 some of the troubling consequences of this trend ("Return of a Native," Political Studies 67.1 ). Advanced economies not only generate appalling inequality and demoralized underclasses, they also tend to import cheap labor from less developed economies and then to deny the newcomers the rights of citizenship. If poverty and illiteracy drive some of the immigrants, or their children, into the criminal underworld, prejudice against them is reinforced. But given the continuing disparities of global economic development, labor migrations on a massive scale can be expected to continue. The result is that polyethnicity will be the norm in industrial societies even as linguistic fluency in the national idiom continues to be a prerequisite of economic success. Although the spirit of civil society and the principle of modularity are deeply averse to the linkage of the rights of citizenship to ethnicity, advanced economies will continue to generate ethnically differentiated and politically disadvantaged underclassesa contradiction for which there are no obvious solutions in sight.
Gellners work, then, issues in a series of ironic paradoxes: the religious origins of secular, civil society; the failure of the economy in the Soviet Union, a society that made a fetish of productivity; the overwhelming appeal of the Gemeinschaft ideal of a closed society in the era of the radically open, global Gesellschaft; and finally the inexorable tendency toward polyethnicity in an era when resurgent nationalisms yearn for ethnic homogeneity. His cool, incisive rationalism was the enemy of every attempt to re-enchant the world, to avoid the intractable contradictions at the heart of the human condition. If he was not as original as Max Weber and the great masters of modern sociology, no one did more than he to preserve and to apply their legacy as our century slouches toward its close.