In August 1984, Gellner moved to Cambridge as the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology. The appointment had been contentious. Edmund Leach had objected behind the scenes, apparently trying to run another candidate, Anthony Forge, for the position. Rodney Needham, the holder of Oxford’s chair in social anthropology, sat – by reason of tradition – on the committee, and objected to the appointment in the strongest terms. But these old enemies did not prevail, and Gellner moved back to anthropology. He gave several reasons for the move in an interview – in addition to something he did not mention, namely the push factor from the LSE due to the manner in which he had been treated over the Martin White chair.1 He was happier, and felt more useful, when teaching anthropologists rather than philosophers: the latter needed to arrive armed with a sense of what they wanted to say, whilst the former, if properly directed when doing their fieldwork, could nearly always do decent work. The fact that Cambridge is small and easy to get around suited his physical condition, as did the fact that the standards of health care there are exceptionally high. He also spoke of snobbery, the charm of candlelight on the silver in King’s, one of the most beautiful colleges in Cambridge. This claim deserves comment. There was nothing snobbish whatsoever about him, traces of the young mountaineer allowing him to live simply at all times. Moreover, he was a slightly uneasy member of the college. For one thing, he dined out on the fact he would have to kneel in front of the Provost to take an oath, with the Provost in question being Bernard Williams, whose origins lay in linguistic philosophy. Williams apparently then abolished this ritual, over Gellner’s protest, so as to avoid being mocked – though it was apparently restored at a later date. Further, he was irritated at times by the super-liberal atmosphere of the college, perhaps especially when his attempt to help members achieve their desire for greater gender equity by proposing the brilliant Islamic historian Patricia Crone was rejected. Still, he was often in the college, usually playing chess after lunch, rather enjoying the mild absurdities of meetings to decide who should occupy parishes which the college still controlled.
Despite all this, the years in Cambridge were difficult and troublesome for him in at least one way. The holder of the named chair normally represented the department in a rather wide range of meetings, with most matters in the university decided by academics rather than by administrators. Gellner hated this, accustomed to a professional administration at the LSE and clearly longing to focus on his own work. He felt he was not particularly good at administration. Perhaps this was unsurprising, for his close colleagues included Colin Renfrew and Anthony Giddens, in charge respectively of the archaeology and sociology departments, both of whom he regarded as brilliant administrators. Further, he did not find relations easy with all members of the department. There was considerable conflict at this time with Keith Hart, contrasting with easy relations with Chris Hann – despite the latter’s direct opposition to his views on civil society and the nature of changes within postcommunism. He was considerably relieved when the chairmanship passed to others. His frustration surely had a foundation. In the last decade of his life he was in constant motion. For one thing, nationalism rose to the top of the political agenda. For another, during the last two years of his William Wyse professorship, he was also involved in setting up the Prague campus of the Central European University. And it may be the case that an element of personal tragedy stood behind what seemed at times a mad schedule – as when he flew to Brazil for a single day to oppose Richard Rorty in a philosophical debate. His youngest son, whom he adored, had had a nervous breakdown, and one sensed that travel let him escape the difficulties of confronting this on a daily basis.
Gellner took his role as social anthropologist with great seriousness. He was active in key institutions, notably as president of the Royal Anthropological Institute between 1991 and 1994. Perhaps more central to his own interests was the new European Association of Social Anthropologists, which he addressed at its founding conference, the talk appearing in the association’s journal, Social Anthropology.2 Further, he attended mainstream anthropological conferences, notably that of the American Anthropological Association, where discussions were held around Plough, Sword, and Book. The occasion was memorable for many because of his reply, after many careful evasions, to an insistent line of feminist questioning asking why he had paid no real attention to the role of women in historical development. His penchant for speaking his mind – assuring the questioner that he liked women, but that they had nothing to do with historical development – caused mild uproar. A different sort of institutional involvement can be seen in the lectures he gave in the university, particularly those that brought anthropological material to bear on key social science issues.3
Still more important was the desire to justify a particular style of anthropology, to set the discipline on a proper course. He much enjoyed tracing the intellectual origins of the British tradition of social anthropology, and this played its part in his passionate argument for the approach against, as he saw it, a dreadful move towards an overemphasis on meaning. The devil he felt he had slain in philosophy thus came back to haunt him in anthropology, drawing forth his full critical talents.4 A good deal of his fire was concentrated on Clifford Geertz. He liked to claim that his attack on Geertz in an essay for The American Scholar was so welcome to many American academics that it was responsible for his election as a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.5 Finally, it should be stressed that the possibility of doing sustained fieldwork again attracted him. The Cambridge years saw him continuing his involvement with Soviet anthropology, trying to work out the extent and limits of intellectual liberalization. The culmination of that work was to have taken place during his sabbatical in Moscow in the academic year 1989–90, but the tectonic shift of that year changed his intellectual agenda. Nonetheless, he regarded the period in Moscow as one in which he was undertaking fieldwork – although the questions with which he had to deal, including the theory of nationalism and the nature of liberal society, necessarily involved drawing on all his intellectual equipment. But despite this concern with social reality, the fact remains that his most prominent contributions whilst at Cambridge were theoretical. Of course, he had his own continuing intellectual interests, with the philosophy of history offered in Plough, Sword, and Book appearing whilst he was at Cambridge. But those interests took on a particular form, were indeed influenced by living life amongst the anthropologists. Three particular contributions deserve comment.
He had lectured on rationality to the social anthropology students since at least 1976, at the invitation of Jack Goody. One set of lectures was recorded and bound under the title ‘The Roots of Compulsion’.6 The material from some of the lectures was used in the early sections of Plough, Sword, and Book dealing with ritual and conceptual styles of knowledge. But the larger part of the material appeared in 1992 as Reason and Culture: The Historic Role of Rationality and Rationalism. This was his second volume for Blackwell’s series on ‘New Perspectives on the Past’, the first being Nations and Nationalism, and many of his prior concerns reappear here, at times in striking formulations.
The first part of the book gives the most detailed account in Gellner’s work of Descartes, stressing his thought’s hard, classical and bourgeois qualities.7 Thereafter Gellner restates his general epistemological view by means of a confrontation between Descartes, Durkheim and Weber. We have already seen that Gellner accepted Durkheim’s view that our concepts are determined by the social rituals that surround them. He then imagined Descartes responding to Durkheim, insisting that no ritual surrounded his own search for clear and reliable ideas, and adding the charge that not all ritual leads to the emergence of powerful cognitive knowledge.8 But Durkheim’s epistemology is saved, selectively, by Gellner’s Weberian claim that the ritual of the Jansenists resembled that of the Calvinists in being ascetic, orderly and this-worldly. These amusing pages conclude with Gellner’s characteristic claims – that science emerged accidentally, for all the universal impact that it would have thereafter.
Most attention is devoted to the enemies of reason. The best-known enemy is authority backed by faith. It is most effective when it rests on revealed truth, for a rational defence of religion is likely to eventually undermine it – although believers ought to be wary of such a classical defence of religion since it can apply to any and every faith.9 As one would expect, considerable attention is paid to the two main ways in which the tense dualism between nature and the self in Kant’s philosophy is resolved – by claiming on the one hand, as did Hegel and Marx, that historical progress would lead to a higher unity, and by insisting on the other hand, as did Nietzsche, that we should simply follow our instinctual drives. The relativism of those stressing the power of culture – the later Wittgenstein, Isaiah Berlin and Thomas Kuhn – is discussed, again in terms that are now familiar. But there are also novel elements in the text. Chomsky’s work appears again as a counter to empiricism’s model of man, but sustained attention is given to the philosophical import of competences that seem to work well beneath the surface of human consciousness. This is a far cry from Descartes’s hope that thought could be grounded clearly and publicly, at least potentially accommodating the possibility that this might lead to irrational outcomes.10 Gellner is especially striking, as noted in the preface, when commenting on Julien Benda. A genuine commitment to rationalism means that one must admit that it is poorly grounded, making it necessary to live without complacency.
