Marginality Imposed and Embraced, Understood and Interpreted:
The Case of Ernest Gellner
John A. Hall
I first had some sense of the importance of the concept of marginality in conversation
with Daniel Bell, about whose work I was then writing an essay. Everett Stonequist’s Marginal
Man (1937) had apparently been deeply appreciated by New York intellectuals of Jewish
background, serving as a document of self-understanding for thinkers such as Lipset, Bell,
Hofstader and Trilling. It was not hard to see the genesis of that excellent book—from Simmel
via Robert Park’s work in Chicago, and with an empirical concentration on ethnicity and race.
That history needs to be constructed, not least as it shows the diverse forms that marginality can
take. But my concern today is with rather different circumstances, those of the social world of
thinkers with Jewish backgrounds, of varying sorts, in which marginality was a matter of life and
death. Simmel points us in the right direction when speaking of the combination of remoteness
and nearness of the stranger for the society of which he is a part, and he adds to this interesting
remarks on abstract thought and on the likelihood that secrets will be given to the outsider. But
the world with which I am concerned is slightly different—Central Europe not Wilhelmine
Germany, and with especial reference to the interwar period.
My attention focuses on Ernest Gellner (1925-95), one of the last great polymaths whose
life was so influenced by the horrors of the twentieth century. My biography (Hall 2010) offers
full details of his work and life, so I will not repeat everything that was said there (although a
commentator may find it useful, if I may be so bold, as to refer to that volume—from which, it
should be noted several passages that follow have been taken). Instead I will highlight certain
elements so as to encourage deeper reflection about the nature of marginality. My points are
present in the title. At a biographical level, one can see that Gellner had marginality imposed
upon him; curiously, he embraced the condition rather than hiding from it, At a more intellectual
level, he understood, ever more clearly, the dilemma imposed by the marginal status of thinkers
with Jewish backgrounds, and he adopted a completely unique attitude towards it. I will deal
with these matters in an odd order, outlining the dilemma, in itself and as seen by Gellner
himself, before turning to his biography, followed in turn by his idiosyncratic response to his
existential condition. Some general comments are offered at the end as to the extent to which
marginality is more representative than we tend to imagine.
Ethnonationalism and Cosmopolitanism, or, Gellner as Analyst
As anthropologist and philosophical historian, with a childhood spent in the erstwhile
Hapsburg lands, Gellner was fully aware of a society of orders. A complex division of labor
characterized agro-literate imperial polities in which different social tasks were handed out to
distinct social groups. There could be conflict in this world, but it was just as often marked by a
rather high level of stability. All that changed at the end of the nineteenth century with the
intertwined spread of industrialization, urbanization and the growth of literacy.
National belonging began to matter enormously, making life very difficult indeed for
culturally distinguishable, economically privileged and political defenseless communities—
whose specialized niches were often coveted by the newly educated masses of the larger society.
1 The contours of the general situation are clear, and were pungently expressed by Gellner himself
when discussing the work of Hannah Arendt. The rise of nationalist sentiment at the end of the
nineteenth century created a dilemma for Jews—and more particularly for those of Jewish
background who had experienced the Enlightenment and the ending of discrimination by the
state. Gellner insisted that the return to roots was always an illusion, a piece of pure romanticism
he neatly illustrated by sardonically noting that ‘it was the great ladies at the Budapest Opera
who really went to town in peasant dresses, or dresses claimed to be such’ (1983: 57). Illusion or
no, the Jews felt the pull of belonging as much as—perhaps more than—everyone else. But the
romantic call to belong affected the Jewish community and the demographic majority in very
different ways.
…the minority had no illusion of its own to go back to. It only had the
recollection of the ghetto, which by definition was not a self-sufficient community
or culture at all, but an unromantically (commercially) specialized sub-community
of a wider world within which it was pejoratively defined. Although in fact a
literary populist nostalgia for the shtetl does exist nevertheless, Jewish populist
romanticism is in the end a contradiction in terms…
So the romantic reaction placed the Jews in a dilemma….They were largely
deprived of the illusion of a possible return to the roots, an illusion indulged by
their gentile neighbours with enthusiasm and conviction. Though shalt not covet
they neighbour’s Gemeinschaft! But, of course, one does. So what’s to be done?
The options which were logically open were either to infiltrate the Other’s
Gemeinschaft, or to create a new one of one’s own, whether or not there had been
any peasants available for the past two millennia, who could define its folk culture
(1982).
