Gellner and the Habsburg Window on Modernity

Abstract

This chapter discusses Ernest Gellner’s conception of a polarized modernity, characterized by conflicting cultural orientations that manifest themselves across a broad spectrum of fields, from theories of knowledge to social philosophies and political ideologies. Gellner defines the opposing trends in various ways, but the alternatives of individualism vs. collectivism and atomism vs. holism seem most appropriate. He sees the late Habsburg Empire as a particularly salient case of this polarization, exemplified by politics as well as paradigmatic thinkers. The chapter takes issue with this interpretation and argues that the late Habsburg constellation was too complex to fit into Gellner’s model. This is evident in the differentiated relations between the imperial centre and the nationalities subject to its rule. The argument then moves on to Gellner’s reading of two influential thinkers, Wittgenstein and Malinowski. On closer examination, Gellner’s interpretation of Wittgenstein as a thinker who successively defended the two polar opposites of modern thought is untenable, and Wittgenstein appears as a much more nuanced and complex critic of modern culture. As for Malinowski, Gellner’s espousal of his research programme—as a synthesis of holism and empiricism—seems premature; a more adequate picture emerges when the work and legacy of Lévi-Strauss are taken into account.

The asymmetry of cognitive and technical power, the sheer fact of cognitive transcendence (however it may come to be explained), the failure of transcendence or consensus in other spheres—these are the key facts of our shared human and social condition.

—Ernest Gellner

Appendices

Comment on Johann P. Arnason’s ‘Gellner and the Habsburg Window on Modernity’

Chris Hann

Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale), Germany

hann@eth.mpg.de

The combination of a metropolis in Central Europe and an island in the North Atlantic is central to the biographies of both Ernest Gellner and Johann Arnason. The similarities would appear to end there. The former moved from Prague to Britain to be schooled in the Oxford philosophy of the day, which he soon abandoned in favour of social anthropology. The latter moved a generation later from Iceland to Prague to be schooled in continental philosophy, from which he eventually gravitated to historical sociology and civilizational analysis. The two scholars have overlapping interests in theorizing the human past. Arnason pays more attention to the empirical details of Eurasian history and, as he demonstrates in his chapter, to the texts of the scholars with whom he engages. Gellner relies more heavily on abstract schemas and structures. This penchant is epitomized in Language and solitude, the posthumous work in which Gellner, using Wittgenstein and Malinowski as his protagonists, dances with the binary oppositions that underpinned most of his oeuvre (including the theorization of nationalism). Arnason’s close reading of this book brings out both the brilliance and the shortcomings of the Gellnerian style.

One line of critique is historical and bears on the institutional realities of Austria-Hungary. Was the demise of the empire an inevitable product of imperial obsolescence, as Gellner assumes, or is it better understood as a contingent consequence of the First World War, as suggested by the recent scholarship of Pieter Judson and others? It is impossible to squeeze the case of Hungary, or even that of Bohemia, into the Gellnerian model of Ruritania made famous in Nations and Nationalism. On the other hand, the tensions of the empire of Franz Joseph can hardly be confined to this geographical space and this era. They illustrate imperial disintegration globally. (Gellner admits as much in the chapter of Language and solitude in which he criticizes the interpretation of Wittgenstein put forward by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin.)

Other criticisms pertain more to the history of ideas. The polarities identified by Gellner do not do justice to the intellectual complexities of the Habsburg Empire in its final decades. For example, as Arnason shows in an ‘excursus’, two sons of Moravia, Sigmund Freud and Edmund Husserl, offer alternative ways to transcend the postulated dichotomy between atomists and organicists, but they are almost entirely overlooked in Gellner’s simplifications. More importantly, drawing on work by and about Wittgenstein that was not available to Gellner, Arnason argues persuasively that his later philosophy cannot be reduced to a relativist defence of cultural cocoons, ‘philosophical populism’. It is more accurate to see both the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations as profound responses to the collapse of civilization (Kultur) in a Spenglerian sense.

Gellner’s focus on Malinowski as Wittgenstein’s Kontrahent was prefigured in numerous earlier studies. In his elegant bricolage, whereas the Austrian who inspired British linguistic philosophy shifted between the poles of positivism and Hegelianism, the Polish founder of the British school of social anthropology succeeded in building a productive bridge between them. As David Gellner notes in his Preface to Language and solitude, several visits to Cracow in the 1980s drew his father’s attention to fresh Polish scholarship on Malinowski’s formation in Cracow, another distinctive corner of Franz Joseph’s empire. Gellner senior was long familiar with a hypothetical intellectual history put forward by Edmund Leach which postulated a link between the radical empiricist functionalism of Malinowski and the pragmatism of William James (Leach 1957). By contrast, Polish colleagues were unearthing the intellectual debts Malinowski owed to the Viennese positivists and all the contexts, social and scholarly, in Zakopane as well as in Cracow, that shaped his thought (Ellen et al. 1988). Gellner became closely involved in this collective project, relishing the opportunity to rebut via fact-based scholarship the speculations of a British colleague sympathetic to structuralist trends in anthropology of which he disapproved.

