A Critique of Gellner’s Neo-Liberalism: Economy, Equality, Epistemology

Abstract

This chapter locates Ernest Gellner in a liberal tradition that originates in the pre-industrial era and culminates philosophically in the ‘open society’ imaginary of Karl Popper, which was a formative influence. Following the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Gellner placed particular emphasis on the ideal of civil society. But the wellbeing of the masses in the twenty-first century is not served by neoliberal market economy or elitist intellectual agendas. Post-socialist experiences of privatization and social polarization confirm the illusory character of Gellner’s defence of liberal meritocracy. The ‘partial historicism’ he proposed in his belated critique of Popper is also found wanting.

…[Karl Popper held] a facile theory of the Open Society … those of us who are committed to those values and aspirations do so nowadays in circumstances which are very different from those which influenced him when he was writing The Open Society…

—Gellner (1996b: 80–1)

Appendices

Comment on Chris Hann’s ‘A Critique of Gellner’s Neo-Liberalism: Economy, Equality, Epistemology’

Johann P. Arnason

Department of Sociology, La Trobe University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

J.Arnason@latrobe.edu.au

I do not disagree with anything in Chris Hann’s critique of Gellner’s input into the celebration of civil society. The strong normative version of that concept, suddenly popular at the end of the twentieth century, has indeed been weighed and found wanting, and as Chris has shown in a series of empirical studies, it has fared particularly badly in the post-communist world. What I would like to add to Chris’s analysis is a brief remark on the context of Gellner’s turn to a historical-sociological defence of civil society as an alternative to past and present misadventures of the human species.

Gellner wrote Conditions of liberty (Gellner 1994) as an answer to the new situation created by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite regimes in Eastern Europe, and to Western misunderstandings of these momentous events. He was critical of the market fundamentalists who relied on shock therapy to align the post-communist world with the West. His own interpretation was no less triumphalist than those of the more militant neo-liberals; he credited the Atlantic incarnation of civil society with having for the first time liberated human groupings from dependence on coercion and superstition. This version of the end of history (at least history as humans knew it for most of the time) was admittedly linked to a more cautious vision of transition to capitalism and democracy than was fashionable in the 1990s. It can nevertheless be argued that Gellner misunderstood the Soviet collapse, albeit in his own distinctive way, and that his misconceptions in this regard have something to do with his wager on civil society.

A critique of Gellner’s views on Soviet history and its inglorious end may start with his description of communism as an ideocracy. Objections to that concept are familiar and fundamental. Ideas do not rule; ideologies enter into the constitution of societies, but do not pre-program them. Nobody would now claim that the ideological component of the Soviet regime was unimportant, but a closer look at Soviet history shows that ideological premises have been adapted to circumstances and imperatives related to the pursuit of power. The most decisive step of that kind, foreshadowed by Lenin and codified in stronger terms by Stalin, was the claim—unjustifiable by classical Marxism—that ‘proletarian power’ in a single country could be used to create the preconditions for socialism. Further innovations followed later. In short, both the ideological framework and the power structures of the Soviet regime were composite formations. But Gellner identifies the ‘ideocracy’ with a supposedly unbroken Marxist tradition. Apart from the above objections, this is hard to reconcile with other aspects of his argument. He refers to the Soviet power elite as a ‘Chayanovite bureaucracy, one playing politics and playing it safe’ (Gellner 1994: 4), more interested in perks and positions than in efficiency. That does not sound like an ideocracy. Moreover, ‘playing it safe’ is hardly an appropriate term for the rulers of a great power engaged in a nuclear arms race and global rivalry with the single stronger power. There is no making sense of the Soviet Union without due emphasis on its hubristic geopolitical ambitions. This brings us to another weakness of Gellner’s interpretation. As he puts it, the Soviet Union was ‘beaten simultaneously in the consumerist and in the arms race’ (ibid.); a third defeat is left unmentioned, namely the failure to maintain a unified power bloc, in contrast to the success of the United States in that regard. The Sino-Soviet conflict, which became open around 1960 and explosive at the end of the decade, was a major factor in the geopolitical sea change of the late twentieth century. Finally, the picture of a bureaucracy interested in security, safe careers and ways of cheating official instructions is not easily compatible with the comments on an over-sacralization of the immanent that left no profane bolt holes. The Soviet version of secular religion did not sacralize everything to the same degree; there were distinctions between levels, and they shifted from one phase to another; and there were bolt holes, varying both in extent and in type. To take extreme examples, bolt holes in the Soviet Union during the great purge of the 1930s were due to the incomplete control of the centre over various peripheries; the ‘normalized’ communist regime in Czechoslovakia after 1968, less interested in penetrating everyday life and individual consciousness than communism at its peak had been, provided bolt holes of a different kind.