The final part of the book, concerned with rationality as a way of life, develops this very claim. The history of reason in action leaves us as ‘Prometheus perplexed’.11 Reason does not work equally well in every sphere, reigning supreme in cognition but largely unable to achieve much in cultural terms. He stressed again that reason is not very useful when dealing with the huge choices that change our identity. His account of reason adds to the charge of parricide, that is, the destruction in the West of the monotheism which had done much to give birth to reason in the first place, the secondary charge of suicide – the inability to create or restore a sense of moral autonomy. There is a contrast here with another allegation, that of impotence – the weakness of empiricism, its inability to provide facts free of theoretical trappings. Gellner hardened his position at this point. He thought the anxiety about this aspect of empiricism was odd given the obvious success of science. He insisted firmly that new facts were able to destroy theories, there being many more consensual refutations within the scientific community than its critics realized. The same point was made more forcibly about politics: prison camps had existed under state socialism and Pol Pot’s regime had killed an enormous proportion of its population – these were facts though they had been denied for bizarre reasons by some intellectuals.12 If the key argument for the absolutist, transcendental quality of science remained historicist and of a limited one-off pragmatist kind – that is, that it worked – Gellner underlined the consideration with especial force. Even if there was a sense in which we constructed science, the odd fact is that the objects discovered by its method are not within our control. They are not made or controlled by us, but discovered. Reality always surprises us.13
Very much in contrast to this consolidation in Reason and Culture of his key ideas was his continuing work on Malinowski – the result of deep fascination and engagement, it allowed a final coming to terms with his own intellectual trajectory. We have already seen that Malinowski’s politics had done a good deal to change Gellner’s view of nationalism, allowing him to argue that several nations might live under a single political roof. Behind Malinowski’s politics was an escape from the stark either/or contrast that Gellner had earlier drawn between positivism and Hegelianism. The former continued to be seen as linked to the Viennese cosmopolitan world represented by Popper, and the latter, so much the charter for culture, was now seen more fully as the key justification for nationalist revivals – especially for historic nations which possessed their own states.14 The excitement apparent in Gellner’s interpretation of Malinowski resides in the Pole having, as it were, stepped outside the confines of this binary opposition – playing with the dealt cards in a wholly original manner. The key discovery about Malinowski’s early years was that his thesis, ‘The Principle of Economy of Thought’, honoured as sub auspiciis Imperatoris in 1908, dealt with the great Viennese positivist Ernst Mach. The interpretation offered in the thesis stressed both the need to concentrate on observable entities and their adaptive role in knowledge. It was these features that carried over into Malinowski’s own anthropological method. The revolution in anthropology associated with Malinowski’s name was based on replacing the magpie method of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which had sought to explain social life by the interpretation of ‘survivals’ of one sort or another.15 Malinowski’s key methodological innovation had been known to Gellner since his time as a doctoral student in anthropology: an institution or belief was to be studied in terms of its current use or function, in terms of the social context of which it formed a part – though Gellner had sought to disconnect the method from the assumption that societies were stable, thereby allowing for historical analysis. Crucially, as has been noted, this position allowed for Malinowski to stress national feelings. The Poles had a national culture even without a state, allowing Malinowski to marry an empirical method with a sense of the importance of culture.16 It might, after all, be possible for several national cultures to prosper under the rule of a single state, for the vicissitudes of nationalism to be avoided.
One sign of Gellner’s status at Cambridge came in the form of an invitation to deliver a sermon to the university.17 He took this invitation very seriously, and talked about its basic scheme for some time before delivering it, marking a break from his general reticence to discuss ongoing work on the grounds that doing so made it harder for him to concentrate on its completion. At this time, Akbar Ahmad, with whom he shared an interest in Muslim tribal organization, asked him to co-author a book dealing with postmodernism and the condition of Islam – an invitation which he had accepted partly so that a good example might be set by having a non-believer and a practising Muslim discussing important issues in a civil manner. He used the sermon as the structural basis for a long essay describing the ideological options available at that time. The publishers came to feel that the different contributions of Gellner and Ahmad did not fit together, and so arranged for separate publications. Perhaps the decision of the publishers was based on the harsh polemical tone of Gellner’s text, published as Postmodernism, Reason and Religion. He had come to loathe postmodernism, regarding it as a terrible disease likely to cause real damage in the academy. He liked to ask his friends if they knew about the offer made by a deconstructionist to a member of the Mafia. He was happy to supply the punchline: it was an offer he could not understand.
Gellner claimed that we face three ideological options – religion, postmodernism and reason – all of them circulating around each other in the uncomfortable tension that lies at the heart of Sartre’s great play, Huis Clos. Religious fundamentalism was illustrated by means of what had become his standard argument about Islam, namely that it was less likely to be secularized than the other world religions, and so certain to have a powerful presence within modernity. He made clear his own distaste for belief based on revelation, but also expressed admiration for fundamentalists’ concern for truth, together with mild envy at the consolation that it gave them.18 In contrast, derision and scorn were poured on post modernists in the longest section of the text. It should be admitted, however, that Gellner was not well versed in postmodern theory, although the two essays which he attacked do indeed exemplify the genre.19 His real enemy was the relativism that he felt was at the core of postmodernism. But there is a certain tension here, between the endless flexibility in postmodernism and the sense of collective systems of meaning that characterizes much anthropological relativism. By and large Gellner ignored this, concentrating instead on the dangers of relativism. His central claim was that postmodernism results from a conflation of subjectivism, that is, the loss of belief in standards of objective knowledge, with liberal guilt about imperialism. One could summarize the postmodernist position by saying that the whole idea of objectivity and clarity is simply a cunning trick of dominators. Descartes had simply prepared the ground for Kipling. Descartes, ergo Kipling. The latter is rejected – and therefore Descartes along with him.20
One source for this argument derived from Gellner’s earlier attack on Geertz. The American anthropologist had claimed that the language of Evans-Pritchard was so clear that it prevented understanding, apparently because it imposed occidental conceptual categories on the thoughts of others. This came to form part of Geertz’s analysis of the work of several famous anthropologists, leading him to recommend what Gellner termed ‘epistemological hypochondria’, that is, a deplorable emphasis on the point of view of the author.21 Gellner’s fear was that so much time might be spent studying one’s own position that fieldwork would become impossible. Expiation for the sins of imperialism through subjectivist self-analysis might then debilitate the discipline. As it happens, Gellner had very particular views about the relationship of anthropology to imperialism. He doubted that imperialism had been much helped by anthropologists, but argued that imperialism had greatly helped anthropology by making it easier for its practitioners to get into the field. He offered two further explanations for the rise of subjectivism. One source was to be found in the history of Marxism, which first sought to explain away the revolution’s failure to occur on the grounds that the working classes were trapped by the commanding heights of capitalist culture, and then attacked via critical theory the putative objectivity of positivism. A second source of subjectivism was to be found in his increasingly pessimistic appraisal of social science. Its lack of genuine cognitive advance, at least in comparison to natural science, meant that academic power and prestige could be achieved by means of ineffable obscurity. And he offered one further speculation. Postmodernism had gained great support in the United States simply because the universalism of that culture was so hegemonic that the ‘discovery’ of difference was all too powerful. All this was but a prelude to the attack on relativism. Particular care was taken to characterize Geertz as a relativist, despite his denial, so that attention could then be directed against his claim that there could be no ‘knowledge beyond culture’.22 Gellner insisted that science was precisely knowledge beyond culture, and restated arguments showing that it had totally changed our position in the world. Further, relativism was by no means as nice as it felt itself to be, noticeably leading at times to respect for cultures in which dissenters were often persecuted. Just as important was a fierce reiteration of his argument against idealism. Meaning was not the only thing that made the world go round. To the contrary, meaning sometimes changed as the result of revolution, marking it as a secondary rather than primary source of power. A final blow was directed at Geertz in this regard. Negara, his splendid account of the workings of the Balinese state, formally made much of hermeneutic explanation but substantively offered sensible and mundane explanations resting on wholly material factors.
‘Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalism’ was the third figure in the debate, and the one with which he identified. It shared with religion the desire to establish truth, but all that it was able to offer in this regard was a procedure rather than a general morality. This latter point made it, in a sense, close to relativism. But where relativism was a fad, science, ungrounded though it may be, had a sufficient track record, intellectually and practically, to sustain it. And he added one final set of considerations. Two attempts to politicize the Enlightenment, to create heaven on earth, had been made – by the Jacobins and by the Bolsheviks. There should be no repeats. What was needed was an arrangement resembling constitutional monarchy: real power, whether political or cognitive, should be in one place, performance and entertainment elsewhere.
There is a postscript to the story of this book. The leaders of the Erasmus Foundation had become worried – presciently, given later developments in Holland – that social cohesion might be undermined by a withering of shared standards, and so organized a conference around Gellner’s volume.23 Various papers were delivered on religious and ethnic fundamentalism, and there was striking discussion about the erstwhile Yugoslavia between the Yale historian and Croat patriot Ivo Banac and the British journalist Misha Glenny. But the centrepiece of the meeting was a confrontation between Geertz and Gellner. As is so often the case, real engagement on the key relevant issues did not take place. What was noticeable to those who attended, including this author, was the extent to which Gellner had wanted to debate – unsurprisingly, since it was he who had arranged for Geertz to be invited.24
Between September 1988 and October 1989 Gellner lived in Moscow, in an unfashionable but relatively self-contained suburb in the south of the city. To have concentrated on Soviet anthropology at the expense of neglecting the death throes of Soviet communism would have been equivalent, he suggested on his return, to studying the Île de France during the French Revolution.25 He abandoned his formal plans, and learnt as much as he could by talking to as many people in as many walks of life as possible. At one time he had hopes of writing books on perestroika or on the intelligentsia, but neither materialized – in the latter case because he had insufficient time to work out exactly what was going on.26 This is not to say that he was unable to offer striking insights.27 Still more important, his period in Moscow was both enjoyable and exceptionally stimulating. He gave a large number of talks, and very much enjoyed speaking Russian. There were many reasons for the attraction. Intellectual life was very high-powered, and it had a breadth which mirrored his own interests. He felt that the fate of the region would be determined by events in Moscow. In this matter, he was essentially parti pris, worrying that the collapse of the Soviet Union would lead to consequences as dreadful as those that had followed the collapse of the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. The attachment lasted for the rest of his life: he gladly returned to teach in summer schools organized by his friends Lena and Yura Senokosov, to whom he dedicated the last monograph published in his lifetime.