But a rigorous alternative to the speculative superficiality of Leach would have required a thorough immersion not just into Malinowski’s biography but into the intellectual climate of the empire and its German neighbour. After all, Malinowski was greatly influenced by the semesters he spent in Leipzig and by his wider reading of German authors, notably Nietzsche. An intellectual engagement of this kind was hardly possible for Ernest Gellner. He was, after all, supervising anthropological studies located around the world, while simultaneously playing the role of peerless transdisciplinary polemicist in British intellectual life. How could he possibly keep abreast of the latest specialized scholarship on Wittgenstein, or on the Habsburg Empire, or indeed on the founding fathers of sociology? Arnason emphasizes the results of recent scholarship that Gellner could not possibly have known. But I think it can be demonstrated that he was not well read in Habsburg historiography to which he might in theory have obtained easy access. I recall stumbling upon William Johnston’s The Austrian Mind in the mid-1980s (via a colleague in Hungary) and finding it highly stimulating, but Ernest was unaware of this contribution (Johnston 1972).

To transcend the speculations of Leach, it is insufficient to construct abstract models, however brilliant, out of questionable philosophical genealogies (cf. Lukes 1998: xvii-xviii). The models must be tested against the facts, on the ground and in the texts. It is to Gellner’s credit that he acknowledges ‘Malinowski’s later mistake’ in shifting towards a theory of language that resembled that of the later Wittgenstein (Language and solitude, Chapter 30). But he does not allow this ‘regrettable’ detail to get in the way of his binaries. There is always the risk that such exuberant models lead to unwarranted speculations. It is intellectually elegant to suggest that Malinowski derived both his holistic conception of ‘culture’ and his emphasis on the ‘ethnographic present’ from the situation of his homeland in the age of partitioned Poland, and to connect these aspects of functionalism to the philosophy of Hegel. Yet there is no evidence that Malinowski embraced the mythical ‘village green’ in the elite resort of Zakopane, or that he was influenced by the nation-building ‘populists’ of that era, be they peasant politicians or ethnographers. It is not justified to link his later emphasis on fieldwork to his Polish background (see David Gellner’s chapter in this volume and the criticism put forward by Mihály Sárkány in his comment).

Despite the great differences in their approaches, I conclude by noting common ground between Arnason and Gellner. Both deploy a notion of ‘modernity’, a novel era in human history. The ‘Habsburg window on modernity’ is distinctive because in these regions of Central Europe the gulf between advanced metropolis and backward countryside was conspicuously large over many generations. This made the goal of a more comprehensive modernization as pioneered to the west and north of Europe more elusive and tantalizing. I agree with Arnason that this empire has had a long afterlife, perhaps detectable even in the post-socialist present. But this Habsburg window does not provide grounds for making the European experience the basis of an unprecedented form of civilization, a periodization with global pretensions, and novel forms of ‘cognition’. In other work, for example on China and Japan, Johann Arnason has contributed significantly to pluralist historicization of modernities, in contrast to the resolute singular offered by Ernest Gellner (Arnason 2020). He concludes his chapter with a discussion of Lévi-Strauss and Descola, endorsing the latter’s explorations of cognitive (ontological) diversity in pre-agrarian societies. As the West cedes supremacy to China in the twenty-first century, Arnason’s civilizational analysis should be congenial to all scholars seeking to transcend Eurocentrism, not least social anthropologists.

References

• Arnason, Johann. P. 2020. The labyrinth of modernity. Horizons, pathways, mutations. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

• Ellen, Roy, Ernest Gellner, Grażyna Kubica, and Janusz Mucha, eds. 1988. Malinowski between two worlds. The Polish roots of an anthropological tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.

• Gellner, Ernest. 1998. Language and solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski, and the Habsburg dilemma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Johnston, W. M. 1972. The Austrian mind: An intellectual and social history 1848–1938. Berkeley: University of California Press.

• Leach, Edmund. 1957. The epistemological background to Malinowski’s empiricism. In Man and culture. An evaluation of the work of Bronislaw Malinowski, ed. Raymond Firth, 119–37. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

• Lukes, Steven. 1998. Foreword in Ernest Gellner, Language and solitude. Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg dilemma, xiii–xix. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.