In the early 1980s, Gellner planned a major cooperative publication that would deal with our present understanding of the ideas and institutions of the history of mankind. Several short essays were commissioned by Gellner, but the project as a whole was not completed. Instead, Gellner wrote Plough, Sword, and Book, a monograph that was enormously important to him. The book is dedicated to his children, and it is clearly intended as a statement of his fundamental views. Its content overlaps with that of Thought and Change, and it does not disavow the theses of that earlier work. This is a strength and a weakness: some points are restated with greater clarity, but others – notably, the analysis of nationalism – are skimmed over very quickly indeed. But the book’s arguments about cognitive growth draw as much from Legitimation of Belief’s reconstruction of modern epistemology. This makes the book extremely dense, and in the final analysis less than successful.1 Gellner realized this himself when he came to read Patricia Crone’s Pre-Industrial Societies, commenting that the fabulous clarity of that book is what he had sought to achieve.2 But the particular interest of his book lies in its three novel elements, the introduction, as it were, of new cards in his intellectual deck. Each novelty derives from what might be termed a pre-commitment to the work of Max Weber.
The premise of the book is simply that we should be explicit about our place in history. We always harbour background assumptions of this sort; much is to be gained from examining them in order to better understand our situation and the options it allows us. Gellner’s starting point is based on his analyses of the Soviet debates about stages of historical development. His own approach is Weberian. He insists that there are three stages of human history – pre-agrarian, agrarian and industrial – and that their workings are best understood with reference to the three sources of social power – economic, political and ideological – whose autonomous character had been recognized and elucidated by Weber.3
Second, Gellner fills in a gap noted in the earlier discussion of Thought and Change, namely the lack of any account of the origins of the modern world. His version is, again, Weberian in spirit. Gellner had no time for views of an inevitable progression from simple to complex societies, rejecting at all times this ‘acorn to oak tree’ approach. His account of the transition from agrarian to industrial society stresses its accidental, fortuitous nature. What needs explaining is the fact that a transition was possible at all. The language used to describe it therefore talks of ‘escape’, the removal of ‘blocks’, and even of a ‘miracle’.4
The third innovation concerns the realm of ideas. The most intellectually engaged pages of the book discuss cognitive evolution. These passages offer a causal account of science’s origins, complementing the argument for its importance in Thought and Change and the account of its functioning in Legitimation of Belief. That cognition plays such a large role in his account of modernity’s creation is surprising, given that belief is seen as only one of three sources of social power – and it is perhaps unfortunate, too, as it is one of the factors that make the book feel unbalanced. If Gellner is clearly Weberian in stressing the autonomy of political power, he is quite as much so in this context. Weber wished to argue for something stronger than what might be termed ‘reflectivism’, present in both Marx and Durkheim, according to which ideas derive from and, so to speak, do the work of more basic social processes. Gellner remains opposed, as one would expect, to a general idealism according to which ideas alone drive reality, but he accepts that ideas can sometimes have that effect. Rational science, once unleashed, has the capacity to endlessly change the social arrangements of advanced liberal industrialism.
The method of the book is philosophical. Gellner stresses at the start that the account is deductive, that a specification of key features of particular social orders leads to arguments dealing with both stability and change. But one should not underestimate the background knowledge in comparative historical and anthropological analysis on which he draws when stating modestly his belief that his argument does not at least contradict known facts.5 His personal experience of urbanization in the Czechoslovakia of his youth underpins an awareness of different worlds, of Islamic and Marxist societies as well as the European anciens régimes that faced Enlightenment thinkers.
Interest in the origins of human society had been apparent in Gellner’s writings about Soviet Marxism, and seems to have been further encouraged by his move to the University of Cambridge’s Department of Social Anthropology, where he was asked to address this issue as part of a lecture series on the subject, hosted appropriately enough by Darwin College.6 Gellner felt it necessary to address the problem of how society is possible at all. The reasoning behind this formulation is simple. Human beings are not genetically determined in a way that results in a single form of social life. To the contrary, what is most clear from the historical record is the astonishing diversity of human societies. But herein lies the problem, at least for those – including James Frazer – who take empiricism seriously. Why shouldn’t the ability to create new associations, as is posited by the sensationalist psychology of David Hume, lead to an endless free-flowing recombination of social life? Why should there be any limits to human expressiveness and diversity? Such a view has, after all, been recommended by various thinkers on the left – by Sartre, whose notion of authenticity allows one to change one’s mind at will, and more recently by Roberto Unger, keen to restore movement to ‘blocked’ societies.7 But Gellner insists that social life does not at all conform to these hopes or expectations; diversity is, so to speak, orderly. Humans genetics permit cultural variation, but life within particular cultures is bounded and predictable.
The thinker who had sensed this problem most clearly was, in Gellner’s eyes, Durkheim. The empiricists failed to realize that our concepts are compulsive, forcing us to see the world in particular ways. Kant realized this, but was criticized by Durkheim for failing to see that the character of our concepts, and the compulsion that attaches to them, is the gift of society rather than a property inherent in every human mind.8 Durkheim’s account is well known: moments of collective effervescence are responsible for the creation of social norms. Aided by drugs and alcohol, by the night, by music and by dance, heightened collective awareness is achieved. This is remembered in the sober light of morning, and it is recreated time and again by ritual. Gellner returned to his long-standing view as to what was original in Durkheim, avoiding the now rather hackneyed view that religion is society’s self-worship. Even if Durkheim’s account of ritual’s origins proves insufficient – and there is some degree of irony in Gellner’s rendering of drunken dancing round camp fires – we still need to explain the compulsiveness of our concepts.
A great deal of attention is given to the ritualized cognition of this Durkheimian world. Gellner returns here to his earlier work, particularly the 1960s essays on anthropological method and the discussion of pre-modern and scientific thought styles in Legitimation of Belief. But he highlights his argument with a new and striking metaphor: a multi-periscope submarine. He presents a picture of active human beings unable to change a social formation because of its circular, self-serving protective devices. His starting point is the simultaneous presence of referential and non-referential statements.
[S]ensitivity to some external natural feature … is normally blended in with other controls, internal to the system. In this way the external reporting is not ‘pure’, and the pure ‘empirical’ element can mostly be overridden by the other controls or dimensions. If the leader of the hunt is ritually impure, then conditions for hunting are impropitious – never mind the ‘real’ natural circumstances. Moreover, the various periscopes, or sensitivities, are diversely constructed; hence their elements do not, and cannot, ‘add up’ with each other.9
The lack of a single, universally applicable criterion for judging claims and beliefs makes cognitive development impossible in early societies. This system is at once rational and non-progressive.
What is the intellectual source of this model? In a letter to Dr Oruç Aruoba, who had translated some of his work into Turkish, he acknowledged that his model of primitive language had been inspired by Wittgenstein.
The multi-purpose and semi-autonomous subsistence of meaning which makes up the primitive use of language (and much use of language amongst us outside science) is indeed inspired by Wittgenstein’s ideal of language games, and his restatement of it.
The reason why I didn’t acknowledge it in the book is not, as you suggest in your notes, prejudices perpetuated from Words and Things. At least not consciously. The point is this: I think the ‘language games’ approach to language is a valid account of the non-scientific use of language but not of science. Wittgenstein wrongly generalized it for all language, and considered this idea to be the solution, or rather the dissolution, of philosophic problems. It is nothing of the kind. Most of the philosophical problems arise from the fact that a different use of language emerged, namely the single currency, united, single purpose and referentially exclusive use of language … so I used Wittgenstein’s idea, but for exactly the opposite purpose for which he intended it. Perhaps I was wrong in not admitting it. I thought it would confuse the issue if I did.10
It is as important to recognize another shift in his thought, influenced perhaps by his engagements with Soviet Marxism. Gellner’s earlier writings drew a straightforward binary contrast between pre-modern and modern systems of thought. His philosophy of history complicated matters, identifying three major stages in human history, each of which allowed for considerable internal variation.
