READING: Ernest Gellner Replies to Critics: On Nationalism, & on Transiting from Agraria to Modernity

From 1997

Ernest Gellner (1997): Reply to Critics: ‘The criticisms… one of them might be called the Argument from Identity. It runs roughly as follows: my vision of nationalism grossly underrates the emotional intensity of national identification and perhaps, more generally, the role of identity in human life in general. Their nation means so dreadfully much to men! Love of one’s country, love of one’s nation, is marked by a depth and intensity of passion, which is shamefully travestied by a theory which would make it a mere consequence of the labour market situation in an occupationally mobile society in which work is semantic rather than physical. Did men die, suffer, kill, write poetry, merely so as to enhance their career prospects?…

Here Perry [Anderson] lets me have it straight from the shoulder, and does not hesitate to speak ad hominem. Well, he does get it right in part, but only in part. He refers earlier in the essay to the difference between cultivated middle classes in Berlin under Bismarck and Prague under Beneš which would account for the difference of tone between Weber and me (and of course I’m greatly flattered by such a comparison)…. Perry is right, an utterly prosaic element and humour are indeed very important in Bohemian life, and this reached me through Czech literature…. It certainly influences my attitude to nationalism and everything else, and may help explain the ‘low jokes’ (P.A.’s phrase). But on the crucial factual issue, Perry gets it absolutely wrong: I am deeply sensitive to the spell of nationalism…. The psychological characterization with which he supports his misguided argument happens to be factually up the creek….

Bureaucratic Life: Agrarian life, for the great majority of its participants, is heavily routinized and involves contact with only a small number of social partners…. Precise, finely honed articulation is not required… [and] its practice would be bizarre and offensive. Modern life is quite different: the range of contacts is very large and so is the range of possible messages between interlocutors. Hence both partners must speak the same idiom, and they must be trained to be able to articulate and comprehend context-free messages—no mean skill, one which presupposes prolonged training. Modern life is contact with bureaucrats: shop assistants, railway clerks, etc., etc. It is this which pushes people into nationalism, into the need for the congruence between their own ‘culture’ (the idiom in which they can express themselves and understand others) and that of the extensive and interconnected bureaucracies which constitute their social environment. Non-congruence is not merely an inconvenience or a disadvantage: it means perpetual humiliation. Only if such a congruence does obtain can one feel ‘at ease in one’s skin’….

The social situation of a peasant was in no way aggravated by the fact that he speaks an idiom distinct from that of his bailiff, landlord, shopkeeper, innkeeper, priest, and local political overlord. They know each other so well that they communicate only too easily…. All this changes when men move into an economically and politically centralized, mobile, anonymous and egalitarian world. The highly variegated and single-shot ad hoc relationships in such a world are function-related and negotiated rather than hierarchically pre-determined. So the functionally essential base-line egalitarianism (all are in principle equal, inequalities are temporary consequences of the state of play, like positions in a football league table) of mobile, occupationally unstable societies is one of the elements in an argument which leads to the need for a shared, standardized, politically underwritten ‘national’ culture. To take part in the game at all, as a gleichberechtigter participant, you need to be acceptable and trained at quite a high level in a complex culture with well-defined rules, capable of engendering an infinity of context-free messages….

My theory… is straightforwardly causal. Political and economic forces, the aspirations of governments for greater power and of individuals for greater wealth, have in certain circumstances produced a world in which the division of labour is very advanced, the occupational structure highly unstable and most work is semantic and communicative rather than physical. This situation in turn leads to the adoption of a standard and codified, literacy-linked (‘High’) idiom… and reduces persons who are not masters of that idiom (or not acceptable to its practitioners) to the status of humiliated second-class members, a condition from which one plausible and much-frequented escape route led through nationalist politics….

Far from down-playing identity in human motivation, I would go further and say that it is far more fundamental and important than desire. Human beings as such seldom have aims or desires, over and above a certain very basic and coarse minimum…. Men play out a role, they do not pursue aims…. You might say that the theory credits men with a certain ‘aim’, namely, the avoidance of perpetual humiliation…. A more natural way of putting the point is to say that… a man whose culture diverges from that of the surrounding bureaucracies simply is not allowed to play out his role—he is ever interrupted and never heard…. No wonder he is a nationalist….