Gellner kept field notes during his sabbatical year, but these have not survived. Still, there are many anthropological observations to be found in a series of occasional pieces. He noted the desire to establish monuments remembering both the victims and the culprits of repression, an indicator not just of the fact that the culprits themselves were often persecuted but quite as much of a widespread recognition of diffused guilt.28 Quite as striking was the extent of media freedom, though he noted wryly that this carnival of the intellectuals was dubbed Telavivenie – an indication of continuing anti-Semitism.29 Particularly interesting was the absence of any clear manifesto of the new order, although he judged this fuzziness to be probably desirable. In general, he took particularly seriously the distinction between two periods, namely those of Stalin and stagnation. Curiously, the horrors of Stalinism did not really undermine belief, as he made clear in a very striking review of Sakharov’s Memoirs.30 That the heroic romanticism which sought to create a new world caused bloodshed seemed almost necessary, and so excusable. The period of stagnation associated with the Brezhnev years was merely shoddy in comparison. And such shoddiness killed belief.
He was characteristically witty on the ironies of demands from above that civil society should suddenly come into being, and he offered a marvellous portrait of Gorbachev as Harun al-Rashid, able to balance superbly between different factions in the Congress of Deputies in 1989.31 Further, he had a real sense of the structural constraints on reform: peasants no longer wanted their land back, whilst the workings of the economy depended in fact upon a sort of socialist industrial feudalism.32 The most striking piece that he wrote was based on field experience. He visited Georgia and Belarus, and additional insights were gained from a rather longer acquaintance with Estonia, for a discussion of ‘Ethnicity and Faith in Eastern Europe’.33 He clearly enjoyed himself enormously, especially when reporting on Belarussian peasants’ memories of the Polish gentry who had dominated them in the interwar years. That one such member of the gentry had enjoyed droit de seigneur was recalled with admiration rather than resentment by the grandson of the woman involved. What mattered for the future in more general terms was the world of difference between areas that had lived under communism for forty as compared to seventy years.
There was the acute moral dilemma of whether charges should be brought against members of the previous regime. In ‘To Try or Not to Try. The Liberal’s Dilemma’ his position is made especially clear.34 He attended meetings of ‘Memorial’, a society dedicated to remembering and seeking justice for the victims of Stalinism. He was not at all convinced that it made sense to prosecute those who had perpetrated Stalin’s excesses. For one thing, most such perpetrators were very old. For another, Stalinism had been very different from Nazism in that the perpetrators had themselves very often been the subject of hideous cruelty and persecution. But something else was more important. Any set of trials would sooner or later be bound to focus attention on the role of the Party, since it was in the end the single institution of any consequence within Soviet communism. If the Party were to be utterly discredited there would be a complete institutional vacuum. As vacuums tend to become filled, Gellner felt sure that intense nationalisms would come to the fore – with consequences that might well be disastrous.35 His own hopes were for continued liberalization, a controlled decompression within the Soviet Union allowing for territorial continuity to be maintained. This did not occur. In fact, Yeltsin played the Russian national card, though only after Party leaders had attempted a coup. Nationalism and democratization took the place of liberalization. As noted, Gellner feared that this was a disastrous error and he did not subsequently change his mind. When, in the summer of 1994, he read Anatoly Khazanov’s manuscript about the end of the Soviet Union in his Italian summer house, he replied saying that he had almost become a Russian imperialist, and as such was not at all keen to endorse his friend’s delight at the end of the Soviet empire.36 He liked to say that he had became a follower of Jaroslav Hašek, the author of The Good Soldier Švejk, who once stood for the Prague City Council on the ticket of a party he had himself founded, the Party of Mild Progress Within the Limits of the Law.37 Further, he took to suggesting that the Chinese might do better by reversing Russian policy – that is, by having perestroika before glasnost.
Beyond these occasional pieces stands something more systematic, namely his attempt to define the nature of civil society. By the late 1980s Gellner was wont to say that the nature of civil society, and, crucially, the possibility of its extension, was the question of the age. In Moscow and later in Prague, he suggested that a key part of the answer was to be found in seventeenth-century English history. What he was doing here was using his thoughts on the contradiction in Hume’s sociology of religion to create an original viewpoint on the origin of civility and toleration in Europe. His claim was that stalemate – the inability over time to fully defeat one’s rivals – led to a grudging decision to live together, which in turn morphed into a positive appreciation of diversity. The fact that he often spoke about Islam when in Moscow led him to consider civil society not just in contrast to failing Marxism, but also in relation to the power of this revived religion. Accordingly, there is a sense in which this late work pulls together much of his previous thought, and to that extent it is a good introduction to his sociology. And one can go further: this material spells out his liberalism perhaps more clearly than elsewhere, and to that extent is something of a summation of his social philosophy.
His views on civil society gained an early airing when he gave the Tanner Lectures at Harvard University in 1990.38 The first lecture was rather dense, and hard for the audience to grasp; the second in contrast was highly successful, not least in leading to a debate with Daniel Bell who chaired the meeting. Gellner’s presumption, that socialism had failed, was challenged by Bell, playing the devil’s advocate, on the grounds that it had never been tried in the conditions which might have allowed it to work – that is, that it had no chance in Russia, a peasant society which had yet to modernize. Gellner refused to accept this, refuting Bell by citing Czechoslovakia, industrialized and affluent in the interwar years, with a sense in Prague thereafter that it had been robbed of its destiny as a second Munich. There were further papers, but all the arguments were drawn together in Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals, which appeared in 1994. Gellner had reservations about the book, or so he professed, on the grounds that it recycled too much of his previous work. But the reception of books is something of a mystery, and this monograph gained wider and more favourable acclaim than any book that he had previously written.39 It was recognition of the fact that he had become a public intellectual. And the author in any case judged the book too harshly. It is indeed true that key arguments were repeated: one can find in the chapter on Adam Ferguson, for example, a neat summary of his view of the fortuitous opening of Western society.40 But a good deal in it was new.
The book made a crucial and wholly novel contribution in its opening pages. It is now generally recognized that naïve boosters of civil society, prone to romanticize popular forces, fail to understand that societal self-organization is not necessarily desirable. The mafia is an unattractive model; so too was the high level of societal self-organization in Weimar Germany, most obviously in its communist and Nazi forms.41 Gellner was the first social theorist engaging in the debate at that time to make this clear, and he did so with reference to tribal society. A society of cousins can be utterly constraining; hence civil society depends on a guarantee of the ability both to enter and to leave groups at will. After making this distinction, Gellner then concentrated on the great ideological communities of Islam and Marxism. If the arguments about Islam are the same as those discussed in chapter nine, genuinely new thought was on offer about the fate of the socialist bloc. Most importantly, Gellner admitted that he had been completely wrong in imagining that Marxism would be an ersatz Weberian ethic allowing for successful late development.42 There were several elements to his explanation for this failure. The most immediate concerned the nature of social life in communist society. Gellner made much of Marxism as the creator of a moral order, noting again that periods of heroism, even with the vast numbers of dead that they created, could be understood within the terms of that morality. The period of stagnation was wholly different. Life became sleazy and markedly atomized; the lack of trust in socialism, the fear that neighbours might report you, accentuating this well beyond anything seen in capitalism. The crucial consideration was that Marxism had sanctified daily life, including that of the economy, leaving no mundane world to which to retreat: the situation with world religions, including revived Islam, has always been different – allowing belief to be sustained even in difficult times.43 In a sense, Marxism had been judged by its own standard, and was found wanting – not so much in itself, for Gellner made much of the benefits that industrialization had brought, but in comparison with progress in the advanced capitalist countries of the West.44 More directly, Gellner had come to believe that a command administrative hierarchy was inimical to economic success. Whilst he had little time for Václav Havel as social theorist, he adored one sociological observation in The Power of the Powerless. The enthusiastic Czech brewer described by Havel, wishing merely to improve his beer, caused problems for his boss within the political hierarchy; and it was easier to dismiss him as a troublemaker than work to improve the product.45 The point that Gellner is making is simple: loyalty to two masters, to power as well as to production, creates confusion which is unlikely to benefit economic life. This led to further interesting thoughts about the place of the economy in modern life. A measure of autonomy for enterprises was necessary for the flourishing of civil society, for a reason still more important than economic efficiency: bluntly put, there was no other source of power, as Weber had argued before, able to balance the state.46 On this basis, Gellner offered some obiter dicta: just as Marxism (loosely seen as an ideology seeking to control the economy) had to be totalitarian, so any command administrative system had to be Marxist.47 But he took especial care not to be misunderstood. A modern economy was like an elephant in a small boat; it was inevitably politicized because the state was responsible for providing the infrastructure on which it depended. The autonomy of enterprises in liberal society could only be relative, a sort of reciprocal consent between the parties. Further, he was opposed to the imposition of neo-liberal policy in post-communist society.48
The book contains other novelties, perhaps best seen from two angles. On the one hand, some elements of his prior thought gained a new edge as the result of particularly striking new formulations. The stress on generalized education as necessary for repeated occupational change was summed up by referring to modular furniture, in which pieces could be added at will. Humanity in the modern world needed to be modular in just this sense. This in turn allowed him to sum up his view of nationalism in relation to civil society, and more particularly to express his fear as to its role in postcommunism:
[T]he modularity of man, so intimately tied up with an industrial and growth-oriented society, has two aspects, two principal social corollaries: it makes possible Civil Society, the existence of countervailing and plural political associations and economic institutions, which at the same time are not stifling; and it also makes mandatory the strength of ethnic identity, arising from the fact that man is no longer tied to a particular social niche, but is instead deeply linked to a culturally defined pool. The one potentiality is a mere option, essential presumably in the long term if the society is to be capable of competing with its rivals, but not always overwhelmingly strong in the short term; the other, however, constitutes an immediately and powerfully felt imperative. This is a fact, whether or not we like it.49
On the other hand, there were more innovations as well. One was the hope, generated by the cooperation of the Soviet Union and the United States at the time of the first Gulf War, that increasing governance at the global level was actually coming to the fore – thankfully, in Gellner’s view, given that only this could allow for an effective response to ecological disaster and to terrorism. A second innovation concerned the validation of civil society. He thought that ‘preaching across cultural boundaries … [was] … a fairly pointless exercise … They are what they are, and we are what we are: if we were them, we would have their values, and if they were us, they would have ours’.50 This was not for a moment to say that he was a relativist, for he continued to stress the power of modern cognition and to base his own standards upon it – and to stress the power of its example throughout the world. But there is a slight difference of tone in this late formulation: the eventual spread of science might do less to undermine established beliefs than he had once hoped.