Gellner’s treatment of ‘foragia’ merits attention. The low population density of primitive life, together with the lack of any division of labour and the absence of material surplus, is described in graphic terms. He is amused by the way in which ideological presuppositions have determined the ways that this mode of production has been characterized. The view from the right is that of Friedrich Hayek, who sees primitive hunters and foragers as so obsessively communitarian that economic growth and social development are completely ruled out.11 This view is dubbed ‘Viennese’ by Gellner, on the grounds that the cosmopolitan, ‘open’ liberalism associated with that city was threatened – or, rather, felt itself to be threatened – by the arrival of large numbers of poor, kin-bound Balkan migrants in the aftermath of the First World War. At the opposite extreme stands the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, who emphasizes that this mode of subsistence requires little ‘work’ as sufficient food can be found within a rather limited time. Sahlins then expresses admiration for the absence of any bourgeois spirit among primitives who do not produce beyond their basic needs – theirs is the first affluent society.12 In this view history is not at all progressive: as Gellner puts it, at first nobody worked very hard, then most worked, and now all work far too much.
Gellner does not offer a dogmatic assessment of the Stone Age, noting that it is hard to do so given that data drawn from surviving primitive societies is probably tainted by contact with more advanced civilizations.13 However, at least two possibilities are taken seriously. Gellner cites the work of James Woodburn on the Hadza of East Africa, which observes a difference between immediate gratification and delayed return, the implication being that this element of social organization might have led to settled agricultural production.14 But Gellner was well aware, based on his knowledge of pastoral nomadic societies, that Sahlins’s position is at least consistent with archaeological findings showing that the cultivation of crops was already familiar to primitives – that is, that the Neolithic Revolution did not result from a sudden technological discovery. For pastoralists are exemplars of a widespread desire to escape the workings of the state. They are fiercely egalitarian, highly mobile, relatively affluent, militarily precocious, and stateless. The last of these conditions is explained to some extent by their mobility. Tribesmen are poor fodder for states. It would be worthwhile in principle to tax the resources of pastoralists but the practical difficulty of doing so means that the effort is rarely made, and even more rarely successful. A tax gatherer who meets with nomads is unlikely to find them in the same place twice. The North African Berber tribesmen Gellner knew were wont to keep jewels hidden inside their clothes so that, if their sheep were stolen, they would have the capital to re-establish themselves elsewhere. Agrarian society results less from a technological discovery or a disposition to delay returns than from the presence of agricultural producers who are unable to move around. This is archetypically the case with those whose means of subsistence depend upon irrigation agriculture.
Whatever explains the transition to agrarian life, there can be no doubt that a new form of society was created on the back of the surplus generated by a growing population of peasant producers. The presence of experts in coercion and in knowledge, swordsmen and clerks, demonstrated that the division of labour had arrived. Accordingly, Gellner charges Durkheim – and, one might add, most occidental social theory – with being terribly wrong to offer a binary contrast between mechanical and organic societies, the former lacking but the latter wholly marked by the division of labour. High agrarian society exhibits a significant division of labour, about which Gellner writes with great power.
It is obvious that a surplus can be extracted from peasants by means of coercion. But Gellner makes other interesting observations. Life in the agrarian age was lived in a pure Malthusian condition of perennial scarcity. Hunters and foragers could face disastrous ecological conditions, but low population density combined with the ability to travel incredibly long distances and rejoin others with whom social ties are shared meant that survival rates were rather high. Peasants cannot travel in this way, and normally belong to no larger culture. In these circumstances coercive capacity plays a role; defence of the storehouse can ensure survival.15 But this is only one explanation for power’s tendency to become concentrated. More obvious is the sheer logic of competition. Given that a rival is likely to seize every advantage, it makes sense to do the same at the earliest possible opportunity.16 And a further consideration follows: once a powerful concentration has led to the creation of a single state, other groups are forced, if they are to avoid being exploited, to form secondary states. But Gellner’s thought is very sophisticated on this point, stressing that agrarian states habitually do not possess the absolute power that they often claim for themselves. A measure of central coordination often goes hand in hand with effective decentralization; rulers, variously comprised of warriors, clerks, burghers and bureaucrats, often sit on top of laterally insulated peasant ‘societies’, based on distinctive cultures within which order is provided on a self-help basis, often through kinship linkages.17 This is clearly true of the pastoral tribes in the classic heartland of Islam. The inability of states to penetrate and organize the ‘societies’ on which they rest was made obvious to Gellner as the result of his fieldwork amongst the pastoral hill tribes of Morocco.18
If the sword is mightier than the plough, it does not however exist in isolation. For the agrarian mode of production was not, so to speak, so closed that it allowed for only one ideological superstructure. To the contrary, the period between about 600 BC and 700 AD sees the emergence of the world religions and ethics. At issue in what Karl Jaspers had called ‘the axial age’ is, in Gellner’s eyes, a fundamental change in ideology between a world of ritual and one of concepts.19 Writing and literacy allow experts in meaning to specify doctrines. Such a crucial development in world history needs explanation, and Gellner suggests that the increasingly abstract way of understanding the world probably appealed because of greater social complexity due to urbanization and an associated development of crafts.20 The absolute exemplar of such a conceptualist theorist is Plato. The attempt in The Republic to sacralize concepts, to give them a purity of form that would ensure obedience to them, is seen as a blueprint for the maximally effective way of ruling agrarian society. But Plato had been wrong, Gellner suggests, in presuming that conceptual purity would have generalized appeal.21 Far more potent are the personal stories at the heart of the world religions, together with their ability to offer promises of salvation to all. But the key point about conceptual Platonism and the world religions is that they tend to be, despite their tidiness and purity, at once descriptive and normative. Differently put, they characteristically underwrite social orders in the same manner as did the ritualistic thought described by Durkheim.
Relations between social power and intellectual life are likely to be complex. A distinction can be drawn between tensions that result from the specificities of organization and those that result from the logic of cognition. The former help us understand variety within the agrarian world, the latter suggest an entirely different social formation. Let us take each in turn.
Specialists in coercion will seek to regularize and simplify their lives by adding legitimacy to brute strength. A measure of obedience can be created by convincing people that the social order is just, and that there is no alternative to it. Power utilizes experts in such legitimation, hoping to achieve what became known in the West as ‘Caesaropapism’, that is, a system firmly uniting political power and religious authority. But this sort of marriage does not always take place. Conflict can result when these types of power do not combine neatly. In Nations and Nationalism, Gellner offered a suggestive scheme of binary oppositions, seeking to distinguish varieties within agrarian political structures. First, warriors and clerks could be centralized or uncentralized, with the former position represented by the papacy among clerks, the latter by the diffuse social organization of Muslim ulama.22 Second, rulers could be gelded – literally, of course, in the case of eunuchs – or they could remain stallions, as was overwhelmingly true of the warrior aristocracy of feudal Europe. Third, membership of the elite could be open or closed. The former position was that of Confucianism, the latter that of the principle of heredity enshrined in the Hindu caste order. The final contrast concerned political-religious fusion, present at times in the military orders of Latin Christendom, but more usually absent, as in Hinduism and Confucianism.23 Plough, Sword, and Book paints the same picture in less abstract terms.24 One characteristic pattern, that of the Latin West, presents a division of labour according to which some rule, others pray and the rest work. But just as important is the fact that a military chief’s legitimacy may well enable him to overcome challenges from within the military elite. Hereditary rulers may depend on clerks to authenticate the blood line on which their power formally depends. A second pattern is that of the classical heartland of the Islamic world. Here the continual circulation of elites based on the interaction between town and tribe is at the heart of Gellner’s sociology of Islam, described and analyzed in the next chapter. A third pattern is that of Hindu politics, ‘the collective snobbery between unequal groups, carried on in the idiom of purity’.25
Agrarian society is likely to be stable. Most of human history is far better understood, Gellner often remarked, through Talcott Parsons rather than Marx: stability is the norm, fundamental change the exception. There are multiple reasons for this. It is very unlikely that traders or merchants can bring into being a new mode of production, even though their activities might lead us to predict this. Merchants are marginalized, either in status terms or by delegating their role to a particular ethnicity, as ‘middlemen’. Any visible wealth they have is likely to be seized by the powerful. In this context, Gellner liked to cite Montesquieu’s account of King John extracting seven teeth of a Jewish merchant, one a day, until on the eighth day the merchant gave up ten thousand marks of silver.26 Knowing this, merchants have two rational options before them. The most obvious is seeking to join forces with the predators themselves, that is, by converting their own resources, usually through marriage strategies, into power. A second route is that of protecting wealth by placing it where it cannot be touched, as occurred widely in Islamic awqaf as well as in the huge temple economies of South India, in the hope that the grantor might derive some regular income from such a move. But a strategy which increases the power of the clerks is equally unlikely to occasion social change. Specialists in belief are unable to take on the specialists in coercion by themselves.
