al reflex tends to exalt a putative Gemeinschaft. According to Gellner, this response is not merely misguided nostalgia for some lost ethnic fraternity that serves as a haven in a heartless world; it is a veiled recognition of the importance, under modern conditions, of a single, standardized medium of communication. Gellners theory of nationalism is, as Perry Anderson has pointed out, a functionalist theory: it has more to say about the objective role of nationalism under modern conditions than it does about the subjective factor of identity. But the subjective factor can take on a momentum of its own, as it has in the former Yugoslavia.
No purely functionalist theory can ever fully explain the mad excesses of nationalism in the twentieth century, and Gellner was perhaps too much the cool rationalist to fathom the recrudescence of fierce ethnic tribalisms in our time. Nevertheless he was deeply pessimistic at the end of his life about the prospects for a happy outcome in the former Soviet Union, worrying not only about a Weimar scenario but also about the dreadful possibilities of nuclear blackmail and terrorism as remnants of the old Soviet arsenal find their way into the clandestine arms bazaar.
Nor was he a cheerleader for the "casino capitalism" of late twentieth-century Western societies. Given modern concentrations of wealth and power, the ubiquity of more or less legal insider trading and corporate greed, and the increasing threat of ecological catastrophe, the "market" is simply too powerful to go without regulation. The rich are rewarded not in proportion to the true (and rather modest) value of their entrepreneurial and managerial contributions, but for their luck in happening to occupy strategic positions in an infinitely complex economy. And as the super-rich enjoy and increase their privileges, an underclass of the dispossessed festers in a chronic and demoralizing poverty that market forces alone cannot possibly redress.
In a posthumously published coda to Conditions of Liberty, Gellner spelled out 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.