Two challenges were mounted to his views on civil society. The first came from his Cambridge colleague, the anthropologist Chris Hann, who insisted that the collapse of state socialism did more to undermine security than to advance anything like a ‘civil’ society.51 There was not in fact much difference between the two, as Gellner himself pointed out.52 Gellner certainly had no time for pure marketism, and was wont in his last years to worry about the emergence of ‘spivvy’ capitalism in Russia – though he did feel that the transition in the erstwhile Hapsburg lands was likely to succeed.53 More interesting was the later criticism of Ashutosh Varshney, who objected to Gellner’s view that civil associations must be voluntary, as well as to the implication that this condition can only be reached in modern circumstances.54 Varshney pointed to the voluntary nature of many civil associations in the past, and went further in arguing that minorities were often protected by communities within which they were more or less caged. Perhaps this shows the fertility of Gellner’s model, encouraging as it does social science research on the extent to which traditional pluralisms can take a liberal direction.
Gellner’s engagement in polemical controversies did not cease in his later years, as is obvious from the disputes with Geertz, Taylor, Rorty, and with postmodernism more generally. There were two further polemics: one conducted with Noam Chomsky in private correspondence preserved in the Gellner Archive, the other, with Edward Said, the subject of considerable publicity. Both reveal a great deal about Gellner’s general social philosophy.
The exchange with Chomsky began as the result of Gellner’s review of Bernard Lewis’s Semites and Anti-Semites. The main purpose of the review was to challenge Lewis’s account in two ways: by insisting that anti-Semitic feeling was present in traditional Muslim societies (even if it was less central to that civilization than it was to Christianity), and to suggest that modern circumstances – the ending of strictly specialized occupational niches – were bound to create difficulties for Jews.55 Chomsky’s concern however was with a particular passage in Lewis’s book, cited in the review:
[T]he Anglo-American liberal, who claims a monopoly of sin for his country … the tortured WASP radical, who sees the Arab-Israeli conflict as ultimately one between Harlem and Scarsdale, and makes a choice determined by his own personal blend of prejudice and guilt.
Gellner had seemed to endorse this description by writing about the ‘bizarre … fruits of self-hate decried by Lewis’. Chomsky felt that this was a slur, and in effect challenged Gellner to produce evidence of such attitudes.56 Not one to duck a fight, Gellner said in his reply that the person who best represented the position he had in mind was in fact Chomsky himself. From this starting point, there followed a general discussion of the nature of the political responsibility of intellectuals in the modern world.
Gellner effectively opened the debate by insisting that a Manichean view of the modern world, of a contrast between liberty and pluralism as compared to authoritarianism and oppressiveness, seemed to him correct. He had no wish to deny the crimes and blunders committed by his own side, nor did he think that these should be ignored rather than criticized.
But in criticising … one does it in context, never losing sight of the fact, or allowing one’s readers to lose sight of the fact, that the survival of freedom and accountable, limited government is an enormously important value even when some of its defenders are occasionally tarnished. If this context is recognised in your political writings, it somehow is totally obscured, and it would be perfectly natural for a reader to feel that it is absent …57
He went on to say that ‘a kind of populist spirit’ pervaded Chomsky’s political writings, in which good and evil are easily identified. In contrast, Gellner noted that his own scholarly work, whilst also dualistic, had tried to ‘identify the mechanisms with which we operate’ rather than to attribute goodness or badness to people. He went on to stress the complexities of the situation in the Middle East. He was well aware that ‘… the Palestinians are in no way connected with what happened to the Jews in Europe, nor are they responsible for the theological documents of the Old Testament, and can reasonably claim that there is no reason why they should suddenly become a minority in their own country’. But if one started from the view that the survival of both communities is legitimate, then castigation of crimes (which had unquestionably occurred) ought to be a bit more symmetrical.
Chomsky replied to this letter at great length and with a candour that Gellner found very moving.58 There were several elements to his reply. First, he insisted that he had often condemned injustices in the Soviet Union (being perhaps even more critical, he claimed, than was Gellner in this regard) and elsewhere, and pointed out that he had been an anarchist since he was about twelve. Second, he noted – and offered to document – extensive American atrocities in Indochina, Central America and the Caribbean. Third, he objected to Gellner’s Manichean view:
What you call the ‘East-West’ conflict is not an East-West conflict. That is to a large extent a propaganda construction of elites on both sides. In reality, the Cold War is a much more complex system, in which elites on each side exploit the quite real crimes of the other as a device to control their own populations and to carry out their own crusades in their own domains.
Finally, he insisted that the majority of social critics in the United States were straightforwardly honest, and entirely free of the complex motives that had been ascribed to them. Intellectuals ought to work at all times against repression wherever it is found, without fear or favour. Accordingly, Gellner was held to be failing in his duty as an intellectual.
Gellner’s reply was lengthier than his initial letter, and it covered a good deal of sociological ground. He began by trying to explain why he valued the West and felt state socialism to be such a threat:
The complexity and interdependence of the industrial machine which alone makes possible the overcoming of poverty-inspired oppression, means that our society is bound to have strong central institutions concerned with the maintenance of the shared infrastructure. The nature of the division of labour makes it very unlikely that this society will be endowed with countervailing institutions of a social or political or territorial or kin type. In other words, the only possible countervailing institutions are economic ones. There is no anarchist option. Nor, in the long run, is there a classical economic liberal one. The only genuine options are either some form of mixed economy, which is capable of ensuring the rule of law, freedom of information, a measure of checks on government etc., or ‘socialism’, which means in concrete terms that the political and economic hierarchies are basically identical. There is no third alternative.
Gellner added to this the view that the chances of liberalizing authoritarian rightist regimes were better than those of liberalizing socialist dictatorships. In other words, he had become, as noted, convinced by Aron. The privileged members of the former ‘have money, and it is possible to make a deal with them, saying: you can keep your money if you give up power’. By contrast, left-wing regimes cannot voluntarily liberalise beyond a certain point. The important privileges and perks within them do not have the form of ‘wealth’ but are all so to speak prebendal, they are attached to official positions. If you lose the position, you lose everything. Consequently political struggle within them must be of the winner-take-all or total kind, thereby ruling out the possibility of a liberal outcome.59
Gellner again insisted that he did not wish to deny, nor to avoid criticism of, crimes committed by the West. But he insisted that the crimes committed by the two sides were not remotely comparable. Whereas the crimes of the West were a by-product of a conflict situation or of mistakes by individuals,
the systematic oppression which is a part of the rival system is a consequence, not of course of individual wickedness, but of the inevitable structural principles of that kind of social organisation. They are also qualitatively rather larger. Nothing the liberal West has done compares with either Stalin or Pot.
On this basis, Gellner then turned to Chomsky’s anarchist standard of judgement. ‘Why should a man judge his own society by an absurd standard, unless he has the need to use a standard which will then enable him to condemn that society with vehemence? In other words, is this not evidence for Lewis’s charge of “self-hatred”?’
Chomsky, in a very long reply, refused to accept any of these arguments. He rejected the notion of two opposing sides altogether (whilst arguing, however, that the West was responsible for the horrors committed by Pol Pot), and repeated his view that intellectuals should stand up against all repression. He felt that his motives had been slandered, and made it clear that he regarded Gellner’s position as craven. He felt that there was no point in continuing the correspondence, and there was no further response from Gellner – who was happy, he noted in conversation, to let the matter drop, as he felt that real engagement was not taking place.
