While the title of this chapter suggests a dual focus, it has in fact a single theme. It deals with a set of conceptual tools which, like a coin, have two opposite but complementary faces. The general framework was already present in Thought and Change, in the insistence that science undermines received morals as it brings technological innovation. But Gellner’s later analysis is more detailed and sophisticated. The most obvious development is an explanation of how science actually works. This account draws upon an inquiry into the implications of work by Noam Chomsky and Thomas Kuhn. Their views were studied by Gellner with the greatest care, his engagement with Kuhn occasioning a complete interpretation of the work of Karl Popper. But a further prefatory comment is in order. Gellner was at once secure and insecure in his feelings about modern rational science. The security rests in the conviction that science works, that it has changed the world, and that there is a need to explain its mechanics. Insecurity derived from the equally strong conviction that there are not, and cannot ever be, foundational philosophical groundings for modern science that are so solid that they can replace the certainties of the past with some contemporary equivalent. It is this that leads to the second element in the title of this chapter, the other side of modern cognitive practices. The fact that science lacks grounding and cannot provide moral certainty creates space for theories designed to make us feel at ease. Gellner does not follow Popper in simply dismissing such theories as pseudo-science. He exhibits a much higher level of understanding, especially of the social roots of particular theories, while nevertheless retaining a great hostility toward them. Gellner was the scourge of re-enchantment theorists precisely because he understood them so well.
The core of Gellner’s philosophy of science is found in Legitimation of Belief, begun during his 1968 sabbatical in California and published in 1974. It is one of Gellner’s most important books, and was certainly seen as such by the author. It is polished, funny and powerful. The book is a mapping of modern epistemology, primarily a sociological analysis of how cognition actually functions. If it puzzled philosophers, social scientists were equally confused by the depth of philosophical understanding on display, and by the insistence that these problems had real relevance for our understanding of social reality. Accordingly, though it was well-received, it did not – in fact or in the eyes of its author – have a truly major impact, that is, it did not change the terms of intellectual debate.1 The book simply did not fit into any established genre. Gellner realized this himself, lamenting that his work resembled that of the philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood, praised as a philosopher by historians and as an historian by philosophers.2
The book begins in a now-familiar manner, announcing that it is necessary to find a general orientation given that we are lost, that our traditional beliefs are open to question.3 This call for orientation is held to be idiosyncratic given the veritable chorus of pluralist theorists arguing against monistic rationalism, from William James in the past to Gellner’s contemporaries Oakeshott, the later Wittgenstein, H. L. A. Hart, Bernard Crick, Quine, Berlin and Toulmin. Gellner defends his monistic urge as critical and limited, claiming that it seeks a minimum of intellectual orientation and is bereft of any desire to abolish social pluralism or to impose monism in political affairs.
The mapping exercise then begins by making a binary distinction between ‘selectors’ and ‘re-endorsers’, amusingly characterized as the difference between ‘hanging’ and ‘all-too-benign’ judges. The latter will be considered later, as part of the analysis of the attractions of false theoretical trails, but they can at least be named at the outset: relativism, naïve evolutionism, and carte blanche theories (that is, theories which say that truth is attainable once obstacles to seeing it are removed).4 Each of these have various manifestations, and they can, moreover, be found in hybrid forms. They stand in stark contrast to the three selectors identified by Gellner.5 Skeletalism, the search for logical form carried out by Russell and the early Wittgenstein, is judged a rather technical strategy of philosophers; one feels that it is introduced partly so that Gellner can then recount the shift in Wittgenstein’s thought towards the sort of relativism that Gellner criticized so ruthlessly in Words and Things. It is different with the two other selectors, empiricism and mechanism, identified more or less closely with Hume and Kant respectively. The fifty-odd pages which detail the weaknesses of these selectors, along with an account of their differences and followed by an explanation of their compatibilities, are amongst the most important that Gellner ever wrote.6 His whole position, mixing sociology and philosophy, is encapsulated here, in a lucid, even simple form. Let us follow the logic of his argument.
Gellner echoes Ryle’s view of empiricism as ‘the ghost in the machine’.7 But his analysis of this selector points in an entirely different direction from that of his Oxford teacher. A preliminary technical discussion seeks to undermine the moral flavour of Ryle’s account by disassociating the ghostlike quality of empiricism from the notion of ‘spooks’ up to no good. What matters about the view that nothing exists outside of sensation, and that human beings are simply bundles of such sensations, is its severe puritanism. Much customary belief goes out the window if we can find no evidence for it by our senses. Gellner will seek to defend this element of empiricism at all costs. But the defence is subtle, drawing attention to the weaknesses of empiricism rather than ignoring them.
A first general weakness of empiricism follows precisely from the puritanism: we are left with very little ground on which to stand. This problem was clearly stated by Hume, who noted the despair into which philosophy had driven him. Empiricism gives no guarantee of the world’s existence, and no faith in a concept as crucial as that of causation. It was the realization of this complete uncertainty that moved Kant to philosophize in the first place. Kant restored order using a very particular move, namely by insisting that our mental structures require order and select information accordingly. If this solution is the best available, it remains a desperate one: the solution depends more on us than on the world outside of us.
The second weakness of empiricism is just as great, and is now much better known. Empiricism as a selector stands accused of impurity, of not even being capable of doing what it promises. The argument here is simple. We live amid a million impressions, and pay attention only to some of them – because they make sense to us, fitting within some schema that we already possess. This point has been made most strikingly in recent thought by Thomas Kuhn.8 Our conceptual apparatus is what allows us to see facts, indeed to find those that will support what he termed a paradigm. Kuhn goes still further, suggesting that any fact that seems to disconfirm a powerful paradigm is likely to be ignored or explained away. The charge then is bluntly that this philosophy has no capacity to select information after all.
There is a final weakness. In the years before writing Legitimation of Belief, Gellner had been enormously impressed by the work of Noam Chomsky, writing on more than one occasion to introduce and explain his work – and corresponding frequently with Chomsky himself to get news of his latest publications.9 In the early 1970s, Gellner was wont to refer to Chomsky as the greatest living philosopher.10 Gellner admired behaviourists’ attempt to develop Hume’s psychological insights into a genuine model of the workings of the human mind: at least they took their own arguments seriously. Nonetheless, that attempt was judged to be an absolute failure. The definitive destruction of this model was Chomsky’s 1957 review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior.11 Skinner’s model of the mind as a stimulus-response device led him to suggest that the sentences we utter in life repeat those that we learned in our childhood. Chomsky demonstrated, conclusively, that this was nonsense, that our verbal repertoire is far greater and that we have the capacity to invent new sentences rather than simply to repeat ones that have been heard before. The charge against behaviourism is that its self-proclaimed toughness is a façade; its inner core explains nothing. Empiricism is mere mentalism, bereft of cognitive power.
Gellner’s survey can be understood by distinguishing between two different meanings of the word ‘reduction’. Behaviourist accounts of the human mind can be seen as reductive in the sense of being cheap. These accounts fail to account for the complexity of human consciousness, and ought therefore to be rejected. Chomsky’s research programme is concerned with capturing the complexity of linguistic use specifically, but the larger analytic point also applies to other areas of mental activity. Here, reductionism has a different meaning, namely that implied by the notion of a mechanism. Appropriate reduction seeks to locate and to specify the mechanisms by which nature works.12 Insofar as human behaviour is seen naturalistically in this way, it is bound to be morally repulsive, for this approach takes what we feel to be personal, idiosyncratic and unique and makes it generally explicable. In a certain sense, this is the weakness of the concept of mechanism, namely that it undermines autonomy. Before commenting more on this, it is useful to spell out further elements of Chomsky’s position which Gellner wishes to elucidate. Most immediately, it is vital to realize that Chomsky’s attack on the cheap reductionism of behaviourism does not mean that he is some sort of soft humanist, happy to leave matters at a level where human powers are simply celebrated – as might be assumed given his radical politics. To the contrary, the Chomskian programme is hard and cold in its attempt to explain human behaviour. It opposes cheap reduction, but is wholly in favour of ‘hard’ reduction. Gellner recognized that casual remarks by Chomsky occasionally gave the impression that empiricism was to be dismissed, but claimed that this impression was misleading, for Chomsky was well aware of the importance of empiricism for testing scientific hypotheses.
Gellner posits here an alternative view regarding humanity. To celebrate human uniqueness is to bask in warmth, but it is also to remain without knowledge; in contrast, explanation must be cold, for it explains us to ourselves. Gellner sympathizes more with the latter position, as two examples make clear. Gellner observes – as did Chomsky in correspondence with him – the facility of Ryle’s position.13 Ryle’s suggestion that psychology is only called for in the case of breakdown led him to say:
Let the psychologist tell us why we are deceived; but we can tell ourselves and him why we are not deceived. The … diagnosis of our mental impotences requires special research methods. The explanation of the exhibition of our mental competences often requires nothing but ordinary good sense.14
Such crude mentalism obscures the fact that much remains to be explained, and it earns only scorn from Gellner. He showed greater sympathy, however, to Arthur Koestler’s attempt, in a book whose title derived from Ryle’s quip about empiricism, to identify some element of human creativity which makes us more than mere machines.15 What strikes Gellner here is that this programme is logically bound to be self-defeating. Were such an element found, it could then be publicly available, thereby ruling out its capacity to serve as a bastion for humanity.16
Before turning to the ways in which the two selectors converge, we should describe Gellner’s own position. At the end of Legitimation of Belief, Kant is described as ‘the greatest philosopher of them all’.17 This is justified by the claim that Kant saved us from the misery described by Hume, by arguing that our mental structures are such that we must see the world in causal, mechanical terms – the perceived regularity of nature thereby being assured. What then remains of our humanity? Gellner argues that Kant preserves an element of humanity in what he describes as a ‘left-handed way’: a philosophy which avoids exceptions makes one on this occasion, arguing that the schemata on which it rests can be ignored precisely because it is one that we have ourselves created. Gellner endorses the Kantian position because it is limited. The bare minimum – validation, obligation, validity of thought, freedom – is saved. His dispute is with theories, such as that of the later Wittgenstein, which save far too much. Many philosophers question the success of Kant’s argument. Gellner did not provide any sustained defence of Kant’s position, perhaps for subjective reasons: his world is Kant’s, cold and marked by tension at all times.