Gellner does not limit his analysis to this static situation. The world religions and ethics are important not just because they give systematic variety to the agrarian world in the form of different civilizations. They also build a bridge to modern knowledge, and to modern production. Before outlining his account of the transition to the modern world, it makes sense, given its density, to discuss its character. We are offered an ingenious intellectual exercise, akin in spirit to the solving of a chess problem. Three elements are involved – protestantism, a new style of production and the balance of power – none of which could alone have managed to effect an exit from agrarian conditions. This is one reason for following Gellner in considering his second, ideological source of tension between power and belief within this section, concerned with the stability of the agrarian world – even though this element, together with the potential for a change in style of production, later proved in different circumstances to be part of the explanation for social evolutionary transformation. Two further points about the argument need to be made. On the one hand, the three elements mentioned intermingle, polymorphously related to each other: this is the world of ‘elective affinities’, the notion made famous in social science by Max Weber, drawing from Goethe’s great novel in which chemical elements mixed together interact to produce something entirely new. On the other hand, it should be made clear that Gellner does not simply repeat Weber’s argument about the relationship between the Protestant ethic and capitalism, though he does not dismiss it and certainly endorses the view that a new society was created for non-rational reasons. Rather, what matters for Gellner about protestantism is its effect on cognition, and thereby on production. His contribution here is one of the most original insights in the whole of his thought.
A passage towards the end of the book encapsulates his view of the importance of the world religions. Referring to the disconnected senses of all traditional thought, at once empirical and normative, he stresses the cognitive potential inherent in the orderly, conceptually unified worldview of the world religions:
These disconnected sensibilities owe their first unification not to being made more referential, but to being made less so. Literacy; scholastic unification into a system; exclusive and jealous monotheism; the shining model of truth-maintaining rigorous inference in geometry, logic and perhaps in law; a centralization of the clerisy; a strict delimitation of revelation and a narrowing of its source, excluding easy accretion, a monopolization and bureaucratization of magic by the clerical guild – all these jointly somehow gave rise to a unified, centrally managed, single-apex system. At any rate, something close enough to such an ideal emerges, causing it to become familiar and normative. It only required the apex of the system to let it be known that He did not interfere in the detailed manifestations of His creation, but preferred to maintain its lawlike pattern, and to withdraw into an infinitely distant hiding, for some of his devotees to seek for His design in the regularity of His creation, rather than by privileged short cuts, and to fuse this endeavour with the deployment of precise and content-preserving mathematics – and an objective, referential, world-unifying science was born.27
The central claim in this passage – a subsidiary one will be noted below – is that intellectual traditions that are based on concepts often call for reformation. Gellner cited Religion and the Decline of Magic, historian Keith Thomas’s important account of the attack by reformist intellectuals in the Christian world on the ad hoc, occasional practices of traditional magic.28 Of course, this call nearly always arises because clerics of the world religions have hands that are sullied with contact with the daily workings of political power. Although reformation may be justified as a return to some earlier purity, its importance lies in its suggesting the creation of a new world. Gellner refers to the classic Weberian thesis. He offers no judgement as to its veracity, insisting instead that this is not the only way in which protestantism matters.29 It is generic protestantism that is relevant, rather than the specific religious movements of early modern Europe. The cognitive change involved is described in these terms:
[A]n inscrutable, inaccessible, unappeasable, anti-rational yet orderly deity might in effect strongly encourage scientific method. It would do so by turning the orderly facts of its creation into the only evidence of its own design. Such a rigid and austere deity had no cognitive favourites, and would not disclose its secrets capriciously to some. Patient investigation of its rules, as revealed in its creation, would be the only path towards enlightenment.30
This accurately describes no less a figure than Isaac Newton, whose religious musings were directly related to what we normally describe as his scientific endeavours.31 At this point, the subsidiary claim in the above passage becomes relevant. The emphasis on God’s refusal to interfere in his creation refers to the intellectual world created by Judaism and the Greeks, which posits a physical universe running according to ‘laws’ of nature.32 In contrast, the late appearance and ‘completeness’ of Islam – further analysed in the next chapter – encouraged the view that everything is caused by God, who is able to interfere in our lives at will. Such a viewpoint seems to have placed limits on scientific inquiry.33
The characterization of this new epistemological outlook is familiar to us, for it is based on Gellner’s interpretation of the views of Hume and Kant, which stood at the heart of Legitimation of Belief.
The basic contrast is between a concept-implementing society – whose concepts (inevitably endowed with contested and ambiguous edges) are systematically implemented, form a system within which both men and nature have their prescribed places, and are sanctified by ritual and doctrine — and a society in which concepts are at least tacitly de-sacralized, where their application is in some measure based on single, isolated criteria, and within which isolated men face an orderly, ‘mechanical’ nature.34
Where change was stymied by the semi-referential nature of most thought within simple and agrarian societies, this new situation, ruled by shared reference to an external world, allows endless ‘turnover’ of facts and values. Metaphorically, the change is seen as one from the multi-periscope submarine to ‘jaws’, that is, to a world in which a single principle could gobble up anything in its way. If this is familiar, the concerns of Plough, Sword, and Book allow for a slightly different characterization of what is involved. First, there is the careful identification of a paradox of modern cognition. On the one hand, knowledge is separated from social life, thereby gaining a measure of autonomy. On the other hand, the old division of labour, that is, a world where specialists monopolize literacy, is replaced by a world of standardized knowledge which can be accessed by all. ‘Orderly conduct throughout, the like treatment of like cases, and the recognition of symmetrical obligations contained in rules’, Gellner argued, ‘replace differential awe restricted to ritually heightened situations, and an ethic of uneven loyalty’.35 Second, he makes use here of a comparison between Durkheim and Weber that would mark his thought thereafter.36 Where Durkheim explains why all men are rational, Weber offers an account of the adoption of key background assumptions which led some men to become more rational than others – that is, to create and adopt a rational-scientific style of thought.
An innovation of Gellner’s account is the argument that a single-stranded approach to facts helps free up economic life.
[A] Protestant world is one in which the sacred is absent (hidden) or, if you prefer, in which it is evenly diffused … Existing practices, and the combination of elements which they embody, cease to be hallowed. So the way is free to innovation and growth by means of new devices, by new combinations of elements. Instrumental rationality becomes more common and acceptable.37
Individuals who stand, so to speak, naked before the facts will create a world in which economic growth becomes as possible as the growth of knowledge; both come to be seen in practical and instrumental terms, free from the sacralizing cage of tradition. And generic protestantism works in a whole series of other ways as well. What matters most is a new type of personality.
