘admirable’ essay that applied the term to the developing world.13 This intellectual appreciation for Aron was certainly enhanced by Gellner’s belief that the Frenchman had shown great bravery in his career. Aron’s famous attack on Marxism as the ‘opium of the intellectuals’ impressed him, and the book of that title was often on his reading lists. He claimed that Aron uniquely combined a sense of reality with an ability to understand left-wing French thought from the inside. But if Gellner was wont to refer to him as the greatest living sociologist, he had little time for Aron’s own attempt, deriving in part from phenomenology, to create a formal language dealing with the nature of historical experience.14 Still, he remained on the six-person editorial board of the European Journal of Sociology, which he had joined at its inception in 1960, until shortly after Aron’s death – and often told stories of Aron’s views on the papers that were submitted for publication.15 But underlying this intellectual influence was surely Gellner’s lived experience, the witnessing of mass migration from country to city both in Czechoslovakia and in North Africa. One detects too the legacy of the theorist of industrial society, Saint-Simon, though there is no indication that Gellner read his work at any stage of his career. But Masaryk had read Saint-Simon, and this certainly influenced the worldview he sought to foster in Czechoslovakia – aiming at general depoliticization in order to create a space in which ‘experts’ could flourish.
Gellner’s claims about the modern social contract – seen less as a contract and more as a sociological condition – were both more precise and more extensive than has been noted thus far. His contention was not just that a contemporary social order will be accepted if it provides a decent standard of living and allows for rule by those sharing a culture with other members of the society, but that this ought to be so. It is worth underscoring the fact that these claims were at once sociological and moral. Certain social processes were identified, but we did not know enough, in Gellner’s view, about the variations in form that they allow. And equally, these developments were to be endorsed on moral grounds. Differently put, we should quite self-consciously commit the naturalistic fallacy. The real and the rational did, in this one case, converge.
Gellner was not only making the sociological claim that an industrialized society would be stable because it would be legitimate. A secondary sociological claim was that the transition of industrial society was taking place.
The mechanics which ensures the necessity of the transition seems to me quite simple. Its crucial premiss is simply that men in general will not tolerate a life of poverty, disease, precariousness, hard work, tedium and oppression, when they recognize that at least most of these features can be either obviated or greatly mitigated.16
Gellner noted explicitly that this was a brutally simple argument, emphasizing at its core a matter of general psychology rather than a feature of social organization. This was sociologically sound, though he glossed his position in an interesting way. While the mechanisms involved were varied, the imitation by states of new techniques might play an important role; such imitation could destabilize existing social conditions, releasing forces for change. But this scarcely mattered, for ‘the secret is out’ that affluence was possible.17 This was not the case with the earliest industrialization in Britain, nor indeed with its initial European emulators. But the name of the game since 1945 has been that of development. Any regime which failed to achieve development was likely, in Gellner’s view, to be short-lived, either because it would be overthrown from within or because it would be destroyed by external forces.18
The moral claim was equally straightforward. It was entirely proper to commit the naturalistic fallacy, since we must prefer a mode of social life that brings comfort, health, long life and the possibility of decency, when scarcity had previously ensured that social advance was almost necessarily at the expense of one’s fellow human beings.19 This was a powerful if banal point, stated more clearly in Thought and Change than anywhere else in his work, and Gellner clearly felt that it barely needed justification. A striking passage, much mulled over in ‘The Notes’, made the point by ridiculing Pascal’s view that the human condition is exemplified by a condemned man in a prison cell – on the grounds that life does not have a predetermined end, and is not necessarily lived out in a situation of relative comfort.
So if we must have a comparison, it cannot be the condemned cell … but something like Auschwitz: you can live a little longer, and a little better, provided you are very lucky and are willing to participate in the degradation and extinction of your fellows … The moral significance of the transition is of course that soon, human nastiness will become a matter of choice rather than necessity. We do not know what other factors – inherent in the social organization of industrial society, or, perhaps, in the human psyche – may operate in that regrettable direction nonetheless: we ought to find out. But we do at least know that the dire material imperative of nastiness is on the way out. Nastiness, hitherto necessary, will henceforth be contingent.20
Further, Gellner aligned himself with John Stuart Mill’s response to those who claimed that utilitarianism – with its insistence on such ‘philistine’ concerns as decent sewage, health and food production – was a philosophy fit for pigs: the critics were the real exemplars of a callous and piggish mentality.21 Their arguments had been inherited by ‘cultural entertainers’ afraid of modern science. A ‘fairly modest annual rate of growth, sustained over time, can do more to alleviate human misery than all the compassion and abnegation that past ages could muster’.22
Gellner’s privileging of industrial society was not complacent:
To say this is not to say that existing liberal affluent societies are things of great beauty and warrant complacency. They aren’t and they don’t. The surviving areas of poverty and underprivilege are obscene precisely because they are now totally unnecessary.23
Joined to this were several passages in which he had a great deal of fun attacking the unrealistic presuppositions of neo-classical economic theory.24 The idea that everything could be left to the market made no sense when the infrastructure of industrial society required state provision of standardized education for all.25 We hear in these passages the imprint of Gellner’s background, of Czechoslovak social democracy, concerned with creating a soft and inclusive managed capitalism. Still more important was the way in which these concerns point to, and underlie, his view of the age of nationalism.
The two leading social theories of the modern world, Marxism and liberalism, had both held that nationalism would disappear with time, doomed either by the spread of international trade or by the emergence of a working class which owed no loyalty to the nation.26 While history had judged the falsity of this prediction, a general enlightenment about the character of nationalism did not then result. Very much to the contrary, nationalism came to be seen as a deeply irrational force, such that men were subject to ‘Dark Gods’, prone to act in accord with their sense of blood and belonging. It was this view that was questioned in the famous opening sentence of a book by Gellner’s LSE colleague Elie Kedourie – ‘Nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century’27 – by suggesting that nationalism was contingent rather than necessary and universal. Gellner claimed to have been ‘woken from his dogmatic slumbers’, as Kant had been when he read Hume, by Kedourie’s demonstration that nationalism was not a universal feature of the human soul.28
Several interrelated and powerful factors were adduced by Gellner to support the notion that nationalism was contingent. Most immediately, rule by co-culturals, that is, obeisance to the notion that state and culture should coincide, was conspicuously absent for most of the historical record. The identity of most human beings was given to smaller units – tribes, cities and peasant communities – none of which had much awareness of the wider, external world.29 This sociological consideration was scarcely contradicted by the presence of empires, for these rarely had the inclination or the means to interfere with local loyalties within their conquered territories. To the contrary, empires often encouraged self-rule by different cultural groups in the interests of peace and good order. The classic instance was the millet system of the Ottomans, which tolerated Christian entities within a nominally Muslim empire on the condition that taxes and slave soldiers were delivered on a regular basis. Still, such large imperial entities did exist, and for good reason. Many ruling regimes are of foreign origin. Especially when rival internal groups compete, it makes sense to have a ruler that is indebted to neither side, and preferably one with inherited skills in administration. Thus the Mamluks provided rulers throughout the Mediterranean during the classical period of Islam. In a similar spirit, universities bring in external chairs when rivalry between factions makes life dysfunctional. External rule has often been welcomed.
It is scarcely surprising to discover that Gellner was unwilling to accept Kedourie’s explanation for the emergence of nationalism, namely that it had been invented by a handful of German intellectuals at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was simply too idealist, especially as an alternative explanation was available. This explanation had two parts to it, each of whose character can usefully be highlighted. On the one hand, Gellner sought to demonstrate that the characteristic cultural units of the past – tribes, city-states and peasant communities – were simply too small to support the workings of modern society. Differently put, what was offered here was an account of the functional requirements of modernity. On the other hand, Gellner described the causes of nationalism. If most units are too small, why is it that development cannot take place under imperial aegis? In linguistic terms, if standardized languages are needed for the functioning of modern societies, why would those languages not be those of the great nineteenth-century European empires? Why are such units too large? Let us consider the two sides of Gellner’s explanation in turn.
The character of modern social life is approached through negative and positive considerations. What mattered negatively, Gellner maintained, was a change from structure to culture.30 In ideal-typical pre-industrial circumstances, the fact that life was, so to speak, obviously structured – that is, that for virtually everyone it involved manual labour of the most difficult sort – meant that communication between groups did not really matter. Gellner cited Claude Lévi-Strauss’s account of a band in which the necessary tasks of daily life were so obvious that cooperation between the band’s two sections was possible even though they spoke different languages.31 The rigidity of this world, in which roles are ascriptive cages, was contrasted with that in which we live.
