Language and solitude by Ernest Gellner
(Cambridge University Press 1998, £12.95)
There are two fundamental theories of knowledge. These two theories stand in stark contrast to each other. They represent two poles of looking, not merely at knowledge, but at life. Aligned with these two polar views of knowledge, there are... theories of society, of man, of everything. This chasm cuts right across our social landscape."
These opening lines of Language and Solitude, Ernest Gellner's last book, published posthumously (he died in 1995), embody the style and tone of his thought. The tone is dogmatic and uncompromising, the style impressionistic and polemical. From the start it is clear that the argument will turn on a simple dichotomy, incessantly reiterated. It is an inauspicious beginning for a study in intellectual history. The career of an idea is as much a matter of chance as that of an individual. It is not logic that is decisive, but accident. Isaiah Berlin-a long-standing b?te noire of Gellner's-was fond of citing the way in which David Hume's demolition of causation in nature was taken up by JG Hamann, the German theologian, as an argument in support of his fideism. The Scottish sceptic would have been horrified had he known that the barbs he fired off against religious faith would be turned by Hamann against scepticism and reason itself. Yet, as Berlin often reminded us, paradoxes of this kind are not unusual in the history of ideas.
Gellner's stark opposition of two highly stylised views is particularly unsuited to a study of intellectual life in the last decade of the Habsburgs. This was a milieu in which, under the benign indifference of a subtle imperial ruling class, many varieties of thought sprang up and cross-pollinated. The Habsburg intellectual style was one in which hybrids and unresolved antinomies thrived. In the wake of the empire's collapse and Europe's descent into dictatorship, racial slavery and genocide, this admirable tradition became the property of the world. Many ?migr? Habsburg thinkers passed lightly through the impermeable boundaries marked by Gellner. This was true of Friedrich Hayek, who is barely mentioned by Gellner, of Wittgenstein, whose thought he fails to understand, and of Bronislaw Malinowski, of whom in part he approves.
In Language and Solitude, as in much of his work, Gellner's interests are not those of a historian or philosopher but of a polemicist. Most of his writings are partisan in the highest degree. Gellner campaigned indefatigably for the Enlightenment. He attacked its enemies wherever he found them-and he found them everywhere. He ferreted through the obscurest corners of intellectual life, sniffing out what he took to be the Enlightenment's worst enemy-relativism. In his eyes, the dilettantes of deconstruction and the Oakeshottian epigones of tradition were equally reprehensible defaulters from Enlightenment canons of universal reason. Along with western Marxists and liberals who wandered from the path of Enlightenment rationalism, they were subjected to all the force of his caustic Czech wit. But Gellner had no answer to relativism. In the end all he could do was demand that we make an act of faith on behalf of the Enlightenment.
Language and Solitude contains much that is witty, wise and true. Anyone who has talked to people who grew up in Vienna before the first world war will recognise Gellner's portrait: "The underlying assumption was that man had but two options in this world: either to become one of the individualist, universal, free-floating, cultivated haute bourgeoisie, with its distaste for the cousin-infested ethnic newcomers... or to embrace one of the ethnic cultures, 'forms of life,' and treat its voice as ultimate and authoritative." Language and Solitude is full of such passages-sly, mischievous and truthful. Yet the account it gives of the Habsburg dilemma is not an exercise in historical interpretation. Like Voltaire's histories, it is propaganda for a cause.
Gellner divides European thought into two traditions. One is rationalist and individualist, the other organic and communitarian. The former is exemplified by Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant and Russell and had a lapidary reformation in the early Wittgenstein. The latter is found in Herder, Burke, Coleridge, Oakeshott and the later Wittgenstein. These two traditions contain rival accounts of knowledge and morality. On the "individualistic/ atomic" view, knowledge "is something practised or achieved above all by individuals alone... In principle, the acquisition of knowledge is something open to Robinson Crusoe, and perhaps to him especially." By contrast, in the organic/communitarian view, human knowledge is an achievement of institutions and communities. Whereas the individualist tradition is universalistic in its view of knowledge and morality, the organic tradition tends to relativism. For Gellner, the individualist tradition affirms the universality of scientific knowledge and the distinctive possibilities of modern civilisation, while the organicist tradition expresses itself in romantic nostalgia, the revolt against science and post-modernism. In this taxonomy of European thought, we are left in no doubt where Gellner placed himself.