If a man’s motive for economic activity is the desire to demonstrate his saved status and to fulfil his calling, he is less likely to cheat than if he is activated by the desire for gain. His rectitude is not at the mercy of his anticipation of the rectitude of others. Thus Protestantism has a double (and somewhat contradictory) role: it makes men instrumentally rational in handling things, and non-instrumentally honest in their dealings with each other.38
If this comes close to endorsing the classic Weberian thesis, it is still the case that much more is at issue. First, higher levels of trust make for ease in productive activity. Second, the self-contained, inwardly-directed character of the actors involved makes it possible to move from a system of pure coercion to one that is gentler and more restrained. Finally, generic protestantism introduced the notion of a calling in life, powerful enough that mercantile activities hitherto shunned as base were now seen as respectable.
Nonetheless, Gellner suggests that generic protestantism does not guarantee in and of itself the emergence of a new world. For one thing, protestantism of this sort is not seen in every world religion, with Hinduism being likely to rule out the egalitarianism implicit in generic protestantism.39 For another, the complete success of a protestant creed is capable of so totally affirming concepts as to prevent the emergence of any new ideas. Gellner suggests that this was as true of the Counter-Reformation’s effects on the world from which he came, as it was of Calvinism and of Islam – whose deity, as noted, was held to be quite capable of interfering directly in the world.40 But the more general point is that new ideas and practices of cognition and of production are not sufficient on their own to prompt a transition to a new social order. Imperial China is held to have been sufficiently aware of its own interests to smother challenges of this sort, aware that their threat was very great.41 Just as important is the vital matter of timing. Had there been too great a move from agriculture to mercantile activities early on, it would have put the whole society at risk in the face of harvest failure.42 Such a move had to be, so to speak, properly timed, made at the moment when an increase in technological power was beginning to bring forth some surplus. But such knowledge, itself characteristic, as noted, of a particular intellectual tradition, depended upon favourable political circumstances in order to operate and triumph. Let us consider now the rise of such circumstances, against the odds, in a particular place and time.
Gellner admits that no account of the West’s ascent is ever likely to be generally agreed upon. This is surely true, given the host of causal variables present within the single case which then had universal impact. The fact that he cites fifteen different possible causes might seem to be a statement of intellectual despair. Nothing could be further from the truth. We will later note all fifteen explanations that he mentions, but it must be emphasized that he offers his own account, hybrid in character and integrating most of the factors he adduces. He sees the rise of the West as the result of a fortuitous opening – and not, as Marx and other evolutionists would have it, the consequence of any logic inherent to some grand process of social evolution.
What did happen was that a miraculous political and ideological balance of power in the non-economic parts of society made the expansion possible, at a time when the technological potential was also available. Just as miraculously, the impulse to make use of the uniquely favourable concatenation of cognitive, ideological and political circumstances was also present in some at least of the producers.43
Let us try to unpack this terse formulation.
The keystone of the explanation is provided by a reflection on David Hume’s sociology of religion. On the one hand, Hume had insisted in A Natural History of Religion that scripturalist monotheisms are enemies of civility when they are in enthusiastic reformation mode.44 Gellner effectively agreed, as noted, insisting that a protestant reformation does not necessarily lead to economic growth. Tawney had stressed this against Weber, insisting that Calvinism had been rigorous, having no truck with easy money-making.45 Gellner reinforces the analytic point on the basis of his knowledge of Islam. This religion came after Christianity, and its monotheism was more logical and pure: nonetheless, its rigour did not lead to the first breakthrough precisely because the ulama in power were so intolerant. But ideological coherence does matter, as Hume seemed to realize when stressing in his essay ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’ that ‘superstition is an enemy to civil liberty, and enthusiasm a friend to it’.46 To say this, of course, makes for an absolute contradiction within Hume’s own position, and it is one for which he has no resolution. But Gellner offers his own explanation.
The real answer would seem to be that it is important for the zealous enthusiasts to be defeated but not crushed. Their defeat converts them to toleration (in any case consonant with the view that truth can only come from an inner light and not from an external enforcement). The fact that their defeat is not total helps them secure toleration. A spiritual as well as political balance of power helps maintain a situation in which central coercion is not exercised to the full. The societies in which this has occurred in due course demonstrated, by their own wealth and power, the astonishing economic and military advantages which can follow this compromise.47
At issue here is the full working out of the generic protestant ethic. The fact that toleration gave protestant intellectuals autonomy without the ability to dominate allowed and encouraged them to concentrate their attention on mundane affairs. Gellner restates his position in these words:
One, but only one, precondition of the emergence of such instrumental rationality is indeed the availability of a large and expanding surplus, which creates a situation in which there is no longer the need for storing and protecting the major part of what is produced. The expanding surplus does, of course, depend on sustained innovation. This, if it is indeed to be persistent and continuous, depends not on any one discovery or even set of discoveries, but rather on a sense of the intelligibility and manipulability of nature. In other words, it calls for a secular, unified, single-conceptual-currency vision of nature.
So, the instrumental spirit in the economy (which, jointly with politically independent producers, helps set up the market), is paralleled by the unified and instrumental attitude to nature. The fusion of data and explanation into a single ideal currency, subordinated to the single aims of explanation and prediction, is essential. The two are parallel, and mutually constitute each other’s condition.48
The subtle interactions at work here need underlining. Growth in one area does much to occasion it in another. And much hangs on the fact of sustained innovation. Such innovation must not be too great at the start, for if it were, the state would likely wish to control it. But innovation must produce at the right time a continuous stream of technological goods, for this has a crucial role as a bribery fund that ensures social stability, especially in transitional moments. Such innovation can first be seen in city-states, and thereafter in the rather particular circumstances of seventeenth-century Holland and eighteenth-century Britain. An external balance of power allowed city-states a measure of autonomy in which the logic of innovation could take its course. Holland and Britain benefited from an external balance quite as much, but to this was added an internal balance based on political stalemate.
Gellner’s argument is abstract and deserves encapsulation. The account offered is not idealist. Gellner is Weberian both in according ideology some causal role and in offering a narrative in which different sources of social power mutually condition each other. Ideological innovation was present and did matter. The generic protestantism seen in several civilizations took on a particularly benign form in the West because a prior balance of power prevented it from seizing power; it abandoned dreams of theocracy, embraced toleration and chose to investigate nature and to perform economically. This, in turn, makes it easier for restraints to be placed on the coercive order, giving still more room for cognitive and economic growth in a process of benign mutual interaction. It is tempting to say that the balance of power in early European civilization made puritans into friends of liberty and civility. But Gellner will not accept this, noting that political fragmentation can often be found, but sometimes as mere anarchy rather than as an enabling condition for social, economic and political progress.49
Rather than offering an encapsulation of this sort, Gellner simply noted the impact of fifteen factors, each of which had been proposed as an explanation for the spectacular development of Europe.50 The factors are worth citing, since commentary upon them will once again highlight the nature of his account.
1.European feudalism is sometimes seen as a matrix of capitalism, for at least two reasons. Though Gellner insists that feudal society is based on status rather than contract, the fact that there is some market in loyalty at least suggests a world of contract. Far more important is the balance of power that feudalism encourages. ‘The central ruler allies himself with the burghers who have acquired a weight of their own, breaks the power of local barons, and effectively centralizes the society’.51 This is the classic explanation offered by Adam Smith in Book III of The Wealth of Nations, a text Gellner knew well.52 Though appealing, the argument failed to explain why a ruler, once assured of his situation, did not then re-establish his power over the newly created sources of wealth?
2.Church and state are clearly separated in the Occident, and curtail each other’s ambitions. But this factor, like most of the others, cannot work alone, not least as the Counter-Reformation joined ideological and political power together again.