[A] very large proportion of one’s relationships and encounters … are ephemeral, non-repetitive, and optional. This has an important consequence: communication, the symbols, language (in the literal or in the extended sense) that is employed become crucial. The burden of comprehension is shifted from the context, to the communication itself … If a man is not firmly set in a social niche, whose relationship as it were endows him with his identity, he is obliged to carry his identity with him … his culture becomes his identity. And the classification of men by ‘culture’ is of course the classification by ‘nationality’.32
If one side of the coin is the collapse of structure’s tight constraints, the other side was positive, namely the acquisition of identity through membership in a large and impersonal community thanks to the educational system supported by a state.33 To swim in modern society, basic literacy was required; everybody needed to be a clerk in order to have basic life chances. Such a high level of generic education is likely to be provided using a single language. A contrast was drawn between the situation of most European countries in which vernacular languages become state-regulated, and that faced outside Europe, notably in Africa, where languages and dialects are so varied and diffuse that the language of the state (whether one such local language, a borrowed non-European language or even that of the former colonial power) is imposed upon the peasantry. In the former case, the mother tongue comes to predominate in the school, whereas the latter condition sometimes sees the language of the school being adopted at the family level. In any case what was involved was extreme social engineering, as in the decision to make all Algerians Arabic-speaking or in the Kemalist diktat that changed the alphabet of modern Turkey. This led to a firm conclusion. Nationalists in power are, so to speak, hypocritical: they pretend to protect folk culture but in fact create new and uniform social worlds, distinctly opposed to most customary practices. The end result of their actions is cultural homogeneity.
Limits on the size of modern states are derived from the impact of nationalist movements. Gellner’s argument was simple. Industrialization created a suffering class, thereby causing social tension. In many European societies the privileged and the suffering masses shared much in common, notably a pre-existing language, allowing for citizenship to be extended after the period of dreadful pain accompanying industrialization. The contrasting situation saw the disadvantaged masses share almost nothing with those in power. In these circumstances, secession could seem very attractive. It was at this point that the North African context of Gellner’s initial theory became important. For he stressed that nationalism tended to have two sources of support. One was the native intelligentsia, often trained in the metropole but, on returning to the homeland, having its social mobility restricted on account of colour or religion. The second was the urban proletariat. There was an interesting addition to the theory. In Algeria mass support came from the Aurès mountains.34 This demonstrated, in Gellner’s eyes, that the disruption brought by industrialization could be anticipatory; the wave of modernization might be felt before it actually broke, though this was certainly not true of the Moroccan situation in which crucial support came from the bidonvilles. But in either case, disillusion was likely to surface amongst the nationalist masses. Gellner very firmly stressed a contrast between the two groups, namely that the intelligentsia clearly benefited from secession (or decolonization), not least by gaining employment of real importance, whilst the hardships of proletarians might well increase given ‘the drive for rapid development and the fact that national government can sometimes afford to be harsher than a foreign one’.35 This fact was the result of a contention absolutely central to Gellner’s vision. Nationalists in power were often social revolutionaries, creating a nation where none had really existed before. Traditional groupings which had resisted imperial pretensions – notably the tribes of the Atlas Mountains which had switched allegiance to the cause of independence shortly before its triumph – were doomed to still greater disappointment at the hands of the new, modernizing elite. The language of a new nationalism stressed folk traditions, invented or not; but what mattered was the social transformation that made such customs irrelevant.
A particularly striking element of Gellner’s initial sustained attempt to explain nationalism was its open-mindedness. Complexities could result from the tidal wave of modernization hitting groups within a single territory at different times.36 Equally, a group might wish to secede not because it had trouble adapting to modern conditions, but rather because it was in fact more suited to them.37 Any minority group with a cultural advantage of this sort was in a dangerous position: its abilities might incite covetousness, turning it into a scapegoat – and hence pushing it towards secession more out of fear than desire.38 Care was taken to mention cases which might seem to contradict the argument. He noted that some pre-modern loyalty-invoking political units, particularly those of Europe’s Atlantic seaboard, were maintained in the age of nationalism. These seemed to be examples of nationalism and nation-states before industrialization.
He offered three potential ways of dealing with these anomalies.39 First, it might be that nation-building activities had been underway since the Reformation. Second, these cases might be excluded altogether from the theory of nationalism, on the grounds that they represented different social processes. Third, a dynastic state might develop alongside, or coincide with, a culture and language, allowing for continuity in territory over time. Finally, weaknesses of nationalism were noted. ‘The world is richer in cultural differentiations, and in systematic injustices, than it has room for “nations”’, making it rather hard to predict exactly which national claims would result in the successful establishment of a state.40 Nonetheless, Gellner made some attempts in this direction. Once a high level of education had been achieved, the need for a single shared language might diminish, as in the Swiss case, precisely because levels of understanding are so high – though Gellner noted that both Canada and Belgium had not reached any such state of ease.41 Equally, some cultural groups can decide not to press claims, either doing well inside a larger society or fearing destruction by a brutal state (which might at the same time be confident enough to hold out prospects of genuine autonomy).42 Finally, Gellner noted that the success of certain claims could be much aided by geopolitical events, as was clearly the case with the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918.43
Gellner finished his account with a set of reflections on the character of the world polity, that is, of a system in which new nations co-existed with older powers, mostly of course now bereft of their erstwhile empires.44 This division within the global system was judged to be advantageous. Gellner suggested that some new nations had benefited from the construction of infrastructure during colonialism, but he insisted nonetheless that independence was fundamentally progressive – releasing energies, generating enthusiasm, and allowing for development to suit genuine domestic needs rather than those of the metropole.45 In this connection, he noted that a genuine struggle for independence might help a new nation establish both loyalty and organization. But for Gellner the most important advantage of the world’s power structure was political, namely that it allowed political liberalism to survive. Had there been a single unified world polity, it would be tempted to act repressively, to create an apartheid-like world polity.
A consequence of the political world system generated by nationalism has been that the convulsions and inescapably centralized efforts to lift oneself by one’s own shoelaces, economically, do not need to be re-imported into the developed, previous imperial, territories … This is a boon: and so is, in the long run, the cultural diversification of the world … pluralism is some kind of insurance against both tyranny and political folly.46
The two principles, industrial affluence and nationalism, comprising the modern social contract did not close off sociological understanding. Very much to the contrary, the exceptional clarity of the argument brought to the fore two further issues, at once sociological and philosophical. Let us consider in turn the consequences of this vision both for the way in which the world is experienced and for the chances that political liberty might spread within it.
The rationale for endorsing the capacities of industrial society was far from Gellner’s only statement on our moral situation. His original post at the LSE had been, as noted, to teach ethics to sociologists, and this surely influenced the amusing mapping of ethical theories which stands at the heart of Thought and Change. Since much of what Gellner had to say was negative, it should be noted that he viewed certain thinkers positively. Both Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche were praised for powerfully conveying the sense of disorientation – of beetle-hood, to recall Kafka – with which Gellner had begun. In contrast, most philosophies prejudged matters, by using language which incorporates a solution derived from the very terms that are used. Before turning to his suggestive map of moral theory, something of its tone can be seen immediately in his comments on Kierkegaard and Hume. The Danish philosopher had assailed the facility of Hegel’s world growth story, yet replaced it not with a continuing sense of difficulty but rather with still greater facility—that is, the notion that one could make some sort of leap of commitment. Epistemological considerations – the inability to ground causation, the lack of guarantee for the continuity of nature – famously led Hume to despair, but also to a surprising means of escape from that condition.
The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? And on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence upon me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.
Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further.47
Gellner felt that it was difficult ‘to read this part of his work without embarrassment’. Hume commends his own moral convictions ‘with the tone of a man whose vantage point is fixed and secure. In the theory of knowledge, he is not like this … Had Hume shown the same honesty and self-knowledge in ethics, which he had shown in logic, he would have been that much more lovable’.48
Gellner divided ethical theories into six types, noting that particular thinkers occasionally tried to combine the insights of more than one type.49 First, he held Platonism, then and later, to be a superb description of the ideological apparatus of a settled agrarian society; it underwrote the values of such a society by the moral flavours attached to the concepts which make social life possible. But excellent sociology made for poor philosophy; moral problems arise when codes conflict, typically because of social change. Secondly, theories which suggested that we should ‘be true to our inner self’ took several forms, with many suggesting that the true self could be found once a sense of harmony was achieved. But harmony was ‘far from being some kind of independent standard for sorting out values, [it] only receives any concrete content as a consequence of some determinate specific set of chosen values’. The many theories of this sort that expressed themselves in psychological terms tended to assume the existence of a true self, waiting to be awakened like Sleeping Beauty. The insistence that we follow a rule, the third type of theory, could be quite as question-begging. It appealed to cultures which favoured religions of the book and bureaucracies, and was therefore open to the romantic objection that what really matters is free expression, the breaking of conventions. Fourth, and still more question-begging, was ‘the way of residue’, that is, theories – Marxism, Wittgensteinianism, psychoanalysis – that suggested that truth will simply be present, ready to give herself up, the moment that egregious error has been removed. Fifth, most space was devoted to the ethical strand inaugurated by Aristotle which encouraged us to aim at a particular target. The supreme example of this position was held to be utilitarianism. Gellner did not for a moment think that the way in which human beings were portrayed in this approach, as a sort of blend of gourmet and accountant, was at all powerful, nor did he think that any formal proof was available that happiness is our ultimate target. But he defended the approach because of its empiricism.
Utilitarianism, on the other hand, commends constant reassessment, a constant shaking-up of the tie-ups between characteristics and evaluations in the light of fact – without respect for existing associations. Of course (and contrary to the mistaken psychology of the utilitarians) neither pleasure nor happiness are some kind of inner sensation-accompaniment, the readings of an inner thermometer: these words are just ways of conveying that we like something, and add nothing to that liking. The utilitarian commendation to re-assess everything in terms of happiness – which as it stands may be a tautologous, vacuous recommendation, amounting to no more than: choose what you like by what you like – amounts however in practice to a most non-vacuous recommendation of revaluations-without-prejudice, a transvaluation of values in the light of what contributes to general contentment.50
Nonetheless, Gellner offered two withering criticisms of utilitarianism. First, our aims were not as rigid and constant as the theory imagined. Roughly speaking, aims were likely to have that character under conditions of scarcity. But affluence allowed aims to become varied, and open to manipulation – making them unavailable as a court of ultimate appeal. Second, utilitarianism was of little use when it was needed most:
[I]n traditional society, habitual associations are more or less sacrosanct and the experiential reassessments are forbidden or discouraged. Transitional contexts, on the other hand, do have an overwhelming aim – ‘development’, ‘industrialization’ – but this aim in the transitional period notoriously involves such massive suffering that Utilitarianism must, in effect, be sinned against rather than observed.51
Gellner will have a good deal more to say about the claim that a vale of tears must be crossed in order to reach affluence. He termed the final ethical approach the ‘rail’ – in effect, the recognition of an obvious necessity, or, differently put, the decision to jump on the bandwagon of history.
The central point made by this typology of ethical theories was negative, namely that the ground on which we stand is none too firm. That said, some positive notes were struck. Theories which concentrate on both target and rail had something to offer, though only when properly interpreted. Admiration was shown en passant for Kant’s attempt to join a concern with the inner self to the notion of following a rule. The insistence that nothing can be based on the contingent produces a philosophy of such minimalism that Gellner felt it did possess a real sense of the transition, of trying to locate order amidst chaos. Of course, Kant was as much concerned with knowledge as with ethics, allowing us to make a transition from traditional ethical theories to what concerned Gellner most, namely the nature and consequences of modern science. His interest was in nothing less than a complete change in the relation between being and knowing.
But before considering this, it is important to note that the initial description of the new social contract suffered from a particular confusion. What was the place of knowledge? Was it somehow a third, autonomous force? This was suggested when he spoke of knowledge as ‘the principal agent’ of the transition to modernity.52 His later work became much clearer on this point. Plough, Sword, and Book and Reason and Culture claim that science played a creative and autonomous role in the emergence of modern society. But something much more important needs to be stressed, namely the importance of science – wherever it came from – as ‘the form of cognition of industrial society’.53 Human beings may have invented, luckily, this particular way of gaining knowledge; but the knowledge is real, able to change the world, and so able to change us. Accordingly, industrial society distinctively exhibits an active and autonomous style of thought as much as a new form of social organization. The particular culture of modern rational science can change societal structure.54 Finally, we should recognize that Thought and Change says little about the actual mechanics of scientific knowledge; Legitimation of Belief was to fill that gap, offering a survey of modern epistemological practices.
The technical strategy at work in modern science was the effort to establish a small redoubt of certainty within the self upon which knowledge and morality could be established. Approaches of this sort resembled the practices of Robinson Crusoe, forced as a castaway to think without the benefit of social support. An alternative name for the same method, that of ‘cosmic exile’, was coined by Quine – who ridiculed the notion, unfairly as far as Gellner was concerned. In general, Gellner preferred to speak of the Pure Visitor. The tradition can usefully be seen as commencing with Descartes, but the sensationalism of Hume and the minimal assumptions of Kant about our cognitive equipment make them quite as central to its development. Gellner admitted that there was no clear and obvious rationale for this view; rather, it is slightly ridiculous given that we must think through, or by means of, the cognitive equipment that we inherit. Still, the attempt to bracket assumptions remains vital. His later work went to great lengths to show that ridiculing attempts to step out of one’s skin should be very firmly rejected.
A second strand to modern theories of cognition was identified, and termed ‘sour grapes’. The central idea here was simply that no one can be quite sure of truth, thereby encouraging toleration of different opinions. Gellner had noted earlier that such toleration was only desirable once argument had led to the dismissal of implausible views, an opinion he repeated later in a powerful essay on ‘The Dangers of Tolerance’. So there was no sudden slide here into relativism.55 The particular justification given derives from Popper’s falsifiability criterion, that is, the view that science is the practice of offering explanations that can be refuted, thereby increasing human knowledge. This view was held to represent an advance upon the ideas of J. S. Mill because it allowed for continual correction, rather than imagining that a pure nugget of selfhood could be found once all carapaces have been removed. But Gellner refused to make things easy for himself, noting that cast-iron grounding for this viewpoint is not really available.
But these arguments, valid though they are in a sense, will only have cogency for those who have previously espoused as their prime value a respect for a certain kind of truth – for not treating as certain that which is not, for not endowing with objective and given status that which properly lacks it. We have no way of compelling people to subscribe to such values. Indeed historically and sociologically, such values are minoritarian, and probably have to be. Most societies have overrated the certainty of their own beliefs …56
Gellner later explained why this vision became so powerful, and he would offer a fuller exposition of the workings of modern cognition. But he insisted here, and in the essays on anthropological method that have been discussed, that science does provide powerful knowledge, that is, it works even though formal grounds for some of its practices are not available.
Two arguments follow from this.
If Ved Mehta is to be believed, Gellner regretted his inability to use the analytic tools of Sir Charles Snow’s ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’ in Words and Things.57 Certainly, part one of the final chapter of Thought and Change, on ‘Knowledge and Society’, claimed – in a way that must have immensely irritated the philosophical establishment – that Snow’s essay was ‘one of the most important philosophical essays to have appeared since the war’.58 A contrast was drawn between humanist intellectuals and modern scientific experts, wholly to the disadvantage of the former. At this point, Gellner devoted considerable space to a reformulation of his attack on the complacency of the Wittgensteinian position that had so influenced Oxford philosophy. The monopoly on literacy had once given intellectuals real power, and thereby the ability to devise moral systems in which they had expertise, but this had been undermined by the spread of mass education systems. What mattered more was the creation of much more powerful knowledge, and a consequent dependence on scientific experts in certain situations – undermining assumptions that were hitherto taken for granted.