Wanting to get in does not mean that one will be allowed to enter—or, worse, to remain inside,
as more or less assimilated German Jews were to discover. In consequence, a third option arose,
rejecting the similarly homogenizing forces of assimilation and Zionism, namely that of pure
cosmopolitanism. A political version that affected the history of the world was that of the
activists and intellectuals of Jewish background who became empire-savers in the East, that is,
the key stratum of the early Bolshevik leadership, seeking a left-wing empire in which they
would be safe (Riga 2006). An intellectual version of equal power was the call made famous by
Karl Popper for an open society, from which tribal yearnings for the womb—including those of
Zionists--would not be tolerated (Hacohen 1996). Thinkers of this sort were prone to
romanticism of their own, liable to forget that the empires from which they derived were often
less arenas of benign multiculturalism than sites of ethnic antagonism (Hacohen 1999).
Allegiance to cosmopolitanism could also be demanding, potentially homogenizing, for all its
emphasis on the universality of human value.
The passage quoted above was the first in which Gellner addressed these concerns
openly, albeit there is evidence in notes that he wrote two decades before, as we shall see, that he
himself had experienced the dilemmas involved. In the last two decades of his life he thought
ever more insistently about the matter, not least when returning to his earliest bête noire, the
philosophy of the later Wittgenstein, perhaps thereby better understanding why he had hated it so
2 much. At the time of his death he was working on the Hapsburg roots of modern thought, the
contrast involved being that between Wittgenstein, the rich Viennese of Jewish background, and
the Malinowski, a Pole with backgrounds in the gentry. The posthumously published Language
and Solitude (1998) opens with the starkest of contrasts, insisting that there are but two ways,
individualism and communitarianism, in which the world can be approached, a binary opposition
held to apply to everything, from epistemology to politics. Individualism had initially been
characteristic of Viennese politics, for long led by German-speaking liberals, proud of a state
which sought to rise above nations. This progressive view was challenged by ethnonational
movements, initially and most obviously from Hungarian speakers, later from all over the
empire, including Czech leaders and, eventually, German-speakers as well. This development
made life very difficult, as noted, for those with Jewish backgrounds. By this time Gellner added
something to his earlier analysis:
In this struggle, the new nationalism used to the full, and very effectively, the
romantic vision of man, invoking roots and repudiating cosmopolitanism. No
doubt it could not have been so effective in this if the social and intellectual
climate had not been so favourable—but it was. It ensured that this vision was
deeply and powerfully internalised in the hearts and minds of men—those it
favoured, but equally, or perhaps even more, those it rejected. It condemned them
to self-hatred and self-hatred was their lot: as many of them had very considerable
literary talents, they expressed and recorded it with eloquence (1998: 38).
The endless stream of Ostjuden, the unsophisticated and ethnically caged Jews who arrived in
Vienna in the years after 1918, meant that feelings of difference were continually re-iterated
ruling out any easy and complete assimilation. In these circumstances endlessly varied choices
were made, and with constant oscillation between them. The exemplar of the situation for
Gellner became Wittgenstein himself, the purest of pure cosmopolitans to begin with, the most
sustained—and self-hating--populist in his later work, at least in theoretical terms. In order to
understand how Gellner came to this view, it is necessary to turn to his life.
No Easy Way Out
The basic outlines of Gellner’s life are clear. He grew up in interwar Prague, in a
characteristic milieu of those with a Jewish background. Many in this tricultural world were
secularized, his father wholly so, his mother nearly so (but with an aunt Hedwig who ran the
Zionist bureau), and it was entirely characteristic that the family had a German governess and a
Czech maid—so that Gellner himself grew up to be bilingual. The family’s great loyalty was to
Masaryk’s progressive republic which held out the promise of belonging. Gellner’s own
emotional feelings were predominantly for Czech culture in all its forms, from camping to food,
and from political satire to adventure stories. But if Gellner had no Jewish education, he was
made fully aware of his Jewish background. For one thing, Masaryk, for all his liberalism, was
uncomfortable with Jews, and arranged a system which gave them integrative rather than
assimilative rights. For another, he became ever more aware of the anti-semitism that grew in
intensity as Czechoslovakia came under ever greater strain at the end of the 1930s. He witnessed
the arrival of the Nazis, and escaped only with some difficulty to England.
3 His secondary education, and a first year at Oxford, took place in England before he
returned to Prague in 1945 as a member of the Czech Armoured Brigade. The visceral desire
present in him during his first period of exile did not translate into renewed belonging. His
mother’s family had been killed in the Holcaust, and he witnessed the expulsion of the Sudeten
population. That understandable but repulsive act convinced him that Czechoslovakia would turn
to the East, for fear of German revenge. Accordingly, he left Prague again, for a second period of
exile, convinced that communism would prove as lengthy and effective an imprisonment as had
been the Counter-Reformation.