Industrialism ‘casts a long shadow’ ahead of itself… the image of an affluent, powerful commercial society, in which traders and producers are not profoundly subjected to a non-economic but exploitative ruling class. Thus for instance, Greek navigators and traders on say the island of Hydra, when they supported and financed the Greek nationalist revolution, must have been fully aware that traders in, say, Marseilles were safer, freer and richer than they, and the idea that they would share these advantages in a Greek, non-Ottoman state, if they succeeded in creating it, could hardly have been long in coming. It did not require theoretical ideas about nationalism. Other Levantine traders sought Western protection by seeking citizenship of outside powers and sheltering under the ‘capitulations’. It was perfectly logical for Greek traders in areas where they were endowed with an extensive Hellenic hinterland, to seek, a so to speak, collective capitulation in the form of a nation-state….

There are no significant differences, as far as I can see, between my position on nationalism and that of Michael Mann. Apparent disagreements are in part simply terminological: I used the term ‘industrialization’ in a broader sense which includes the earlier commercialization of society, which only also become ‘industrial’ in a narrower sense (power machinery, large-scale production) later, thereby however allowing the social changes already initiated by commercialism to be preserved, extended and to become entrenched. It is, however, true that I did not stress sufficiently (without however being unaware of) the importance of a certain kind of centralizing state for both cultural homogeneity and for the emergent awareness of the importance for each individual of partaking in the culture of the state and nationalism.

A process of this kind presumably accounts for the cultural unification of Han China, for the Latinization of the Western Roman Empire and the Hellenization of the Eastern and Byzantine empire. This process in the Hapsburg empire, with the replacement of Latin by German, initially led to a Landespatriotismus, at first intertwined with a linguistic (‘ethnic’) nationalism which, however, in the end replaced it altogether. Political centralization, the imposition of a bureaucracy with standardized recruitment procedures and written idiom and its replacement of power-holders with a local power base, unquestionably constitutes part of the preconditions of nationalism. A state committed by its very manner of operation to cultural Gleichschaltung is not merely an effect of a new socio-economic system, but also an important independent cause. On this point, I am glad to have learned much from Michael Mann’s work, and thanks to him, am unlikely to commit this error again in the future. One should also add Protestantism (and its emulation in other denominations and faiths) as a similarly important precondition….

McNeill observes that though my book is entitled Plough, Sword and Book, I am really only concerned with the book and pay little heed to coercion. It is certainly true that I do not go into details concerning the Varieties of Coercive Experience, and certainly do not possess a mastery of this area remotely comparable to McNeill’s. But my failure to go into details is not only due to ignorance, but also to the fact that I hold that the agrarian political predicament is, au fond, very similar: the stability of technology and the nature of coercive equipment force men either to submit to the concentration of power or to combine in ritually and otherwise stifling communities (or indeed, both of these at once). This thesis, which seems to me important and deserving of sustained scrutiny, explains why, unlike McNeill, I do not think the escape from the idiocy of rural life could easily have happened anywhere, and similarly I do not think, as Macfarlane does, that cultures which avoid the agrarian trap could easily emerge without any ‘miracle’, or could even have persisted in a kind of perpetual lineage of liberal purity….

Agarian society is defined by food production and storage plus a fairly stable technology, and hence by the absence of sustained innovation, hence no mass-production. From this it follows that it must be Malthusian. It must value offspring, or at least male offspring, as a source of labour and military strength, but at a certain point cannot sustain population growth. From this, consequences follow for its organization and ethos. Its members cannot escape the ever-present threat of hunger by expanding production, because the precondition of sustained, open-ended expansion, namely a growing technology based on science, is absent. That exit being barred, the only possible strategy for individuals and groups within agrarian society is to try and improve their position within it. In Agraria, when famine comes, men starve according to rank…. The logic of this situation is reflected in the value systems of agrarian societies: ‘honour’, i.e. preoccupation with status above all else (in the Middle Ages, as Tocqueville put it, nobility was beyond price), high regard for aggressiveness and martial skill, contempt for work. Add to the rule of the Red, the rule of the Black: when writing is added to food production, the storage of ideas and morality in writing freezes the system further, and makes it self-perpetuating….