The second set of considerations was more important still. Gellner suggested that there were three stages in the history of cognition. If the first was concerned with how we can know anything at all, the second was far more confident, seeking to understand how it was that we had come to know so much – roughly speaking, the former is exemplified by Descartes and the latter by Kant.59 The third stage was that in which we started to fear science, on the grounds that it might devour us. Two elements are at work here: firstly, we turn to experts for real knowledge, thereby diminishing the importance of received opinions; secondly, the inability of science, based as it is on continuous change, to provide much moral certainty. All this was summed up in the notion that epistemology had replaced metaphysics – or, rather, that epistemology is our metaphysics. These factors change the balance between being and knowing, with such morals as we have limping behind science, put aside and treated with irony and scepticism. But there was a further consideration: ‘the more we understand and control, the more we also see how we ourselves can be understood and controlled. The achievement of power is also the discovery of impotence’.60
The self was that which was not explained, thereby being considered unique and idiosyncratic; the possibility that our behaviour, intimate or otherwise, might be understood was a challenge to the notion of individuality. Gellner admitted that there was a necessary limit to this, for any theory about human beings must be held by someone – just as any book describing determinants of behaviour can only make sense to a reasoning being. Nonetheless, what impressed him in general was the diminution of space for humanity. The cost of modern science was clear: technical power diminished moral warmth and certainty.
Gellner often argued that theories gain their power from what they exclude as much as from what they include. Utilitarianism’s insistence on pleasure and pain would matter little without the rider that nothing else existed. Thought and Change has this same character because liberty is deliberately excluded from the modern social contract. Nonetheless, Gellner held liberty to be desirable in itself, and a great deal of his later work concerned itself with the possibility of producing liberty within societies deprived of it, so to speak, by historical necessity. Let me fill out this picture.
Industrialization established unavoidable parameters of social life, but it did not thereby rule out all options. Gellner warmly endorsed the value of political openness, but systematically demonstrated the relative feebleness of arguments for political liberty.61
1.A first argument was the Popperian view that science is based on refuting conjectures, rather than on establishing universal and unchanging knowledge. Nonetheless, uncertainty is, so to speak, reliable. Unfortunately, this view of science is most likely to appeal to those already living inside a liberal society.
2.It may be that political liberty is necessary for the knowledge upon which modern science depends. However, while this might have been true of the initial breakthrough to a new cognitive style, it is not at all certain that it applies to later imitative development.
3.Liberal societies have a greater capacity for change than illiberal and rigid regimes. Gellner made the honest observation that the second and third argument do not fit with the first – for they offer the very certainty that had initially been ruled out.
4.The argument that clearly appealed to Gellner himself was Kantian in spirit. The fact of openness, of being free from any established state of affairs, whether institutional or intellectual, is attractive to those who wish to be masters of their own fate. ‘Liberty and equality but not fraternity’, seems to be the message as to what should be valued.
5.In the long run, affluence will be generalized, thereby suggesting that concentration on other political objectives – above all, the establishment of safeguards against tyranny – was more important. This argument was likely to have significant appeal only for those who are convinced that universal affluence really is inevitable.
His own wry comment on these five points must be recorded.
This set of arguments, not fully consistent with each other, and at widely divergent levels of abstraction, does not, alas, amount to a rousing manifesto for liberty. The very disparateness of the arguments may worry one: any one of them alone might have sounded more convincing than their conjunction. One must heed Kant’s warning against supporting one’s values by a mishmash of arguments, which weaken rather than reinforce each other. But if the arguments one can muster do not match up to the degree of one’s conviction, it is perhaps as well to confess it.62
This was, however, only one way of looking at the fate of liberty in the modern era. Gellner drew an interesting distinction between different routes to modernity. The original European routes were largely unplanned and accidental, the product of long and complex historical processes. But the situation for each state thereafter was completely different. Planning becomes possible because of the general realization that a new social order exists. It is this consideration that underlay nearly everything that he had to say about liberty in modern social conditions. Roughly speaking, liberty was a fortunate accident for the countries making the original transition; thereafter, the centralization of power for developmental purposes almost necessarily places softer political rule at a discount.
Gellner’s position on the centralizing impact of development is best reconstructed by considering his important 1967 essay ‘Democracy and Industrialization’ in tandem with various staccato comments in Thought and Change.63
In the essay, he argued that democracy is best understood as having two meanings. On the one hand, it can mean the rule of the people; on the other, it can mean softer political rule, constitutionalism and liberty. Gellner argued that the former is neither logically nor sociologically bound to produce the latter.64 It is very, very difficult to disagree peacefully at any time, and almost impossible when immense issues are involved. Democracy works best, Gellner insisted, in societies where much is shared, limiting disagreement, and accordingly keeping resentment and irritation to bearable levels. He pointed out that Tocqueville’s argument that shared religion strengthened democracy in the United States rested on precisely this consideration. He further related it to the modern, realistic theory of democracy – that is, to the Schumpeterian theory which states that democracy is merely a means of changing leaders within a particular social structure, rather than a genuine ‘rule of the people’ that would allow fundamental changes to the social structure itself. This distinction is arguably a useful one, and the seemingly dull and limited realistic theory often seems convincing. In contemporary Iraq, the potential democratic tyranny of the majority Shi’ites is limited by entrenched clauses – established without much consultation by the Americans, albeit later passed by a national referendum – which give complex veto powers to national minorities, thereby creating a constitutionally limited democracy.
‘Democracy and Industrialization’ turns to transitional societies to make these arguments about the nature of democracy. But the implications for the polities of developing countries were clear, and stark. The absence of consensus caused by the lack of a settled social structure – or, rather, the fact that it is being created ab novo – means that democracy in transitional societies was very unlikely to create regimes which favour limited rule. Utilitarian choice makes sense within a stable context, but this philosophy, as Gellner had argued, was useless as a guide to the transition because ‘during something inherently so painful, what hope is there for government by consent? It seems almost a contradiction’.65 He underlined a particular irony: real choice is impossible at the moment when crucial choices are inevitably being made.
More elaborate arguments explained why industrialization is likely to rule liberal politics completely out of court. For one thing, the unsettling of traditional societies – by increased hopes, by old regimes seeking to catch up – created discontent that fuelled revolutions. Once in power, revolutionary regimes were likely to create a new industrial order. Industrial economies do not have large rural workforces, thus it seems rational to encourage urbanization. Creation ab novo applies still more to nation-building. In the Algerian case, national homogeneity was to be increased by declaring Arabic the official language of the state. This required force, both to make the Arabic-speaking peasants send their children to school and to prevent the use of Berber and French as alternative linguae francae. Gellner summed up his position by insisting that it is the logic of the situation rather than the actions of bad politicians which creates unfavourable results.
In stable contexts, one can play for marginal advantages, and accept defeat, tolerate opposition, and refrain from pushing every advantage to the utmost, in the knowledge that tomorrow is another day. In transition, tomorrow is not another day: it is an other day, altogether. He who is in control now will mould that tomorrow, and hence control now is incomparably more valuable than the quite spurious hope of a later ‘turn’. Rival politicians in transitional societies like to think of each other as the local Kerensky. The knowledge of this inevitably ‘escalates’ the stakes of politics, and brings it close to a kind of total politics in which nothing is barred.66
The implication is that we must recognize the necessities involved in seeking to transform and to improve societies. In this matter Gellner called for support from a distinguished English thinker:
The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great, that … a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients.67
This is John Stuart Mill, the paragon of liberalism, writing about the conditions necessary for liberty. This, too, is a matter on which Gellner did not change his mind, quoting the passage from memory at a small conference in Prague in 1993.
