3: Another Note on My Own Gellnerian Lens

Another major theme running through Gellner’s work, intimately connected to the social organisation and culture of SOR rationalism, is nationalism. Incidentally, before getting into that, I want to revisit an aside I made in my last note: the peculiar distinction in philosophy between so-called Analytic and so-called Continental traditions may be illuminated by Gellner's schemas. His model offers an unusually integrated lens through which to grasp this difference - a distinction that does seem to track something real, though its precise contours remain elusive. My very tentative suggestion is that it reflects divergent philosophical temperaments, shaped by contrasting civilisational experiences, which Gellner’s framework helps us to see. 

One tradition is largely inflected by the Scottish Enlightenment - pragmatic, empiricist, anti-dogmatic, anti-enthusiastic, and moderate in tone. The other is more clearly shaped by the French Enlightenment - dogmatically rationalist, ideological, enthusiastic, and revolutionary in its impulses.This contrast may be rooted, in part, in the differing political and cultural trajectories of Europe. On the Continent, especially in France, the absolutism of monarchy gave way to an absolutist republicanism, in which the revolutionary spirit and a thirst for metaphysical clarity shaped both political institutions and intellectual life. By contrast, in the United Kingdom, the Scottish Enlightenment reflected an already established proto-bourgeois politics and culture that avoided the need for such foundational rupture. 

Consequently, it took a more piecemeal, compromising form, wary of systematic thinking and resistant to the idea of final causes.This helps clarify the distinction between the absolutist philosophical style characteristic of thinkers such as Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, and even Wittgenstein, and the more fallibilistic, incremental, empirically grounded approaches of figures like Locke, Hume, Bentham, Mill, Russell, Dewey, and Quine. The former tend towards sweeping totalities, dramatic ruptures, and metaphysical architecture. The latter remain sceptical of grand systems, favour piecemeal progress, and treat knowledge as always provisional and corrigible. Gellner’s sociology of knowledge allows us to see these differences not merely as stylistic or cognitive preferences, but as expressions of different historical experiences with modernist power, political transformation, and institutional organisation. Rather than eternal debates between fixed intellectual camps, the analytic-continental split becomes a reflection of how societies internalised and developed Enlightenment rationality. As with everything else, philosophical traditions do not float above history; they are cultural artefacts, and perhaps even more abstract and historically inflected than sociology or anthropology.

Given how much contemporary philosophy of education is written in the continental style, I often find myself struggling with it, not because it is wrong, but because it feels estranged from my own cultural background. It frequently overlooks the extent to which philosophical commitments are shaped by national histories and institutional legacies. The assumptions of the analytic tradition, fallibilism, empirical grounding, suspicion of total systems, are not just philosophical preferences; they are, in Gellnerian terms, deeply rooted in a particular sociopolitical formation. And that background still informs the way I think.This seems an especially important reflection today, as philosophy of education, particularly at the Institute of Education here in London, is increasingly studied by a very cosmopolitan mix of students from the Far East, India, the Middle East, Africa, and across Europe. These students bring with them not just different educational systems but entire civilisational experiences, legal traditions, state forms, and orientations to authority and modernity. Gellner’s perspective can help us make sense of how these traditions converge or clash in the classroom, and why the questions and answers that seem obvious to one cultural background may seem odd, evasive, or irrelevant to another. A more self-aware engagement with the sociological underpinnings of philosophy, especially as they shape educational thought, seems crucial if we are to take seriously the genuinely global nature of contemporary philosophical discourse.

Anyhow, that's just a speculation. What I want to do for the rest of the time is sketch what I take to be Gellner's theory of Nationalism because, as I said above, it is deeply entwined with his theory of rationalism which I wrote about in my previous note. 

So, as I see it, Gellner’s mature articulation of his model of Nationalism sharpens the distinction between two universal features of human life while insisting that their historical interplay gives rise to the non-universal phenomenon of nationalism. “Society,” he writes, “is made up of culture and organisation.” Culture, in this view, is not genetically inscribed behaviour but a set of “patterns of conduct generated by emulation.” While certain cognitive or linguistic capacities may be rooted in biological preconditions, like Chomsky’s idea that language acquisition presumes a universal grammar, the actual transmission and content of culture are unconstrained by biology. Culture, in this model, can change rapidly and even deliberately. 

