McLemee on Hall on Gellner

It’s not true that Gellner has no prominence (the comparison to Foucauld, Rorty, et al. notwithstanding). Open virtually any book on nationalism and you will see his work cited. I would venture to guess that 80 to 90 percent of social scientists have heard of him even if they’ve never read a word he wrote. The journal International Political Sociology ran a piece on him a few years ago (v. 1, n.4, 2007): R. Dannreuther and J. Kennedy, “The International Relations of the ‘Transition’: Ernest Gellner’s Social Philosophy and Political Sociology.” No doubt Gellner’s work should be more widely read, but McLemee’s line about “no prominence” is an overstatement — in fact, it’s just plain wrong.

I do say, if memory serves, that the work on nationalism is very well known an even unavoidable. But the larger body of his work isn’t, which was my point.

Never read them, Lemuel? Heck, I’ve never even heard of them!

“Grey glutinous porridge – but with diamonds buried in there if you are prepared to stir your spoon around.”

This is especially true in German I think. Parsons improved the porridge in his translation, though not the diamonds.

It’s Plough, Sword, and Book. Words and Things is the most enjoyable bit of character assassination ever, and The Psychoanalytic Movement runs it a close second. Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion is great, too. And “Flux and Reflux in the Faith of Men” has one of the best quotes to be found in social-scientific writing. If Gellner has a liability, it’s that his wit is so sharp that he tends to be read for the laffs, and his ability to deride his opponents is given a freer rein than his desire to refute them. Still, not someone you’d want taking pot-shots at you.

As for Weber’s prose, the best verdict is by GEM de Ste Croix:

At times Weber can be lucid enough, even for quite long stretches; but he often lapses into an obscurity which does not always repay the repeated rereadings it invites.

I didn’t hesitate to buy the new book for $32. I look forward to reading it.

Sounds like the Timberites are more enthusiastic about the book than Macintyre was.

http://www.helsinki.fi/~tuschano/writings/strange/

It happens that I’ve just been rereading The Conditions of Liberty over the past few days, for the first time since just after it came out. And that was prompting me to wonder about Gellner’s relatively low profile. I’d forgotten how much good material there is in it– and while that’s my own fault, it’s a mistake that should have been impossible to make, because it ought to get cited constantly in the literatures I’ve been reading.

I’m getting tremendously more out of the book this time, as I bring more knowledge to the table as a reader than I did a decade and a half ago. I wonder whether Gellner’s attractive prose makes it too easy to think that he’s suitable for beginners. I remember running into this thought when I read Words and Things without at that time having read any of the material he was responding to, but Conditions of Liberty has a reputation as a kind of light and meant-to-be-popular book. I now think that that’s all wrong, and that Gellner could write so lightly in part because he presumed his readers to already know a lot. There are plenty of allusions that are funny if you get them, and never explained if you don’t.

John Hall’s office is a few floors up from mine, but this is the first I’d heard that the Gellner biography he’s been working on has been published. Thanks for the heads-up, Henry.

(Aside: I’ve actually grown fond of those long tedious parts of Politics as a Vocation. Considering the scope of the ideas being developed, they’re not *that* long. But Gellner’s just as efficient in developing and laying out a big idea, while also being great fun to read.)

i too thank novakant for the link to the uschano review. a very interesting overview of the reception and influence of gellner’s “words and things”.

i’ve not read it, but should like to try. uschano agrees, for instance, with flew’s assessment that it was “not only a “juvenile work” displaying “fundamental frivolousness and irresponsibility” (1984: 77), but also “the immediate or ultimate source of innumerable slick and ignorant put-downs in the subsequent literature”…One of the first things that strike the reader of Words and Things is Gellner’s extreme rudeness. Hardly a paragraph goes by without some invective being used. ”

can’t wait! sounds to me like gellner was a blogger avant la wordpress.

He seems to be especially deeply unfashionable among modern anthropologists

It seems to be a common occurrence that Gellner is not taken seriously be people that are actually in the fields that he is criticizing. This is generally a good reason to be suspicious about a thinker. Mistaking good writing for good thinking is one the most common mistakes that educated people make. But I am a Wittgenstein fan boy, so I am probably just biased.

I look forward to Henry’s and Cosma’s paper.