Gellner’s exam papers at the LSE often asked students questions about whether Kant and Hume were, so to speak, friends rather than enemies. His own preliminary justification for a positive answer was that both thinkers stressed the dangers inherent in religious authority. More important was the division of labour: mechanism shows us the form that explanation must take, whilst empiricism – useless in that regard – remains vital as a selector of evidence by which theories can be tested.18 But Gellner has admitted the impurity of empiricism. How then can he continue to insist upon its efficacy?
The answer to this question lies in sociology. Both mechanism and empiricism are cognitive ethics. They are norms, telling us how we should proceed to gain understanding. An important passage puts the matter clearly:
No-one who writes a book on method thinks he is merely replicating the precepts of consistency, non-contradiction and so forth. So, a methodology must have some meat which is not merely logic. But if it asserts, or presupposes, something over and above the formal requirements of logic, will not that something else, whatever it may be, have some implications concerning the world? And if so, can one not imagine or construct a possible world within which those implications are false, and within which consequently those recommendations are misguided? And if such a world is conceivable, obviously we cannot say, in advance of all inquiry, that such a world is not the real world. But what use is a methodology which prejudges the nature of the world we are in, before we have investigated the matter, and before we have any right to an opinion about it? So we cannot use it before we inquire, as a tool of investigation, or as a guide to what tools to use. And we certainly do not wish to use it after our inquiry is over. For one thing, it is too late by then; for another, by then we can presumably enjoy some much more meaty conclusions, and will hardly have much time for the relatively thin and abstract doctrines of methodology, even if, from another viewpoint, they evidently were not thin and abstract enough.19
This is to say, in the contemporary idiom, that there is no firm foundation, no utterly reliable basis for our epistemological positions. In the case of empiricism, what matters is the a priori assumption of atomism, that is, the belief that large packages can be separated into component pieces.
It enjoins, above all, a sensitivity to the distinction between that which is publicly verifiable by experiential evidence and that which is not, a sensitivity which is low or even systematically obscured in traditional culture. It creates a distinction where it barely existed … Thus the really important social impact of the ghost philosophy is the injunction ‘Be sensitive to the boundary, and impose consistency with respect to it’; the secondary injunction, ‘Down with the transcendent’ (Burn the books containing it according to Hume, or Call it technical nonsense according to Ayer) does not matter much. If the first injunction is well observed and implemented, for all practical purposes the second is already performed and prejudged. In social contexts in which the first is well diffused and respected, it is perfectly possible to play down and, at a superficial level, ignore the second in the interests of courtesy, kindness, tact or antiquarianism. It hardly matters.20
The atomic presumption may, in some ultimate sense, be unjustified. In political life, Burke insisted that removing the smallest element of the social order could lead the whole to fall – for each part was connected to every other. The possibility that our moral world might be some sort of cozy, meaningful unity clearly appalled Gellner, partly based on the Kantian argument that this would downplay human agency.21 Of course, Kantian principles are as normative as those of empiricism. The world may not be a marvel of engineering, some sort of Rolls Royce engine which runs flawlessly and smoothly like a machine. This can be put differently by saying that Hume and Kant do not describe some essence of the human mind in and of itself. To the contrary, they suggested ways in which we should conduct ourselves in cognitive terms. And these cognitive norms seem to work: they produce world-transforming knowledge, and the sheer fact of the technical consequences of organized science gives us hope that the reality does indeed operate along mechanical lines.
The sociological character of epistemological assumptions further helps explain the ways in which Hume and Kant – or rather the principles that they represent – can best be seen as working in concert rather than separately. At an epistemic level, the most obvious logical conclusions to draw from sensationalism are unlikely to aid the growth of knowledge. One option in the face of the insubstantiality of the ghost is to passively withdraw from the world, on the grounds that all is illusion. This ‘Indian’ solution had a distinguished representative in Western philosophy in the person of Arthur Schopenhauer.22 This route never gained general support, seeming esoteric at best given the obviousness of science’s practical success. A second option is active rather than passive: if all we have is our sensations, then we may as well make the most of them.23 But this route was also avoided because the British empiricists were centrally concerned with a desire to understand the structure of things.24 Thus David Hume, in spite of his sensationalist view of the mind, was attracted by a nearly Kantian view of structure:
Could men anatomise nature, according to the most probable, or at least the most intelligible philosophy, they would find, that … causes are nothing but the particular fabric and structure of the minute parts of their own bodies and of external objects; and that, by a regular and constant machinery, all the events are produced, about which they are so much concerned.25
Equally, La Mettrie’s L’Homme machine, to which Gellner had devoted sustained and admiring analysis in 1964, contains a defence of both empiricism and materialism – indeed, empiricism is seen as the best route to materialism.26
Attempts to synthesize empiricism and causal mechanisms can also be made at the ethical level. Here too the obvious consequence of associationism might well be the choice to enjoy the finer things in life rather than attempt in any way to change the world. But the empiricist tradition did not succumb to such passivity. Its great theorists, above all the philosophical radicals, lived within a reforming world; they sought to contribute to progressive change through the rigorous application of their ideas. Formally, it might seem that the utilitarians would have been unable to do much good because happiness, as critics point out, was used simply to mean ‘whatever men in fact desire’, thereby making the ethic vacuous, and incapable of distinguishing between one policy and another.
Not at all: one of the most important ways in which vacuity was avoided was precisely at this point. The utilitarian vision, in terms of which this ethic was articulated, was thoroughly permeated by the sensationalist-atomistic manner of seeing the world, which consists of seeing the world made up of our experience, and the experience as broken up into its elements. From this followed a powerful and most discriminating, non-vacuous injunction – when assessing important policies, institutions and codes, before you work out the felicific accounts, break up the items on the balance sheet into their ultimate constituents. The accountancy must not be in terms of the old package-deals; all items must be broken up. And this is enormously important: for the manner in which traditional ethics convey and maintain their values is precisely by looking at experience through those package deals …27
Gellner encapsulates the puritanism at work in the utilitarian tradition in the quip that it is ‘unlikely that any orgy was ever graced by the body of John Stuart Mill’.28 The same point is made negatively with reference to G. E. Moore, the standard-bearer for Bloomsbury longings for higher states of mind. The legacy of Moore did far less to reform society, at least in Gellner’s view, because it undermined the atomic postulate, thereby allowing belief systems to enter in as ‘package deals’.29
Everything said here about the pillars of modern cognition is highlighted by consideration of pre-scientific modes of thought. Gellner’s portrait of the latter returns us to his early insistence that absurdity and contradiction can help to produce social control.30 The contrast between the ‘modern’ and the ‘savage’ mind depends upon a close reading of an impressive article by Gellner’s friend Robin Horton, an anthropologist of sub-Saharan African belief systems.31 Gellner rejects some elements of Horton’s account, notably its claim that there are no alternatives found within traditional belief systems, and its concentration on the situation of isolated individuals. There are in fact many alternatives within traditional systems of thought, but it is difficult to judge between them in a way that would add to the society’s shared knowledge. Too many concepts available in these contexts are at the same time descriptive and evaluative, and their cultural entrenchment makes it impossible to challenge them. No generally accepted standard can be used to judge on claims of any sort because the cognitive division of labour is underdeveloped, without a distinction made between these descriptive and evaluative functions. The contrast he draws between traditional and modern thought is rather abstract, and was later reframed in a more effective way at the start of Plough, Sword, and Book, his philosophical history of humanity. Nonetheless, in spite of the account’s abstraction, this framework allows for the dazzling passages at the end of Legitimation of Belief that contrast the philosophies of science of Kuhn and Popper and highlight Gellner’s own position.32
The standard interpretation of Kuhn and Popper sees them as utterly opposed, unsurprising given the celebrated clash that took place between them at the LSE in the late 1960s.33 For Popper, what matters most is openness and criticism, the bravery to make one’s ideas as clear as possible so that knowledge can advance through the openness of theories to refutation. Such a condition of permanent revolution utterly appalled Kuhn, reminding him of the chaotic intellectual lives of the social scientists he famously encountered whilst spending a year at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton – who argued endlessly about the very nature of their enterprise, to the detriment of the production of actual results. What matters for Kuhn is a shared set of understandings, a paradigm, within which high-level research can be conducted and knowledge is accumulated by means of mutual interaction. The fact that such paradigms are held to be incommensurable makes Kuhn a relativist, but it was the cowardice of the normal science he approved of that drew Popper’s fiercest ire. And the field was not by any means left to Popper. Kuhn demonstrated that scientists do not in fact abandon their theories in the face of disconfirming evidence: they tend to introduce ad hoc clauses which immunize theories from refutation as necessary, for a clean slate would deprive them of the comforts of their paradigm.
Gellner’s interpretation of these two figures is both original and powerful. Against the current of critical commentary, he insisted that these thinkers, seemingly opposed to each other, shared a common error. They had different ways of overlooking the importance of the revolution that made us what we are, and so it was best to consider each of them in turn.
Gellner begins his overview of Popper’s position by noting contradiction and confusion, which he will seek to explain and to resolve. The contradiction, generally acknowledged and admitted by Popper himself, is between the bravery he commends in scientific research and his praise of piecemeal engineering in social affairs.34 Confusion surrounds the question of whether Popper should be seen as a positivist. He was accused of this by members of the Frankfurt School, but went to considerable lengths to insist that this characterization was unfair.35 Popper’s position on this point became increasingly important to him, so much so that Gellner felt it appropriate to distinguish between the views of the early and late Popper. What came to matter more and more to Popper was a quasi-Darwinian view that life itself is a process of trial and error, and that progress depends upon the critical spirit which allows this process the maximum space in which to operate.