It is in this context that Gellner offered his interpretation of Marxism.68 Great admiration was expressed for ‘its stress on social structure, on conflict between the component parts of it, and on the influence of ecology and the division of labour on that structure’. Further, Marxism avoided the characteristic serialist weakness of evolutionary theories because it possessed, in class conflict, a concept that sought to explain the transition from one stage to another. Nonetheless, Marxism was judged to be poor at prediction. ‘The historic role of Marxism seems to be not to lead societies out of the crises of industrial society, but to help them to pass over the big hump of industrialization’. There were other ironies:
The correct political behaviour of the revolutionary is to wait for the ripe moment in advanced societies? On the contrary, Marxism is embraced by the impatient, in backward societies, in order to break out of vicious circles of stagnation which otherwise grip such societies. It leads them to behave in a markedly Utopian manner. Are advanced societies driven to economic imperialism? There are constant complaints that they do not export enough capital to the underdeveloped world. Capitalist countries without empires prosper, and those which cling to them are the poor-white nations like Portugal, themselves underdeveloped .… Workers have nothing to lose but … the T.V. set, etc.? Capitalism contains the seed of its own destruction? It seems, on the contrary, to lead to a social structure which dampens all revolutionary ardour. Proletarians have no country? It is nationalists above all who flirt with Marxism … As for the state withering away: Leninism appears, on the contrary, to provide a regrettably well-adapted rationale for the concentration of power …
All of this was summarized in the notion that Marxism was best understood in Weberian terms, as a modern protestant ethic. Gellner made his position crystal-clear in a debate on socialism in Africa, arguing that moralistic concerns had been replaced by economic considerations.69
This analysis signalled a key part of Gellner’s intellectual agenda, to which he would devote enormous energies for the rest of his life. He had no doubt but that Marxism was a danger to liberty, above all because its very plausibility led people to treat it with the kind of seriousness which leads to persecution. But he had powerful hopes to set against this. The very fact that Marxism was adopted for partly pragmatic reasons, as a development strategy, might allow for some freedom of manoeuvre. Then there was the hope that the ideology itself was sufficiently flexible that it could continue to serve as official ideology without demanding strict obeisance. His view here resembled that of David Hume’s sociology of religion: fanaticism can be diminished by custom, with intolerance undermined by the hollowing out of belief systems. But the absolutely crucial question, given that the centralization of power for development purposes is well-nigh inevitable, was whether softer political rule could be established once an industrial mode of production was in place. He was very hopeful in this regard, believing that the unfolding logic of the industrial mode of production – that of an ever greater increase in specialization, itself based on scientific knowledge – might allow softer forms of political rule to emerge.
‘Democracy and Industrialization’ insisted that it is pluralism which, so to speak, makes democracy attractive, or liberal. Softer political rule may well have the best chance of enduring when plural elements manage to survive the process of transition.70 Moreover, there may be something to the older view that pluralism in the advanced world depends upon some economic power being kept out of the hands of the state.71 Insofar as this is a defence of capitalism, it is a very mild one, for Gellner had no time at all for the view that a modern society can be run according to laissez-faire principles.
There are intimations of all Gellner’s later work in Thought and Change. A six-fold agenda was established. First, one can see a fascination with closed worlds, self-reinforcing ideologically and thereby hard to escape. This stands as the background to a second area of interest, namely the need to explain how a move from closed worlds to something more open becomes possible. A third part of his agenda is related, but slightly different: whatever the cause of the transition to an open society, description is called for in order to understand how it functions. Gellner is aware that initial transitions are odd, and that later ones, able to imitate earlier examples, are likely to be wholly different. So a fourth element of his agenda was to concentrate on the likely character of other transitions, notably those under the aegis of Marxism and Islam. As imitative development is likely to take place by the use of centralized coercive power, the fifth part of Gellner’s agenda concerned the possibility of liberalizing regimes once they had passed through the trauma of development. The final matter, always at the centre of his mind, is examining the character of our lives within an industrialized and rationalized world. No modern thinker has stood so close to Weber in insisting that our times must be disenchanted – an insistence which did not prevent Gellner from paying great attention to attempts to create closed ideological worlds within modernity. These themes structure the chapters which follow.
If this agenda was proof of great intellectual ambition, the book was not well received, at times not properly understood. Though there were letters of appreciation from David Riesman, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Eric Wolf, the reviews often wished for a clearer, more sustained and less polemical treatise.72 Alasdair MacIntyre’s review was typical in describing an ‘exceptionally fertile thinker’ who had produced a thin book in which there were ‘twenty-five fat ones screaming to be let out’.73 It should be acknowledged that there is an obvious truth here. Two central arguments of the book seem to be in contradiction. On the one hand stands the structural argument stressing the need for a shared and common national culture, in order to socially integrate dislocated masses and to help with the functioning of industrial society. A more intellectualist concern, on the other hand, insists that modern scientific knowledge is so much based on openness and so characterized by perpetual change as to rule out depth or fixity to any modern culture. One sees here the tension at work in Gellner’s general position, caused by the desire to respect both the national principle and the open, cosmopolitan world of rational science. The tension was resolved, at least in some of his later work, in an interesting manner. Nationalism will cease to be threatening once affluence has been achieved, for a diminution in the stakes involved will lessen overt and violent conflict. More generally, the desire for riches will lead to a measure of respect for openness, less because of any general intellectual maturity than because of changes in the unfolding logic of industrial society. The final result is clear: all that is available is ‘ironic cultural nationalism’, a limited cultural identity within a world of high living standards.74
An interesting review by George Lichtheim characterized the book as ‘the liberalism of the technocratic age. This kind of liberalism is no longer tied to the bourgeois institutions of private property and the market, though it remains indifferent to socialist considerations … The tone is optimistic, and the stress is on the bright new vistas opened up by technology’. The book, Lichtheim concluded, ‘lacks the tragic sense’.75 A long and affectionate letter from Ron Dore also noted the book’s fundamental optimism, but went a little further by regretting that it had little to say about the management of conflicts that were likely to occur within advanced liberal societies.76 Gellner’s optimism did not last, at least regarding two of what were then considered to be the three worlds of modernity.
‘A Social Contract in Search of an Idiom: The Demise of the Danegeld State’ argued in 1974 that the First World’s combination of liberalism and capitalism had become unstable.77 The political economy had deprived itself of the stick of coercion and was now, given the oil crisis, without the carrot of Danegeld. The actions of a half-integrated working class accordingly did much to create stagflation. Gellner vigorously attacked the two theories trying to make sense of this situation. Economic theory arguing that a solution could be found in a return to market forces was useless. The infrastructure of modern industrial society was so huge, and so much provided by the state, that the notion that individual effort lay behind these achievements no longer made much sense. In general, there was simply too much awareness that politics set the terms by which the market worked, making any notion of a market-derived just price merely risible. This was not to say that the free market had never had any force. To the contrary, the short period in which economic forces were not politicized, when producers had been small enough to introduce a new mode of production, had played a vital role in the development of a liberal system, in which power was not in a single set of hands.
It was this that led to Gellner’s criticism of leftist theory. It was a dreadful mistake to imagine that everything was amiss, to condemn without reservation. Liberal institutions needed to be maintained, and this was no easy task. In these circumstances, Gellner argued firmly for a social contract based on corporatist institutions, adding to this the idea, derived both from an analysis of Czech stratification under socialism (discussed below) and from Fred Hirsch’s The Social Limits to Growth, that social peace might be enhanced if rewards take the form of status as well as money. In particular, he suggested that those performing the objectively worst and least interesting jobs might be given higher rewards, in large part because jobs of intrinsic interest and satisfaction would in any case be filled, even with lower levels of remuneration. These views, of course, reflected more immediate practical concerns. His quip at the time was that British politics needed ‘Maggie [Thatcher] to be followed by Roy [Jenkins]’ – that is, a measure of social discipline restored, before a return to a more realistic social democratic position. Such views were not uncommon at the time, and he did nothing to hide his own position, notably writing a piece entitled ‘Ostrichism’, not accepted for publication, in which he argued that the Labour Party – post-Callaghan and pre-Blair – was so far removed from reality as not to deserve election.78 Visceral feelings were often involved. When Ken Livingstone took over the Labour Party leadership of the Greater London Council immediately after their victory in the May 1981 election under a different leader, Gellner felt that a coup had been carried out. He had genuine fears of a Labour Party under the leadership of Tony Benn. His fears were vastly exaggerated at this point, the uncritical transposition of his Central European experience to a wholly different political culture. Altogether more balanced was his view that the provincialism of British politics might be alleviated by a firm commitment to Europe. ‘Better the Bundesbank than the Bank of England’ was another quip of his during this period, reflecting his view that the solidity of social peace in Britain was not matched by an equivalent interest in economic efficiency – the situation in France was held to be the complete inverse. On multiple occasions, Gellner made clear his endorsement of British cooperation in the European Union and its predecessors, though there are no signs that he favoured the creation of a European super-state.
