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Ernest Gellner, 1925--1995NotebooksErnest Gellner, 1925--199528 May 1998 15:42British philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist, self-describedEnlightenment rationalist fundamentalist, born to Czech parents in Paris andraised in Prague, where he lived the last few years of his life, and died in1995. He received a very thorough training in the Wittgensteinian "linguistic"or "ordinary language" philosophy fashionable in Britain (and more particularlyOxford) in the '50s, and found himself quite unable to believe it, so he ranaway to become an anthropologist, and studied the Berbers because amountaineering group at the London School of Economics organized a trip to theAtlas. His first book, Words and Things (1959; preface by Russell, to whom he dedicated his second book)combined a crushing philosophical critique of linguistic philosophy with asociological analysis of "the narodniks of North Oxford", "an intelligentsiawithout ideas." It was at once a succès de scandale (probablythe only kind Gellner wanted, frankly) and the first real demonstration of hisstyle: a devastating, hilarious combination of learning and intellectualseriousness with verbal play and irreverence, in particular an almost uncannytalent for finding apt, mocking names for things and ideas.Most of Gellner's writing consists of essays and reviews, in which a fairlylimited number of themes crop up again and again; if you like what he says, hebrings to mind kaleidescopes, and if you don't, he just seems repetitive. (Ithink he was a superb kaleidescope, but even so, when readingPostmodernism, Reason and Religion, his one genuinely bad book, Ireached the point where I said to myself, "If he says `terms of reference'again, I'll scream"; and I did.) Most of these themes themselves revolvearound the "great hump" or "great ditch", which divides the modern worldfrom pre-modern civilizations.On the far side of the ditch from us lies Agraria, a realm of"agro-literate polities" subject to "the tyranny of kings or cousins (orboth)", consisting mostly of highly isolated, custom-bound, illiterate ruralproducers with magical, ritualistic, socially-oriented religions, dominated andexploited by "the red and the black," expert coercers and literate classespracticing various technically ineffective, self-confirming, meaningful orenchanted forms of cognition, which tended more towards universalism,rule-boundedness and scripturalism than did the folk-cults. Those of us on thisside of the ditch have "escaped from the idiocy of rural life" (a phrase hecheerfully took from Marx) through a lucky accident, a "miracle". Sometimeabout three or four hundred years ago, in an otherwise none-too-promisingpenninsula of Asia, circumstances conspired to bring forth a kind of cognitionwhich was cumulative, technically effective, and of no value as either a socialcement or an emotional comfort --- science, and the epistemologies descendedfrom Descartes (in Gellner's view, much better as charters for science, andprescriptive accounts of how to go about it, than as descriptions of how theworld works or how messy human beings actually think). This was combined withclasses of people who were more interested in producing wealth than in eithertheological or political disputes, and polities which, in exchange for taxrevenue, were willing to let them alone. Wealth accumulated, and accumulatedfaster as technological progress became regular and accelerating; productionbecame dominant (an unusual condition; in Gellner's view, Marx's main mistakewas to think that production was always dominant, to deny the "autonomy ofcoercion"), eventually buying off the population at large ("the socialbribery fund"; Gellner probably under-estimated the degree of struggle needed to establish "the Danegeldstate"). Socially, these societies are (at least relative to theirpredecessors) liberal, permissive, rich, powerful, secularized, engaged in"single-stranded" activities (e.g., in buying food we worry about taste andcost, not marriage alliances or the need not to alienate our grocer lest he notstand with us in the next feud), peaceful, atomized, economically unstable andculturally homogenous.The last two, economic change and cultural homogeneity, are, Gellner claims,connected, and together give rise to nationalism: his theory of how thishappens is brilliant, innovative and convincing, and I've summarized it in myreview of Nationsand Nationalism, so I shan't repeat it here.There's more, of course, though related to this: thoughts on how to getbeliefs to spread without their passing proper tests of cognitive legitimacy;general considerations on the "legitimation of beliefs"; the effects ofcrossing the ditch on the former "artisans of cognition", the humanistintellectuals; how, if at all, liberal, industrial, charter-less societies canhold together; the "Rubber Cage" of advanced industrialism, where rationalityin science and production co-exists with exuberant nonsense in the rest oflife; the idea that "positivism is right, forHegelian reasons"; Ibn Khaldun and traditionalIslamic society; why contemporary Islamic societies are notsecularizing; the problems with the philosophies of Popper, Quine; his inspirationfrom Hume, Kant, Weber, Durkeheim; the impossibility ofCosmic Exile and the necessity of its function.Recommended: By Gellner: Anthropology and Politics Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and ItsRivals [The only book I know which makes sense of the shibboleth of"civil society"; but it's very wrong about market socialism. See "The Civiland the Sacred" (PDF,281k) for what amounts to a 50-page preview.] Culture, Identity and Politics [essaycollection with fine pieces on Hannah Arendt,Bronislaw Malinowski (a fellow Central European positivist turned Britishanthropologist) and the Ayatollah Khomenei, among others] The Freudian Movement: TheCunning of Unreason [Probably his single best-written book] Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski andthe Habsburg Dilemma [How many things fit together, fourth and finaltake] Legitimation of Belief [How everything fitstogether, take II] Muslim Society [Doesn't, alas, contain hispolemics with Said, which I've still yet to read] Nations and Nationalism [Convincing, all tooconvincing; see my review];cf. Encounters with Nationalism [essay reviews of books by, onand against various nationalist intellectuals; fine tribute to Sakharov] andNationalism [A very compressed presentation, only about 100 pages] Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of HumanHistory [How everything fits together, take III] Reason and Culture [If only for the dialoguebetween Descartes and Durkeheim] "The Restof History" ["Political control of economic life is not the consummation ofworld history, the fulfilment of destiny, or the imposition of righteousness;it is a painful necessity."] Saints of the Atlas [His Moroccan field-work] Spectacles and Predicaments Thought and Change [How everything fitstogether, take I] Words and Things: An Examination of, and an Attackon, Linguistic Philosophy John Hall, "Conditions of Our Existence," an obituary notice inNew Left Review 215 (1996): 156 Michael Lessnoff, Ernest Gellner and Modernity[A nice "Gellner for beginners" book; also, I think, the only"Gellner for beginners" book] A page ofon-line obits from the University of Kent GellnerResource Page from the LSE To read: Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences[=TheConcept of Kinship] The Devil in Modern Philosophy permanent link for thisnote RSS feed for thisnoteNotebooks:  Hosted, but not endorsed, by the Center forthe Study of Complex Systems |
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