Gellner’s interpretation of Popper rests on the revolution that brings the two great selectors into play. One element of Popper’s thought that can be elucidated by these means is his supposed contradiction between the praise of revolution in cognitive but not in social affairs. Gellner suggests that there is no real contradiction here at all. Scientific progress takes place on the side of the great divide marked by the impact and working of the two great selectors. That great divide is a real revolution, but the changes that take place thereafter are really piecemeal cognitive reforms. Einstein’s view of the universe did not change everything; rather it incorporated the theories of Newton. The fact that, say, bridges built before 1905 do not require demolition as soon as new bridge-building technologies are developed neatly illustrates the symmetry of the Popperian universe: changes within the realm of knowledge parallel those that are possible in relatively open liberal democracies.
Gellner has harsher words about other elements of Popper’s system of thought. Most importantly, he insists that Popper must have an allegiance to positivism if the key tenets of his thought are to work. This is most obviously true of the early Popper’s insistence on falsifiability. For this principle to function it must be possible to imagine refutation by reference to empirical material. It should again be emphasized that this does not mean that Gellner believes that facts somehow exist unproblematically in a neutral world. The way in which falsifiability works is rather different:
If we insist that a theory only deserves respect if it is falsifiable, we force anyone who accepts this criterion, to visualize a world in which the theory can be falsified. And to do this is to impose a most dreadful and extremely salutary humiliation on that theory. What world-visions, ideologies, most characteristically do, is to construct a world within which their own falsification is quite inconceivable and in which the preliminary steps necessary for such a falsification are blasphemous, and in some way disqualify him who would set them up … Insistence on genuine falsifiability deprives the theory or world-outlook of this capacity to be a judge of its own truth. The real importance of the criterion lies in this power to take them down a peg.36
But the same point also applies to the late Popper. For it is mere naïvety on Popper’s part, Gellner insists, to imagine that the critical spirit can in and of itself guarantee intellectual progress. This optimism simply fails to take seriously the long periods of intellectual stagnation that have marked human history, and grossly underestimates the difficulties in moving beyond them. In one sense this naïvety is surprising in Popper, given that he also has a psychologistic theory according to which human beings are all too easily attracted to the comfort and cosiness of stable, closed intellectual and social worlds. In any case, Gellner suggests that there are cogent objections to be made against applying natural selection or trial and error methods to human social life.37
Kuhn fails in a rather different way to appreciate the great revolution that introduced the cognitive ethics on which we depend. The point about thought before the scientific revolution is not that it was anarchic, but rather that paradigms were so very rigid. The failure to recognize this undermined Kuhn’s position in at least two ways. First, normal science itself depends upon a measure of empiricism. Second, it is quite obvious that Kuhn prefers Einstein to Newton, and so would like to escape the relativism inherent to his position. What this suggests is that his paradigm changes take place within the world defined by the great selectors. He has failed, in other words, to distinguish the great scientific revolution that allowed these selectors to work in the first place from the changes that then take place following and within the context of this revolution.
Gellner states that his concern is ‘with how the arena came to be set up at all, and not with the rules that govern its internal procedures’.38 But this is not yet the case, for it is only in Plough, Sword, and Book, considered in the next chapter, that he offered an explanation of how the field itself came to be established. Rather Legitimation of Belief offers a contrast between two worlds, asserting that there is a ‘big ditch’ between them. He insists that there are no final proofs of causation, the sufficiency of reason or the orderliness of the world – and that there can never be such proofs. But if we want to acquire powerful knowledge, we must act on the assumption that the world is regulated by cold, orderly, impersonal laws.
This is the only ‘proof’ which, in the end, is available. We choose a style of knowing and a kind of society jointly. All in all, mankind has already made its choice, or been propelled into it in truly Faustian manner, by a greed for wealth, power, and by mutual rivalry. We can only try to understand what has happened.39
The formulation that he seems to have found most satisfying, for he would use it often after he came up with it, was that ‘positivism is right, for Hegelian reasons’.
Appreciation of Gellner’s philosophical position as a whole would be incomplete if it rested merely on his defence of the actual workings of these two cognitive ethics: empiricism and mechanism, the ‘selectors’. For one thing, there was still no sense of how science emerged. In this area Gellner was, so to speak, a model of logical correctness, in that he offered a causal account that differed from his functional explanation of the actual workings of science. This causal account is addressed in the next chapter. We must deal with a more general consideration now.
Gellner claims, in effect, that there are three modern schools of thought. One of them, broadly speaking liberal, rational and empiricist, has just been described, and another which ‘re-enchants’ the modern world is treated at the end of this chapter. The remaining framework is that of Nietzsche and Freud. Gellner’s admiration for Nietzsche was as great as his respect for Hume and Kant, and his occasional treatments of this thinker were subtle. He tended to see Nietzsche as seeking to complete the Enlightenment project, thereby showing us that our principles are not well grounded, rather than pointing in some clear way towards fascism. This is not to say that he accepts that Nietzsche’s position is itself firmly grounded. If what we really want instinctually is satisfaction, how was it ever possible for conscience, so clearly at the heart of Christianity, to unman us?
The influence of Nietzsche is apparent in Gellner’s response to Hume’s claim that reason is and ought to be nothing but the slave of the passions.
Anyone not familiar with Hume’s thought might well suppose, on reading this remark out of context, that Hume’s vision of man was something like that of Dostoevsky, that he saw man as possessed by dark, tortuous, mysterious, perverse and uncontrollable passions. Not a bit of it. To understand properly the true nature of the famous Humean enslavement to passion, you must conjure up a different picture altogether. Imagine yourself floating in a boat on an artificial landscaped park, say one designed by Capability Brown. The currents of the lake are the passions, and you are indeed their slave, for the boat has neither oars nor rudder. If reason be the captain, it is a totally powerless one. The vessel will follow the currents, for there simply are no other forces that can impel or impede it.
Will they propel the boat to its destruction, in some maelstrom or cataract? Not at all. These currents are mild, the shores of the lake are rounded and slope gently. The currents may take you to a picnic on an island with a grotto, or, alternatively, to a musical performance of Handel on one of the shores … With such passions, who would not gladly be their slave?40
If Kant’s philosophy was utterly dependent on puritan assumptions, Hume’s was as dependent on civility and refinement, so much admired by the Scottish moralists of eighteenth-century Edinburgh. But, says Gellner, our lives are neither restrained nor angelic, and we learn from situations of trauma, from the whole of our experience rather than from a careful sifting and evaluation of a multitude of sensations, all of equal worth.
The above passage – exemplifying Gellner’s talent as a stylist – comes from the opening pages of 1985’s The Psychoanalytic Movement. This title was more or less mandated by the nature of the series in which it appeared, but his own intent was clearly evident in the subtitle he chose for the book: ‘the cunning of unreason’. That the first print run of the book mistakenly had ‘the coming of unreason’ as the subtitle utterly infuriated him – he spent half a morning correcting the mistake in copies that had been sent to him.41 Despite this hiccough, the book itself was extremely well received.42 Perry Anderson claimed that it was arguably Gellner’s best book, and there is certainly a feeling of polish and completeness about it that some of his later books lacked – characteristics that can only really be appreciated by reading the book in its entirety.43 This is not at all surprising. Gellner’s interest in psychoanalysis dated back to the 1950s, and there exists an outline for a book on the subject dated 1961. Further, in the mid-1960s he returned to his earlier plan to conduct fieldwork amongst psychoanalysts. This involved interviews with Donald Winnicott, then president of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. Gellner later recalled a discussion about sex which gave the impression that Winnicott found the act itself to be incredibly difficult, ‘as if’, in Gellner’s words, ‘climbing the North face of the Eiger on every occasion’ – a view with which Gellner had no sympathy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Winnicott declined to allow Gellner’s proposed investigation but promised to organize research at a later date – a commitment that he would not keep.44
Gellner’s sympathy for the hard-headedness of the psychoanalytic tradition, one that ascribes to human beings a more realistic, Darwinian-tinged nature, is manifest in the early pages of the book – from which the passage quoted is drawn – in which he describes the ‘Nietzschean Minimum’.45 He makes much of the deviousness of our instincts, and states with some abruptness that in his view clear evidence is not needed on a matter so obviously true, namely that our mental life is at the mercy of unconscious forces. More generally, Nietzsche’s positing of a ‘will to power’, suggesting that there is pleasure to be had in ruling over others, is seen as a dreadful challenge to liberal society. This is contrasted with Freud’s habitual, more limited concern with sexual matters. Late Hapsburg society had a highly ambivalent attitude towards sex, at times licentious, at times puritanical. To speak about sex openly then was to challenge social norms in a striking manner. But Gellner suggests that sex presents no real challenge to contemporary liberal society – to the contrary, endless gratification is seen as a possibility soon to be realized. This sets the terms of Gellner’s account of psychoanalysis and its offshoots. Therapy is seen as wholly compatible with liberal society, largely because the radicalism of Nietzsche is diminished through the putative offer of a cure. Roughly speaking, his view is that what is powerful in psychoanalysis derives from Nietzsche, while the Freudian contribution is thoroughly question-begging. An example, not cited by Gellner, makes the point clearly: Freud is thoroughly Nietzschean when considering marriage as a struggle between wills until death.