His worry about the Third World was rather different. The patronizing, de haut en bas tone of books about development such as his own, he noted in ‘Recollection in Anxiety: Thought and Change Revisited’, made little sense given that the politics of late-developing societies were gaining force.79 These reflections were written at the time of the second oil shock. But what impressed him more than changes in the economic realm was the emergence of powerful ideologies within the developing world. He suggested that there was a move away from figures such as Lenin to alternatives symbolized by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
There was one final set of criticisms offered by Karl Popper.80 After acknowledging the importance and ambition of the book, and noting that his criticisms were ‘less good’ than those which Gellner had earlier made of his own Open Society, he offered several comments. He began by complaining that Gellner could not, so to speak, let go of the Wittgensteinians. ‘My point is that you fall in with those in my opinion quite incompetent philosophers who take Wittgenstein [plus his followers] seriously, as representing something characteristic or at least intellectually important: and that you, indirectly, strengthen this view’. He also thought that Gellner took Snow too seriously, arguing that he was ‘linked with very local English phenomena and social fashions’, thereby being ‘quite unlikely to have that kind of universal significance in our present society which, so it seems to me, you attribute to [him]. (For example, in Vienna there were never two cultures. Freud is in this respect only typical)’. But the central charge that Popper made was that Gellner’s allegiance to historicism led him into basic error.
Although you would of course agree that there is interaction between Thought and Change, it seems to me that you say ‘thought must not be blind to social change’ – which is true enough as a criticism of Wittgenstein [and his followers]. But apart from the fact that historicists and followers of sociologism have been saying so for a long time, the main function of thought is to influence change; and I do not see that, or why, philosophy cannot, or should not, do this; simply by searching like science for the truth, in connection with problems of its own; of course, changing problems. It is the search for truth which has, in fact, brought about the greatest changes – very often, more often than not, by missing the truth by a wide margin.
One does not have to accept Popper’s intellectualism to recognize that any evaluation of the nature of Gellner’s liberalism must concern itself with his historicism.
Gellner’s grounding of liberalism is at once partial and powerful. The limits of this grounding were stressed by Gellner himself. On the one hand, science does more to undermine belief than to create it. On the other hand, there is an even more obvious difficulty: Gellner’s insistence that different worlds are imaginable imposes necessary limits on his position. It is possible to argue that a life marked by poverty and disease is ultimately better than one blessed by the comforts of science. Gellner’s position derives from the fact that very few are prepared to make this ascetic case, fewer still to actually live it – though he wrote before the greening of the left wing of European democratic systems. There is everything to be said, at least in my view, for his concern with the welfare of normal people, the belief that a society with increased life expectancies and a diminution of human suffering is morally desirable. He replied to a note from Perry Anderson (occasioned by the ‘anxious’ reflections that have just been noted) in a way that highlights his beliefs:
As for myself, I am deeply Philistine, and that aspect does not bother me too much. Some bits of it do – I really can’t stand the sack of Bath and of Edinburgh, and the beginnings of the same in Leningrad. In fact I wrote a letter to The Times protesting against that atrocious hotel next to the Finland Station, urging that the guns of the Aurora be turned against it and put to good use, and that the architectural department of the Leningrad Soviet be promptly sent to the Okhotsk Canal, but they never published it. But otherwise, all in all, I am prepared to pay the price of vulgarity for peace, reasonable diffused prosperity and equality. If God obliged me to choose for mankind, giving the option of living in a universalized Vienna of 1975 or 1905, I think I would, albeit with some private bitterness, be obliged to opt for 1975.81
Behind this conviction lay his admirable range of interests, notably his appreciation of modern science and concern for the developing world – and of course the roles of nationalism and Marxism within it. His deep concern with social improvement makes his liberalism all the more impressive. How wonderful to have a liberal thinker sceptically undermining the narrow little orthodoxies of the age, all so keen to wrap us in swaddling clothes! He even embraces a measure of emptiness as a value in itself, a sign of mankind’s maturity, rather than seeing it as a loss. To these moral considerations should be added a sociological fact: the retreat to simplicity is simply not possible.
This discussion of Gellner’s grounding of liberal values brings us to his practice as a liberal. Gellner systematically engaged in audience-hopping. Everything that follows derives from the paradox, so central to his work, involved in stressing the presence of different, utterly viable worlds whilst insisting at the same time that modern science possesses world-historical and utterly transformative cognitive power. Accordingly, one audience to whom he speaks is ‘us’, the advanced world which pays allegiance to rational science. He was arguably seeking to help us understand ourselves better, not least so that we might be up to defending our world if the need arose, as it did in the face of fascism and Bolshevism. But when he tries to explain the workings of this world amongst other worlds, he becomes a universalizing liberal searching for a way to speak to people within those different worlds. There is thus a constant oscillation. An ironic but important contrast can be drawn between Gellner’s audience-hopping and the position of other contemporary social philosophers. A broad tendency suggested that inter-faith dialogue can manage diversity – the work of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor is its exemplar. My own experience suggests that, at the deepest level, this approach does not recognize diversity at all, presuming rather that discussion will bring agreement because humans share so very much in common.82 Gellner was rather different in his views, a Weberian aware of genuine difference, of allegiances to different Gods, and an anthropologist who had lived through the different worlds of modern Europe, both pre-war and postwar. There is a sense in which he sought to respect such difference, while suggesting only the likelihood of a shared interest across cultures in technical power.83 In this his approach was, so to speak, sly and Machiavellian: adopt the technical means, and the bastions of closed belief systems would eventually fall. But this is an area in which he wobbled, as we will see in chapter nine, later slightly shocking some of his colleagues in refusing to ‘preach’ to the Muslim world in the wake of the Rushdie affair – though this did not for a moment, he stressed, make him a relativist.84 It is worth underlining his irritation at the political conflicts within liberal societies in the 1970s. Talking to people in different worlds was less effective than the power of example. Worryingly, the self-indulgent failures of liberal society would increase the coherence of anti-Western ideologies, above all Islam.
What of Popper’s rejection of the historicist base of Gellner’s position? Popper’s insistence that thought should determine rather than reflect reality was unlikely to appeal to Gellner. Societies had structures: only when we understand them do we know our real options. At the back of Gellner’s position was the view just discussed, namely his insistence that different worlds have their own standards. It was hard to escape closed worlds. It was this that led him to criticize the work of one of his closest friends, Ian Jarvie, judging as far too cheerful his Popperian belief that refutation led to improvements in knowledge even in pre-industrial societies, a view that Gellner felt lacked awareness of primitive thought systems’ capacity to evade falsification.85 The transition from one world to another was often by an existential leap rather than as a gradual progression by means of rational trial and error, the abrupt replacement of one set of standards by an alternative system. Chapter seven will consider the varied works in which he offers a full and considered assessment of Popper’s philosophy of science. But the distance from Popper can be seen at this time in a passage implicitly aimed at Popper’s admiration for the Periclean dictum that everyone can judge a policy, even if only some propose it.
Can they? I certainly cannot. Any issue in the modern world, for instance, has repercussions in a number of fields, each one of which requires a high-powered expertise for its comprehension. The experts whom one knows generally impress one by their lack of expertise in fields other than their own, notwithstanding the crucial importance of cross-implications. Naïvely one may suppose that those at the Top who take decisions are polymathic supermen, somehow qualified to assess the many-sided implications of their decisions. Acquaintance with any of them dispels such illusions … In the modern world it is truer to say that almost anyone can initiate a policy, but no one can judge it.86
Gellner maintained this view throughout his career, even applying it to high-stakes issues within liberal societies.87 Nonetheless Gellner did have a good deal of respect for expertise. The passage following this quotation continues with a series of assertions about the importance of scientific knowledge, not least in providing the material comfort which matters so much for the modern social contract. He would not change his mind on this matter. A decade later, in Legitimation of Belief, he argued that people turned from traditional ‘knowledge’ to genuine science whenever the stakes were high.88 And the argument of his social philosophy as a whole is that we do indeed know certain things. Social science is not an abject failure. We know that mass education and nation-building – the two being, of course, intimately related – are necessary preconditions for the modern social contract. If we know these things, they can be and should be acted upon, as Mill suggested – and as they will be by elites all over the world, whether Marxist, Comtean or Islamic in character. Failure to do so is to let poverty continue. The process involves enormous pain, but it is sensible to recognize necessity.89 There is an air here of a wise elite, dictating changes to those who do not understand. Politics understood as voice, compromise or as blocking capacity is thereby ruled out. Equally, there is no sense that social movements gain their character from their treatment by the state more than from social structures. This is a crucial matter, as it affects the odds of successful liberal constitutional change, and is a factor in the assessments offered below of his work on Islam and on nationalism.