Gellner illustrates this with an example of a tribal group that, formerly prestigious as a Tibeto-Buddhist trading community, shifts its allegiance and identity, adopting a Hindu-Nepalese state language and religion. The transformation is not biologically driven but socially chosen, enacted through emulation and alignment with perceived prestige or power. Organisation, by contrast, refers to the structured apparatus of rights, duties, obligations, and privileges. It is the institutional scaffolding that governs interaction and legitimacy. Culture and organisation are always present in any society, but nations, crucially, are not. 

Nationalists tend to forget this. For them, a shared culture is not merely one bond among others, it is the bond. Extreme nationalists go further: they turn cultural homogeneity into an absolute principle, one that cannot tolerate internal difference. They are perpetually thwarted when pluralism persists, and their fallback explanation is the idea of “awakening.” According to this view, nations are eternal, sleeping entities that occasionally forget themselves, only to reawaken to their “true” identity. Gellner calls this dangerous and false. The tendency to assume that all people everywhere “want to live exclusively with their own kind” is neither empirical nor explanatory, it is ideological. As an alternative to this perspective that sees nationalism as a necessary feature of social organisation Kedourie, in his Nationalism book of 1960, suggests that it is merely a contingent doctrine, “a by-product of the scribblings of a set of thinkers in one particular historic situation,” and that it was “invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century.” 

Gellner, however, offers a more dialectical position: nationalism is neither necessary nor contingent. It is the necessary consequence of a particular configuration of modernity - our configuration - but the preconditions that produced it are not themselves universal. That’s why nationalism now appears to have swept across the globe without it being innate. “Since the end of the eighteenth century,” he observes, “nations have taken a grip increasingly everywhere.” 

To make this argument, Gellner constructs a tripartite schema of human history: Foraging, Agrarian, and Scientific/Industrial societies. In the foraging era, by far the longest era of human societal organisation, nationalism is simply absent. (However, foraging remnants that persist into modernity often become nationalist precisely in reaction to external encroachment: they raise national consciousness in a defensive mode.) The agrarian era (Gellner calls this 'agraria'), by contrast, sees massive expansion in population and social complexity, accompanied by the growth of both coercive power (Stendhal's “Red” values) and ideological or clerical authority (Stendhal's “Black”values). 

States centralise power, though not universally, and with that centralisation comes stratification. Cultural differentiation and hierarchy develop in tandem. But nationalism still doesn’t emerge as a dominant principle, even if proto-nationalist sentiments can be found. Why not? Because ideas remain “frozen in agraria.” These are Malthusian societies: productive capacity is capped, even as populations grow. As Gellner puts it, “men starve according to rank.” The logic of survival, both individual and collective, is shaped not by production but by hierarchy. “Government is control of the store,” and the strategy of life is jockeying for rank within a rigid pyramid. In such a world, production is less valuable than coercion. Honour becomes the key moral ideal: “a touchy sensitivity about one’s own status, blended with a cult of aggressiveness and skill in coercion and intimidation.” These are the Red values of power. But the Black values of ritual, doctrine, and transcendental mediation are equally important: they stabilise the coercive order with cosmological legitimacy, offering salvation and structure in return for obedience. One survives not by invention or productivity but by knowing “who to gang up with.” This is the role of the great world religions, all of which were functionally required by the agrarian set up.

The Enlightenment, in Gellner’s framework, is not merely an intellectual movement but a rupture: a rejection of this world of frozen rank, stifled innovation, and cultural stasis. Seen through this model, nationalism is the product of a particular modern mutation: the transition from agrarian to industrial society (Gellner calls this industria), where the demands of production finally outpace those of coercion. Now, standardisation of education, language, and culture becomes necessary to feed the machine of industrial productivity. The cultural homogeneity demanded by nationalism isn’t an eternal truth but an artefact of mass literacy, credentialism, and the bureaucratic state. Philosophy, like nationalism, then, is also a product of these conditions. The divergence between Anglo-American and continental philosophical styles is not about clarity versus obscurity, empiricism versus metaphysics but is a symptom of deeper historical and institutional splits. And perhaps, as Gellner’s own trajectory suggests, philosophy itself might best be rethought not just as arguments, but as anthropology. 