The book’s main purpose is to offer a sociological explanation for an astonishing ideological success story. For personal life in advanced liberal societies has come to be seen in terms derived from Freud, with vast amounts of money accordingly spent on therapies of one sort or another. It may well be that our instinctual life is always best seen in Nietzschean terms. Nonetheless, major changes in society exacerbate our insecurities and fears, vastly increasing the demand for care and consolation. The core of Gellner’s hypothesis – for the argument had no basis in sustained research – rests on the view that in late industrial society life depends, for the vast majority, on relations with people rather than on any brute interaction with nature. Hell is no longer nature but, as Sartre had it, other people. Human relations are all too often difficult, competitive, noisy and troubled. If one pays a therapist, at least one is listened to, and without interruption. This is but one of the ways in which therapy has a central role in providing pastoral care. Beyond this, however, is a more specific account of the way in which therapies, perhaps especially the costlier, more personalized ones, ‘hook’ their clients. Gellner here returns to the analytical framework he had used when dealing with linguistic philosophy.46 Passionate adherence to doctrine comes less from plausibility, necessary though that is, than from threats – from the insistence that severe problems will follow if allegiance is less than total. And there is a further element to which he devotes a great deal of attention. Roughly speaking, for most people for most of the time, reality is the result of the continual affirmation of our selves by others – as was famously argued by Erving Goffman, perhaps the most brilliant American sociologist of the postwar period.47 Gellner argues that analytic sessions become almost addictive because they sin against the habitual courtesies of social life; therapists can withhold confirmation for long periods, thereby making their eventual interventions all the more powerful. Gellner claims that the truly novel finding of psychoanalysis – the reality of transference – derives from these circumstances. The fact that analysts control affirmation gives them enormous power, making them – as Freud wished – a modern version of Plato’s Guardians.48
A good deal of the book’s interest and power resides in the way that this current of thought is placed within the history of philosophy as a whole. In this spirit, the success of the psychoanalytic movement is partly explained by the philosophical problems that it solves, all of which deserve cursory listing.49 First, it finds a way to build an ethics that corresponds to our greatest needs, an achievement beyond Nietzsche’s powers. The ethics in question are not generalizable, but specific to particular individuals, and all the more powerful for that. Second, the portrait of our troubled and erratic inner life is far more realistic than the calmer portraits offered by Hume and Descartes. Third, the psychoanalytic movement solves the Cartesian problem of the trustworthiness of knowledge by insisting that the curing of neuroses will allow the truth to shine forth. Fourth, the tension within Kant that comes from seeing humans as at once determined and autonomous is replaced by a more sequential view, in which freedom is established once determinant neuroses have been removed. Fifth, psychoanalysis gives us a Durkheimian sense of the sacred, again at the individual level, and surrounds it with ritual. Finally, Weber’s insistence that modernity is cold and disenchanted is countered by a doctrine which offers the hope of personal salvation.
Gellner admits that description is unlikely ever to be entirely neutral, and clearly spells out his own view of the scientific standing of therapeutic analysis. Psychoanalysis fits clearly within his general schema of cognition. It is perhaps the classic case of a carte blanche theory, taking for granted that truth will simply be apparent once errors derived from neuroses have been resolved. This position is termed conditional realism, and it is quite as bad as naïve realism. For facts do not speak for themselves; they are rather found as the result of questions shaped by theories – which is not, as has been noted, to gainsay the merits of factual investigation in testing theoretical assertions. Further, naïve realism is closely linked to naïve mentalism. The point was strikingly put in Legitimation of Belief:
Any explanation of human conduct or competence in terms of a genuine structure is morally offensive – for a genuine structure is impersonal, it is an ‘it’, not an ‘I’. Chomskian structures are also known to be, in part, well hidden from consciousness; he himself lays great stress on this. If this be the correct strategy in the study of man, then the I is ultimately to be explained by an it (alas). The Freudian id was beastly but, when all is said and done, it was cosily human in its un-housetrained way; at worst you could say it was all too human: it was human nature seen in the image of conscious man, but with gloves off. (Like us, but without the advantages we’ve had, if you know what I mean.) The explanation of our unthinking, quasi-automatic competence into explanatory schemata, outlining structures which are not normally accessible to us at all, is far more sinister. This kind of id is not violent, sexy and murderous, it is just totally indifferent to us.50
This side of the Freudian world view is strikingly humanistic, presuming that we can easily understand ourselves in hermeneutic terms, far removed from any Chomskian sense of competences that need to be explained. But there is another side to Freud’s theories, termed by Gellner ‘psychohydraulics’.51 This is primarily the Freud of the early years, but always present thereafter to some degree, insisting that mental life is material, and subject to mechanical explanation. But Gellner sees this model of the mind as wholly sloppy and unspecific – he is especially amusing when discussing ‘cathexis’, that is, the ability of libido to fly around the place, attaching itself to different objects at will. Gellner cuttingly observes that commentators have often thought it possible to clean up Freud, to make his work internally consistent – either as hermeneutics or as materialism. Gellner insists that this can never be done, that the theory tends both ways, gaining from the prestige of science whilst seeing our behaviour in all too comprehensible human terms.52
Although there is much more to the book than a Popperian account of the defects of psychoanalysis, that element is present. Much is made, naturally, of the way that the concept of ‘resistance’ is used to evade falsification – by insisting that there is something psychologically wrong with critics, that they require therapy in order to see the error of their ways and recognize the truth of the psychoanalytic perspective. A very specialized passage amounts to an argument in Popperian terms.53 Gellner had cordial relations with Adolf Grünbaum, a Popperian philosopher of science, but disagreed with him nonetheless.54 Grünbaum’s claim was that psychoanalytical theory could be stated clearly enough that it would open itself to falsification in principle – though this had not yet been done. In contrast, Gellner insists that the theory can never be formally tested because evidence is controlled by therapists. There is, however, one general exception. Psychoanalysis and therapies offer the promise of a cure, albeit haltingly at times, often claiming merely that misery will be reduced. Such evidence as has been marshalled in this area did not, in Gellner’s view, suggest that the promise had been kept. Rather there seemed to be a three-horse race, between psychoanalysis, spontaneous remission, and alternative therapies, in which no contender seemed to have a clear lead.55 Gellner was amused by the way in which the threat of the unconscious was seen as somehow not too serious. This made little sense to him. If the unconscious could control everything, the idea that it would allow itself to be interpreted was very unconvincing, even comical.56 The book ends with a clear and distinct view: ‘C’est la thérapie, et non pas la maladie, qui est imaginaire’.57
He continued to write in this area. For one thing, there was some engagement with the psychoanalytic community itself. John Bowlby wrote warmly, endorsing a good deal of what Gellner had said, but insisting that genuine empirical work had been done on childhood development.58 Then Gellner entered the lion’s den itself. He debated his claims with Charles Rycroft at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. He insisted that analysts were bound to be secular priests, even if they wished to reject that role, for the simplest of reasons: the demand for consolation services was so great that this fate would always be forced upon them.59 He also engaged in direct debate with Stephen Frosh, interestingly defending his view that science is less impure than psychoanalysis.60 He sharpened his position in a number of ways. He encapsulated his view of Freudianism’s key element in a nice formula stressing that its originality lay not in the idea that the mind has an unconscious, but rather that the unconscious has a mind.61 In this vein, he cited a comment of Chomsky’s that we might never be able to understand human behaviour, even if we unlock the secret of how we are able to learn complex grammar with the greatest of ease.62 Gellner did not defend Chomsky’s view, but emphasized the achievements of psychoanalysis in pointing to the place in which dark drives met with semantic complexities.63 In general he stressed that something like instinctual forces must be present, for they made sense of Darwin – whose general viewpoint was held to be true.64 Finally, he doubted the extent to which counsellors truly endorsed the emotions uncovered by depth psychology, suggesting that they habitually arranged some sort of compromise between deeper feelings and traditional values, thereby continuing in their traditional role as guardians of moral values.65
His last writings on psychoanalysis stressed the force of the Nietzschean position. Along these lines, he attacked Jonathan Lear’s Love and Its Place in Nature, objecting to its view of love as gentle and considerate rather than as ‘blind, ravenous, possessive, destructive and tormenting’, and to its attempt to build a new epistemology based on love. In Lear’s world ‘a healthy sexuality is covered by an anodyne account of the world in which all problems disappear. Snow White is furtively curvaceous but she is credited with a saccharine purity’.66 Similar points were made against Freud’s late notion of the ‘pleasure principle’, held by Gellner to contradict the central Freudian idea – that we have the capacity to make ourselves unhappy. This critique occurs in an introduction to Civilization and Its Discontents comparing Freud with other social contract theorists.67 Freud finds the origin of society in the killing of the father by a band of brothers, and suggests that memories of this primal act then hold society together. Gellner suggests that Durkheim’s view of conceptual constraint through ritual makes more sense of society’s origin, and objects, on Malinowskian grounds, to the view that legacies of the past have such force – insisting on the need to analyse the present purpose and function of any purported legacy. But even if Freud’s general view of the demanding nature of morality is true in some cases – in Shi’ism and Judaism perhaps above all – it makes no sense, as it should, of Hinduism and Buddhism, or of Confucianism, which all lack the rigour characteristic of the three great Abrahamic religions. Still, Gellner’s final note stresses how well it fits with our own self-indulgent consumerist society. The fact that the demands of conscience are softened at an individual level is contrasted with Marxism’s attempt to create a new public morality. Marxism over-extended itself; Freudianism in its various forms lives on, exemplifying Mies van der Rohe’s dictum that less is more.68
Gellner’s understanding and account of modern cognition were profoundly Weberian. The great cognitive practices do not represent the human mind per se, but rather a style of cognition that came into being in a particular place at a particular time. The next chapter describes Gellner’s own explanation for this fortuitous opening. But just as important for Gellner is the other side of the rationalization and disenchantment combination that characterizes Weber’s thought. In this matter one can claim that he is more Weberian than Weber himself. To justify this evaluation it is necessary to begin by recalling Weber’s position.