To sum up, Gellner’s descriptions do not seem to fit the strange mixture of secular religion, command economy and geopolitical overstretch represented by the Soviet model. But it has yet to be shown that this mismatch is linked to his idea of civil society. He defined the latter in terms of contrasts to three other societal types. The oldest of them, still studied by twentieth-century anthropologists, is dominated by kinship and ritual, averse to political despotism, and at its most pronounced rightly described as stateless. Next in line is Islamic society, a long-time neighbour of the West, not about to go the way of the Soviet Union and perhaps even capable of mounting its own version of an ideological challenge to Atlantic societies. Gellner characterizes it, in somewhat polemical terms, as a mixture of ‘religious moralism and cynical clientelism’ (Gellner 1994: 27), but this is a shorthand expression for more theoretical perspectives. ‘Moralism’ refers to the sovereignty of the Law, anchored in sacred texts and traditions and backed up by standardized rituals, notwithstanding the struggle of reformist Islam against more primitive forms of ritualism; clientelism is of many kinds, including local, regional and political versions, as well as tribal ones of earlier origin.

The third enemy of civil society is—or was—the Soviet model. On closer examination, the continuity of the three undesirables turns out to be more significant than Gellner first suggested. If the notion of ideocracy is to be used, it would surely be applicable to Islamic understandings of divine law and revealed text. We could even go one step further and argue that, since kinship is a cultural construct (that is now the consensus of anthropologists), it is a variant of ideocracy. As for clientelism, it was a notorious feature of Soviet-type societies, especially in their phases of slow decline. And given the insistence on securing loyalty through the fostering of local cultures (‘national in form, socialist in content’ was the official slogan), it could even be suggested that there was an admixture of tribalism in the Soviet model.

If civil society is defined against this continuum, it looks like a liberation of society from self-inflicted constraints that mix absolutist ideas with particular interests—or, as we might rephrase it, obstructive patterns of culture and power. And a liberation of society is unthinkable without a liberation of its individual members. Gellner was critical of the liberal utopias that—more or less explicitly—presupposed pre-social individuals capable of social choice. His emphasis on both sides is not altogether unlike the Marxian idea of a mutually conditioned free development of the individual and the social whole.

There is a final turn of Gellner’s argument that merits a brief mention. Being less optimistic than the marketeering liberals about a rapid Westernization of the world, he nevertheless hoped for an ‘alliance of great powers … administering the world loosely speaking in terms of Civil Society conventions’ (Gellner 1994: 181), and he did not think it was unlikely that the Chinese leadership would go along with this. This prospect raises a question on which it would be tempting to speculate: What would Gellner have made of Xi Jinping’s China?

Reference

• Gellner, Ernest. 1994. Conditions of liberty: Civil society and its rivals. London: Hamish Hamilton.

In Defence of Ernest Gellner: Comments on Chris Hann’s ‘A Critique of Gellner’s Neo-Liberalism: Economy, Equality, Epistemology’

Anatoly M. Khazanov

I have decided to call these comments ‘In Defence of Ernest Gellner’ after some hesitation. As a scholar he does not need any defence, at any rate not mine, his colleague of a lesser calibre and of a more limited range of expertise. Besides, his very good scholarly biography by John A. Hall (Hall 2010) remains relevant to this very day. But having been a close friend of Ernest for several decades, I consider it my duty to defend his memory from factual mistakes, ill-hidden biases and animosity, and especially from political accusations. I would write these comments in any case, but I appreciate Hann’s assurance that he always separates personal relations from scholarly disagreements; I would like to add that this is just what Gellner always did.

It seems that Hann did not find in Gellner’s works anything that remains valuable today. Gellner to him is already a scholar of the past, a fallen star whose academic citation index is declining. Actually, Hann was very critical of Gellner’s scholarship even when he was still alive; however, he has become especially active in this regard since Gellner’s passing. He never fails to mention anything that, in his opinion, might be detrimental to Gellner’s reputation as a scholar. Thus, Hann mentions critical reviews of Gellner’s books and considers them ‘brilliant’ and ‘shrewd’. He even does not fail to note that Conditions of liberty by Gellner was not published by a university press and was never reprinted. But I will not argue with him on these issues. Gellner’s seminal studies speak for him better than anybody else can. And thirty-one other participants in the conference are of a very different opinion than that of Hann.

Still, Hann’s attack on Gellner is not only scholarly, it is much more personal and political. To be fair, I want to stress that he also says many good words about Gellner as an individual and a colleague. He writes that Gellner was a generous, egalitarian and supporting mentor. Actually, it was Gellner who introduced Hann to me, in Cambridge, and asked me to talk to him about the real situation in the socialist countries. But very soon I concluded that, in this regard, Hann was hopeless; he was not interested in the facts on the ground.