Turning to Gellner’s other notable polemic of this period, spectacular public fireworks resulted from his review of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism.60 We have already seen in Gellner’s reviews of the work of Bryan Turner a deep scepticism toward the view that the West was responsible for blocking the rise of Muslim societies. His review of Said’s book offered a direct critique of the ‘bogy of imperialism’. He felt that modern imperialism was made inevitable by the technological lead of one part of the world, and was therefore reluctant to accept the view that Occidental ideological presuppositions had played the crucial role given to them by Said. In any case, Gellner argued that Said’s readings of Gide, Camus and Fanon were mistaken. But he was moved to action here less by a long-lasting dislike of the idealism in Said’s position than by the en passant attack on such serious scholars as Patricia Crone and Michael Cook. The main point of the review was that powerful scholarship of Oriental societies had come from very varied places, some from Western scholars and some from the colonial administrators known to him from his North African work – and errors were equally possible on the part of those of whose ideological position Said approved. Said’s reply ignored most of this, accusing Gellner of Orientalism on the grounds that his work on Islam lacked knowledge of classical Muslim languages, although he acknowledged ‘some fieldwork (without Arabic or Berber) in a part of Morocco’, so as to suggest, on the basis of a single quoted sentence, that his work exhibited ‘obsessive revulsion for “Islam”’.61 Gellner replied forcefully, though he refrained from underlining his facility in Berber. One point he made very clearly was that the sentence in question had been torn out of context, and emphasized his obvious and long-standing commitment to understanding Muslim societies. He then returned to his main charge, that Said only took seriously the scholarship of the politically correct. ‘I am worried … by the attribution of merit and truth in virtue of who one is, or to the political category or group of origin to which one belongs, rather than to the affirmations themselves on merit’.62 A further letter from Said effectively repeated his original case, whilst denying the charge of political correctness.63 A final letter from Gellner made fun of Said’s insistence that literature had played a key role in imperialism by imagining the viceroy of India worrying about the contents of the latest issue of Scrutiny.64 There is an epilogue to this controversy. In the last months of his life Gellner was planning a conference on a rather different sort of Orientalism, namely the view of Central and Eastern Europeans about the lands to their east, lands which had often bred nomads who had overrun them.65 The conference mattered to him a great deal, not least as it allowed him to engage with many of the Soviet anthropologists that he knew. It seems that Said had accepted an invitation to attend.66
Shortly after his return from Moscow Gellner was visited in Cambridge by Ivan Havel, who brought with him a personal request from his brother Václav to assist in the creation of a Central European University. This was to be funded by George Soros, the Hungarian exile of Jewish background who had become one of the world’s great financiers. Soros had already played a significant role in intellectual opening and civil society development in Central Europe, and his Open Society Institute now played a major role in the region. Such a university would have campuses in Prague, Warsaw and Budapest, and it would improve the human capital of the region in order to ensure that democratic openings were consolidated. The guiding light of the whole enterprise was liberalism, exemplified for Soros in the work of Karl Popper – who had refused Soros as a research student long ago, but whose ideas led to a special meeting in Prague on 26 May 1994.67 Václav Havel was very keen on this renewal of cultural capital, and was prepared to loan as the site for the Prague campus a nearly completed trade union conference centre in Táboritská, a street in the heart of Žižkov, the interwar hub of Prague’s red working class. Gellner was torn. He faced forced retirement in Cambridge at the end of the 1992/3 academic year, and was already looking for further employment – for it was clear, to his friends and to Gellner himself, that he did not wish to settle down to any sort of quieter life. To that end he was being courted by Boston University, and was at times interested in other openings in North America. But he had always felt relatively ill at ease in the United States, knowing himself to be European; in any case, events in Europe were far more interesting. Yet there was a problem. His great interest was in the former Soviet Union, not least as he felt that developments there would determine the fate of the region. Furthermore, he had reservations about the Czechs, in large part because of the manner in which the Sudeten Germans had been expelled, though he was just as concerned with their capacity for craven subordination. But, in the end, he chose to concentrate his attentions on Prague. He taught there part-time from 1991–3 whilst finishing up at Cambridge, and on a permanent basis for the remainder of his life. He handled his reservations in a characteristic way – by teaching in Russia in the summers, and by eventually looking for a cottage to purchase in the south of Bohemia.
He was decidedly delighted to be back in Prague. When the Café Slavia – next to the Národní Divadlo, both of them sacred sites of Czech nationalism – re-opened, he felt sufficiently moved to suddenly stand and sing a Czech patriotic song, to the bemusement of the clientele. Regular purchases of Bohemian glassware were made, given away to friends as if in a personal attempt to revive the Czech economy. He very much enjoyed speaking Czech on a daily basis, and was amused when told that his figures of speech were dated and were those of a thirteen-year-old schoolboy. And he enjoyed re-reading Czech and Hapsburg literature, appreciating in particular Roth’s The Radetzky March, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, and Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk. Many found great charm in his attachments to Czech culture, and he played a notable role in introducing intellectuals from the West at meetings of one sort or another. He clearly enjoyed showing the city to many visitors, whether academics or family members, and took great pleasure in entertaining them in the city, characteristically plying them with excellent Moravian wine. He sent many visitors to beautiful towns such as Telč, and to the south of Bohemia, especially to Krumlov. He went there himself, recalling German activism in reaction to Czech nationalism; he also returned to Příbram where he had spent much time as a child. His limited free time was often spent exploring parts of Bohemia, notably the spa towns still best known to us as Marienbad and Carlsbad.
The university personnel derived in part from his links to Jiří Musil. In 1990 Gellner attended a conference organized by Musil – who had just become head of the Sociological Institute because, as someone who had never joined the Party, his hands were notably clean. On that occasion, Gellner insisted that the Czechs would prosper, at least in part because they had Prague – correctly predicting that it would soon become a major tourist attraction.68 Musil, Gellner and Ray Pahl, a sociologist from the University of Kent who shared with Musil an interest in urban sociology, took advantage of the meeting to plan a department of sociology for the Central European University. A short opening summer session took place in 1991, with the full-scale programme – soon including further social science subjects, notably international relations – getting under way in the autumn. One-year courses were offered to students from the whole of Eastern Europe, partly taught by visiting professors, in social theory, stratification, research methods, ‘market, state and society’, ‘nationalism, ethnicity and race’, and in postcommunism. These initial years were exciting and extraordinary. For many, this was the first opportunity to talk freely, and with colleagues from different countries, and lives were distinctively changed by this experience. Gellner very much enjoyed the informal atmosphere there (for he lived in the same building as the students), insisted that the students call him Ernest, and was deeply interested in their lives and ideas. There can be no doubt that Gellner made a substantial but incalculable contribution to the intellectual life of the region. Still, the schedule was punishing, and he could not have managed without the constant support of his wife. For he was not just teaching in both Prague and Cambridge but also involved in setting up, from 1992, a Centre for the Study of Nationalism. The desire to have such a centre had been on his mind from the start – because he was so terrified that the collapse of the socialist bloc would lead to the disasters that had followed the ending of Ottoman and Hapsburg power.69
But there were considerable frustrations involved in working for the Central European University. Most obviously, there was a complete lack of any organized structure, in large part because decisions for many years were made by Soros himself. A titanic clash of egos soon took place between Soros and Václav Klaus, the free-marketeer who became prime minister in 1992, the immediate result of which was a decision to close down operations in Prague. As it happens, that decision was rescinded, but it created an air of uncertainty that Gellner felt was utterly opposed to the needs of institution-building. His hope was that the appointment of a rector for the university as a whole might change things significantly, especially if such a person were able to persuade Soros to make a large donation so the university could manage its own affairs. But the appointment of Alfred Stepan did not prove to be any sort of administrative cure-all, even though Gellner appreciated the liveliness of his ideas. For one thing, endless discussions about the purchase of a building came to naught, and an unfortunate move was made into a Stalinist building that turned out to be riddled with asbestos. Eventually a small building was purchased on Prokopova, very close to the original site in Žižkov – but this was just at the end of his time in Prague, and only provided a home for his centre. No permanent solution to the funding problem was found whilst Gellner was alive, and he was endlessly irritated at the inability of the central organization to finalize the terms of his own contract. Soros soon became convinced that the Poles, Magyars and Czechs were successfully consolidating their democracies, and so chose to spend more of his money further to the east. This led to the closing of the Prague campus in the summer of 1995, with all subjects moving to the Budapest campus – except for sociology, which went to Warsaw. There was considerable irony in this: Soros’s interest in decentralization did not seem to apply to his own university; it became ever more a Magyar monopoly.70 Gellner would have been prepared to move to Warsaw, if need be, but not to Budapest – he felt that the Hungarians were clever, and he did not speak the language. He continued to press for the return of the philosophy department to Prague, and was deeply angered by the move of the philosophy library to Budapest.
Gellner’s reputation lent weight to the university as a whole, with his Centre for the Study of Nationalism naturally attracting scholars not just from Central Europe but also from points further east and west, both as visitors and fellows. Amongst their number were Rashid Kaplanov, Victor Shnirelman, Anatoly Khazanov, Petr Pithart, Tom Nairn, Michael Ley, Zdenĕk Stary, Charles Taylor, Ron Dore, Shmuel Eisenstadt and Geoffrey Hosking. Most importantly, the centre organized a series of conferences and seminars. A large conference in 1993 brought together a very large number of the world’s scholars of nationalism, and Gellner notably organized a programme which involved increasing general awareness of Czech nationalism – by gaining entry into the grand reception rooms in the castle designed for Masaryk by the Slovenian modernist architect Jože Plečnik, by an evening at the Národní Divadlo, and by a performance of Czech folklore. But smaller conferences and seminars dealt with the Czech-Slovak split (one conference on the theme being held in Edinburgh, another in Prague, with comparative material on the potential split between Quebec and the rest of Canada); Philosophy and Westernization (dealing with the elective affinities between different philosophies and particular Central European countries); the filling of the postcommunist vacuum in Russia (co-presented with the Moscow School of Political Studies); the role of ethnography in the formation of national self-images and national ideology; the role of historiography in the construction of national ideologies and self-images; Alois Musil and the Muslim world; and Muslim postcommunist societies.71 In the autumn of 1995, ten pre-doctoral students were recruited to the centre in Prokopova, to join Gellner and two of the academic visitors. They found the experience remarkable, but one of them, Siniša Malešević (later to become an established figure in the field of nationalism studies), confessed to feeling unease when Gellner sat down to watch television with him – saying it was as if Max Weber had dropped by.