3.European states may have had a measure of restraint forced upon them because of competition with other states. ‘Presiding as it does over a partly commercial society, [the state’s] fiscal income is greater if the subjects prosper. Prosperity depends on a measure of security and liberty. Excessive tax demands or arbitrariness are counterproductive … ’.53
4.The burghers are, for Weberian reasons, self-contained, and this diminishes the intensity of struggles for power. Particular attention is paid to the English case, in which the defeat of an ideological revolution then led, through political stalemate, to the emergence of toleration.
5.Gellner cites the work of Lawrence and Jeanne Stone, making the Tocquevillian argument that the British aristocracy may have been relatively permeable, a class rather than a caste, thereby allowing a good deal of accommodation with new wealth.54
6.The presence of a surplus was necessary, at first to bribe rulers and later to buy off discontent from below.
7.This fund was the result of innovation – as noted, not so great at the outset as to either threaten members of the ancien régime or to make it worthwhile for them to seek to control it.55
8.Peasant life in general does not encourage specialization and development. Gellner noted the thesis of Alan Macfarlane according to which English society lost its peasantry in the Middle Ages, thereby becoming uniquely individualist.56
9.An important religious factor may have been, as Louis Dumont argued, the manner in which monasticism created disciplined and orderly conduct.57
10.A second possible religious factor was the way in which the Christian church destroyed extended kinship links, as explained brilliantly by Jack Goody, thereby making people, bereft of their own means of self-help, that much better as fodder for state-building.58
11.Gellner suggests that the direct thesis of Max Weber – that the economic ethic of occidental Protestantism created a powerful work ethic – may have some truth to it.
12.Negatively, it may be that all that is needed to explain the difference between northern and southern Europe is the malign influence of the Counter-Reformation.59
13.A plural state system built competition into the core of European life, thereby making any return to stagnation impossible.
14.An internal and external balance of power seems to have been crucial. The two may be connected, as noted, in so far as decent internal behaviour might augment tax revenues needed for military competition.
15.The presence of a national bourgeoisie, rather than the specialized bourgeoisies of city-states, was crucial, and reinforced many of the factors mentioned. Such a bourgeoisie characterized English history, partly by the early establishment of centralized estates.
Gellner’s own account draws to a greater or lesser extent on most of these factors, some of them of his own invention, with others so closely linked to each other as to scarcely be distinct analytically.60 Exceptions to this generalization are the explanations offered in 5, 8, and 9, which seem to be mentioned mostly out of respect for their authors. Gellner’s argument as a whole can be seen as one in which kinship’s ‘caging’ of productive possibilities is escaped, allowing for the emergence of socially mobile individualism, and to that extent explanation 10 can be seen as a summary of his whole position. But one suspects that the purpose in citing this explanation was rather different. The brilliant work of the Cambridge school of historical demography, inspired by John Hajnal and Peter Laslett, led by Tony Wrigley and with a decisive contribution from Jack Goody, had shown kinship links in Europe as a whole to be limited.61 Gellner found this work to be deeply suggestive, and was therefore somewhat irritated by these scholars’ refusal to step beyond their immediate empirical findings. There is a sense in which he was pushing them to theorize their findings.
Two final points about Gellner’s own position need to be stressed. First, no single factor explains the transition: it is the combination of elements – indeed the way in which the elements are changed by combination – that matters. Second, resuming the theme of Thought and Change, the process as a whole was unconscious, indeed running very much counter to the obvious norms of rationality of the agrarian age. There was no social contract creating this world:
It would have gone against the grain, against the rational interests of participants, who were not yet imbued with the spirit of this order. The logic of the situation in which men found themselves precluded them from subscribing freely and rationally to such a contract (or, in most cases, from finding it intelligible). We had to be tricked into it. We may see this as the cunning of reason or as a concatenation of accidents.62
The implication here is that others will have to be tricked into it as well. ‘Fundamental changes transform identities’, he argued once again, going on to insist that consent only made sense within an established world.63 There were but two reasons for accepting the argument he was putting forward, namely ‘the internal plausibility of our own model of how, fundamentally, cognition works, and the external consideration that it leads to great control, power, and hence, pragmatically, that it prevails’.64
Although industrial society marks a step forward in social evolution it resembles the agrarian world in one way. Neither mode of production is so dominant as to allow only a single political superstructure. Gellner’s general view of the world of advanced liberal capitalism is by now familiar: it is a relatively open world in which science prospers, bringing both affluence and diminished moral certainty – with Danegeld doing a good deal to secure social cohesion. Marxist regimes present another social context, still seen as a social world that had lost ideological rigour, accordingly ripe for liberalization – but Gellner now showed some awareness of Aron’s argument that left-wing dictatorships were less likely to liberalize than those of the right.65 This was not true of a third social formation, that of Muslim societies. His claim here – that Islam has the capacity to adapt itself to modernity, thereby resisting secularization – forms the core of the next chapter. The fourth world is that of alternative forms of imitative industrialization. Gellner stresses less the inevitable loss of democracy when centralized power forces development than he does a measure of ideological schizophrenia. Science and technology in the initial breakthrough had at their base the non-rational desire to understand the divine order, and perhaps to bring it about on earth. In contrast, late-developing societies have the option of adopting the fruits of science in a purely instrumental manner, such that ‘the computer and the shrine may be compatible’.66 However, a distinction needed to be drawn amongst the paternalistic modernizers-from-above, between those who genuinely believe in the tolerated folk tradition and those who politely ignore it.67 A final type of society is that of the backward, in which ‘relatively strong states dominate weak civil societies, and where ideological life is opportunist and largely a function of utilizing the international competition between blocs. Cuius military aid, eius religio’.68
This analysis was rather conventional, but more striking were Gellner’s sustained ruminations on the character of the sources of power under conditions of modernity. There were difficulties within each realm.
The background condition for the cognitive realm was provided by Gellner’s interesting characterization of the modern character of the division of labour. He saw it as vastly increased on the one hand, yet much diminished on the other, essentially because of the generic training in modern societies, all members of which need to acquire the ability to act as clerks within a changing industrial world. The complex specialization of the few disappears as a new world is created, in which all have distinct tasks, most of which are, however, carried out in the same way. Gellner is here repeating a central contention of Thought and Change, namely that we are entering into an age of culture – a world in which literacy is available for all given that communication skills are so necessary in modern society. It is at this point that one can see some difficulty arising. Gellner was keen to stress that cognitive power looks set for continual growth, making the underwriting of morals ever less likely. He drew a distinction between the vulgar and the serious Enlightenment, the latter illustrated once again by the spare worlds of Kant and Hume. The conclusions drawn are familiar: identity must be considered with irony, given that true cognitive power lies in a separate realm, causing change and instability to which we must then adapt. Rationality was better for making small decisions than large ones. It worked within a single social world rather than serving as much of a guide between them, a consequence of which was that very important decisions, characteristically made by those occupying key positions of power, will be made less by reason than by intuition.69 But there is another difficulty that needs to be stressed. Some of the mechanisms by which high culture is provided for a society are far from restrained or limited. The next two chapters consider Islam and nationalism in turn, with a key question in each being whether these ideological principles can ever allow identities to be held ironically.
Two sets of comments are offered on the economy. First, the social infrastructure of modern society is so extensive that the idea that matters can be left entirely to the market are rendered nothing less than ridiculous.70 Differently put, the economy is inevitably politicized, making some sort of corporatist bargaining, whether public or hidden from view, inevitable. The second set of comments is wholly new, and clearly deeply felt. The meaning of wealth is held to have changed. A minor critical comment concerning social mobility was addressed to his Cambridge colleague Chris Hann, the anthropologist of Central Europe.