Recent scholarship has supported many of Gellner’s claims about the ways that forced industrialization is likely to diminish political liberty. Atul Kohli’s exceptionally powerful work is relevant here.90 The economic success of South Korea rests upon a coercive-capitalist route, in which the state works with leading capitalists, accumulates capital for infrastructural and industrial development by repressing wages, and establishes from above clear developmental strategies.91 In contrast, development has been in part stymied, in part merely slowed, in both India and Brazil because democratic pressures prevented either the adoption or the maintenance of developmental strategies which involved short-term social costs.92 Kohli further analyses the case of Nigeria, wholly bereft of an effective state and accordingly having the gloomiest prospects for political and economic development. Interestingly, Kohli concludes with moral qualms similar to Gellner’s, noting that development may come at the expense of liberal democracy. It may be that the fifth and last of Gellner’s arguments noted in the previous section apply to Brazil and India. But moral complexity is added by the recent history of South Korea. Its developmental regime certainly provided improvements in living standards. Yet this does seem in turn to have contributed to a social base for political liberalization. The chances for consolidated democracy now look greater in South Korea than in Brazil, perhaps greater even than those of India. So here is a case in which great social pain may be followed by successful political decompression.
Rather similar concerns can be raised about Gellner’s view of nationalism. Of course, it can be said bluntly that his characterization of nationalism as homogenization is powerful. The Czech case supports Gellner’s position. The tricultural world did collapse in the Second World War, with further simplification – the secession of the rich Czechs from the poor Slovaks, discrimination against gypsies – taking place in the years after 1989. Crucially, Czechia is representative of twentieth-century Europe. To be clear, this is not to say that Gellner’s sociology captures the social forces that brought about this state of affairs, on which much more will be said later. What matters is the Gellnerian premise, the future-oriented claim, so to speak, that national homogeneity is necessary for societal success. There is a good deal to be said for Gellner’s position. Economic flexibility is often aided by the ability of a homogeneous national community to act together, not least because external threats are seen as a common problem.93 These generalizations hold true, for instance, for Denmark, whose success owes much to the way that it divested itself of territories and peoples because of its remarkable ability to lose wars. This point is made clear by an extremely powerful and highly technical paper explaining how the Danes took over the English butter market from the Irish in the nineteenth century. Homogeneity allowed the Danes to set up cooperatives and to improve the quality of their butter, for this was where profits lay. In contrast, the main avenue to advancement in Ireland lay in the courts – that is, in claiming land from the English.94 Might it be that a background element to recent Irish success – the emergence of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ – is the creation of a homogeneous community in the Republic? One may further add that national homogeneity – as in South Korea in contrast to Nigeria – can help economic development, a factor omitted by Kohli.95 Further, welfare spending is certainly related to homogeneity, for the simple reason that people are more prepared to be taxed at high rates when the monies are spent on people like themselves. And liberal democratic politics do indeed become easier in circumstances of homogeneity. For one thing, an end to stalemate between competing groups allows decisions to be made; for another, the regulation of differences at the heart of democratic politics is much easier when the differences in question are bounded by shared identity.
The most obvious thing about the views expressed in Thought and Change is, as Lichtheim and Dore noted, their essential optimism. The book was written in an era of national reconstruction, soon after the horrors of Nazism had been brought to an end. It reflects the sense that development is possible.96 National cultures can be created which will allow people to be included – with national identities likely, as noted, to lose intensity as affluence advances.97 Finally, there is the hope that liberalization might follow from forced industrialization. All of this suggests that the pain of transition, of getting over the big hump, is worth it. This is a powerful case, to which something can be added, namely that there are dangers to outright democratization, understood simply as majority rule. It behooves us to realize that the outcome of democratization in the absence of institutional guidelines and constraints can indeed be repulsive.98 For Gellner, good things do not always go together; the hard-headed realism of his work is classical in nature.
But one can and should remain uneasy. To begin with, there appears to be a contradiction in his work. Gellner’s appreciation of the distinctiveness and viability of different social worlds is undercut by his insistence that there is a generalized awareness that affluence is possible. If this is so, development per se may have democratic elements after all. Secondly, there is something to be said for the view that political liberty is more widely recognizable than Gellner admitted. One component of modernity seems to be anti-imperialism, whether in communist Poland or in contemporary Iraq. It would be madness to presume that anti-imperial sentiment automatically translates into the consolidation of democratic regimes. Nonetheless, there is here, so to speak, a moral base for liberty to which Gellner gave little attention.
There are still more important considerations. Bluntly, not every centralization of power, even when justified as a means to development, has resulted in human progress. The ‘authoritarian high modernism’ identified by James Scott gave us the disasters of agricultural collectivization in the Soviet Union and compulsory villagization in Tanzania.99 Dore was equally sceptical about the functional benefits of higher-level credentials within developing societies.100 Such criticisms cannot be ignored. Perhaps there is something to be said for the rise in educational standards in erstwhile socialist countries, since this might help economic development now that the Cold War has ended. But against that must be weighed the record of genuine economic disaster. Russia was one of the world’s great grain exporters in 1914: collectivization so ruined agriculture that the country is now dependent on the outside world for its food supply. More generally, it seems certain that socialist planning from above, bereft of any market mechanisms, is a dead end for technical progress.
His views about nationalism, summarized here and at greater length below in chapter ten, deserve a similar critique. That pre-existing cultural homogeneity might have benefits may well be true, but this is not to say that forcible homogenization should be or need be encouraged. Many attempts at forcible homogenization, especially in Africa, have been dismal failures, bringing misery to millions without corresponding benefits.101 Equally, the history of territorial partitions has been wholly dreadful.102 Then one wonders if there are elements of false necessity in Gellner’s praise for Kemalism. The consequences of the Turkish route have often been far from benign: given the enormous authority of the elite resulting from its success in war, was it really necessary to impose a form of official nationalism that so disadvantaged the Kurds?103 It is just as important to remember that federal and consociational schemes have sometimes worked, even though many have failed.104 This is to question an implicit assumption in the Gellnerian premise of homogeneity, namely that a modern state must have complete cultural unity in order to succeed. His understanding of the necessary functions of modern society can be challenged at this point. India works as a state-nation rather than as a nation-state, and its example suggests a better way forward for many countries of the world than does the European experience. It may be that a limited measure of unity sufficient for the workings of a modern economy can be gained by the recognition of diversity.105 Gellner would move toward this position in his final years.
This brings us to the question of democracy as a restraint on the exercise of power. Absolute catastrophe – notably the great famines caused by collectivization and the Chinese Great Leap Forward – results from the absence of any internal check on a core executive. Despite the difficulties of development in India, the ability to curtail disastrous policies has meant, as Amartya Sen famously argued, that this huge South Asian country has never experienced a truly catastrophic famine.106 Liberty may not be in the cards, easily, generally and automatically, but one can reasonably give it a more central place in the scheme of things than that allowed by Gellner. The importance of public discussion can be exaggerated, but one should be wary of discarding it altogether. This is a prescriptive point, but it has some descriptive aspects that make it reasonable. All in all, the world’s emergent political shape presents a more varied picture than that depicted in Gellner’s work. There are cases which support him, and cases which distinctly contradict him. It is reasonable therefore to seek liberal limits to the recognition of necessity.
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1Thought and Change, London, 1964, p. 52.
2Ibid., p. 77.
3Ibid., p. 78.
4Gellner to I. C. Jarvie, 28 January 1965.
5A charming essay by Roman Szporluk (‘Thoughts about Change: Ernest Gellner and the History of Nationalism’, in J. A. Hall [ed.], The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism, Cambridge, 1998) describes the impact of the aphorisms, and his attempt to link them together in his own career.
6This consideration made him utterly opposed to the revival of contract theory pioneered by and exemplified by John Rawls. He had only derision for ‘Mayflower’ philosophy.
7Thought and Change, pp. 24–5.
8Ibid., pp. 27–9.
9Ibid., pp. 15–20.
10Ibid., p. 69.
11Gellner will later argue that criticism – revered by Popper as the alternative to historicism – is insufficient as a means to ground our knowledge and activities. See below, chapter 7.
12Thought and Change, chapter 2.
13R. Aron, ‘The Theory of Development and the Historical Interpretation of the Contemporary Era’, UNESCO, 1960, cited in Thought and Change, p. 144.
14‘Time Machines’, Time and Tide, vol. 42, 1961. This is a review of Aron’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History, the translation of his 1938 doctoral thesis. Aron noted later that Gellner was astonished by the attention he gave to Sartre’s Marxism (R. Aron, Mémoires, Julliard, Paris, 1983, p. 592).