In ‘Science as a Vocation’, the important lecture given in Munich shortly before his death, Weber claimed that disenchantment was the ineluctable fate of our times. If there was a technical aspect to Weber’s explanation of this phenomenon, it was in a passage comparing modern science to magic – ‘disenchantment’ is the translation of a term which literally means ‘de-magification’. Weber insisted that knowledge comes at the cost of meaning. The world was once seen in anthropomorphic terms, and this made it seem warm and sympathetic: one might believe that sticks and stones are possessed of spirits, thereby making them appear as meaningful entities. In contrast, modern science is rendered morally empty by its presupposition that everything is in principle explicable.69 Weber makes clear that ‘primitive man’ is not somehow less capable than a modern urban resident; that is distinctly not the case, given that the former has survival skills which the latter lacks.70 Nonetheless, the city-dweller does live in a technically sophisticated milieu which now dominates the world. There is an opportunity cost to modernity: the price of technical and cognitive power is a certain moral void, a loss of comforting illusions. Further, our world becomes disenchanted by the nature of its social organization. As bureaucracy and legality characterize industrial society, there is little room for genuine collective fervour of any kind. The world in which we live must be cold rather than warm. At a crucial juncture of his lecture, Weber made a comment about the sociology of death. The modern world sees such rapid change that death now becomes meaningless. Where ‘some peasant of the past’ could gain wisdom with age because everything had been experienced in this world and salvation was promised in the next, an old person today is ‘past it’, their death rendered more pointless by the absence of religious legitimation.71 Weber insisted that science could not answer Tolstoy’s question about how one should live; modern knowledge is technically powerful but morally empty.
Weber wobbled when analysing disenchantment. The clear thrust of his argument is that this fate is inevitable, that it cannot be escaped. This led him to harsh words which Gellner quotes in Legitimation of Belief with marked approbation:
Never as yet has a new prophecy emerged … by way of the need of some modern intellectuals to furnish their souls with … guaranteed genuine antiques … they produce surrogates … which they peddle in the book market. This is plain humbug or self-deception.72
Weber distinguished between thinkers who invent new beliefs on the grounds that they would be good for us, and those who believe in the reality of a deity.73 He has great respect for the sincerity of the latter, though he does not think that the option is generally available, but he completely condemns the facile instrumentalism of the former. Weber was not, however, above considering the need for religious belief. He claimed that emergent modernity was ‘an iron cage’, and endlessly worried that it might lead to social stagnation. Egypt had been bureaucratized and rule-bound and this had led to decline, and he worried that this fate might also strike Germany. But the fact that one could choose one’s beliefs, that science could not tell us what to do, meant that room was left for human freedom. Weber argued in similar terms in the philosophy of science: rather like Kuhn, he argued that theoretical approaches involve pre-commitments that made them invulnerable to refutation. His position was, therefore, relativist, effectively existentialist, and thereby close to mere ‘decisionism’. The position is potentially repulsive, for there seem to be no rational grounds by means of which one position can be chosen above another.
Weber’s own politics showed precisely how this capacity for repulsiveness could be made actual. Mere wealth and social integration mattered little for Weber, given his Nietzschean background. His plans for political reform after the First World War privileged a party system in which a clash between charismatic leaders would ensure dramatic, dynamic change within society. There was little sense here of controlling the exercise of power; to the contrary, power was to be given to the elite so that they might move society forward.74
Modern social theory is haunted by the ghost of Max Weber. This is especially true of the Frankfurt School. The famous address of Jürgen Habermas when receiving the Hegel Prize in 1974 simply asked ‘Can complex societies build a rational identity?’75 Herein lies the whole programme of one of the most celebrated social philosophers of the age. Much the same is true of the social philosophy of Charles Taylor. His various works have suggested that modern life presently suffers from a malaise because insufficient attention has been paid to ways of creating the communal life necessary for healthy individuals to thrive. Taylor likes to encourage as much as to scare, and so reassures us that the politics of recognition together with an appreciation of our civilization’s inherent values will allow for the malaise to be managed.76 Habermas and Taylor suggest that modernity can allow us a new and solid identity. Gellner is their absolute opponent.
He stands very close to Weber, but adds to his position. He shared the same views on the practical knowledge of ‘primitive men’, and systematically showed that modern cognition has presuppositions that rule out by fiat anthropomorphic self-understanding,77 and his analysis of the reduction involved in mechanistic explanations adds to Weber’s account. Further, a brilliant essay – ‘A Bundle of Hypotheses, or, the Gaffe-Avoiding Animal’ – partly explains the curious fact that Weber’s description of the modern world included two types of rational action, based on values and aims respectively. Gellner argues that the former is devoured by the latter; our constant capital, to adopt Marxist terminology, is continually diminished, leaving us merely with variable capital.78 This matters enormously. Only relatively small matters can be dealt with by means of rational calculation. Any truly large decision – divorce, death, a change in occupation – cannot be subject to a rational decision, for the simplest of reasons: one’s identity will change as the result of the decision. Thus rationality is useful when it is least needed, but hopeless when dealing with crucial issues. Human beings thus change from being a bundle of sensations to being a bundle of hypotheses. In these circumstances, life is much more about finding ways to fit in, by avoiding gaffes, than it is about easy and calm rational calculation. This sort of existentialist understanding, typical of Gellner, does not for a moment lead him to follow Weber in calling for a return to heroic politics. The background assumption is, again, that a choice has already been made. Our style of cognition gives us a higher standard of living, and it is accordingly endorsed by Gellner for social democratic reasons.
The contrast between Weber and Gellner was accurately noted and described by Perry Anderson, as that between the high politics of Wilhelmine Germany and the low, social democratic politics of Masaryk’s Czechoslovak Republic.79 Gellner’s own response to the problem identified by Weber is to allow strictly limited commitment to society:
[T]he acceptance of ‘forms of life’, from styles of food, handshakes and wallpapers to political rituals or personal relationships – but an acceptance which no longer endows anything with an aura of the absolute, but is ironic, tentative, optional, and above all discontinuous with serious knowledge and real conviction. In this limited sphere of ‘culture’, relativism is indeed valid. In the sphere of serious conviction, on the other hand, relativism is not an option open to us at all.80
This passage comes from the section of Legitimation of Belief concerned with ‘ironic cultural nationalism’. It is not just that one needs irony about one’s self; just as important is a much more tentative allegiance to one’s nation than a nationalist such as Weber would like.
Gellner criticized numerous theories which sought to re-endorse the world. Legitimation of Belief noted three great types. There is no need to consider again the two great carte blanche theories that exercised him so much, namely Wittgensteinianism and Freudianism. Similarly, little needs to be said about relativism given the earlier extended discussion of the work of Peter Winch, as well as his attack on Isaiah Berlin – though it is important to remember the two elements of his critique, namely that relativism can be deeply intolerant, and that social change makes epistemic relativism inoperative in contemporary circumstances. The criticisms made against naïve evolutionary theory in the first chapter of Thought and Change are likewise maintained throughout his work – as is the claim that a more limited idea of evolution, namely evolution to an affluent world respecting the nationalist principle, deserves our support. The crucial world growth story is, of course, Marxism, and his views here again need not be repeated. But a short list of thinkers seeking to ‘warm up’ the world can begin with a consideration of theorists indebted to benign views of social evolution.
Gellner’s application to study in Harvard in the early 1950s emphasized the importance of the work of Quine, and there is evidence that he was engaged in critical discussions of his work at that time. Nonetheless, a full two decades passed before Gellner offered an account of Quine’s work in two closely related essays.81 The key theme echoed his charge against the late work of Popper, namely that of an excessive confidence in the continuity of human success in terms of cognitive endeavours. The taken-for-granted confidence at the back of Quine’s position is derived, in Gellner’s view, from his pragmatism – from the belief that trial and error methods will continue to work, as they have done in prior human history. Two elements are seen as lending support to this view. First, Darwinism is seen rather benignly as suggesting that the best practices are indeed the ones that are selected, that we make our way in nature without much difficulty. Second, the striking success of the American economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is taken as the normal condition of humanity.
Gellner has several objections to this position. He stresses that there have been long periods of stagnation in human history, and that a breakthrough to unfettered economic growth was the result of a very curious concatenation of circumstances. Quine at times invokes a background assumption – ‘our scientific method’ – that allows him to feel secure in the selections that have been made, and further to take for granted that consensuses reached are less biased than veridical.82 But this is exactly like Popper, to act within a world which takes our cognitive practices for granted. Quine’s accurate and amusing attack on the impossibility that any ‘cosmic exile’ can exist does not undermine the fact that empiricism in particular remains potent as an epistemological norm. Lastly, Gellner is critical of Quine’s reference to natural selection. For one thing, the period over which selection works may be that of millennia, thereby placing it on a different time scale to the sudden and dramatic jumps of human history.83 For another, natural selection can be rather specific; in contrast, the great selectors on which Gellner insists that we rely are general and puritanical. It is this feature that allows them to deal with crises of meaning and morality, that is, to deal with the situation faced by the originators of our epistemological tradition.