I am sceptical about the alleged data denying social mobility. The main gimmick seems to be to say that if you hold social structure constant, then there is not much mobility. But the whole point is that the social structure is totally inconstant, and that the amount of mobility there is, and which has great consequence, is itself a consequence of the changed social structure. No doubt, if we discount all the people who have left the working class, because the working class itself has diminished, and pretend that the proportion of the working class remains the same, then the mobility figures cease to be very impressive, or perhaps there is not much mobility at all. But that totally distorts the reality of the situation. Incidentally, I am not unaware of the tremendous amount of inequality. The point is, it is a different kind of inequality.71
Still, endless competitive consumerism might end up by destroying the planet on which we live. Of course, the desire for wealth did make sense insofar as material needs had not been satisfied, and it was certainly understandable in those still haunted by recollections of genuine scarcity. But he felt it was possible to imagine the satisfaction of material needs, going on to say that much competition for material goods was ridiculous given that there was often little real difference between an expensive claret and a good supermarket Rioja. He drew an analogy with classical Rome, wondering why a political procedure had not been found for ‘dispensing with a useless consumption city, leaving farmers on the land, and not importing slaves’.72 His hopes of avoiding a similar fate for consumer society rested on an awareness that money mattered less on objective grounds than because it brought status. Perhaps it might be possible to divorce emolument from status, as the economist Fred Hirsch had argued in Social Limits to Growth, a pioneering book that Gellner much admired.73
In a thoroughly anonymous and mobile suburb … how can one convey status other than by material symbols which do waste resources and cause pollution? Would it be conceivable for local councils to confer, let us say, municipal mini-knighthoods? Of course, it is conceivable, but would they be taken seriously enough to dissuade both the recipients of the Borough Ks, and their unsuccessful rivals, from purchasing unnecessarily large cars?74
The area in which there was the greatest difficulty, in Gellner’s view, was that of politics. Orders tended to be obeyed where bureaucracy was well established, as had been so strikingly true in Nazi Germany. Further, the argument that one should not kick against the pricks ‘lest worse befall’ had the capacity to disable liberal opposition to repulsive regimes, as had been true of the politics of normalization in much of the socialist bloc.75 Little comfort could be taken from such weak and passive support for liberty. And there was worse. Marxist societies continued to suffer from their ideology’s lack of any means to control political power. Gellner devoted several interesting pages to the full-blooded ‘right wing alternative’. Fascism had been defeated, but Gellner in his later years came to feel that the desire for community might yet again gain teeth, perhaps linked to an ethos of survival of the fittest.76 His concluding questions revealed gnawing doubts:
Will the need to counteract the discontent of a swollen, leisure-endowed but status-less class bring about the revival of a new central faith, centrally enforced? Will this be facilitated by the decline in that instrumental rationality which had brought about the new world, but is no longer required when that world is fully developed? The same solution need not prevail everywhere.77
Plough, Sword, and Book does succeed in offering a striking view of our place in the world. Its sociology of agrarian life has much to recommend it, while the account of the transition to the modern world is subtle and ingenious, perhaps most of all in its claims about the character of generic protestantism. No philosophical history can ever be wholly correct; the genre’s utility is rather in providing a model which can help to evaluate the significance of empirical findings. Thus Gellner’s model highlights as important the recent discovery in Anatolia of the complex religious monuments of Gobelki Tepe, since these were erected before the emergence of agriculture – a development seen increasingly by archaeologists as the result of desperation rather than of desire. But it is necessary to go beyond this pragmatic view to offer critique – defensive at first, then negative – of Gellner’s argument.
Major assaults have been launched against ‘Eurocentrism’.78 One element of this offensive concentrates on European self-congratulation, the belief that special merit of some sort accounts for historical European successes. This is indeed true of some accounts of the rise of the West, the recent work of the historian Anthony Pagden being a prominent example.79 But this certainly does not apply to Gellner in any immediate or complete sense. For one thing, he was careful to speak of a miracle that happened in Europe, rather than uncritically assert that there was a European miracle.80 For another, his account is careful and limited. Accidents are stressed, as are difficulties. He admits that Greek rationality had nothing to do with monotheism, and goes so far as to highlight the interest in magic of members of the late seventeenth-century Royal Society, including Newton himself.81 Further, political liberty is seen as the result more of accident than of design.
But we can leave the moral issue to one side for a moment, and turn to a second, purely descriptive element of this critique, namely that there was nothing truly special about Western society before roughly 1800. Until that time, the major civilizations, perhaps especially China, are held to have been roughly at the same developmental level, all exemplars of Smithian growth. There are very good reasons to object to this view, as is made clear by recent revisions of the revisionists themselves.82 For one thing, development does seem to have taken place earlier in Europe than elsewhere. Malthusian crises continued to affect China long after they had been dealt with in Europe.83 Crucially, productivity levels were higher in England than in China by 1700.84 For another, there remains much to be said for the view that this development depended on prior institutional differences. One aspect of Gellner’s work that seems especially solid is his writing on science.85 Further, his argument about the contribution of warfare – driving emulation, and thereby occasioning restraint on the part of states needing to protect their tax bases – does not seem to have been undermined by recent research.86
Direct criticism of Gellner’s views of development came from Alan Macfarlane, arguing above all that the concept of transition was overdone, given that the seeds of modernity were present in the European feudal past, albeit sadly blocked in continental Europe by the rise of absolutism.87 Gellner replied to this just before his death in a spirited manner, accusing Macfarlane of being an English Narodnik unable to truly appreciate the difficulties of escaping the agrarian condition.88 Macfarlane returned to the argument after Gellner’s death in his sophisticated account of ‘the riddle of the modern world’, in which Gellner’s philosophy of history is compared with the views of Montesquieu, Smith and Tocqueville.89
We must not foreclose discussion of the moral evaluation of European development. An interesting argument in this area has recently been made by Michael Mann, a thinker indebted and sympathetic to Gellner.90 Europe may have been liberal internally, Mann suggests, but it was far from being so externally. It is important to distinguish here between the fact of viciousness and the more controversial claim that European development depended upon such viciousness.91 Gellner was well aware of this violence, but offered an account in which European development was essentially endogenous. And he noted that some peripheral countries had benefited from direct rule.
An ideal fate of a ‘backward’ territory might well be the following: a colonial occupation which provides some schools and the ‘infrastructure’, and undermines the power of the traditional and backward-looking ruling class; followed by a struggle for independence which generates a united and determined leadership with a good mass organization; followed by independence in which these tools can be used for growth.92
This is a view upheld by a good deal of modern scholarship.93 But beyond this, Gellner did make positive moral points. The initial developmental breakthrough had depended upon liberal political conditions, and the resulting model at least provided a model for liberalizing societies to emulate. A far more important consideration concerned rational science. The moral contribution of diminished mortality rates and decent living standards resulting from our ability to transform nature was a constant centrepiece of his thought.
Gellner’s view of the workings of contemporary society is open to negative critique, however, on two different but related counts. Let me begin with his insistence that the search for wealth has become self-defeating. One cannot avoid seeing here the persona of the thinker, sitting happily in Moscow with a glass of champagne and a piece of excellent black bread – convinced that affluence had been attained, as was indeed the case if one compared the Soviet Union to Tsarist Russia. Temperamentally, I fully endorse such simplicity, even with a measure of frugality. So too did Adam Smith in 1759:
[Riches] are immense fabrics, which it requires the labour of a life to raise, which threaten every moment to overwhelm the person that dwells in them, and which while they stand, though they may save him from some smaller inconveniences, can protect him from none of the severer inclemencies of the season. They keep off the summer shower, not the winter storm, but leave him always as much, and sometimes more exposed than before, to anxiety, to fear, and to sorrow; to diseases, to danger and to death.94
Nonetheless, Smith endorses commercial society. The illusion that wealth would bring happiness – and illusion it was, utterly dominant in the vulgar for all that the wise could see through it – was beneficial: it created not just industriousness but political stability. What matters for human beings, in Smith’s eyes, is the approval of one’s fellows, and this is most often gained through the possession of riches. Social life resembles, to use a modern metaphor, an escalator: distinction is gained by possessing something that those below lack. Smith’s world is one of jealousy, rather than one of envy – that is, in which it is normal to try to catch up with the person above, rather than to create policies designed to level the field, or to change the rules of the game. Of course, Gellner was well aware that monies were only important insofar as they bestowed status – that is, he had reached the conclusions of The Theory of Moral Sentiments himself, albeit by a different route.
