ERNEST GELLNER: A COMBATANT IN THE BATTLE OF IDEAS
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A Combatant in the Battle of Ideas
A defender of the West when it was most embattled, a defender of reason at a time of dangerous irrationality.
By BRENDAN SIMMS
‘I am sorry, I have written another,” Ernest Gellner used to say in his later years before publishing a new book. “I just couldn’t help it.” Not even his death in 1995 stopped the flow. The last of his posthumous works, “Language and Solitude,” appeared in the late 1990s. Now Gellner has been brought back to life—alongside his combative ideas and his maverick approach to intellectual combat—in a sympathetic but by no means reverential biography by his former pupil John A. Hall.
Like so many British academics who rose to prominence after 1945, Gellner was an immigrant from central Europe. He was born into an aspirant family of assimilating Czech Jews, was forced into exile by Hitler coming to power and rose to become first a professor at the London School of Economics, then at Cambridge University and finally, in the early 1990s (after the Berlin Wall fell), at the new Central European University in Prague.
In common with so many other émigrés, Gellner served in the war (in his case in a Czechoslovak armored unit), and he was grateful to Britain for defeating Nazism and offering him a home after the end of hostilities. Unlike many such émigrés, however, he showed no interest in acquiring the outward trappings of social success and acceptance. Instead, as Mr. Hall shows, Gellner made his watchword “cold intellectual honesty.” This was matched by a strong dose of warm and passionate courage.
Gellner was by training and profession an anthropologist. He began his career by conducting fieldwork among the Berbers of Morocco, sometimes accompanied by his intrepid wife, Susan. But Gellner was really a classic polymath whose interests ranged across several disciplines at a time when it was still (just) possible to feel a mastery of more than one field of study. Gellner launched forays into philosophy, sociology, psychoanalysis and history.
The fields might have been diverse, but the method of inquiry was similar in each case: analytical rigor combined with a strict commitment to reason. Those who knew Gellner recall that this commitment could result in truly nerve-racking conversations, in which they found themselves under relentless interrogation as Gellner tried to get to the heart of a problem. There was not much small talk, and there was nowhere to hide as he chipped away at the position of his interlocutor—or, to put it another way, his opponent. As one might imagine, Gellner did not suffer fools gladly. He told the assembled doyens and divas who constituted the celebrated Cambridge History of Political Thought school, for example, that there were simply too many of them.
When he started his writing career, Gellner’s targets were mainly on what was perceived to be the right side of the cultural-political spectrum: In particular, Gellner attacked the philosopher Michael Oakeshott and the intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin for their romantic traditionalism.
Gellner was at odds with Oakeshott’s belief that only tradition could guarantee civilized rule and Oakeshott’s related claim that the imposition of rationality would lead to fanaticism. As for Berlin, Gellner was a critic of his argument for value- pluralism, which Gellner saw as something that could be achieved only at the expense of reason. In Berlin’s hands, as Gellner saw it, “the history of ideas,” Mr. Hall writes, “became something of a game, in which thinkers were damned as dangerous because anti-pluralist or praised for endorsing the incommensurability of values.” Gellner was particularly angered, Mr. Hall says, that “a fellow exile from the disaster zones of Europe” (Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire) could be “so infuriatingly complacent.”
Such judgments were hardly surprising, given Gellner’s outlook. He really could not be called a traditionalist or a “multiculturalist” (to borrow a term from today). Among much else, he welcomed modern industrial society and the prosperity that it brought to the previously impoverished. He therefore had little time for the anti-Westernism of a new generation of intellectuals, rising to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, and by the end of his career most of his enemies were to be found on the left. In any case, as Mr. Hall notes, “Gellner was instinctively opposed to all lazy thinking, clichés and conventions, whether of the right or the left.”
Gellner’s most celebrated demolition was of the literary critic Edward Said (1935-2003). When Said accused Gellner of writing about North Africa without having a command of the native language, Gellner was too modest to respond that he was in fact conversant in the language of the Berbers. He did, however, make a strong case that the whole theory of “orientalism”—Said’s idea that Western interpretations and depictions of the East were designed not to understand the East but to control it—was based on erroneous assumptions about the political power of literature. The viceroys of India, he pointed out brutally, were not known for eagerly scanning the pages of late-19th-century literary magazines.
Probably the most important, and certainly the best-known, of Gellner’s works was “Nations and Nationalism” (1983). As Mr. Hall remarks, its focus on central Europe made the book in many ways an autobiographical investigation in which the author came to grips with a phenomenon that had shaped the world in which he grew up. On Gellner’s reading, nationalism was a reaction to the forces of globalization and modernization in the 19th century, a reaction to “population explosion, rapid urbanisation [and] labour migration.”
Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography
By John A. Hall
(Verso, 400 pages, $49.95)
Crucially, nationalism was not, in Gellner’s view, a matter of some essential primordial identity, a dormant monster that simply needed to be “kissed” into consciousness. Gellner was deeply ambivalent about nationalism. He saw the homogeneity produced by the nation-state as the precondition for modernity. But he was also appalled by its excesses. “No nation,” he once wrote, “is fit to rule itself. . . . [Nations] fight each other, and they oppress their own minorities.” For this reason, and others, Gellner was no Zionist; he did not believe that his Jewishness determined his identity. He was prepared to fight for Israel, he quipped, but not to live there.
When Gellner returned to Prague to teach late in his life, he was disappointed to find that the diversity that had made the city so electric in the 1930s was no more. The Jews had been murdered by the Nazis, and the Germans had been expelled at the end of the war; he regarded the Czechs with great affection, but he also saw them as “dull.”
Unsurprisingly, Gellner’s work was heavily attacked throughout his life. He was able to rebut accusations of “Eurocentricity”: His deep engagement with other cultures was more than evident in his fieldwork in North Africa and in his studies of Islam, in which he showed, among other things, the resilience of the religion in the face of modernity.
Gellner’s response to feminist critics was characteristically blunt but perhaps less satisfactory. When backed into a corner about the absence of women from one of his seminal works, he answered that, while he liked women, he had to insist that they had nothing to do with historical development.
Many of the problems that Gellner addressed during his long intellectual career—such as the roots of nationalism and the role of contemporary Islam—are obviously of direct relevance today. But the most pertinent part of his legacy lies in his fearless endorsement of Western modernity at a time when it was becoming increasingly embattled in the academy and elsewhere.
As Mr. Hall demonstrates, Gellner believed that there really was a clash between “liberty and pluralism,” on the one hand, and “authoritarianism and oppressiveness” on the other. In a passionate riposte to Noam Chomsky, who had accused him of ignoring Western crimes, Gellner charged that his critic had “obscured” 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.”
This was the authentic voice of Ernest Gellner: honest, cool and reasonable. Mr. Hall is to be congratulated for reminding us of how much we miss it today.
—Mr. Simms, a professor of international relations at Cambridge University, is the author of “Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire.”
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