Volume 5.2 1997
This page was last updated on 03/15/99
One of the surprises of the revolutions of 1989 was the popularity of the idea of civil society among dissident intellectuals in eastern and central Europe. The idea of civil society reaches back to the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment. It posits a society in which interest rather than kinship or ethnicity generates the most important social bonds; in which liberty rather than equality or fraternity is the primary value; and in which a complex network of voluntary associations shelters the individual citizen from both the power of the state and the risks of the market. Civil society, for the great philosophic historians of the eighteenth century, offers not a promise of redemption or perfection but a hope of steady progress. No one was better situated to anatomize this concept than the late Ernest Gellner, himself something of a philosophic historian, a skeptic concerning perfectibility but a firm believer in the possibility of progress. When he died in his native city of Prague in November 1995, European liberalism lost one of its most brilliant and incisive theorists.
Gellner was unusual among intellectuals of his generation in never having undergone a Marxist phase. His early mentors were George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Karl Popper, Bertrand Russell, and Raymond Aronall of them powerful critics of Marxist versions of totalitarianism. For Marx, the notion of civil society as a plurality of institutions, thriving in the space between the market and the state, was a bourgeois fraud. Gellner, for his part, regarded this severe dismissal of the idea of civil society as Marxisms original sin. Conditions of Liberty offers a brilliant reassessment of Marxism, while bringing together virtually all of the major themes of Gellners late work: the transition to modernity as pioneered by early modern Britain; the implications of the Soviet collapse; the crucial role of nationalism in modern societies; and the surprising resilience of Islam which, in its scripturalist 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 t