Not all of Gellner’s life revolved around the university and his centre. Of course, he observed the Velvet Divorce of Czechs and Slovaks with considerable interest. This was a split of which he approved, in large part because he felt that this was the only way in which a perceived inferiority of Slovak intellectuals could be remedied.72 But he made no public statement endorsing the split, probably because he did not approve of all or perhaps most such splits – noting privately that he thought Quebec’s best option was to remain within Canada.73 Further, he took considerable pleasure from the conflict between Havel and Klaus, the one seen as a representative of the Frankfurt School and the other as an adherent of Milton Friedman.74 He had enormous admiration for Havel’s moral stature and felt that the Czechs were lucky to have him – even though he found his ideas (but not his plays) vague and unrealistic.75 Nonetheless, he came increasingly to feel that Czechia had become desperately dull. He remembered the multicultural Prague of his childhood, and could not help but contrast it with a new Prague bereft of Germans, Jews, and Slovaks. He said frequently in those years that he did not wish Prague to become like Vienna. There was an obvious irony in this. His theory of nationalism insists that homogeneity is the base on which industrial success can be built. Nonetheless, he loathed the lack of diversity, and sought to oppose the claustrophilia of the Klaus government. The conferences he organized were in part designed to add spice to Czech intellectual life, and he sought to establish intellectual links locally. His work on nationalism had an immediate impact in Prague, not least as he established links with Miroslav Hroch, as well as with academics in different departments at Charles University.
He offered sustained reflections on the way in which the Czech past might affect its future in two essays, and he noted on at least one occasion his intention to write more about Czechia. ‘The Price of Velvet’ compared Masaryk and Havel. Admiration for both figures was apparent, but so too was bitter criticism at the ‘velvety’ character of Czech political transitions. The historicism of Masaryk, the sense that one ought to act only in accord with historical developments, was seen as contributing to Czech fatalism in the face of great powers.76 Gellner later noted that Masaryk might have fought in 1938 had he still been alive, whereas Beneš, despite the desires of his generals, refused to do so; the transition in 1948 was even less contentious. In contrast, Havel stressed the power of the people in ending communism. Gellner simply felt that this was not true, as was apparent from the way in which Havel as president chided the Czechs for political passivity. A much better guide was to be found in the early 1990s in the viewpoint of Petr Pithart. Gellner had long known Pithart’s work: he had previously been a communist, but then became a dissident whose samizdat writings on the meaning of the 1968 events, under the pen name Sládeček, he had previously analysed.77 He became the prime minister of the Czech half of Czechoslovakia after 1989, before becoming closely associated with the Central European University.78 Pithart’s argument was simple: there had been no revolution at all, the regime lasting so long because of Czechoslovakia’s genius for normalizing itself. This is something that Gellner feared, and it explains his enthusiastic review of a long letter of Jan Patočka’s which offered an account of Czech history to a German woman who might well have joined him in Prague.79 Patočka had little time for Masaryk’s view of the Czech past, giving a much smaller role to the Hussites. What mattered for Patočka was the absence of a native aristocracy and the presence of a Catholicism that suppressed Enlightenment thought. The end result in Patočka’s eyes was petty-mindedness in tandem with an egalitarianism that undermined human agency. It was for these reasons that Patočka had suggested during the communist period that a dose of Nietzsche might help the Czechs more than continual obeisance to Masaryk. Gellner was sympathetic to this view. But he was not able, as noted, to follow Patočka and Pithart when they seemed to suggest that an alternative Czech foundation story might be found in the non-ethnic patriotic views of the early-nineteenth-century mathematician Bolzano.
The depth of his political concerns in the final years of his life was apparent to all who visited him in Prague. His concern with Islam and nationalism, with the revival of capitalism and the filling of a moral vacuum, were behind his interest in Russian developments. But his interests involved intellectual history and comparative sociology quite as much. The planned conference on Orientalism was to be matched by another on the Caucasus, likely in his view to become the scene of bitter nationalist conflict, and so deserving considered attention. There were other detailed plans. He wanted to work on the triangle of nationalism, populist ethnography and anthropology.80 Furthermore, he was interested in the revival of a saint cult in south Bohemia, and hoped to work with Czech colleagues. His complete independence of mind was on display time and again in these years, particularly in a series of reviews, most of which served as essays in their own right. One example was his participation in the debate over Heidegger’s philosophy and politics.81 Where most commentators had written about this in the most sententious terms, Gellner almost shrugged the matter off. For him, Heidegger was a dull opportunist whose prose at times was impenetrable and whose politics told us little about the moral dilemmas facing intellectuals in the twentieth century. In contrast, Sakharov illuminated those dilemmas, and produced genuinely interesting philosophical ideas.
Still, many friends and observers noted that he was tired. For one thing, there was simply the punishing schedule of travel, publication and teaching that characterized these last years. For another, he did not enjoy being treated as an authority, and was indeed almost irritated at times when asked to repeat himself: this was obvious to those who attended the conference on Muslim postcommunist societies – he came to life only when turning away from his older work to talk about Alois Musil, the T. E. Lawrence of the Hapsburgs.82 Most noticeable was a considerable dose of pessimism about current intellectual trends. ‘Anything Goes’ was very representative in this regard. The fin de siècle had been genuinely liberating; in contrast, the fin de millénaire seemed wilfully self-destructive – self-indulgent, prone to relativism and bereft of much sense of reality. Social constructivism was rampant, and it desperately needed to be replaced with an emphasis on the natural basis for the construction of society – that is, re-emphasis of the way in which science changes our world.83
Some of his late writings contained biographical snippets, although he refused to write an autobiographical introduction to a volume of essays assessing his work.84 His mind was often on the character of his life and career. When in Italy in the summer of 1995 he wrote to Wendy Doniger about one of his closest friends, Richard Olendcki, a Pole who had survived Auschwitz and with whom Gellner would sail when he was in Massachusetts. They had had a final lunch in Warsaw where Gellner for a short period held an appointment as an Erasmus Professor.
Richard Olendcki dies as he wished to do very peacefully and quickly. He had made arrangements with the doctors to ensure that there was no lingering … I admired him very much and there is no man I would rather choose for a companion if I had to be on the mainland of Europe in let us say 1941.85
He travelled a great deal that autumn, and arrived in Budapest rather tired in early November to host a conference organized by his Centre for the Study of Nationalism on the role of formerly dominant minorities. The idea was simple – to cast light on the potential behaviour of Russians, especially those ‘beached’ in areas that they had once dominated. To that end, papers were offered on the Hungarian experience, and on different facets of the Irish situation. The LSE was well represented, with papers being delivered by Brendan O’Leary, Marianne Heiberg, Bill Kissane, George Schöpflin and Dominic Lieven.86 Gellner gave an impromptu talk on the last day of the conference, 5 November, apparently brilliantly summarizing the proceedings. He then attended a long bureaucratic meeting at which he finally gained assurances regarding the future of his centre. He then flew back to Prague, went to his rooms in Prokopova, and was felled by a heart attack – sudden, massive and immediately fatal. The letter to Doniger suggests that this is the death that he too had wished for: certainly it is hard to imagine him somehow slowing down.
His students in Prokopova were shattered. Appreciation for their teacher, for his informality and concern for their well-being combined with insistence on the highest intellectual standards, was expressed at a first memorial service in Prague, the comments later published in Prospect in December 1995. The leading papers in England featured obituaries, all of them affectionate, some marked by small errors.87 The Economist noted his ability to transcend particular fields, and endorsed this by repeating the boast of Max Weber: ‘I am not a donkey and I don’t have a field’.88 Two appreciations went beyond the formalities to capture something of the man. Alan Macfarlane wrote a lengthy and powerful appreciation for his college.
Something that struck most people was the contradiction between the acerbic and often cruel debater, and the enormously kind and gentle human being. At the personal level, as his numerous friends and pupils could witness, his life was full of little acts ‘of kindness and of love’. He was also extremely generous with his time, possessions and support. At times he felt that all this natural kindness might be taken as a sign of weakness, so he used to try to justify it as a Machiavellian strategy.
Memory of his roots made him an extraordinarily modest person, self-depreciating, humble and somewhat shy …89
Macfarlane stressed his ability to ask the right questions, noting finally that ‘in the man and in the writing one felt the touch of genius’.
Tom Nairn had spent a year as a fellow of the Centre for the Study of Nationalism, purportedly working on ‘micro-nationalisms’ – something which amused Gellner a good deal – and he drew on this experience to express his own sense of loss.