Agraria is doomed, by the very logic of its situation, to remain what it is. We know, in fact, that we have broken out of it: if the argument showing that this cannot be has some cogency—which to my mind it has—then we must be puzzled concerning the nature of the explanation…. For McNeill… the breakthrough was on the agenda, deep in the social genes of Eurasian society, and was a matter of time and chance just where and when it would happen. Whilst a Chinese breakthrough is imaginable, I for one cannot follow McNeill in visualizing it in Malaya. It takes more than an indented coastline and some traders and pirates to make the modern world. It is attractive to think of Penang as another Venice, but Venice was not enough….

The whole thrust of Macfarlane’s work is to see modernity (liberal individualism) not as an escape from or reaction against a dark stifling hierarchical domination… but as continuous with a pure past… an heir to those seventeenth-century English radicals who looked back to the liberties of a pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon past…. For Macfarlane, not only early medieval Western Europe, but some forager societies are modern, and an astonishing passage even goes as far as to hint that a path might lead from hunter-gatherer societies to (modern) Los Angeles…. The aspiration is endearing….

For my part, I hold the thesis of Neolithic Whigs, persisting bulldog-wise from the birth of agriculture to the steam engine to be quite outstandingly implausible, and the Monte Carlo alternative—freedom emerged by accident through agrarian diversity, its number had as good a chance as any other to turn up on the agrarian roulette-wheel—almost as improbable: the miraculousness of individualist liberty in Agraria is not a consequence of it being one of a set of equally viable alternatives, but a consequence of its going against the very grain of agrarian life, and special circumstances not merely had to allow its birth, but help it get around the hump, to pass the Cape, as the French say….

Ian Jarvie is a thinker to whom my personal debt is quite specially great…. It might be best to proceed to what Jarvie himself calls a ‘deep quarrel’, namely the location of the transition to the rational or critical attitude. Popper locates this birth somewhere among the Pre-Socratics, whereas I connect it with the rise of industrial society (in a very broad sense of the term). This is of course far more than a dispute about dating. What is at issue is the relevance of sociology….

If the essence of the scientific method is something as simple as trial and error, and this has always been with us, ever since the amoeba, then why did trial and error need to be reinvented? Why did humans, whom the invention of language enabled to disconnect the idea from its bearer and thus to practice trial and error faster, more effectively, and more painlessly, than pre-human practitioners of trial and error who could only eliminate error by being themselves personally eliminated—why did beings blessed with this great advantage, tumble back into a ‘closed’ way of thinking which evades trial and ignores error? Popper the optimistic evolutionist seems to me to be at loggerheads with the pessimistic prophet of the Open Society. He needs a theory of the Closed Society, and one which is not circular and does not simply explain it by the yearning for security, for the closed tribal womb….

The charge that both Malinowski and I idealize the Hapsburg empire, and perhaps the British empire as well. For my own part, I am fully aware of the under-current of brutality, at what you might call the sergeant-major level of society, which co-existed, in intimate symbiosis, with both an orderly Rechtsstaat and with the Gemütlichkeit. All the same, it was moving in the right direction, and in some places, such as Prague and Cracow, the order and creativity were more in evidence than the brutality, and it was all incomparably better than the two totalitarian systems which, after two decades, followed the collapse of the Empire. Nothing Chris can throw at me will lead me to abandon my political slogan—Better Franz Josef than Josef! I am a card-carrying member (or would be if someone found me a card) of the party founded by Jaroslav Haăek, author of Svejk, namely, the Party of Mild Progress Within the Limits of the Law…

LINK: <https://newleftreview.org/issues/i221/articles/ernest-gellner-reply-to-critics>