So the questions that face us become very precise. Has this mechanism come to an end? Or, rather, is it the case that this mechanism now ought to come to an end? What merit, finally, is there to Gellner’s contention that the scramble for money can be replaced by the sharing out of status goods? The possibility of ecological disaster naturally entails respect for Gellner’s concern, lending his ideas from two decades ago an immediate contemporary relevance. Further, ingenuity may allow for some splitting between reward and status; jobs of inherent interest and status may well attract even if they no longer return the greatest reward. Still, it is hard to follow him very far in this direction. A logical consideration is simply that Gellner’s argument does tend to an illicit, teleological functionalism at this point: the ‘necessity’ for change does not mean that this need will be met. Further, a precondition of Gellner’s recommendation – that genuine poverty be abolished – has most certainly not been met. His puritanical view is a poor guide in a fundamental sense: the rich can always find pursuits or possessions which serve as means to distinguish them from those below. The escalator quality of capitalist society most certainly remains in effect, with its ignoble contribution to political stability as strong as ever. If one extends Gellner’s argument from a capitalist country to capitalist society as a whole, difficulties increase. Enormous growth is simply necessary if the needs, let alone desires, of the vast majority of humankind are to be met. The possibility of redistribution on a world scale is surely infinitesimal. There is no need to go further, for here undoubtably is one of the major problems facing modernity. Scepticism as to Gellner’s suggested reform leads to a wholly unsceptical and fervent hope that scientific breakthroughs will occur, above all in order to create new sources of clean energy.
A larger and more important negative critique is also in order. The traces of Saint-Simonianism that seem present in Gellner’s thought, perhaps derived from Masaryk with reinforcement from Aron, suggest a potential for modern industrialized society to stabilize, to find some point of rest. There is a great deal to be said for the notion that the modern era is industrial, and that many social characteristics – bureaucracy, literacy, education – rest on this fact. A Weberian approach to liberal capitalism and to the socialist bloc in the postwar years had a very great deal to recommend it. One might further defend Gellner by remembering that his understanding of modern society stressed that instability would only become truly serious – despite his fears of the stagflation that gripped Britain the in 1970s – when inequality was joined with an ethnic marker. Perhaps Japan points to a possible future in that its homogeneity allowed it to survive a decade bereft of economic growth – but also free from social instability.
Nonetheless, the modern world cannot be understood without recognizing the dynamics of capitalist society. One consideration here is internal. Gellner tends to take for granted that corporatist arrangements are necessary, claiming that at times their absence impairs economic success. Matters are much more complex. To begin with, corporatism is often ill-defined. Countries classified as corporatist have often owed their success partly to the non-corporatist elements in their political economies – to reliance on international markets in the Danish case, and to non-Keynesian monetary policy in postwar Germany. Further, the great postwar inflation probably had little to do with the absence – or presence – of corporatist arrangements: what mattered most was the refusal of the United States to tax its citizens to pay for the simultaneous burdens of the war in Vietnam and ‘Great Society’ social programmes – with its hegemonic power allowing it to print money, and so to spread inflation throughout the advanced capitalist world.95 Finally, it is by no means clear that corporatist arrangements are, at least at all times and in all countries, easy to manage.96
A second consideration is much more important. Capitalist society creates permanent instability. If the entry of new countries into the developed world makes this obvious at present, change will remain capitalism’s essence even if the whole world is industrialized. The single greatest analysis of this process – Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation – was quite as much a product of the Hapsburg world, but Gellner did not consider this work in the context of his analyses of the works of Hayek, Wittgenstein, Popper and Malinowski.97 Polanyi argued that the endless change brought about by capitalism would eventually lead society to protect itself, a view offered as explanation for international trade rivalry at the end of the nineteenth century, leading in turn to geopolitical conflict in the twentieth century. As it happens, Polanyi’s explanation for Europe’s disastrous twentieth century is probably incorrect: capitalists were able to adapt to change, as were their societies, with disaster resulting much more from foreign policy mistakes on the parts of elites.98 But two points follow from this. First, geopolitics and capitalism most certainly can intertwine, as in protectionist policies, and these may yet lend dynamics, perhaps of an undesirable sort, to contemporary world politics. Second, Gellner’s philosophy of history does not really comment on the causes of Europe’s twentieth-century wars, thereby failing to give us an account of the autonomy of geopolitics. There are requisite elements, most obviously a theory of international relations, missing from his account of the taming of the forces of coercion.
____________________
1The book was, however, well received. Eugen Weber (Times Literary Supplement, 28 October–3 November 1988) and W. G. Runciman (London Review of Books, 27 October 1988) outlined the main theses, found the argument interesting, but doubted that it conclusively demonstrated its case. Frank Kermode (Weekend Telegraph, 19 November 1988), Adam Kuper (New Statesman, 26 August 1988), David Levy (‘Political Order’, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 22 April 1988) and R. A. D. Grant (Times Educational Supplement, 14 October 1988) were united in their praise – the last author noting, however, that the book was less for the general reader than for the scholar. A longer reaction came from Michael Meeker (Cultural Anthropology, vol. 6, 1991), admiring the model-building skills but arguing that a normative position had been smuggled into an account that claimed to be strictly objective. Gellner himself was most pleased when the book was mentioned favourably by King Hussein of Jordan in a speech to the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, 13 October 1989.
2P. Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World, Oxford, 2003. Her review of Gellner’s book, ‘Getting the Conceptual Handles’, appeared in Government and Opposition, vol. 24, 1989.
3Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History, London, 1988, chapter 1.
4Gellner chose his words with care. In his ‘Introduction’ to a volume of conference proceedings dealing with ‘the European miracle’ (J. Baechler, J. A. Hall and M. Mann [eds], Europe and the Rise of Capitalism, Oxford, 1988) he distinguished between ‘the European miracle’ and ‘the European miracle’ – that is, he disavowed any European moral self-congratulation, asserting further that the miracle could be extended to the rest of the world.
5Plough, Sword, and Book, p. 13.
6‘Origins of Society’, in his Anthropology and Politics, Oxford, 1995.
7R. M. Unger, False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy, Cambridge, 1987.
8E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, New York, 1995, introduction.
9Plough, Sword, and Book, p. 52.
10Gellner to Oruç Aruoba, 30 January 1990.
11F. A. Hayek, The Three Sources of Human Values, London, 1978.
12M. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, London, 1974.
13He also discusses (Plough, Sword, and Book, pp. 29–32) a middle position, that of Veblen, in which primitives are seen as sociable and work-addicted; this view of history gets rather short shrift as it says nothing about the importance of the state.
14J. Woodburn, ‘Egalitarian Societies’, Man, vol. 17, 1982. Woodburn had been a colleague at LSE for many years, and he contributed to Gellner (ed.), Soviet and Western Anthropology, London, 1980.
15Plough, Sword, and Book, pp. 129–31.
16Ibid., p. 147.
17Ibid, pp. 149–50.
18Nations and Nationalism, Oxford, 1983, p. 9.
19Gellner had admiration for the way in which Shmuel Eisenstadt developed the insights of Jaspers, and pressed for one of Eisenstadt’s papers to be published in the European Journal of Sociology.