Gellner was, afu, very much ‘in’ (social) anthropology, and a leading writer in that field.

so I am probably just biased

or just plain ignorant

Google finds me Lessnoff’s “Ernest Gellner and Modernity”, first chapter here: http://www.the-rathouse.com/Lessnoff__Gellner_and_Modernity.doc

Gellner and Bourdieu both wrote about the Berbers and also had other things in common.

Gellner affiliated with Russell and Popper against Wittgenstein and to all intents and purposes was purged from philosophy for that reason.

This is one of the strangest sentences I have read in a while.

Gellner sounds interesting, but like the kind of book that could get a reader into trouble if they weren’t an anthropology graduate student who was going to spend seven years discussing the ideas in it with other scholars. I’m not sure the characterization of his writing as similar to blogging is far off (nor how well Flew comes off by that criterion fwiw). Google Scholar says he has published articles in journals like Mind as well as in New Left Review, but Wikipedia only mentions the wide-ranging books. My bookshelves are already overflowing with cranky polymaths who have mean things to say about trends in late twentieth century thought, and reading cynically gets wearisome. It sounds like I could easily go wrong swallowing Gellner’s pronouncements whole.

So it is John Emerson. And poor Wittgenstein is now on your shit list? I could have sworn that less than a year ago he was one of the heroic few, battling it out against The System.

This is one of the strangest sentences I have read in a while.

It’s more or less true, I think. Gellner hated Wittgenstein’s views, as one Austrian Ego contra another. Much of the bile in Words and Things wells up from his rejection of Wittgenstein, even if several of its targets (Austin, Ryle) wouldn’t have seen themselves as Wittgenstein’s followers.

# No it is a deeply strange sentence, because of course Gellner ‘won’ his battle with the OLPers, and post war Anglo-American philosophy is not, in fact, particularly Wittgensteinian (well not in terms of the ‘later’ Wittgenstein anyway). So the idea that Gellner got ‘frozen out’ by the ovewhelming ocult power of the Wittgensteinian establishment is a deeply strange idea.

Sorry, I know Gellner didn’t like (Gellner’s caricature of) Wittgenstein. It was the idea that he (or anyone) had been ‘to all intents and purposes… purged from philosophy’ for having ‘affiliated with Russell and Popper against Wittgenstein’ that seemed strange to me. But knowing who the author of the sentence was makes it a lot more comprehensible.

Gellner was, afu, very much ‘in’ (social) anthropology, and a leading writer in that field.

or just plain ignorant

Yes, definitly ignorant. I was just expressing my vague feelings about Getller since I was surprised to see Henry and espiecally Shalizi support. My first impressions could be wrong, but that review doesn’t impress me.

“Gellner returned repeatedly to the basic point that the development of scientific knowledge (the quintessential manifestation of “openness”) had radically enhanced the capacity for rapid economic growth and improved quality of life. No gainsaying of this was possible. Among his final writings are withering dismissals of postmodernist bad faith around the notion that some cultures have magic and others have technology.”

This sounds like cherry picking the worst of “post modern” thinkers and using them as a straw man to tarnish the rest.

Gellner’s work is standard reading in courses on the modern Islamic world, but I’m glad I read about Plough, Sword, and Book and his writings on steppe history here, I’m going to go look at those now. But, I wouldn’t say he’s exactly underappreciated. among people who study the modern Islamic world. It was a long, LONG time ago that I read Reason, Religion, and Postmodernism, but what I took away from it at the time was that he didn’t really engage with the ideas he was criticizing, and it was mainly a pat on the back intended for other people who weren’t interested in really trying to understand postmodernism.

Geertz has encouraged a whole generation of anthropologists to parade their real or invented inner qualms and paralysis… They agonize so much about their inability to know themselves and the Other, at any level of regress, that they no longer need to trouble themselves too much about the Other…

Richard Eaton made, somewhat later, an (IMO) much more convincing critique along those lines: the subaltern studies movement in South Asian history led to too much focus on sources in European languages, and a neglect of sources in South Asian languages. Even if he’s right, it’s not really a critique of the ideas themselves. There’s no reason not to learn Hindi, Tamil, Persian, Urdu, &c., and then apply Geertz’s ideas or those of the subaltern studies movement to texts in those languages. (A more useful critique would be that the subaltern studies approach is less useful for understanding power relations in situations other than European colonial empires.)