Mid-twentieth century Central European intellectuals were often so grateful for the home
that they found in Britain that they became enthusiastic Anglophiles. The title of a memoir of
Gellner’s uncle Julius—‘England Receives Me as a Human Being’—is entirely typical in this
regard. Love exhibited could be reciprocated, as it was in the case of Isaiah Berlin:
Isaiah more or less accepted everything the English liked to believe about
themselves: that they were practical, untidy, eccentric, fair-minded, empirical,
common-sensical and that ubiquitous word, decent. His was a version of
Englishness frozen in the moment when he first encountered it in the 1920s: the
England of Kipling, King George, the Gold Standard, empire and
victory…Narrow-minded provincialism, philistinism and insularity played no part
in his idea of England. If the English took to him it was because he offered them
back their most self-approving myths (Ignatieff 1998: 36).
This sort of attitude was conservative, at least in the minimal sense of support for local customs.
Gellner’s uniqueness lay in the fact that he did not give uncritical endorsement to the culture
which he sought to join. His ability to stand on his own feet, to think for himself, partly comes
from a contentious disposition allied to the confidence that came from having had to face as a
soldier the possibility of death. But it also grew out of deep reflection on his experiences.
His name was rather made by an attack—in Words and Things (1959)--on the dominant
philosophy of the period, seen as part of a much more general complacency of the time.
Linguistic philosophy, so dominant in Oxford, had been deeply influenced by the later
Wittgenstein who had come to a relativist position insisting that universal truths were not
available—making the task of philosophy limited, namely the understanding of the rules of the
particular culture in which it found itself. Gellner thought this was nonsense: it had no
appreciation of the fact that language in part attempted to improve usage; it ignored the role of
science; it stressed the manners of an upper class, thereby making it hard for outsiders—mere
parvenus—to get in; and it represented in the end a curious, passive and facile populism of the
establishment. This caused enormous offence, famously expressed in a storm of opinion in the
correspondence pages of The Times. There was a good deal of bravery involved. Gellner wished,
at least some of the time and in a part of his character, to ‘get in’, to be accepted within British
society. The break with the world of his Oxford teachers was totally traumatic, expelling him
thereafter from the philosophic establishment.
This is not the place to go into the details of Gellner’s assault on linguistic philosophy.
But it is helpful, in the context of this project, to say something about his deep dislike for the role
adopted by Isaiah Berlin, the celebrated figure who stood so close to ‘the movement’ Gellner
regarded him as a performer, rather than as a thinker, the ‘CIA’s J.S. Mill’, and a ‘Postprandial
4 Hegelian’, noting in this case that ‘after dinner, one does not wish to have one’s mind strained’.1
He saw Berlin’s work as ‘always the same’: the ‘failures of past celebrities dragged together to
justify not trying’.
Gellner’s contempt for Berlin seems to have as background the very different ways in
which these two thinkers reacted to British society in the light of their Jewish heritage. Sustained
analysis of the issues involved will tell us a good deal about the nature of marginality.
Berlin made a striking contribution of his own to the notion of Jewish self-hatred in an
essay, directed at Arthur Koestler, on ‘Jewish Slavery and Emancipation’. The desire to get into
a host society was often so great that it led those of Jewish background to become theoretical
experts in local norms, thereby marking their very difference in such a way as to make
assimilation more difficult. This was such a vicious circle that it was all too possible to come to
hate those elements of one’s background—above all, intellectuality, eagerness—which made
assimilation so very difficult. A particular claim of Berlin’s was that the creation of the state of
Israel changed everything for Jews, whether religiously active or merely culturally loyal. On the
one hand, it made the decision to stay outside Israel a genuine choice; on the other, it created a
state in which all the unease and difficulties that went with life in a host country disappeared, a
situation in which life became simple. Surprisingly, all this was a prelude to Berlin rebutting
Koestler’s claim that Jews now faced a simple binary choice, between total assimilation and
moving to Israel. Berlin maintained that Koestler was blaming the victims, that Jews had the
right to preserve their differences—that is, that integration rather than assimilation was a
respectable ideal. At the end of their exchange of views he complained that:
Arthur Koestler does not do justice to my argument. It is not, to use his words,
that, ‘unreason, however irritating or maddening, must be tolerated’ or that Jews
or anyone else ‘have the right to be guided by irrational emotion’. My thesis was
and is that to demand social and ideological homogeneity, to wish to get rid of
minorities because they are tiresome or behave ‘foolishly or inconsistently or
vulgarly’ (these are indeed my words), is illiberal and coercive and neither
rational nor humane (Berlin, cited in Cesarani 1998).