20Plough, Sword, and Book, pp. 79–83. Gellner adds to this ‘demand’ side of the equation comments about the ‘supply’ side – noting in particular the importance of geometry and astronomy, citing E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, London, 1925.
21Ibid., pp. 86–90.
22Cf. ibid., pp. 98–100.
23Nations and Nationalism, pp. 14–16.
24Plough, Sword, and Book, pp. 94–8.
25Ibid., p. 98.
26Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws [1748], Cambridge, 1988, p. 388, cited in ‘The Withering Away of the Dentistry State’ in Spectacles and Predicaments, Cambridge, 1980, p. 311.
27Plough, Sword, and Book, pp. 197–8.
28K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, London, 1971.
29Plough, Sword, and Book, p. 105.
30Ibid., p. 101.
31Ibid., p. 199.
32Gellner very much liked, and was perhaps influenced by, the work of John Milton. One of his papers making these points was published in the European Journal of Sociology: ‘The Origin of the Concept “Laws of Nature”‘, vol. 22, 1982.
33P. Crone and M. Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, Cambridge, 1977, p. 128 and chapter 14.
34Plough, Sword, and Book, p. 133.
35Ibid, p. 110.
36Ibid., pp. 111, 128.
37Ibid., p. 106.
38Ibid., p. 106.
39Ibid., pp. 121–2.
40The architecture of Prague is dominated by the Counter-Reformation, with important strands of Czech thought seeing it as having blocked developments that would otherwise have taken place. Gellner shared this perception, and was accordingly drawn to H. Trevor-Roper, ‘Religion, the Reformation and Social Change’, Historical Studies, vol. 4, 1965.
41Plough, Sword, and Book, p. 132.
42Ibid., pp. 109, 130.
43Ibid., p. 132.
44D. Hume, A Natural History of Religion [1777], London, 1976, chapter 12. We will see that this reading of Hume had first appeared a few years earlier in Muslim Society, Cambridge, 1981; it was to be used again later, for a slightly different purpose, in Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals, London, 1993.
45R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, London, 1926.
46D. Hume, ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’, in his Essays Moral, Political and Literary [1777], Oxford, 1963, cited in Plough, Sword, and Book, p. 114.
47Plough, Sword, and Book, pp. 114–5.
48Ibid., p. 131.
49Ibid., p. 170.
50Ibid., pp. 158–71.
51Ibid., p. 159.
52Smith is discussed in his Radcliffe-Brown Lecture at the British Academy, ‘Nationalism and the two forms of cohesion in complex societies’, reprinted in Culture, Identity and Politics, Cambridge, 1987.
53Plough, Sword, and Book, pp. 159–60, drawing at this point on A. O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph, Princeton, 1977.
54Ibid, p. 160, citing L. and J. Stone, An Open Elite? England, 1540–1880, Oxford, 1984.
55Ibid., pp. 161–2.
56A. Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism, Oxford, 1978.
57L. Dumont, Essais sur l’individualisme, Paris, 1983.
58Gellner is here adding an interpretation to J. Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, Cambridge, 1983.
59Trevor-Roper, ‘Religion, the Reformation and Social Change’.
60This is most obviously true of the interrelations between 3, 13 and 14; equally the argument of 12 is the limitation mentioned in 2.
61The fundamental contribution is A. M. Wrigley and R. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction, London, 1981.
62Plough, Sword, and Book, p. 257.
63Ibid., p. 193.
64Ibid, pp. 201–2. He cautioned (p. 204) that the pragmatism involved was, so to speak, one-off rather than generic.
65Ibid., p. 271.
66Ibid., p. 222.
67Ibid., p. 221.
68Ibid., p. 223.
69Ibid., pp. 209–10.
70Ibid., p. 189.
71Gellner to Hann, 5 December 1994. Gellner dictated a good deal of his correspondence, overwhelmingly so in the last years of his life. Accordingly, I have corrected an obvious grammatical mistake that appeared in the original.
72Plough, Sword, and Book, p. 231.
73F. Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth, London, 1977.
74Plough, Sword, and Book, p. 231.
75Ibid., p. 235.
76Ibid., pp. 242–7.
77Ibid., p. 272.
78J. Goody, The East in the West, Cambridge, 1998; R. B. Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience, Ithaca, 1997; K. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton, 2000; J. M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, Cambridge, 2004.
79A. Pagden, Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East and West, New York, 2008, subject to powerful critical analysis by C. J. Tyerman, ‘How Wonderful We Are’, Times Literary Supplement, 23 May 2008.
80‘Introduction’, in Baecher, Hall and Mann, Europe and the Rise of Capitalism.
81Plough, Sword, and Book, p. 199.
82J. M. Bryant, ‘The West and the Rest Revisited: Debating Capitalist Origins, European Colonialism, and the Advent of Modernity’, Canadian Journal of Sociology, vol. 31, 2006; M. Mann, ‘The Sources of Social Power Revisited: A Response to Criticism’, in J. A. Hall and R. Schroeder (eds), An Anatomy of Power: The Social Theory of Michael Mann, Cambridge, 2006, and ‘Predation and Production in European Imperialism’, in S. Malešević and M. Haugaard (eds), Ernest Gellner and Contemporary Social Thought, Cambridge, 2007; P. Huang, ‘Development or Involution in Eighteenth-Century Britain and China: A Review of Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 61, 2002.
83K. Deng, Fact or Fiction? Re-examination of Chinese Premodern Population Statistics, LSE Economic History Working Papers 76, London, 2003.
84R. Brenner and C. Isett, ‘England’s Divergence from China’s Yangzi Delta: Property Relations, Macroeconomics, and Patterns of Development’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 61, 2002.
85M. Jacobs, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Modern West, New York, 1997, and ‘Commerce, Industry and the Laws of Newtonian Science: Weber Revisited and Revised’, Canadian Journal of History, vol. 35, 2000; J. Goldstone, ‘Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the Rise of the West and the British Industrial Revolution’, Journal of World History, vol. 13, 2002.
86J. A. Hall, ‘Confessions of a Eurocentric’, International Sociology, vol. 63, 2001.
87A. Macfarlane, ‘Ernest Gellner and the Escape to Modernity’, in J. A. Hall and I. C. Jarvie (eds), The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner, Amsterdam, 1996, p. 213.
88‘Reply to Critics’, in Hall and Jarvie, The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner, pp. 661–6.
89A. Macfarlane, The Riddle of the Modern World: Of Liberty, Wealth and Equality, Basingstoke, 1995.
90Mann, ‘Predation and production in European imperialism’.
91The most striking attempt to quantify the extent to which predation was responsible for European economic development remains P. O’Brien, ‘European Economic Development’, Economic History Review, vol. 35, 1982, which insists that the contribution was rather small, with most growth coming from the development of home markets.
92Thought and Change, London, 1964, pp. 176–7.
93M. Lange, for example, argues that areas within the British empire that had experienced direct rule tended to have the capacity for development (Lineages of Despotism and Development: British Colonialism and State Power, Chicago, 2009). Similar points about the impact of Japanese imperialism in South Korea are made by A. Kohli, State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery, Cambridge, 2004. Cf. D. Acemoglu and J. A. Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Cambridge, 2005.
94A. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments [1759], Oxford, 1976, p. 183.
95For brilliant analyses along these lines see M. Smith, Power, Norms and Inflation, New York, 1992, discussed in J. A. Hall, Coercion and Consent, Oxford, 1994, chapter 2.
96K. Bradley and A. Gelb, ‘The Radical Potential of Cash Nexus Breaks’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 31, 1980.
97An intellectual biography of Polanyi is desperately needed. His trajectory has its specificities, notably in having a Russian mother with populist sympathy, a Budapest childhood and experience of interwar ‘Red Vienna’.
98J. A. Hall, International Orders, Oxford, 1996.