Gellner’s office in Prague looked northwards towards Žižkov Hill, a view of the things that most interested and infuriated him. It was dominated by the Czech National Memorial and the outsize equestrian statue of the blind Bohemian military hero, General Jan Žižkov … The National Memorial had also been used by the Communists to pretend that they were the true inheritors of Czech nationhood. Klement Gottwald, the ‘Czech Lenin’, was embalmed there for some years after his death in 1953, until the air conditioning failed and the mouldy cadaver had to be furtively smuggled out. So from where Ernest sat … there was a daily reminder of another example of how vulgar autocracy, fake ethnicity and Stalin’s big stick had fused together to form a uniquely dire parody of modernity.
I always felt that what mattered most about modern history was in that room. The thought of never entering it again, never hearing Ernest’s walking stick thumping up the corridor, or the latest low jokes about Socialism, Slovaks or Californian professors, fills me with desolation. One consolation is that he seems to have been irrepressible and in no way diminished, right to the end. Certainly, conversations last year showed the same mixture of disrespect, malicious humour, deep insight and spiky, somewhat conservative, rectitude as 20 years before.90
There were three further services. Czech law required that his body be kept for some time before it could be flown home to England. Eventually, the body was cremated after a private but very well-attended service held near Chichester, where he had long kept a boat. David and Deborah Gellner spoke movingly about their father. A memorial meeting was held at the LSE, at which several people spoke, most strikingly Shelagh Weir. The final service was held at King’s College on 24 February 1996. Both Ron Dore and John Davis gave formal addresses, and these were interspersed with readings from Weber and Descartes, and from his own Legitimation of Belief. The programme contained lines from Fulke Greville’s 1609 play Mustapha. Gellner loved this passage, and had used it as the legend to The Psychoanalytic Movement.
Oh wearisome condition of Humanity!
Borne under one Law, to another bound:
Vainely begot, yet forbidden vanity,
Created sicke, commanded to be sound:
What meaneth Nature by these diverse Lawes?
Passion and Reason, selfe-division cause:
Is it the marke, or Majesty of Power
To make offences that it may forgive?
Nature herself doth her own selfe defloure,
To hate those errors she her selfe doth give.
The dual emphasis on passion and reason made these lines a wholly appropriate epitaph for Ernest Gellner.
____________________
1J. Davis, ‘An Interview with Ernest Gellner’, Current Anthropology, vol. 31, 1991, p. 67. The rest of the information in this paragraph comes from this interview. Alan Macfarlane, one of his Cambridge colleagues, doubted that complete acceptance would have suited him, recording Gellner’s remark that lack of total involvement in any organization helped him protect his intellectual independence (A. Macfarlane, ‘Ernest André Gellner, 1925–1995’, King’s College Annual Report, November 1996).
2‘Anthropology and Europe’, Social Anthropology, vol. 1, 1993. The address was given in 1990 at the founding meeting of the association in Coimbra, Portugal. The second meeting in 1992 was held in the Czech Republic, with Gellner playing an active role in the proceedings. The essay was reprinted in his Anthropology and Politics: Revolutions in the Sacred Grove, Oxford, 1995.
3Two examples stand out: ‘Origins of Society’, in Anthropology and Politics, and ‘Trust, Cohesion and the Social Order’, in D. Gambetta (ed.), Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, Oxford, 1988. The latter, given as part of a lecture series at King’s, exemplifies his habit of speaking his mind. He began by saying that there were too many historians of political thought, leading to a situation in which Hobbes could be seen as completely liberal rather than as the theorist of order. This naturally drew a sharp response from John Dunn, one of the leading lights of an approach to intellectual history best exemplified by the work of Quentin Skinner, in his paper in the same volume. But sharpness on Dunn’s part went hand in hand with appreciation, not least when noting that ‘only’ Gellner could have attacked Berlin as forcefully as he did when reviewing John Gray’s book on the Oxford historian of ideas.
4Davis, ‘An Interview with Ernest Gellner’, p. 66.
5‘The Stakes in Anthropology’, American Scholar, vol. 57, 1988, reprinted in Anthropology and Politics.
6The lectures are available in the Gellner Archive.
7Gellner also expressed his views on Descartes in ‘The Pure Inquirer’, in Spectacles and Predicaments: Essays in Social Theory, Cambridge, 1979, a review of Bernard Williams, Descartes: the Project of Pure Inquiry, London, 1978.
8Reason and Culture: The Historic Role of Rationality and Rationalism, Oxford, 1992, pp. 38ff.
9Ibid., p. 60.
10Ibid., pp. 124–8.
12Ibid., p. 168. I think the implicit target here is N. Chomsky and E. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights, 2 volumes, Boston, 1979.
13Ibid., p. 164.
14‘Zeno of Cracow or Revolution at Nemi or The Polish Revenge: A Drama in Three Acts’, in Culture, Identity and Politics, Cambridge, 1987. The paper also appeared in a volume of papers drawn from the Malinowski memorial conferences: R. Ellen, E. A. Gellner, G. Kubica and J. Mucha, (eds), Malinowski Between Two Worlds: The Polish Roots of an Anthropological Tradition, Cambridge, 1988. Gellner wrote many papers on the Hapsburg roots of Malinowski’s thought, culminating in Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma, Cambridge, 1998, discussed below.
15Gellner reviewed recent work on Frazer, then wrote an important essay – ‘James Frazer and Cambridge Anthropology’, Anthropology and Politics, highlighting the associationist character of the method – and treating it as a logical consequence of the empiricism of David Hume. Turner’s painting of The Golden Bough adorns the cover of Anthropology and Politics.
The sacred grove of Nemi is represented by a single huge tree (the tree of knowledge) under which sits a diminutive figure being hailed by a stranger. A small crowd stands at a distance overlooking a panoramic view complete with misty lake and mountain bluffs. Why would a book called Anthropology and Politics be marked by Frazer’s primal scene? The subtitle gives us a better guide to what the book is really about: Revolutions in the Sacred Grove. The idea of a priest-kind, whose successor must first kill him seems well-suited to academic life in our century; and Gellner’s central theme is the intellectual politics of modern anthropology. He clearly thought that Malinowski’s slaying of Frazer was the formative act in twentieth-century anthropology (K. Hart, ‘Ernest Gellner: Bard with the Killer Touch’, Cambridge Anthropology, vol. 19, 1996, p. 93).
16He speculated in an interesting way as to why Westermarck, who knew Central and Eastern Europe, had not been able to achieve Malinowski’s revolution before the Pole arrived in London. Both thinkers rejected fully-fledged nationalist ideals, but Malinowski also embraced them – thereby giving him a sense of the need for holistic explanation that Westermarck never achieved. (Language and Solitude, pp.129–31).
17‘The Uniqueness of Truth’, a sermon before the University of Cambridge, King’s College Chapel, 31 May 1992, reprinted in Anthropology and Politics.
18Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, London, 1992.
19The essays in question were those by Paul Rabinow and George Marcus, the editors of Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley, 1986. Gellner had reviewed rather harshly Rabinow’s account in Symbolic Domination of the descendants of a Moroccan saint (Times Literary Supplement, 13 February 1976). This new attack led to a hostile review by Rabinow in Man in which he accused Gellner of fabricating a quotation. Gellner replied (‘On Fabrication’, Man, vol. 1, 1995, p. 631), denying the charge but admitting that the wrong page number had been given. ‘But the passage is unquestionably there, and Rabinow, who after all is its author, must have known that it was indeed there when he made this curious and baseless accusation. What is bizarre about this episode is that Rabinow should knowingly affirm a brazen untruth which is so very easy to nail down’.
20Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, p. 30.
21C. Geertz, ‘Evans-Pritchard’s African Transparencies’, Raritan, Fall 1983, reprinted in Geertz’s Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, Oxford, 1988. Gellner reviewed this work in the Times Higher Educational Supplement on 22 April 1988.
22C. Geertz, ‘Anti Anti-Relativism’, American Anthropologist, vol. 84, 1984.
23Praemium Erasmianum Foundation, The Limits of Pluralism: Neo-Absolutisms and Relativism, Amsterdam, 1994.
24Gellner insisted that ‘however much I tried to remove personal animosity from disagreement, he simply wasn’t capable of responding. If criticized and not treated as a Guru, which is what he is used to, he becomes prickly and touchy and simply cannot take it. I find this a pity … ‘ (Gellner to Patricia Crone, 12 October 1995).
25Davis, ‘An Interview with Ernest Gellner’, p 68.
26Discussions took place with Paladin, the initial publishers of The Psychoanalytic Movement, for a book on glasnost. His desire to write something more general on the intelligentsia was noted by Anatoly Khazanov, interviewed in January 1999.
27Several observations of this sort were made, for instance, in an interview with Nikki Keddie, ‘A Year in the Soviet Union’, Contention, vol. 2, 1992.
28‘Perestroika Observed’, Government and Opposition, vol. 25, 1990, p. 4.
29Ibid., p. 5.
30‘A reformer of the modern world’, Encounters with Nationalism, Oxford, 1944.
31‘The Congress of Deputies’, Gellner Archive.
32‘Perestroika Observed’, p. 8.
33‘Ethnicity and Faith in Eastern Europe’, Daedalus, vol. 119, 1990.
34Unpublished paper, Gellner Archive.