Although Berlin did not directly accuse Koestler of Jewish self-hatred this is precisely the charge
leveled against Koestler by his biographer, David Cesarani (1998). The homelessness that
affected Koestler led, in Cesarani’s view, to a stridency and instability in his life, from Zionism
to communism, followed by a return to Zionism once communist beliefs had been abandoned,
and ending both with an attempt to hide his Jewish background altogether and a strange denial of
Jewish ethnicity in general—all of this always linked to callous behavior to women.
The charge of self-hatred is at the center of any analysis of marginality, suggesting as it
does that this status is so painful that people will deny themselves in order to escape the pain that
it brings in its wake. But the charge is complex, moving quickly from description to prescription,
as Gellner himself stressed when considering Sartre .
1
All unattributed quotations in this section (except for those from the unpublished review of Gray’s monograph on
Berlin) come from `The Notes’, a set of aphoristic comments written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, never
published and now housed in the Gellner Archive at the London School of Economics.
5 And authenticity—sociologically spurious concept (related to
alienation)—all roles are contingent and are seen as necessary; also there
is a regress—Jean-Paul Sartre ask[s] one to [be] an authentic Jew (for
instance), but why not be authentically one not wishing oneself [to be
such], etc., etc? Many roles incorporate their own rejection.
All balls this existentialist talk of choice of self, then sticking to it, assuming
responsibility, etc. In fact, most of us have numbers of cohabiting selves, in a way
complementary even while logically opposed. (Like Czechs who in wartime
always have a legitimate government with each side). We could manage with one
self about as well as with one suit.
But the question of self-hatred must be addressed. For Gellner did think about the Jewish
background from which he came, and whose provenance had been reinforced against his will by
historical events.
We mid European Jews—exactly like man according to existentialism—
choosing attributes, being given none. Human situation, only somewhat
more so. Unfortunately, it is of the essence of those attributes that they
are not chosen but given. If chosen, are somehow false. Not surprisingly,
a mainly descent-based society values givenness of attributes more than
endeavour, contrary to Kant.
Being a Jew is also like human condition, in that there is no correct
solution.
Jewish disability: inability to act any role with conviction.
There will always be a false note, which ever you do ashamed of being
ashamed, etc. ad infinitum, no equilibrium possible here; where would
authenticity lie? Mate in three whatever you do. Sense of play acting,
whatever one does. Impotence, ignorance, chaos, unreality.
We Jews are specifically like Sartre’s picture of man in general—self-chosen and
not liking it.
These crunched private notes certainly demonstrate awareness of the acute difficulties of Jewish
identity in the modern world. Further, there are similarities with Koestler. When the Czech
sociologist Jiri Musil was in temporary exile in Britain after the Prague Spring of 1968 he visited
the Gellners in Hampshire—and was shown various memorabilia of Prague, including tram
tickets from before the war. This did not prevent Gellner bluntly telling Musil during the visit
that he was ‘nowhere at home’. Further, he tended to agree with Koestler in thinking, in the light
of the Holocaust, that there was a choice between assimilation or gaining one’s own state, if one
wished to avoid death.
Given that the current intellectual climate so favors diversity and multiculturalism, this
last point might, so to speak, hand the game to Berlin and prove that Gellner suffered from
Jewish self-hatred in the manner specified. But matters are not at all so simple. The fact that
6 Gellner suffered ambivalences about these matters all his life is a far cry from saying that he
suffered from self-hatred. There is no real evidence for this parlous state, and the claim that he
suffered from it should be firmly rejected. He differed very dramatically from some of the
figures mentioned. Then Gellner did not suffer from the enthusiasms, the endless search for and
abandonment of varied causes that had characterized Koestler’s career. Equally importantly,
Gellner did not suffer from that extreme self-hatred that leads to hiding one’s origins. But, he
also made no big deal of his Jewish ethnicity--being more prone to advertise his Czech rather
than his Jewish background, not surprisingly given its greater role in her personal formation. He
wished to be accepted as ‘normal’, that is, without reference to a background which he did not
deny but which he did not especially wish to be seen as relevant to his views or life-chances.
There were many facets to his identity: he denied none—one consequence of which was a refusal
to be caged within Jewish identity.