There is nothing novel in this caricature. A similar cartoon version of European intellectual history is found in Karl Popper's Open Society and Its Enemies. Gellner is cruder. Take the example of Hume, regarded by Gellner as a paradigmatic atomic/individualist. Yet it was Hume who attacked Hobbes and Locke for their neglect of custom and tradition. For Hume, human beings were au fond social, and it was absurd to imagine (as Hume believed Hobbes did) that society could originate in a contract, if only because promising is itself a social institution. What is wrong with Gellner's typology, however, is not that thinkers such as Hume are misplaced in it. Rather, it does not help to illuminate the history of ideas-it merely serves Gellner's polemical purposes.
In most of his writings Gellner was a controversialist setting his sights on highly topical targets. At times, this enabled him to produce work of striking power and originality. Gellner's writings on nationalism left many questions unanswered but marked a big advance in thinking on the subject. His suggestion that a homogeneous national culture is a functional necessity of modern economic relationships between strangers, is arresting. It is also a useful corrective of the truly daft idea (sometimes advanced by Popper and Elie Kedourie) that nationalism is no more than a species of intellectual error, a theoretical monstrosity palmed off on the modern world by a handful of romantic thinkers.
When he turned his attention to philosophical questions, Gellner's polemical energies were less usefully employed. His famous attack on linguistic philosophy, Words and Things (1959), was notable for its incomprehension of the philosophers it ridiculed. Gellner never tired of repeating that the English-speaking world exaggerated Wittgenstein's originality because it was ignorant of the Habsburg world from which he came. No doubt there is something in this but, for his part, Gellner never understood the genealogy of Wittgenstein's later work. The Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, no less than the author of the Tractatus, was in the lineage of Kant. Following Kant, Wittgenstein took for granted that the world as we see it is shaped by our minds. It is not too big a step from that to the belief that the concepts embedded in the language we use form our view of the world.
It is partly because he took seriously the formative role of language in shaping thought that Malinowski, the other main character in Language and Solitude, is attacked by Gellner. On the whole, Malinowski-who founded social anthropology in Britain-is viewed by Gellner as on the side of reason. But, like Wittgenstein, Malinowski fell into darkness. In his later work he ventured the idea that there is no fundamental difference between "savage" and "civilised" language. In allowing this, Malinowski let the demon of relativism into the sacred grove of social science. In Gellner's book, he thereby joined the "organic/communitarian" camp.
In truth, most Habsburg thinkers straddle Gellner's impassable divide. This is certainly true of Hayek. Like nearly every thinker of his generation, Hayek worried about how the traditions of a liberal civilisation could be protected from corrosive doubt. His post-Kantian inheritance prevented him from seeing liberal values as eternal. But he found it impossible to accept that liberal civilisation was only one form of life among others. The intellectual self-consciousness of Habsburg civilisation had the effect of undermining it. Precisely because of their distinctive intellectual virtues-an acute sense of history and an understanding of other cultures-Habsburg thinkers could not help relativising their own values. When nationalism swept across the Habsburg lands, the elites were powerless to resist it. They were already convinced that their time was up.
For the thinkers of the Habsburg emigration this problem was not solved, only shelved. Hayek oscillated between Gellner's two traditions. Sometimes a Burkean traditionalist who revered the past as a repository of wisdom, at other times Hayek propagated an Enlightenment cult of unending progress. When he came to rest it was in an evolutionary, scientistic argument for liberal society, according to which it is bound to win because it is the most productive.
Gellner never accepted the more doctrinaire parts of Hayek's thought, but his defence of liberal, Enlightenment civilisation was not much different. For Gellner, liberal societies are superior because-barring a run of bad luck-they are sure to prevail. Their greater wealth, knowledge and virtuosity in devising new technologies will enable them to triumph over their rivals. This is not so much an argument for liberal civilisation as a bet on it. As such it is no more reasonable than Pascal's famously ill-placed wager. (After all, the Habsburgs' wealth and learning did not save them.) For all his irony, Gellner ended up as a sort of a fideist of the Enlightenment. He was no more able to resolve the Habsburg dilemma than the Habsburgs themselves.