35The dilemma described here was perhaps a subset of something larger. In 1992 Gellner felt very torn in the matter of trials in general. On the one hand, he noted that no trial of Stalinism had taken place anywhere, despite the millions of deaths. On the other hand, he felt that trials might lead those who had lost power to seek a counter-restoration to protect themselves. He noted wryly that he was hard to please.
36The book appeared the next year as After the Soviet Union: Ethnicity, Nationalism and Politics in the Commonwealth of Independent States, Madison, 1995.
37This trope was repeated on several occasions, as in ‘Reply to Critics’, pp. 677–8.
38‘The Civil and the Sacred’, in G. B. Petersen (ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values XII, Salt Lake City, 1992.
39The book was very widely and favourably reviewed, notably by John Gray (‘Our Way’, London Review of Books, 22 September 1994), Francis Fukuyama (‘The Mystery Deepens: The Persistence and Fragility of Civil Society’, Times Literary Supplement, 28 October 1994), and Alan Ryan (New York Times Book Review, 1 January 1995).
40Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals, London, 1994, chapter 8. The book also repeats arguments about the relative moral emptiness of liberalism, the self-defeating quality of modern wealth production, the incoherence of democratic theory (in an argument asserting that civil society was a superior concept because of its more realistic sociological foundations), and the character, stages and varieties of nationalism.
41S. Berman, ‘Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic’, World Politics, vol. 30, 1997.
42Conditions of Liberty, p. 49.
43In the last years of his life Gellner often made this argument, not least in frequent visits to Chicago, then the home of a project dealing with religious fundamentalism. A particularly striking example of this line of thought is ‘Fundamentalism as a Comprehensive System: Soviet Marxism and Islamic Fundamentalism Compared’, in M. Marty and S. Appleby (eds), Fundamentalisms Comprehended, Chicago, 1991.
44Conditions of Liberty, chapter 19. Cf. ‘Homeland of the Unrevolution’, Daedalus, vol. 122, 1993.
45Conditions of Liberty, p. 89, referring to V. Havel, The Power of the Powerless, Armonk, 1990.
46M. Weber, ‘Socialism’, in W. G. Runciman (ed.), Weber: Selections, Cambridge, 1978.
47This line of thought was continued in ‘Coming to Terms’, a review of A. Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War, published in The New Republic, 4 December 1995. Gellner suggested that Nazism was in the end less totalitarian than was Bolshevism.
I remember hearing a wartime speech of Goering’s over the radio: apart from referring enviously, with barely hidden admiration, to Soviet toughness – this was, he said, no longer toughness (Haerte) but barbarism, infuriatingly they repaired destroyed railway lines in severe frost with their bare hands – he also said, when we win, we shall live and let live, none of that dreadful puritanism for us. His sybaritic attitude was personal as well as political. Had Hitler won and then died about the time Stalin died, Goering might have been a more successful Krushchev’ (p. 45).
48‘Return of a Native’, Political Quarterly, vol. 67, 1996.
49Conditions of Liberty, pp. 127–8.
50Ibid., p. 214.
51C. Hann and E. Dunn (eds), Civil Society: Challenging Western Models, London, 1996, especially C. Hann, ‘Introduction: Political Society and Civil Anthropology’.
52‘Reply to Critics’, pp. 677–8.
53‘Agenda’, January 1993. Gellner was close at this time to Stephen Graubard, the editor of Daedalus, and helped plan some excellent issues on the sociology and meaning of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Graubard seems to have asked for guidance regarding the issues of the time. There were four areas to Gellner’s ‘Agenda’: nationalism (and the impossibility of finding clear normative principles to deal with the conflict it created); the problems involved in creating an ‘instant bourgeoisie’; Islam as the ‘shadow religion’ in Central Asia, and the nature of the moral vacuum, at once similar to and different from that faced by the Weimar Republic.
54A. Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civil Life: Hindus and Muslims in India, New Haven, 2002, pp. 42–4.
55‘Prejudiced Encounters’, Times Literary Supplement, 22 August 1986.
56Chomsky to Gellner, 15 September 1986.
57Gellner to Chomsky, 3 October 1986.
58Chomsky to Gellner, 13 October 1986 and Gellner to Chomsky, 27 October 1986.
59Nonetheless, he admitted that his own views of the Soviet Union were relatively mild. He was referring here to the fact that a measure of liberalization had already taken place – as in the practice of harassing dissidents by the rule book rather than by gulags. Though he had accepted Aron’s point, he had not given up hopes of controlled decompression, and explained that it was on this matter that his current research focused.
60‘The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-Out Colonialism’, Times Literary Supplement, 19 February 1993, reprinted in his Encounters with Nationalism. Cf. R. Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies, London, 2006, especially chapter 9. Irwin’s book provides plentiful evidence in support of Gellner’s claims about Said. But Irwin is mistaken in one regard. There is no evidence that Gellner was writing a book about Orientalism at the time of his death – though he was, as we will see in a moment, planning a conference on the subject, conceived however in an original way.
61E. Said, ‘Letter to the Editor’, Times Literary Supplement, 19 March 1993.
62‘Letter to the Editor’, Times Literary Supplement, 9 April 1993.
63E. Said, ‘Letter to the Editor’, Times Literary Supplement, 4 June 1993.
64‘Letter to the Editor’, Times Literary Supplement, 11 June 1993.
65He had insisted on using ‘Three Heroes’, a painting by V. M. Vasnetsov (1848– 1926), as the jacket illustration to his State and Society in Soviet Thought, Oxford, 1988 – it showed ‘the Russian version of their own traditional states, as an organized force defending Russia from nomadic incursions’.
66C. Hann to Gellner, 28 November 1994.
67The occasion – which involved a seminar, an Open Society Prize, and the granting of an honorary degree from Charles University – was very carefully handled, much to the amusement of Tom Nairn, a fellow of The Centre for the Study of Nationalism at the time. No smoking was allowed in the building several days in advance, and questions, which had to be asked by Gellner, were pre-prepared.
68But he also had fears at this time, worrying that there might be a communist backlash on the part of the workers of northern Bohemia, a poor, degraded industrial and mining area.
69His concern was so strong that he sought for funding from several sources – from the European Academy in 1991, and from the Nuffield Foundation and the European Union shortly before his death.
70Relations between Soros and Gellner were not close. Gellner wrote to Soros occasionally, and met him at meetings of the Senate. He tried to convince him that theoretical reflection was necessary rather than a self-indulgent ivory tower activity. On one occasion he wrote (Gellner to Soros, 30 October 1995, Gellner Archive) to say that Dr Zahradnik, President of the Czech Academy, had proposed a triangular relationship between the Centre, his Academy and Charles University. ‘No doubt important people in the Czech government are hostile to us. But there is also quite a different current, and the letter and initiative from the head of the Czech Academy seems to prove that it is worth aligning oneself with it’. Gellner noted that he had admired a presentation that Soros gave on Popper, and felt that his interpretation of the situation in Russia was particularly impressive.
71The conference on nationalism led to S. Periwal (ed.), Notions of Nationalism, Budapest, 1995, to which Gellner contributed an introduction.
72He had attended a conference on ‘Ethics and Politics’ in Bratislava in April 1990, and came back convinced that only full independence could remove the chip on the shoulder of the Slovak intellectuals with whom he spoke. The Gellner Archive contains an unpublished essay describing the atmosphere of the conference.
73The last pages of his Nationalism, written during the last summer of his life, are relevant in this context. His argument there was that we do not possess any clear set of principles by means of which to deal with every nationalist claim. Sometimes self-determination was right, sometimes it was better to encourage processes of assimilation.
74He was acute on Klaus, noting well before it became obvious that his radicalism was largely rhetorical, that is, that little was in fact done to undermine the social safety net to which the Czechs had long been accustomed.
75‘The Price of Velvet: Tomáš Masaryk and Václav Havel’, in Encounters with Nationalism.
76Not all blame was laid at Masaryk’s door, since the handing over of power in 1918 had been equally smooth.
78Pithart, quoted in Gellner, ‘The Price of Velvet’, p. 126.
79‘Reborn From Below: The Forgotten Beginnings of the Czech National Revival’, in Encounters with Nationalism.
80Gellner to his former doctoral student Shelagh Weir, 4 July 1995.
81‘Mind Games’, New Republic, vol. 209, 1992, reprinted as ‘The Nazi Jew-Lover’, in Encounters with Nationalism.
82The essay he devoted to Musil is reprinted in Encounters with Nationalism.
83‘Anything Goes’, Times Literary Supplement, 16 June 1995, reprinted as ‘The Coming Fin de Millénaire’, in Anthropology and Politics.
84Such autobiographies were a standard feature of the series in which the volume appeared (J. A. Hall and I. C. Jarvie [eds], The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner, Amsterdam, 1996). He tried on several occasions to sit down to this task but simply could not bring himself to do it.
85Gellner to Doniger, 2 August 1995, Gellner Archive.
86Lieven’s talk apparently blamed the French Revolution for all the mess that nationalism had caused. Gellner would have none of this, clearly rejecting nostalgia for the world before 1789 (email from Kissane, 17 April 2009).
87He did not die at Prague Airport, whilst he was survived by his wife and all four of their children.
8825 November 1995.
89Macfarlane, ‘Ernest André Gellner, 1929–1995’.
90T. Nairn, ‘Nationalism Is Not the Enemy’, Observer, 12 November 1995.