Gellner’s admiration for the elegance of Quine’s style, and deep appreciation for his technical skill as a logician, does not prevent him from making two further criticisms. He echoes the criticism made directly by Chomsky, to the effect that Quine’s allegiance to behaviourism is enough to convict him of mentalism. That we are able to succeed cognitively tells us nothing about the mental competences which allow us to do so.84 Secondly, he makes a more specialized argument about how Quine seeks to support his position by means of very different arguments, some general, others technical – none convincing on its own, and no more so when taken together.85
Quine was considered as effectively a second-generation pragmatist, far less individualist than William James, lacking any avowed interest in creating an American philosophy, and more or less representative of the rather different America of the 1950s, when his most brilliant work was done.86 Gellner, by contrast, offered no generational picture of Richard Rorty, whom he came to know, and very much liked, in the last years of his life – perhaps first meeting him when Rorty attended Gellner’s opening lecture at the Central European University in Prague in 1991. He socialized with him again after the two men were brought together in Cambridge by Quentin Skinner. Gellner repeated the arguments about pragmatism’s excessive confidence in our ability to know the world in a public debate in Brazil, and when moderating a debate between Habermas and Rorty in Warsaw in 1994.87
Gellner viewed Hegel as something of a master of obfuscation, suggesting that the triumph of reason may or may not be a sign of the presence of the divine. But he defended Hegel against the interpretation offered by Charles Taylor, arguing that the German philosopher had a much more realistic view of the powers of coercion than did Marx. Taylor, a philosopher of the Canadian New Left, used Hegel to call for the creation of an ‘expressivist’ politics going beyond ‘the end of ideology’, to allow for some sort of unity between self and society. Gellner would have none of this when reviewing Taylor’s treatment of Hegel:
Unlike Taylor, I do not take the year 1968 too seriously; a shadow of a shadow, ersatz of ersatz, it re-enacted 1848, which in turn had re-enacted 1789. But the 1970s scare me stiff. The expressivists never made the Financial Times index tremble. The miners and the oil sheikhs, who do have that power, are not activated by expressivist yearnings. All they want is a much bigger share of those post-Enlightenment goodies which expressivism spurns. Furthermore, it is not clear to me how advanced, large-scale societies can fulfil the requirements of expressivism, other than by holding Nuremberg rallies. I’d rather do without. What on earth is wrong with having one’s expression at home (paperbacks, classic, hi-fi) and leaving the public sphere to soulless pragmatism?88
This review was a prelude to a more sustained confrontation between the two, in a 1984 television debate chaired by Michael Ignatieff.89 Gellner repeated the charge made above in greater detail, insisting that a solid identity was incompatible with modern science, and going on to praise the egalitarianism of industrialism and its ability to diminish conflict – leading to a simple charge: ‘Don’t live on it and then spit on it’.90 Taylor argued in contrast that disenchantment was much overrated, and that the self could somehow be anchored in a renewed sense of community.
Gellner maintained cordial relations with Charles Taylor, though he once remarked privately that he wondered if Taylor realized the extent to which Gellner disliked hermeneutics, Marxism and Catholicism, in Gellner’s view the pillars of Taylor’s thought. His attitude to Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method was very different, the scathing and brutal character of his criticism perhaps linked to their shared background in Central Europe. The quietness of Canada’s past might be some excuse for Taylor’s naïvety; the historical record of Central Europe meant that Feyerabend ought to have known better.
Feyerabend’s position developed from a central claim, namely that the philosophy of science had been unable to successfully locate the scientific method. Gellner had no problem with this premise, going even further and suggesting that it is unlikely that there will ever be a successful theory of this sort.91 All that we can do is to look at styles of thought, and to specify the one which has led to successful discoveries. But that was not Feyerabend’s reaction. Rather than following Gellner’s line, or remaining a mere sceptic, he proposed ‘methodological anarchism’ on the rather paradoxical grounds that no particular method works, and that therefore allowing everything will lead us to something like the truth.92 The recommendation that ‘anything goes’ was combined with a series of attitudes that Gellner clearly loathed. It was ignorant, referring to the non-Western world as tribal, seemingly unaware of the character of the very different civilizations of the pre-industrial world; it was facile, pretending that consistency in outlook did not matter; it was delusional, in imagining that normal physical laws did not exist; and it was deeply unattractive in suggesting that violence was justified given the rigidities of organized society.93
In a sense, existentialism is not, despite itself, very far removed from anarchism. The premium placed on authenticity makes the establishment of morality impossible, as Sartre’s failure to produce his promised treatise on ethics effectively demonstrated, because what one values one day might well be replaced on the next by a different object of affection, endorsed with equal passion. An element of Sartre’s reaction to the infinite openness of life, recognized by Gellner in a review of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, is that the urge to commit fully can lead to the endorsement of violence.94 The review itself was a coming to terms with Sartre, considering him as a figure from a particular period, but pointing out, accurately, that the attempt to marry Marxism and existentialism does not really work. Gellner encapsulated the book’s essence in an aphorism: ‘History is the story of class struggle, but in the idiom of Huis Clos [No Exit]’.95
At various points in Legitimation of Belief, Gellner approvingly quoted Gaston Bachelard’s quip that the world in which we think is not the same as the one in which we live.96 This view of the power of science, so pithily expressed, led to an attack on phenomenology’s attempt to confirm the taken-for-granted meanings of our daily world, our Lebenswelt:
In the days when the Lebenswelt was simply the world, die Welt, no one felt much need to demonstrate its existence and importance … To make that Lebenswelt ultimate is, ironically, to violate real common sense, or to give a false phenomenology of our world … In the course of claiming to ‘suspend’ it, the phenomenologists have in effect done quite the reverse. The alleged suspension constitutes a kind of vindication, a justification of the ordinary world as such, leading it to be treated as ultimate in its own sphere, and no longer treated as a rival or dated scientific theory.97
If we want to know what a table really is, especially if we plan to manufacture tables, we should, and more importantly do, turn our attention to the cognitive norms Gellner identified in Legitimation of Belief.
For the ghost, the table is a bundle of actual sensations. For the machine, the table is a congeries of whirling particles. Either of these views deserves respect. The one view which cannot be taken seriously, except as an affectation in the philosopher’s study, is that the table is a table.98
It is not surprising that Gellner’s sabbatical year in California directed his attention towards ethnomethodology, then at the height of its power and influence. This branch of sociology had as its object the authentication of everyday life, the desire to demonstrate that quotidian social practices allow society to be created and maintained. Gellner’s appraisal of what he considered to be the Californian way of subjectivity was given as a paper to a conference of ethnomethodologists in Edinburgh in the early 1970s. The paper included anthropological asides on the movement’s style of exposition, and it caused great offence. But the attack was deadly serious. Underneath his jokes about accountability, indexicality and reflexivity, Gellner pointed to both idealism and indifference to genuine science – or, rather, a lack of means by which real knowledge could be created or explained. He then amplified his earlier view about the sloppiness of countercultural thought, criticizing Daniel Bell’s claim that countercultural ideals represented nothing less than a challenge to capitalism.
A really advanced industrial society does not any longer require cold rationality from its consumers; at most, it may demand it of its producers. But as it gets more advanced, the ratio both of personnel and of their time is tilted progressively more and more in favour of consumption, as against production. More consumers, fewer producers; less time at work, more at leisure. And in consumption, all tends towards ease and facility of manipulation rather than rigour and coldness. A modern piece of machinery may be a marvel of sustained, abstract, rigorous engineering thought; but its operating controls must be such that they can rapidly and easily be internalised by the average user, without arduousness or strain. So the user lives in a world in which most things have an air of easy, ‘natural’, ‘spontaneous’ manipulability. And why should not the world itself be conceived in this manner?99
Gellner was a constant critic of religion. He resembled Weber in having a certain respect for ‘genuine’ monotheistic belief, hoping that at least someone would remain faithful to established doctrines just in case they did ultimately prove to be true. But he had complete scorn for modernist theology. He disliked Wittgensteinians who justified religion on the grounds that it was but one way of life amongst others, self-perpetuated via its own practices. But this justification was part of a larger argument. Religious belief could be justified on the grounds that it was functional, and it could be maintained if its practitioners hold, in effect, ‘double citizenship’ – in both religious and general society. This was only possible, however, because the cognitive claims of religion, so vital to authentic believers, had been downplayed or ignored.100 These manoeuvres were condemned by Gellner as facile.
Gellner made rather similar points against Western Marxism. Noting the tortuousness of Althusserian epistemology, he remarked: ‘like the man who could hardly watch the play for watching his reactions to it, these men seem to theorize not so much about society and reality as about their own theorizing about society’.101 In this vein, he liked to cite David Downes’s quip that praxis makes perfect.102 Something of a reductio ad absurdum of this style of thought was reached, Gellner wrote, in the account of the Asiatic mode of production offered by Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst in their Althusserian phase. The categories of Marxist theory were expounded in a manner which established that this particular mode could not have existed. Their later reference to empirical reality, that is, their examination of the historical record, was but an afterthought.103
Gellner’s overall philosophy is nuanced with regard to epistemology, but severe toward thinkers offering more moral warmth and harmony than they can deliver. Let us reconsider both sides of this epistemological coin.
Gellner’s view of modern rational science rested on normative foundations which can be underlined by an analogy with liberalism, properly understood. Liberals who simply describe others as ideological, as is far too often the case, naïvely presume that their position is neutral, preordained, even somehow inscribed in the heart of humanity. This is not the case. Liberalism is an ideology amongst others. It is a peculiar one, for it does not seek to control every bit of reality, to claim authority over every part of life, public and private. It is not, to use a Sartrean expression, a totalizing ideology. Only with this in mind can liberalism be defended – as a world view which is rather empty morally, enabling technological development and innovation but also, in my own view, sufficient powers of constraint to sometimes prevent catastrophe. Gellner wrote about the ‘end of ideology’ school in this way. But the point here is that his account of rational science is subtle because it is similarly self-conscious. There is no excuse for complacency, because neither mechanism nor empiricism is fully grounded. We can imagine different worlds. Nonetheless, these approaches have a measure of effectiveness which keep us in their thrall. It is indeed very difficult to imagine politics in the advanced world managing without the prospect of economic growth created by modern science.104 Furthermore, Gellner’s concern for the details of ordinary life, for improved standards of living and increased life expectancies, has much to recommend it.
Gellner’s criticisms of the ‘re-enchanters’ can only be understood by introducing some complexities to the discussion. Why were these polemics so important to him? Why spend so much time on thinkers he regarded as essentially trivial? When explicitly asked this question he once replied on a postcard: ‘Envy. Why should they be in the warmth when I am in the cold’. It is certainly easy to detect a personal element at work here: the view of humans as seeking to avoid ‘gaffes’ surely came naturally to an immigrant, whose Jewish background, in his own view, made it hard to avoid making faux pas of one sort or another. Linked to this is his insistence that no position is fully grounded. At the Paris presentation of his paper on the ‘gaffeavoiding’ character of human beings Gellner was criticized for, in Aron’s words, the austerity of his view of rationality. An unpublished postscript began by insisting that his view of rationality derived from an interpretation of our situation, and not from his own predilections which may or may not, he insisted, be austere. But he directed his attention towards a view of rationality proposed by Donald Davidson, which centred on the idea of personal development. Gellner would have none of it. After doubting that different cultures shared the same set of values, he then described the situation facing an individual.