A big puzzle thinkers in the nineteenth century asked was how we exited the cycle of coercive society that defined agraria? According to Gellner, we didn’t, at least, not through any clean break or revolutionary leap. “No exit!” he proclaims, underscoring the idea that modernity didn’t abolish the structures of coercion and hierarchy but transposed them into new configurations. To grasp nationalism’s rise, one must first understand how culture and organisation were related in agrarian societies: not as separate spheres but as a tightly bound hierarchy in which culture served organisation. Culture in agraria did not unify populations in the way nationalism would later require. Instead, it marked and magnified status distinctions. “Each strata defended its way of life jealously,” Gellner writes. Mobility between strata was severely restricted. The lowest classes - primarily producers - were physically and socially segregated into separate villages, often locked into identities shaped by their rank. If social mobility did occur, it was hidden, distorted, or culturally neutralised. 

What mattered was the preservation of the hierarchy and its symbolic supports. Culture, far from being a unifying force, was a system of differentiation. It reinforced organisational stratification and was tailored to suit rank. Gellner is explicit: “Culture is there to reinforce, underwrite, and render visible and authoritative the hierarchical status system of that order.” In this system, individuals were known not as abstract members of a nation or culture but by their rank within a fixed order. Culture served to mark these boundaries, through clothing, speech, ritual, diet, and genealogy. And these boundaries weren’t merely decorative; they were essential to the system’s functioning. Cultural nuance indicated social place. Hence, unlike nationalism, which thrives on lateral sameness and mutual substitutability of citizens, agrarian culture pointed upward and downward, toward inequality and immobility. 

Indeed, violence in such societies tended to be internal to cultures, not between them. Aristocrats fought other aristocrats; feuds occurred between clans or factions sharing the same broader cultural matrix. Where inter-strata conflict did happen - such as in some commercialised city-states - it was atypical, not a general model. Most of the time, culture did not map onto territory in any nationalist sense. Instead, culture expressed vertical differentiation. Its boundaries were often obscure or even invisible. For example, Morocco’s Berber tribes maintained genealogies linking them to Middle Eastern Arab or Biblical lineages, claims that bore no relation to the languages they spoke or their historical migrations. These genealogies are not literal but ideological: they signal cultural legitimacy, not territorial or linguistic coherence. In contrast, in southern Tunisia, a more visible cultural-linguistic divide exists between Berber and Arab dialects, and the distinction is entangled with older conflicts where Berber identity is tied to a memory of religious heresy, making it a marker of deviance rather than of equal membership. 

This ambiguity about the visibility and salience of culture is important. In classical Greek society, for instance, culture was highly visible and revered, but even there, it was not yet nationalism. Similarly, Israel, with its concept of a universal deity paired with a culturally exclusive clientele, offers an early case where nationalism-like sentiments such as identity bound to a singular cultural-religious form begin to emerge. This was one of the origins of the idea that a shared culture might constitute a legitimate political unit. But these were exceptions. Gellner points to the Hussite movement in 15th-century Bohemia as another precursor: a proto-Reformation linked by later nationalists to Czech nationalism. Yet even here, the neat nationalist story falters. The line separating Hussites from loyal Catholics cut across linguistic boundaries, muddying the idea of cultural unity. In other words, even where nationalism’s seeds appear to be planted, they do not follow the expected contours of shared language or ethnicity. 