These are but general considerations. It is possible to go a good deal further, in
understanding the animosity between Gellner and Berlin and its roots in Jewish dilemmas--and
in a way which is at once interesting and in effect to Gellner’s advantage. To do so it is first
necessary to spell out the elements of Gellner’s critique of Berlin. The crux of their intellectual
disagreement was that Gellner did not believe that liberalism could or should be defended by
stressing the ‘incommensurability of values’, Berlin’s most prominent theme. ‘If that is so, it is
hard to see’, Gellner wrote later, ‘in what sense policy could ever be rational, any more than
accountancy would be possible if it were to be carried out simultaneously in a set of mutually
inconvertible currencies’ (Gellner 1992: 135). Berlin’s ‘value-pluralism’ was relativism, and in
his view relativism opened the door to irrationalism. One could not tolerate everything,
especially the counter-enlightenment, if one wished to be a serious liberal. Gellner put the matter
particularly clearly in the last year of his life, when reviewing John Gray’s treatment of Berlin’s
thought. Insisting that the incommensurability of values was relativism in all but name, he noted
that this deprived us of ‘the means, indeed of the right, for expressing deep revulsion. Given
those incommensurates, how do you cope with societies which contain slavery, gulags, female
circumcision, torture, or gas chambers, and whose apologists might well invoke that deep
pluralism…’.
Like other relativists, Berlin grants himself a non-relativistic meta-theory: not
merely so as to be able to articulate the theory at all, but because he allows
himself a positive and general political theory, endowed with specific content.
Just because values are plural and incommensurate, Berlin recommends politics
of compromise and balance. A most commendable piece of advice, one I for one
am happy to follow, but is it exempt from the pluralism of incommensurate
(hence equal) values which is at the base of everything, which defines man? If it
is not exempt, then who is to stop religious fundamentalists, for instance, from
finding compromise on religious principles unacceptable? If it is exempt, what
happens to the theory itself?
There was, however, a second intellectual criticism. Berlin never dealt with an obvious
contradiction in his thought. In broad terms he favoured nationalism, not least in Israel itself,
since communal feeling released energy and created cultural power. But what role was pluralism
to play in such units?
7 Then there are many comments about Berlin’s social role, as an interlocutor, as an
organiser, as a grandee of the humanities in Britain. Several concentrate on Berlin’s links to
linguistic philosophy.
Why is he allowed to treat theories and outlooks en gros,
impressionistically, etc., when other Oxford philosophers see that as
supreme sin? (They cannot talk of determinism without distinguishing
fifteeen varieties, etc., etc.) Answer: because it is clearly understood that
none of those theories is true, that this is only ‘history of ideas’, that
nothing like this can be true, except when negative…
… Isaiah Berlin provided a flank cover for linguistic philosophy, …
entertainment provided retreat for linguistic philosophy.
There are two points at issue here. The first concerns camouflage. Gellner found the view that
political theory was dead ludicrous, not least as he could not for a moment imagine that
revolutions, riots and wars would have been prevented by clearer linguistic usage. But even those
who lacked much interest in history found the idea of the death of political theory troubling.
It was Berlin who found a much more acceptable way out of this little difficulty.
Political theorizing was rendered salonfaehig after all. Political philosophy was
not to be exactly dead, but not too embarrassingly alive either…
The history of ideas became something of a game, in which thinkers were damned as dangerous
because anti-pluralist or praised for endorsing the incommensurability of values. ‘Either way,
everything will “remain as it was”, which is what the fashionable philosophy of the time
required’. The second point concerns the retreat. Oxford philosophers gradually abandoned their
initial claim that solutions--or rather dissolutions--could shortly be expected to key philosophical
problems. Berlin distracted students’ attention from the failure to fulfill this promise.
Gellner was angered that a fellow intellectual of Jewish origin, a fellow exile from the
disaster zones of Europe, could be, in his eyes, so infuriatingly complacent--and transmit that
complacency to others. He also disliked Berlin’s use of his Jewish origins, and his implied
comfortable integration. He told his friend Anatoly Khazanov that he considered Berlin to be a
‘Court Jew’. Berlin, prematurely, made British society seem more tolerant, integrationist and
welcoming to Jews than it in fact was before the 1960s. Berlin was tolerated both because of his
academic skill and visibility, and because he was prepared, in Gellner’s view as ‘a successworshipper underneath’, to accept a set of complacent intellectual assumptions. There is a sense
in which Gellner is reversing the charge of self-hatred which has been considered here. Berlin
was so anxious to be accepted, in Gellner’s view, that he compromised his integrity.