[T]he succession of states frequently does not have a ‘progressive’ form of A’, A’’, A’’’, etc., but rather, an oscillating form of A’, A’’, A’, A’’, etc. Everyone knows that this is characteristically the case in inner conflicts within the breast of a single individual, but it is also liable to happen in politics, science, and no doubt elsewhere. And once this is so, then of course there simply is no overall direction which could bring us normative salvation.105
With this in mind, he directly attacked Davidson’s position:
The idea that a change from A to A’, where the two successive conditions differ in their norms or values as well as in other ways, is ‘rational’, can only make sense if some meta-world or meta-value is assumed, in terms of which they can be compared, so that the later one be declared superior.106
Meta-values needed to be discussed openly, rather than assumed or smuggled into the equation when no one is looking.
Gellner’s comments here, and in the debate with Charles Taylor discussed above, allow us to draw distinctions between descriptive and prescriptive aspects of his thinking. Descriptively, we can surely question his insistence that there is little that we can really believe in, that scientific knowledge has left us disenchanted. Are our lives so empty? How ‘warm’ really were people’s lives in the past? Significant victories over disease and early death, perhaps especially over infant mortality, can support the argument that the advanced world is far from disenchanted, even taking into account the obvious diminution in religious belief. As it happens, Gellner was quite keen to make this argument himself. His insistence on a measure of stoicism is sometimes stressed so insistently that it obscures his more positive appraisal of this disenchanted world – that it privileges material progress.107 But a second question must be asked of his position. If disenchantment is inevitable, what should we make of the many re-enchanting creeds that are professed? Gellner’s general explanation for the fact that we do not inhabit a Weberian ‘iron cage’ but rather a more permissive ‘rubber’ alternative has been noted already: only production requires cold logic, while consumption is free from this constraint. Still, he insists that disenchantment ought to mark our attitudes toward the world. One element of this position is aesthetic, an extreme dislike on his part for sloppy, question-begging thought. But more importantly, he contradicts his own frequent charge that re-enchanters of one sort or another are trivial, the mere providers of cultural entertainment. When pushed, Gellner was prone to argue that the desire to re-enchant the world was in fact dangerous. He made this particularly clear in his television debate with Charles Taylor, attacking at length the latter’s desire ‘for a self more at peace with the community’:
[T]he only way to do it in the large anonymous mass society is by major … political theatre productions, such as are in effect typical of the authoritarian regimes of the thirties … where belongingness, to some extent hierarchy, but certainly belongingness – incidentally, exclusion of the outsider – were all deeply symbolized so that their affective life and their political life dovetailed precisely in the kind of way you seem to desire … The romantic Left and the romantic Right do sometimes meet.108
Gellner went on to question Taylor’s claim that liberal democracy expresses our values. He refused to believe this. There had been widespread accommodation to the Nazi order, and that order was entirely compatible with one significant strand in European thought. The romanticism of ‘roots’, when joined with social Darwinism, was, he argued in his critique of Hannah Arendt, as much a retreat from reason as was the worship of historical forces.109 He continued to press his attack on Taylor:
[T]he main Nazi critique of Weimar was that the outward institutions and the inner feelings didn’t cohere. They used language which overlaps with yours: that the purely instrumental, technical outer world didn’t correspond to deep inner feelings. And the justification of this new romanticism was precisely to broaden the congruence. Well you can’t have it both ways. If this is what you want, if your complaint against excessive modernity is the insulation of the self, I’m not quite clear in the name of what you reject some versions which are very full-blooded and, alas, gave the participants an enormous amount of satisfaction .…110
Gellner admitted that he could not fully ground his own liberal leanings. Modern, affluent liberal democratic society seemed to him to rest on fragile foundations. The right strategy was to analyse its character, allowing us to confront its essential problems and to consider the options that remain. What was needed was a coherent philosophy of history.
____________________
1Alan Ryan reviewed the book respectfully, though he understandably drew attention to the lack of proper copy-editing, in the New Statesman (24 January 1975). Bernard Crick was enthusiastic in the Observer (9 February 1975). Peter Mew, ‘Wot Not Who We Are?’, Inquiry, vol. 19, 1975, obviously enjoyed the book, but accused it (p. 125) of political irresponsibility on the grounds of excessive quietism:
‘Reading Gellner you could be forgiven for thinking that all that is needed, following a general injection of rationality, is a contrite and quiescent return to the mainstream of Western society under the pure guidance of science and technology. This goes deeper than nonsense; it is the disingenuous solution of a swashbuckling liberal who has succeeded in our society and wishes to re-endorse it, who ignores the fact that science and technology are not simply there to be used for the benefit of all. In this connection, it is capitalism which “transcends cultural boundaries” and effectively decides what course science and technology will take … The alternative to opting out is, of course, to channel one’s energies into the struggle to break the fetters of capitalism … ‘. Alasdair MacIntyre seemed to seek payback in his review for The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, vol. 29, 1978, for Gellner’s varied criticisms of his own work – most notably Gellner’s 1971 attack on ‘The Belief Machine’, reprinted in The Devil in Modern Philosophy, London, 1974. MacIntyre’s main point was that Gellner did not offer enough of a positive philosophy, being content to proceed by analyzing the errors of other thinkers. He was clearly out to wound, mocking the style, indeed going so far as to suggest (p. 108) that ‘jokes and sneers are often symptoms of status anxiety and ambivalence … ‘. In contrast, Jürgen Habermas was deeply impressed by the book. He did not review it, but told me that he recommended, without success, that it be translated by Suhrkamp. An indication of Gellner’s disappointment was immediate. Paul Stirling was staying with the Gellners in Hampshire on the weekend that the Sunday papers had the book to review. ‘I remember him going to buy them all, and that he seemed disappointed’ (‘Ménage à Trois on a Raft’, Cambridge Anthropology, vol. 19, 1996/7).
2Steven Lukes interviewed by Brendan O’Leary, 27 February 2001. Gellner had considerable admiration for Collingwood, comparing him favourably to Wittgenstein: the relativism of the former was troubled, that of the latter merely complaisant (‘Thought and time, or the reluctant relativist’, in his The Devil in Modern Philosophy, London, 1974).
3Legitimation of Belief, Cambridge, 1974, chapter 1.
6Ibid., pp. 71–127.
7G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind, London, 1949.
8T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, 1962.
9There are various letters from Chomsky in the Gellner Archive between 1968 and 1971, discussing Wittgenstein, Ryle and Descartes, providing references that had been requested, and seemingly endorsing some of Gellner’s interpretations of his work. Gellner seems to have sent him his ‘On Chomsky’, New Society, vol. 13, 1969. He continued to review Chomsky’s books in later years. Their more tendentious exchange on political matters is described below in chapter 11.
10Probably he meant something more specific, namely the greatest living ‘active’ philosopher. For Popper was still alive, and his impact on Gellner’s work, and Gellner’s admiration of Popperian ideas, was unrivalled. Doubts about Chomsky’s research programme are by now quite widespread. But this does not affect Gellner’s argument – which concerns the nature of explanation in general rather than Chomskian linguistics in particular.
11Chomsky’s review is widely available, for example in J. Fodor and J. D. Katz, (eds), The Structure of Language, Englewood Cliffs, 1964.
12Much the same position is later taken by Jon Elster, Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, Cambridge, 1989; Solomonic Judgments: Studies in the Limitations of Rationality, Cambridge, 1989, and Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions, Cambridge, 1998.
13Chomsky to Gellner, 21 October 1968. Gellner also cited (Legitimation of Belief, p. 90) the judgement made by Chomsky in his Cartesian Linguistics (New York, 1966, pp. 12 and 81): ‘Ryle is content simply to cite the fact that “intelligent behaviour” has certain properties … these are characterized in terms of “powers”, “propensities” and “dispositions” which are characterized only through scattered examples. These constitute a new myth as mysterious and poorly understood as Descartes’ “mental substance”‘.
14Ryle, The Concept of Mind, p. 326, cited in Legitimation of Belief, p. 102.
15A. Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine, London, 1967.
16Legitimation of Belief, pp. 105–6.
17Ibid., pp. 184–88.
18Ibid., p. 108.
19‘An Ethic of Cognition’, in Spectacles and Predicaments: Essays in Social Theory, Cambridge, 1979, p. 164. This essay, which appeared in 1976 in a volume memorializing Imre Lakatos, should really be read in tandem with Legitimation of Belief – for it highlights the latter’s central claims with particular power.
20Legitimation of Belief, p. 122.
21‘Perhaps, who knows, the world is a Big Cosy Meaningful Unity after all, only we haven’t hit on it yet: or perhaps – excuse my shudder – one of the existing faiths is the true one’ (‘An Ethic of Cognition’, p. 179).
22Legitimation of Belief, pp. 114–5. This characterization of Schopenhauer is amplified later in his Reason and Culture, Oxford, 1992, especially pp. 84–7.
23The quotation immediately above comparing Hume and Ayer points to Gellner’s belief that the logic of the positions of both was radical. But both had settled into the world, rather too comfortably for Gellner’s taste.
24Legitimation of Belief, p. 115.
25D. Hume, The Natural History of Religion [1777], London, 1976, section III, cited in Legitimation of Belief, p. 57.
26‘French Eighteenth-Century Materialism’, in his The Devil in Modern Philosophy.
27Legitimation of Belief, p.118.
28Ibid.
29Probably Gellner exaggerated here – but in a way that in fact helps his own case. Keynes produced a very great deal of social reform because his puritanism was so deeply engrained.
30Legitimation of Belief, chapter 8.
31R. Horton, ‘African Traditional Thought and Western Science’, Africa, vol. 37, 1967.
32Legitimation of Belief, pp. 168–84.