Hann also mentions Gellner’s hospitality and even the red wine that he sipped in his house while watching football games on TV. He notes that Gellner was tolerant of other opinions that did not fit his own. He encouraged students to follow their own approaches. He had only one deficiency, alas: he was always dismissive of Hann’s views and never took them seriously.

It is not as though Gellner would be surprised by Hann’s criticism; he dealt with it once before, and dealt with it quite handily, in fact. In a volume devoted to Gellner’s social philosophy, Gellner responded at length to all of the chapters, among them Hann’s. He concluded his response to Chris: ‘Much of the rest of Chris’ essay is a straight political polemic, and none the worse for that. Chris says that my remarks about Malinowski tell us more about me than about Bronislaw: Chris’ remarks about me tell us more about Chris. Chris is a socialist whose justified dislike of the defects of Western capitalism (as well as of Bolshevism) led him to hope for a Third Way, and the manner of the demise of the Communist empire has, at least for a time, dashed such hopes’ (Gellner 1996:677). It is obvious that Hann was and still is very offended by Gellner’s attitude.

Be that as it may, political disagreements between Gellner and Hann were very great and serious. Guido Franzinetti (see his chapter in this volume) has already mentioned that the academic Left was always hostile to Gellner. I would like to dwell a little on the reasons for this. The first reason is obvious. Gellner never accepted Marxism in all its reincarnations, whether classical Marxism, or Soviet Marxism, or neo-Marxism, or post-Marxism. Likewise, although he paid due attention to economic inequality that existed and continues to exist in Western democratic countries, a dogmatic concept of the eternal class struggle was quite alien to him.

Hann mentions some other reasons for Gellner’s views. In his opinion, Gellner’s life history distorted his understanding of socialism and blinded him to the darkest sides of the capitalist mode of production. Well, this explanation smacks of a Marxist determinism that assumes that political views of human beings are defined by the circumstances of their lives.

Hann’s last explanation of Gellner’s political views, to say the least, is in very bad taste. He claims that Gellner spent his life in a socio-economic cocoon. Only a very biased and prejudiced person can clam this, while ignoring the well-known facts of Gellner’s biography. Is it so difficult to comprehend that all his life he was courageously overcoming numerous problems and difficulties, economic, social, physical?

At the age of thirteen, Gellner had to flee from Czechoslovakia and became a homeless refugee. In England, which became his host country, he managed to attend only a marginal, not-quite-a-grammar school, and then got a scholarship to Balliol, in Oxford, because its head thought that his college should admit a few foreigners in order to teach them how to become proper Englishmen. During WWII, Gellner volunteered to fight in the Czech Armoured Brigade, then returned to his beloved Prague, but soon had to leave it again because he rightly concluded that the communist seizure of power in the country was inevitable. His second move to England was followed by his slow, gradual and rather difficult advancement in the British academic world. But its many influential members never considered Gellner a full member of their tribe, if a member at all.

By contrast, Hann spent his own life in the ivory towers of academia, successfully and uninterruptedly climbing its ladder from one position to the next higher one, sometimes with Gellner’s assistance. In his publications, he always declared his allegiance to the poor, disadvantaged and exploited all over the world. But when the chance occurred, he preferred to move from England to rich and comfortable, but capitalist, Germany. So, who spent his life in the socio-economic cocoon, Gellner or Hann?

There were much more serious reasons for Gellner’s aversion to socialist regimes. Altogether they were responsible for the death of around 100 million of their own subjects. Other millions were imprisoned in the numerous gulags. Some nationalities were exiled; others were discriminated against. Apparently, there are still some intellectuals in the West for whom this is irrelevant. For them the ends justified the means. But not for Gellner. The living standards in the capitalist countries were much higher than in the socialist ones. But this was also irrelevant for the Western Left; socialism promised a bright future, while capitalism was unable to do this.

Hann blames Gellner even for his alleged voting for the Conservative Party. I do not know how Hann managed to find this out; his reference to Hall’s biography of Gellner is misleading. Hall (2010: 157) mentioned only that in 1974 Gellner once quipped that British politics needed for Maggie (Thatcher) to be followed by social democrats. When Gellner talked to me about British politics, he mentioned several times that he had never voted for the Conservative Party. And I trust him more than I trust Hann. Moreover, I doubt very much that Gellner discussed with him his voting preferences at all.

But let us assume that Hann was right. I am almost embarrassed to remind him of the obvious: Elections are real only when citizens can choose whom to vote for. Does he prefer the socialist practice of voting only for one candidate chosen by the Communist Party? This practice that was ridiculed in the old Soviet joke: ‘God created Eve, brought her to Adam, and told him: Choose!’ That was the first socialist and the most democratic election in world history. Finally, does Hann think that it is impossible to be a good scholar while holding conservative political views?

