heir energies into sober industry and philanthropy, thereby generating both an industrial revolution and a civil society. Mandevilles famous paradox, in which private vices (greed and envy) produce public benefits through the alchemy of the market, is subtly revised here: revolutionary enthusiasm, modulated into private virtue, produces the unanticipated breakthrough to modernity.
Few modern writers have orchestrated the themes of the philosophic historians and their sociological successors (Tocqueville, Durkheim, Weber) with so much clarity and insight. Gellners interpretation of the transition to modernity is rooted in the history of philosophy and the sociology of religion. As in all of his work, there is a wonderful combination of historical sweep and sociological precision. "Civil society" emerges in a specific historical context, but also as the answer to a more general problem: how to avoid the Leviathan state on the one hand, and the stifling social conformity of militant sects on the other. In Britain, religious and political compromise miraculously created an ideal environment for both economic growth and intellectual liberty.
From the perspective of this first breakthrough to modernity the Soviet experiment appears hopelessly retrograde: a disastrous attempt to fuse the political, ideological, and economic spheres in a single bureaucratic apparatus. The result was first terror (Stalin), then squalor (Brezhnev), with the latter far more corrosive of the regimes authority than the former. Gellner argues:
Here revolutionary enthusiasm was transformed, not into private virtue, but into hubris and corruption: the Leviathan state on the one hand, a demoralized populace on the other.
One of Gorbachevs errors was to think that liberalization would immediately generate economic growth, thus giving him the opportunity to refloat the Soviet Union as a superpower. In the absence of a genuine civil society to undergird market reforms, liberalization actually disrupted production and seemed to lead, ominously, to a more or less open criminalization of the economy. Tentative market reforms, instead of revitalizing the economy, only furthered the drift toward economic feudalism, as the managers of enterprises and local political bosses rushed to enhance their own power and wealth at the expense of the failing center. It is a great deal easier, runs an Eastern European adage, to turn an aquarium into fish soup, than it is to turn fish soup into an aquarium. What emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet economy was not the dynamic market socialism for which Gorbachev had hoped, but rather an inefficient amalgam of clientelist politics and corrupt entrepreneurship.
Gorbachevs second, and fatal, mistake was to underestimate the centrifugal force of nationalism in the Soviet empire: again, it was easier for ambitious rival politicians to appeal to national pride and ethnic grievance than to create, ex nihilo, a democratic politics in what was still after all a one-party state. Ideology, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and as socialism appeared to be bankrupt, and liberalism stillborn, nationalism expanded to fill the gap.
Gellners theory of nationalism is undoubtedly one of his major achievements. One of the leading features of modern society, he argues, is the "semanticization" of work. From the advent of the office to the triumph of the computer and the internet, modern work is increasingly intellectual rather than physical, requiring fluency in a standardized idiom. Advanced technology places a premium on the ability to communicate with far-flung networks of essentially anonymous interlocutors. Effective participation in such networks is possible only for those who have mastered the standard literate culture of the society in which they happen to live: hence the overriding importance of the language that is taught in schools and used in offices, understood by nationalists everywhere. But at the very moment when, in Webers terms, the world of work has been transformed into an open-ended, anonymous Gesellschaft, the modern ideologic