Some final comments are in order. It may well be that visceral Jewish self-hatred was in
part a generational affair. Kafka’s generation seems prone to this feeling because their situation
was so stark, blaming their fathers for making them either too Jewish or too cosmopolitan. Such
feelings should be distinguished from the resentment that was often present thereafter, not least
in Gellner himself. To find that life is made especially complex because of one’s background can
be deeply irritating. But in Gellner’s case resentment did not lead to a desire to escape or to deny,
but rather to a sense of resignation. In the last analysis, what is noticeable is that his identity was
8 secure. There was no personal crisis caused by his Jewish background. Insofar as this identity
was present it came from the outside. There was no need for any personal struggle, no need to
break with the ideals of his childhood. All-in-all, Gellner seems wise enough not to have chased
after any singular form of authenticity, accepting instead life lived with ambiguities. So if we
think again of Berlin what is striking is that Gellner was content to be much less rooted. He
dipped into various social worlds, was marvelously adept at characterizing them, but did not
choose to completely immerse himself in any. His absolute insistence on rigorous intellectual
honesty follows directly from this. No comfort could be found in social life, only in unvarnished
allegiance to the truth. Perhaps this stance does reflect a Jewish background—and a particularly
honest and striking response to it.
The Balancing Act
Gellner’s own positive philosophy was stated in Thought and Change (1964). The
modern social contract was in his view made up of two elements: a society would and should be
seen as legitimate if it was industrialized and ruled by those co-cultural with population as a
whole. It is important to stress that this was a balancing act. Industry depended upon scientific
knowledge, thereby on reason, openness and doubt—in other words, on the key elements
stressed by Popper, the Viennese cosmopolitan whose thought influenced him most of all. But
Gellner did not follow Popper all the way. For one thing, where Popper loathed nationalism,
Gellner—the child of Masaryk’s liberal Czechoslovakia—wrote extensively about its
importance, its functional necessity for modern social organization, and about its emotional
appeal. For another, Gellner insisted—against most rationalists, with especial reference to
Popper and Quine—that reason itself did not have secure roots, that it was but one option
amongst others. That did not stop him defending it, but the defence involved was so to speak
left-handed—concentrating on the benefits brought by science. There is much to be said on that
topic. But what matters most here is the simple question: how did he manage to be at one and the
same time the theorist of nationalism and the fierce defender of science?
This is a matter on which there seems to me to be development in his thought over time.
The thirty period of national reconstruction after 1945 was one of rather generalized optimism.
In Gellner’s case this meant the ability to join reason and belonging together with relative ease.
The stakes of national conflict would diminish with economic growth, whilst national formation
would allow everyone to get in. By the 1980s, however, Gellner seemed more worried,
passionately so as the collapse of communism in East and Central Europe made him fear a repeat
of the interwar period—in which small, squabbling states, riven by internal ethnic conflicts lived
in a power vacuum that encouraged interference by external great powers.
In these circumstances he thought against himself, trying to find a way in which different
nations could live under a single roof—the very thing he had felt to that point to be wholly
impossible. ‘The political thought of Bronislaw Malinowski’ (1987), a reconsideration of
Malinowski’s late and wholly neglected Freedom and Civilization, most clearly signals this
change. Gellner’s argument is paradoxical, accepting the injustice of inequality between
imperialists and colonized, but refusing to accept as a corollary the view that the colonized
should gain independence as fast as possible so as to become similar to their erstwhile rulers.
What is needed is rather an egalitarianism in which all nations are ruled from the outside. ‘No
9 nation is fit to rule itself…They fight each, and they oppress their own minorities and hamper—
if not worse—the free expression of their culture’. What is needed is indirect rule, as in effect
practised by both British and Austrian empires, and as putatively to be practised in the future by
an international organization such as the League of Nations. A policy of this sort would work
well in England.
The League commissioner, perhaps a minor Habsburg archduke, would work
discreetly form some functional but unostentatious secretariat, located in a
new edifice in some anonymous London suburb—say Neasden. An architect
in the Bauhaus tradition would be commissioned to design it. All ritual and
symbolic activities, on the other hand, would continue to be based on
Buckingham Palace. Thus the English would be emotionally spared any
visible, let alone conspicuous, externalization or expression of their
diminished sovereignty.
Gellner highlighted the attraction of this option. History had shown that Franz Josef had been
better than Josef. Further, the ‘universal protection of cultural autonomy, combined with
political constraint imposed by a benevolent centre, must clearly appeal to an age such as ours,
which suffers from the opposite condition—political independence blended with dreary cultural
standardization’.