15The next chapter records an exchange of views between them. Aron admired Gellner, but noted on more than one occasion that he found his views ‘a little severe’.
16Thought and Change, p. 70.
17Ibid., pp. 70–71.
18Ibid., p. 70.
19Ibid., pp. 145–6.
20Ibid., pp. 144–5.
21Ibid., p. 73.
22Ibid., p. 219.
23Ibid., pp. 118–9.
24Ibid., pp. 117–8.
26Ibid., pp. 147–8.
27E. Kedourie, Nationalism, London, Hutchinson, 1960, p. 1.
28Gellner, Nationalism, London, 1997, p. 10.
29Thought and Change, p. 152.
30Ibid., pp. 153–7.
31Ibid., p. 154.
32Ibid., pp, 155, 157.
33Ibid., pp. 157–64.
34Ibid., p. 168.
35Ibid., p. 169.
36Ibid., p. 171.
37Ibid., p. 169.
38Ibid.
39Ibid., p. 173.
40Ibid., p. 174.
41Ibid.
42Ibid., pp. 174–5.
43Ibid., p. 175.
44Ibid., pp. 175–8.
45Ibid., p. 176.
46Ibid., p. 178.
47D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature [1739], London, 1985, p. 316.
48Thought and Change, p. 58.
50Ibid., pp. 97–8.
51Ibid., p. 100.
52Ibid., p. 72. A slightly different formulation is on p. 65.
53Ibid., p. 72.
54R. Schroeder, Rethinking Science, Technology and Social Change, Stanford, 2007, draws on Gellner, and underlines this part of his work.
55‘The Dangers of Tolerance’, in Contemporary Thought and Politics, London, 1974.
56Thought and Change, p. 113.
57V. Mehta, The Fly and the Fly Bottle, London, 1962.
58Thought and Change, p. 209.
59Ibid., p. 205.
60Ibid., p. 213.
61Ibid., pp. 115–9.
62Ibid., pp. 119–20.
63‘Democracy and Industrialization’, in Contemporary Thought and Politics.
64An implicit assumption in this formulation is revealing. Much of what is being said concerns the way in which a majority can ‘tyrannize’ a minority, a worry that perhaps reflects his Jewish background. More positive views of democracy come from within majorities that have been controlled by dominant minorities.
65Thought and Change, p. 141.
66Ibid., p. 67.
67J. S. Mill, On Liberty [1859], in J. S. Mill, Three Essays, Oxford, 1975, p. 18, cited in Thought and Change, p. vi.
68Thought and Change, pp. 131–6, from which the quotations in this paragraph are drawn. It may be useful to point to the four stages of Gellner’s relationship with Marxism: admiration for Marx himself, great distaste for modern Western Marxism, deep interest in and fascination with Soviet Marxism followed by an attempt to explain why Marxism failed so badly as a moral creed.
69M. Roberts, E. A. Gellner, A. Crosland, R. Serumaga and P. Mbayi, ‘Talking Aloud on African Socialism’, Transition, no. 24, 1966, p. 45.
70‘Democracy and Industrialization’, p. 37.
71Ibid., p. 40. There is a marked resemblance here to Weber’s endorsement of capitalism in his lecture on socialism. (M. Weber, ‘Socialism’, in W. G. Runciman [ed.], Max Weber: Selections, Cambridge, 1978).
72Lévi-Strauss to Gellner, 19 January 1965; Riesman to Gellner, 15 March 1965; Wolf to Gellner, 15 April 1967.
73A. MacIntyre, ‘Thoughts about Change’. Similar views were expressed by A. Arblaster (‘Industrial Society’, Tribune, 15 January 1965), A. Ayer (‘The Real and the Rational’ Sunday Times, 17 January 1965), S. Lukes (‘Punting Names About’, New Society, 21 January 1965) and W. G. Runciman (‘Doubts and Redoubts’, The Observer 31 January 1965).
74Legitimation of Belief, Cambridge, 1974, chapter 9, especially pp. 191–5.
75G. Lichtheim, ‘Neo-Liberalism’, New Statesman, 15 January 1965, p. 81.
76Dore to Gellner, 10 January 1964.
77‘A Social Contract in Search of an Idiom: the Demise of the Danegeld State’, in Spectacles and Predicaments.
78Ian Jarvie kindly supplied me with a copy of this text, which is not in the Gellner Archive.
79‘Recollection in Anxiety: Thought and Change Revisited’, in Culture, Identity, and Politics, Cambridge, 1987.
80Popper to Gellner, 15 January 1965.
81Gellner to Anderson, 16 January 1981.
82Exactly the same point can be made about Jürgen Habermas’s ‘ideal speech’ situation and John Rawls’s ‘original position’.
83A comment on Ayer’s philosophy, in the context of a discussion of the importance of Snow’s two cultures thesis, implies in my view that brute scientific progress is likely to be much more comprehensible to members of developing societies than more abstract philosophical considerations. See Thought and Change, p. 208.
84Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals, London, 1994, chapter 29. A. Macfarlane was one of those shocked.
85‘A Cheerful Philosopher of Social Science’, Times Literary Supplement, 1 September 1972.
86Thought and Change, pp. 64–5.
87Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History, London, 1988, pp. 209–10.
88Legitimation of Belief, p. 196 and passim.
89S. Avineri objected to a talk that Gellner gave in Amsterdam in 1992, suggesting that the proper policy – in connection with nationalism, as I recall – was always to support the weaker party. Gellner vehemently disagreed. Some changes had to be accepted: to block them might even put minorities at risk.
90A. Kohli, State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery, Cambridge, 2004. Similar points are made in Matthew Lange’s equally impressive Lineages of Despotism and Development: British Colonialism and State Power, Chicago, 2009, which draws a striking contrast between levels of state power resulting from direct and indirect rule within the erstwhile British Empire. Direct rule that changed social structures is shown to have beneficial consequences for later economic development.
91Of course, this strategy follows on from the land reform and the bureaucratic innovations imposed by the Japanese.
92There are complexities at work here, requiring more research. Failure might have been caused by appalling policies, it therefore being a nice point as to whether such policies were mandated by democracy.
93J. L. Campbell and J. A. Hall, ‘Defending the Gellnerian Premise: Denmark in Historical and Comparative Context’, Nations and Nationalism, vol. 16, 2010.
94K. O’Rourke, ‘Late Nineteenth-Century Denmark in an Irish Mirror: Land Tenure, Homogeneity and the Roots of Irish Success’, in J. Campbell, J. A. Hall and O. Pedersen, (eds), National Diversity and the Varieties of Capitalism: The Danish Experience, Montreal and Kingston, McGill/Queens, 2006.
95The omission is curious for Kohli writes well elsewhere – ‘Can Democracies Accommodate Ethnic Nationalism? Rise and Decline of Self-Determination Movements in India’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 56, 1997 – on this very matter.
96Gellner reaffirmed his views about the universalizability of industrial society late in life, having little truck with the idea that a ‘fourth world’ might never develop. In contrast, his views on nationalism became more troubled in the last decade of his life, leading, as will be seen in chapter 10, to a significant change in his general position.
97Optimism at this point applied to the situation of Jews, and those of Jewish background: Gellner considered the general situation after 1945 to be not too bad. This irritated his student Anthony Smith, who disliked still more the claim that the Holocaust was simply a mistake of industrial society (Interview with Anthony Smith, September 2008).
98This realization stands at the heart of J. Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict, New York, 2000, and M. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, Cambridge, 2005.
99J. C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven, 1998.
100R. Dore, The Diploma Disease: Education, Qualification and Development, London, 1976.
101D. D. Laitin, Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa, Cambridge, 1992, chapters 3 and 8.
102B. O’Leary, ‘Analyzing Partition: Definition, Classification and Explanation’, Political Geography, vol. 8, 2007.
103G. Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success, Oxford, 2002; P. Anderson, ‘Kemalism’ and ‘After Kemal’, London Review of Books, 11 and 25 September 2008.
104Excellent reviews of the mechanisms in question are contained in the papers in S. Noel (ed.), From Power Sharing to Democracy: Post-Conflict Institutions in Ethnically Divided Societies, Kingston and Montreal, 2005.
105D. D. Laitin, Nations, States and Violence, Oxford, 2007, chapters 4 and 5.
106A. Sen, Poverty and Famine, Oxford, 1978.