ralist or puritan form, functions as a surrogate for nationalism.
For Gellner, as for Max Weber, the hallmark of modernity is the "disenchantment of the world" through the powerful agencies of science and capitalism. Traditional agrarian societies, dominated by military/aristocratic and clerical elites, are geared to the maintenance of social order rather than to economic growth and intellectual innovation. But reason and profit are potent solvents of tradition and the sacred. Modernity implies an unbounded cognitive universe in which nothing is sacred and the supply of intellectual capital is constantly increasing. Rapid if uneven economic development is driven by an army of mobile, literate specialists. Perpetual economic growth and occupational mobility, in turn, imply a closing of the ancient gap between literate high culture and oral popular culture, so that in principle all educated members of a society are capable of responding to opportunities created by advances in technology and the division of labor. The individual is "modular": commitments and affiliations are chosen rather than inherited. And whereas in pre-modern societies kinship, religion, politics, and economics are inextricably intertwined, in modern societies these spheres are more or less autonomous. In particular, the market and the state are countervailing powers, balancing and constraining each other, and thereby allowing the rich associational life of civil society to flourish.
Gellner follows Weber again (and David Hume) in locating the origins of this breakthrough in a religious matrix. The Protestant Reformation, by leveling the distinction between clerisy and laity, by dignifying labor with the concept of vocation, and by universalizing literacy, supplied some of the prerequisites of modernity. In England, in particular, a stalemate between the bureaucratic, ritual-oriented Anglican Church and the scripturalist, puritan sects played a crucial role. Frustrated in their attempt to create a virtuous polity, puritan enthusiasts channeled their 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 