Language and Solitude (1998) goes somewhat further. For one thing, Malinowski allies
cultural sensitivity with empiricism, thereby escaping the binary opposition with which the book
had started. The empiricism of Mach is endorsed in combination with an appreciation of culture.
Politically, this allowed Malinowski to seek to protect national sentiments without allowing them
any sort of absolutist status. For another, Gellner made specific points about language. In 1923
Malinowski’s ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Language’ appeared as a supplement to a
book on The Meaning of Meaning, co-authored by C.K. Ogden, the first translator of the young
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. This essay arrived at the view of language
suggested by the later Wittgenstein, emphasizing in particular that meaning resides in action and
use. But Malinowski insists that this is not the only type of language in existence. Such
contextual language is clearly dominant in simpler societies, but it has been replaced, at least in
the higher reaches of scientific discourse, with linguistic use that is context-free, and accordingly
far more malleable. Language is not always a prison; it can also be a tool. This had long been
Gellner’s view, and he accordingly endorses Malinowki’s position with delight—though noting
sadly that Malinowski backtracked from this sensible position in later work.
All of this stands in great contrast to the withering attack on Wittgenstein. Gellher
considered that the Viennese philosopher had managed to get things wrong twice, first by
espousing an impossibly abstract universalism and then by retreating to a relativist populism that
ignored the impact of science altogether. In the last pages of the book Gellner explains why the
binary choice between communitarianism and individualism is mistaken. Each position has
weaknesses as well as strengths. Atomistic individualism is enormously important because when
used prescriptively it creates knowledge powerful enough to transform the world, and to bring in
its wake the riches on which we depend. But it fails to provide us with a way of life, indeed it
fails descriptively to account for the sociability of lived experience. Cultural theorists make this
10 point, correctly, and their position is accordingly indispensable. But that is not for a moment to
say that it can be turned into an absolute, presuming that cultures are everything, cocoons from
which no escape is possible. Some escape has been made, and our problem is that of seeing how
much meaning this then allows us. This returns us to the distinctiveness of Gellner’s position. He
was at once the theorist of nationalism and a rationalist enlightenment fundamentalist. What final
thoughts can we offer as to the ways in which he managed to combine both ends of the
spectrum?
Gellner’s greatest allegiance was to the fallible world of scientific rationalism, though he
felt that its general appeal rested less on its openness that on its more brute capacity to provide a
high material standard of living. The second principle of the modern social contract, recognition
of nationalism, was necessary for that high standard of living. And that high standard of living
could be relied upon to tame nationalism itself. For one thing, the stakes of conflict would be
lowered once a high standard of living was generally available—removing the political
gunpowder caused by the presence of an ethnic marker in combination with social inequality. In
these circumstances he came to believe, late in life, that cultural difference under the same
political roof might, after all, be possible. For another, the dependence of a high standard of
living upon science meant that in the end the occasional moments of absolutism of nationalist
ideology would be undermined—for science was based on change, doubt, the relative emptiness
of being. This was not to say that there would be any general adoption of Kantian-style views.
What rather matted was that the unfolding logic of industrial society would give greater
prominence to new middle class specialists likely to prefer technical reason to ideological
verbiage.
All that could be offered then was what he termed `ironic cultural nationalism’ (1974).
The need for this limited identity came from the fact that one must have some style, some rules
of engagement for social life to take place. This plea of limited identity should not be taken to
mean that Gellner is any less rationalist than Popper—who condemned nationalism in all its
forms. The difference is really that Gellner’s loyalty to rationalism stressed its emptiness, its lack
of grounding, in contrast to Popper’s rather romantic view that critical rationalism was written
into the very nature of life. In that sense Gellner was much more deeply homeless than Popper.
For much of his career he was sustained by the feeling that technical power would slowly
undermine ideocracies. Late in life he began to doubt that this would be true within the Islamic
world. His thought in these areas remains challenging, though my own sense is that his
understanding of social life lacks sufficient awareness of politics—both as a cause of discontent
and as a practice by means of which conflicts can sometimes be accommodated.