Who can seriously believe that hits on Google Scholar are a measure of intellectual value? They are a measure of how fashionable one is, which tends to be the opposite of having lasting value.

Ah, but I doubt that there’s anything new in that. No evidence of a peculiarly contemporary degeneration. Thinkers have always been evaluated on popularity. And there’s always those who insist that popularity is a superficial and ephemeral measure of value.

Q. Didn’t Soros tap Gellner for his Central European educational operations?

We are currently writing a paper that could fairly be summarized as Gellner wedded to an explicitly evolutionary theory of institutional change. With network theory! And machine learning! And cognitive science! And handwaving! Lots of handwaving.

Do you really mean “handwaving” or do you mean speculation?

What’s the difference?

I can think of two. There’s a difference in connotation, but perhaps, depending on what you’re actually saying, in content as well.

When A says of some work by B, “Oh, that’s full of handwaving,” A’s making a pretty negative statement, implying that B is trying to slip some unsubstantiated BS past the reader as through it’s the real goods. When B says of his own work, “lots of handwaving,” the connotations aren’t so negative. It’s more like, “I know, it looks like BS, but it’s really not; there’s something there, trust me, really.” And that something is generally speculation.

The thing is, if current ideas just aren’t up to the task, whatever it might be, then you need some speculation to get to a new and more productive place. There’s just no other way to get from here to there, where it is not at all clear where there is or how to get to it. So you create a hypothetical there and indicate plausible steps for getting from here to it. If you’ve done your work well — which is not at all easy — then you or someone else can proceed down that path and see what turns up. If you’ve done your work very well indeed, then it will have been worthwhile regardless of what comes up. Because you will learn something.

Fact is, any well-trained data monkey can do good sound work that comes up with results but doesn’t ever stray into new intellectual territory. To implicitly validate such work as the highest intellectual good by using “handwaving” as a terminological cloak for “necessary and responsible speculation” is to surrender the whole intellectual enterprise to the unimaginative routiners. (Of course, some of us think that happened a long time ago; but still . . . )

So that’s one difference, the important one.

The other, of course, is that you don’t, in fact, mean speculation. You really do mean handwaving in the sense of trying to pull and intellectual fast one through one devious device or another.

Economists are rigorous and look where that got us. Handwaving shall make you free.

I don’t see why Kieran Healy is so excited about that quote from Gellner on Islam. Maxime Rodinson had Islam and Capitalism probably more than a decade before Gellner had that idea.

I would like to add that Gellner’s essay “Culture, Constraint and Community” in his Anthropology and Politics is one of the most brilliant essays in pure social theory that I have read (he would not like to know that he reached similar conclusions as the Austro Marxist Max Adler as to the historicity of a priori assumptions without which society would not be possible). It’s a powerful philosophical exploration of the nature of the social. But still I think his view of the dynamics of industrial society is naive, his understanding of the reason he champions naive and undeveloped, and his Orientalism and colonial apologetics untenable. I looked it up and Michael Lessnoff had written the first intellectual biography. So one question is how his and Hall’s compare.

More seriously, I would love to see a discussion of the state of the art in the theory of the state, also how the theory the state and its institutional development/history seemed to fall by the wayside intellectually. Maybe it’s just too much econ exposure on my part, but it seems like over the last few decades general educated opinion actually started to believe that the market was prior to the state, an impressive testimony to the power of ideology since it is so obviously false.

Sorry, @ 52.

John Halasz, sometimes I get the feeling the only thing in the world you care about is if someone has Done All of the Assigned Reading.

MQ @54:
“Maybe it’s just too much econ exposure on my part, but it seems like over the last few decades general educated opinion actually started to believe that the market was prior to the state, an impressive testimony to the power of ideology since it is so obviously false.”

Yes, it’s too much ‘econ exposure’ — or rather, exposure to econ of a particular sort.

I don’t think Gellner ever took up the question of the rationality of the emotions (see Andrew Sayer The Moral Significance of Class)., but please correct me if I am wrong. I don’t remember his differentiating reason as defended from the position of an impartial spectator and reason as approached through reflective equilibrium (see Amartya Sen The Idea of Justice). The kind of science he defended is what Richard Lewontin would have called the high school version. I also remember a pretty harsh criticism of Gellner by Aziz al-Azmeh, also an author published by Verso. But that dealt not with his understanding of reason but his understanding of Muslim society.