33I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave, (eds), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Cambridge, 1970.
34Popper has a defence for this, namely that piecemeal changes in society allow us to calculate the impact of change. This scarcely removes the contradiction. Anyway Gellner ruthlessly criticizes the defence in Legitimation of Belief, p. 172, principally on the grounds that small changes can be swamped by the sheer remaining bulk of a society’s institutions.
35R. Dahrendorf, ‘Remarks on the Discussion’, in T. W. Adorno, H. Albert, R. Dahrendorf, J. Habermas, H. Pilot and K. R. Popper, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, London, 1976, and ‘Positivism against Hegelianism’, in his Relativism and the Social Sciences, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 6–7. There is a sense in which ‘Positivism against Hegelianism’ is Gellner’s attempt to articulate the debate that never really took place.
36Legitimation of Belief, p. 111.
37‘Positivism against Hegelianism’, pp. 52–3.
38Legitimation of Belief, p. 184.
39Ibid., p. 127.
40The Psychoanalytic Movement: The Cunning of Unreason, 2nd Edn, Oxford, 1993, pp. 12–13.
41With time he learnt to joke about it, imagining Freud chuckling in his grave at such a Freudian misprint (‘Psychoanalysis as a Social Institution: An Anthropological Perspective’, in E. Timms and N. Segal, (eds), Freud in Exile, New Haven, 1988, p. 223).
42Anthony Clare praised ‘a stylish, witty and deceptive readable book’ (Nature, 14 November 1985); Hans Eysenck welcomed and found plausible the sociological attempt to explain the social success of a faulty theory (Institute of Psychiatry Journal, 15 January 1986), whilst the New Statesman saw it as ‘one of those iconoclastic masterpieces of sceptical good sense and fine intelligence that you might come across once in ten years if you’re lucky’ (New Statesman, 31 January 1986). The most sustained treatment of the book (in which a direct comparison, aware of their Jewish roots, is made between Freud and Gellner) was offered by Jose Brunner, in his ‘Foreword’ to the re-issue of the second edition of the book by Blackwell in 2003. Brunner’s doctoral dissertation, supervised by Leszek Kolakowski, was examined by Gellner and G. A. Cohen. It appeared as Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis, Oxford, 1995.
43P. Anderson, ‘Science, Politics, Enchantment’, in J. A. Hall and I. C. Jarvie, (eds), Transition to Modernity: Essays on Power, Wealth and Belief, Cambridge, 1992, p. 204.
44Winnicott to Gellner, 17 May 1966. Gellner had kept this letter for a purpose. Suspecting that he would be accused, as he had been when attacking linguistic philosophy, of a basic lack of knowledge, he intended to produce the letter to show that his attempt at research had been blocked. But he could not find the letter, while the book met with more approval than condemnation. The Gellner Archive also contains a letter from A. H. Williams, the business secretary of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, to Mrs. A. Hayley, 27 October 1965, in which exactly the same arguments as those of Winnicott were made.
45The Psychoanalytic Movement, pp. 17–23.
47E. Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior, New York, 1967, and Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order, New York, 1971.
48The Psychoanalytic Movement, chapter 7.
49Ibid., pp. 182–6.
50Legitimation of Belief, p. 99.
51The Psychoanalytic Movement, pp. 94–7.
52Ibid., pp. 95–7.
53Ibid., pp. 156–67.
54Grünbaum wrote to Gellner, 18 November 1976, after their first meeting, thanking him for his interest in one of his papers, and expressing a desire to meet again soon.
55The Psychoanalytic Movement, pp. 171–3.
56Ibid., p. 140.
57Ibid., p. 193.
58Bowlby to Gellner, 21 November 1985.
59‘Psychiatry and Salvation: Discussion Paper’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, vol. 80, 1987, p. 760.
60‘Psychoanalysis, Social Role and Testability’, in W. Dryden and C. Feltham, (eds), Psychotherapy and Its Discontents, Buckingham, 1992, chapter 3.
61Ibid., p. 44.
62‘Psychoanalysis as a Social Institution’, p. 227.
63Ibid., p. 226.
64Ibid., p. 225.
65‘Reflections on Depth Psychology and the New Counselling’, unpublished paper, July 1985, Gellner Archive.
66‘Vicious Circles of the Psyche’, Guardian, 23 April, 1992, p. 29.
67‘Freud’s Social Contract’, in his Anthropology and Politics: Revolutions in the Sacred Grove, Oxford, 1995.
68‘Introduction to the Second Edition’, The Psychoanalytic Movement.
69M. Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’ in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, (eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New York, 1946, p. 139.
70Ibid.
71Ibid., p. 140.
72Ibid., pp. 154–5.
73There are of course many examples of the former, perhaps most interestingly in recent years D. Bell, ‘The Return of the Sacred? The Argument on the Future of Religion’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 28, 1977.
74In a celebrated meeting with General Ludendorff in 1919, Weber described his view of democracy in these terms: ‘In a democracy the people choose a leader whom they trust. Then the chosen man says, “Now shut your mouths and obey me. The people and the parties are no longer free to interfere in the leader’s business”‘. Ludendorff felt that he could live with such a system (Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, New York, 1975, p. 653). Weber’s political views were first fully discussed by W. Mommsen, whose Max Weber and German Politics 1890–1920, Chicago, 1984, contains a discussion of Weber’s wartime views on what should be done with territories conquered to the East – views which justify the use of the word ‘repulsive’ in this paragraph. Brendan O’Leary has pointed out to me that Weber’s views were consistent only in their decisionistic character – for he wobbled between proposing party competition to generate good parliamentary leaders and enhancing presidential power.
75A part of his address was translated and published as J. Habermas, ‘On Social Identity’, Telos, vol. 19, 1974.
76C. Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, Concord, 1991, and The Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge (MA), 1989. The latter volume, and the later A Secular Age, Cambridge (MA), 2007, suggest in places that the underwriting of a solidary self can most securely be achieved through religious belief.
77Plough, Sword, and Book, London, 1988, p. 41.
78This paper (now in his Relativism and the Social Sciences), given at a small conference on rationality in Paris in 1979 organized by Jon Elster, apparently made a large impression on the participants, including Raymond Aron, Bernard Williams, Brian Barry, Gerry Cohen and Donald Davidson. Aron criticized the ‘severity’ of Gellner’s view, as did both Cohen and Davidson. Gellner’s response to Davidson’s remarks is considered below. After he gave his paper, Patricia Williams remarked that the paper showed to many that he was really a continental philosopher.
79Anderson, ‘Science, Politics, Enchantment’, p. 200.
80Legitimation of Belief, p. 207.
81‘The Last Pragmatist, or the Behaviourist Platonist’ and ‘Pragmatism and the Importance of Being Earnest’, both in his Spectacles and Predicaments. One of the papers was given at Harvard, with Quine in the audience.
82‘The Last Pragmatist’, p. 211.
83‘Pragmatism’, p. 253. But neo-Darwinists differ between gradualists and those who believe in punctuated equilibrium – differing both in theoretical reasoning and on the data in the fossil record.
84‘The Last Pragmatist’, pp. 227–33.
85Ibid., pp. 221–40.
86Ibid., pp. 220, 235.
87J. Habermas, R. Rorty and E. A. Gellner, ‘Enlightenment – Yes or No?’, in J. Niznik and J. T. Sanders, (eds), Debating the State of Philosophy, Westport, 1996. Gellner died before his text was revised, and it accordingly gives a vivid sense of his speaking style. On this occasion Gellner drew a distinction between the admirable clarity of Quine and Rorty and the deliberate obscurity of Derrida and Foucault, deeming the latter ‘countercultural clowns’, unworthy of rational opposition.
88‘The Absolute in Braces’, in Spectacles and Predicaments, p. 39.
89M. Ignatieff, with Ernest Gellner and Charles Taylor, ‘The Tough and the Tender’, in M. Ignatieff, B. Bourne, S. Bellow, E. Eichler and D. Herman, (eds). (Voices: Modernity and Its Discontents, Nottingham, 1987.
90Ibid., p. 32.
91‘Beyond Truth and Falsehood, or No Method in My Madness’, in Spectacles and Predicaments, p. 186.
92Ibid., p. 185.
93Ibid., pp. 196, 197, 197, 195.
94‘Period piece’, in Spectacles and Predicaments.
95Ibid., p. 110. Gellner discussed Sartre in passing in Legitimation of Belief, p. 199, noting the facility of his sense of freedom, characterized by J. F. Revel in a phrase in which Gellner delighted: ‘le self service de sa conscience libre’.
96Legitimation of Belief, pp. 101, 194.
97Ibid., pp. 195–7.
98Ibid.
99‘Ethnomethodology: The Re-enchantment Industry or the Californian Way of Subjectivity’, in Spectacles and Predicaments, pp. 61–2.
100‘The Rubber Cage: Disenchantment with Disenchantment’, in Culture, Identity and Politics, Cambridge, 1987, pp. 159–61.
101Ibid, pp. 161–2.
102‘Period Piece’, p. 108.
103B. Hindess and P. Q. Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production, London, 1975.
104This sentence reflects my own view. In the next chapter we will see that Gellner does try to imagine social life without ever-increasing growth. One should remember that his theory of nationalism suggests that deep conflict will arise only when social inequality is combined with an ethnic marker.
105‘Postscript to the paper for Jon Elster’s Conference’, Gellner Archive, p. 5.
106Ibid., p. 6.
107Ignatieff, Gellner and Taylor, ‘The Tough and the Tender’, pp. 36–7.
108Ibid., p. 33.
109‘Accounting for the Horror’, Times Literary Supplement, 6 August 1982, reprinted as ‘From Königsberg to Manhattan (or Hannah, Rahel, Martin and Elfriede or Thy Neighbour’s Gemeinschaft)’, in Culture, Identity and Politics, pp. 86–90.
110Ignatieff, Gellner and Taylor, ‘The Tough and the Tender’, p. 34.