What does this all say about the way in which he came to terms with his own Jewish
background? The distinctiveness of his position can be appreciated by referring to the recent
brilliant work of Pierre Birnbaum on the varied ways in which social scientists with Jewish
bacgrounds have confronted their pasts (Birnbaum 2008). Complete assimilation can, in
Birnbaum’s view, be dreadfully mistaken since it destroys cultural distinction, with the historical
contribution of Jewish culture being very much to the forefront of his own mind as something of
great value. This places Birnbaum in the camp of Isaiah Berlin and his follower Charles Taylor,
as a proponent of liberal integration—that is of a culturally plural world, though he is fully
cognizant that this must not be so exaggerated as so as to recreate cultural cages from which it is
11 hard to escape. Birnbaum suggests that this line of thought owes much to Montesquieu. I am not
so sure. The Persian Letters certainly argues for toleration, but does so in a very particular way.
There is no doubt at all that Montesquieu has absolute allegiance to a very few universal
standards, but beyond those he seems almost a complete skeptic and relativist—less praising
different ways of life than throwing his hands up at the mild absurdity of every single one of
them. In a sense this is Gellner’s ironic cultural nationalism. Certainly Gellner had no very great
Jewish allegiance to go back to, having an identity which was far more Czech. He did not hide
his Jewish background, but he did not romanticize it either—and certainly did not wish to
somehow recreate it. One might say that this makes him a bad Jew, though the point surely is
that this was not really his identity, or at least much of it. But perhaps he was true to his Jewish
background in a very particular way. Consider this comment of Hannah Arendt, writing about
Walter Benjamin’s generation of thinkers whose background was Jewish:
…these men did not wish to ‘return’ to the ranks of the Jewish people or to
Judaism, and could not desire to do so—not because…they were too ‘assimilated’
and too alienated from their Jewish heritage, but because all traditions and
cultures as well as all ‘belonging’ had become equally questionable to them
(Smith, 2009).
Of course, this is slightly wrong. The great subtlety of Benjamin as a thinker cannot disguise the
fact that he found some sense of belonging in Marxism, while many other thinkers from this
background found belongings of very varied sorts. The distinctiveness of Gellner is that he was
brave enough to do without any complete and guaranteed identity, precisely because every
belonging had become questionable to him—though his Czech upbringing had given him a real
sense of the nature of belonging. Accordingly, Gellner’s world is austere. But in that lies its
attraction. Not much real comfort for our woes is on offer; the consolation services peddled in
the market are indeed worthless. He offered us something more mature and demanding: cold
intellectual honesty.
Conclusion
I cited above a note of Gellner in which he suggest that ‘being a Jew…is like the human
condition…’. Certainly, he considered the basic dilemma just described as universal, for all that
his particular circumstances made him feel it so very acutely. There is an opportunity/cost to
modernity, in Gellner’s view, in that the goodies provided by science come at the cost of a
diminution of moral warmth and certainty. My own attraction to Gellner’s work has rested on
some sense that this is so, that the conventions of society, the givenness or taken-for-granted
character of daily life are something of a façade. A marginal man can see more clearly than the
rest of us.
And I endorse his social philosophy for another reason. He was deeply suspicious of
political romanticism, of thinkers who wished to somehow warm the world up, to make it
complete once again. Part of his criticism was aesthetic: such theories were so often full of holes.
But a more important part of his viewpoint stressed the dangers that came when attempts were
made, in complex societies, to try to restore moral unity. The record of such attempts has indeed
been dreadful. Accepting less may bring us more.
12 References
Birnbaum, P. 2008. Geography of Hope: Exile, the Enlightenment, Disassimilation. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Cesarani, D. 1998. Arthur Koester: The Homeless Mind. London.
Hacohen, M. 1996. ‘Karl Popper in Exile: The Viennese Progressive Imagination and the
Making of The Open Society’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, vol. 26.
Hacohen, M. 1999. `Dilemmas of Cosmopolitanism: Karl Popper, Jewish Identity and “Central
European Culture”’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 71.
Hall, J.A. 2010. Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography. London: Verso.
Gellner, E.A. 1959. Words and Things: A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study
in Ideology. London: Gollancz.
Gellner, E.A. 1964. Thought and Change. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Gellner, E.A. 1974. Legitimation of Belief. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gellner, E.A. 1982. `Accounting for the Horror’, Times Literary Supplement, 6 August.
Gellner, E.A. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gellner, E.A. 1987. `The Political Thought of Bronislav Malinowski’, Current Anthropology,
vol. 28.
Gellner, E.A. 1998. Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg
Dilemma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ignatieff, M. 1998. Isaiah Berlin: A Life. London.
Riga, L. 2006. `Ethnonationalism, Assimilation and the Worlds of the Jewish Bolshevisk in Fin
de Siecle Tsarist Russia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 48.
Smith, Z. 2008. ‘ F. Kafka, Everyman’, New York Review of Books, 17 July.
13