As George Orwell noted long ago, some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals could believe them. I was always amazed by those Western intellectuals who preferred to love so-called scientific socialism at a safe distance while enjoying a comfortable life in the capitalist countries they claimed to hate so much. Many people living in communist countries preferred that capitalist Hell to the socialist Paradise and moved to the West as soon as they got the chance. Others simply fled to Western countries even at risk to their lives. By contrast, a few people who did not want to leave their home countries were forced to do this because of their dissident activities. Still others challenged communist rulers by insisting on their human right to emigrate. By the way, Gellner and the Dutch anthropologist Henri Claessen were the two most active amongst my Western colleagues whose relentless pressure on the Soviet authorities prevented my imminent arrest and eventually allowed me to emigrate from the Soviet Union. But I have never heard about anybody who voluntarily moved in the opposite direction. Hann is no exception in this regard.

Nevertheless, after doing some fieldwork in Hungary, Hann became and still remains a great admirer of its communist regime. Hungary, in his opinion, was entirely different from the Soviet Union. Really? Strangely enough, Hann still refers only to his field materials collected in a small part of the country and ignores numerous publications on communist Hungary, perhaps because they contradict his opinion. I wonder if Hann was aware of the specifics of ethnographic fieldwork in the communist countries. Many people there were afraid to tell foreigners what they really thought about their regime because of the ever-present secret police informers. A popular joke that Hungary was the happiest barrack of the socialist (prison) camp proves that many Hungarians did not share Hann’s enthusiasm.

I am very surprised that, while praising the late Kádár regime, Hann never mentions its previous history: the suppression of the Hungarian anti-communist revolution by the Soviet tanks and the subsequent cruel and mass repressions, whose victims ranged from those who were killed, imprisoned, tortured or deported, to those who were ‘only’ fired upon, harassed and blackmailed. Many Hungarians are writing now that Kádár started his economic reforms only after he had managed to break the national sprit, conformism had become dominant in the country, and many scholars, journalists and famous cultural figures had become collaborators and informants of the secret police. Only after that did Kádár the Hangman turn into Kádár the Reformer (see, e.g., Kovacs 2009).

Remarkably, Kádár’s Soviet patrons, who became suspicious and nervous from the first days of the Prague Spring to the Solidarity movement in Poland, were not concerned about or opposed to the Kádár’s ‘goulash socialism’, an injection of a limited dose of market into the mainly unchanged command economy. And why should they be against his carrot of some improvement in Hungarian living standards? The state retained its ownership of the key economic resources and continued to repress dissent. Its subjects were still denied basic civil rights and freedoms. To this very day, Hann is disappointed with Gellner’s out-of-hand dismissal of his rosy picture of Kádár’s Hungary. But is it really so difficult to understand why he did this?

Finally, about civil society: Hann claims that Gellner himself felt uneasy about the synthesis he had suggested in his book, and to prove this, he again refers to Hall’s biography of Gellner (2010: 356–360). I have carefully read those pages again, but I did not find there anything that might confirm Hann’s opinion. Gellner unambiguously considered civil society indispensable for democracy, and Hann disagrees with his views. But Hann’s own perception of civil society is rather strange: he calls it highly elitist and blames it for economic and other deficiencies of neo-liberalism.

However, civil society in Gellner’s perception does not consist in governments or multinational corporations. It is not supposed to deal with economic problems, inequality, taxation, welfare and so on. Its goal is to safeguard the liberal democratic character of countries where it is found. No more, no less. It is civil society that protects Hann’s right to think what he wants to think, to speak what he thinks, and to publish what he is saying in public. Whatever Hann may think, Gellner’s strong though sober argumentation on its behalf remains valid to this very day.

This right is very dear to people like me, who were denied it when we lived in socialist countries. Many people in Western countries take it for granted without being vigilant enough. But there were and still are those who understand that this right and civil society in general should be constantly protected from various undemocratic ideologies, movements and parties on the Right and on the Left. Gellner was one of them.

References

• Gellner, Ernest. 1996. Reply to Critics. In The social philosophy of Ernest Gellner, eds. John A. Hall and Ian Jarvie, 623–686. Amsterdam—Atlanta: Rodopi.

• Hall, John A. 2010. Ernest Gellner. An intellectual biography. London and New York: Verso.

• Kovacs J. M. 2009. Accomplices without perpetrators: What do economists have to do with transitional justice in Hungary? In Perpetrators, accomplices and victims in twentieth -century politics. Reckoning with the past, eds. Anatoly. M. Khazanov and S. Payne, 150–173. London and New York: Routledge.