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 ideological 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