Other exceptions include the bureaucratic centralisation found in the Chinese imperial state or the two halves of the Roman Empire where we have administrative coherence without nationalist ideology. Similarly, the Enlightened Despots of the eighteenth century may have laid the infrastructural groundwork for nationalism but it seems they did so without subscribing to nationalist principles. Protestantism, too, is sometimes seen as a proto-nationalist movement. Its emphasis on vernacular language and personal salvation may foster identification with a particular culture. But even here, the identification is legitimised not by shared culture per se, but by faith and the pursuit of salvation. What Gellner insists on is that in agrarian society as such, “cultural similarity is not a political bond, and political bonds do not require cultural similarity.” This is the crucial difference. 

In modernity, nationalism insists that shared culture must form the basis of political legitimacy, that the anonymous, mobile citizen is only truly legitimate when embedded in a culturally homogeneous nation. Agraria functioned under a different logic. Culture divided vertically. Organisation enforced it. And politics did not require cultural unity, only rank, ritual, and control of the store. So when nationalism arises, it is not the flowering of some eternal human desire for belonging. Nor is it merely a false consciousness conjured by poets and philosophers. It is the historically specific outcome of a shift in how culture and organisation must now relate. 

Nationalism demands horizontal similarity, substitutable citizens, and mass literacy. It displaces the old function of culture from differentiation to standardisation. And in doing so, it repurposes the coercive apparatus of agraria not to enforce rank, but to produce homogeneity. Mind you, the ghost of hierarchy never leaves; it simply adapts to new forms. There is, as Gellner reminds us, no clean exit. 

Modernity changes everything. It does not merely reform old systems, it reconstitutes the foundations upon which legitimacy, identity, and power rest. The defining feature of this transformation is the emergence of economic and scientific growth as dominant imperatives. Unlike agraria, which was locked into the Malthusian trap where production barely kept pace with population growth, industrial society escapes it. Growth is no longer cyclical and ceiling-bound but exponential and self-reinforcing. Population growth is now sustainable as a social consequence of industrialisation, reversing the ancient pattern of a cyclical rise and fall. The new legitimacy of the industrial order is anchored in this economic growth, and alongside it, nationalism becomes its political complement. 

Economic growth becomes not only an empirical reality but a principle of legitimation. It is what gives the system moral force and momentum. Social mobility becomes pervasive. As Tocqueville noted of early democracy, equality no longer arises from ideology but from mobility itself. The crucial point is that we are not mobile because we are egalitarians, we are egalitarian because we are mobile. This reversal is central. The conditions of industrial life - urbanisation, formal education, mass employment, mass communication - create a fluidity that dissolves rigid status hierarchies. Castes and estates, which were stable in agraria, are no longer viable. The expectation of improvement, the belief that one can rise, acts as a bribe. Even if mobility is uneven or mythologised, the promise is psychologically and politically effective. 

Industria's mobility requires equality and it also cannot function without a degree of meritocracy. The specificity of innovation and technical competence demands talent rather than heredity. Status, such as it exists, operates “only during office hours.” It is not sacred, and it does not carry over into ritual life. It is contingent, performative, and always subject to change. Where agrarian difference was absolute - a priest is not a peasant, and never will be - industrial difference is relative. “Difference is on a continuum,” and “a deep chasm is a scandal.” Thus modern society is scandalised by visible and immutable inequality, agrarian society was not. This scandalisation is evidence of the normative power of the new order. Nationalism, in this framework, is not about mythical blood ties or sacred lands. It is the political form of an emerging cultural homogeneity. 

The new mass culture is not shaped by myth, ritual, or clan, but by shared literacy, shared code, and shared access to economic and political institutions. Participation is anonymous and mobile. One belongs “directly, without mediation.” Associations are ephemeral and voluntary, and “have no legal powers over members.” You don’t need a birthright, a sacrament, or a lineage to join them. As Gellner quips: “You don’t have to slaughter a pig to join the Labour Party.” This striking line captures the radical desacralisation of membership. Culture is now carried not in the body or the blood, but in the code - codified, script-linked, and educationally transmitted. It operates in a standardised, abstract medium: Mandarin, English, French and so on, languages stripped of local nuance and elevated into carriers of national unity. 

Work itself changes. It becomes semantics based, not on a ritualised or inherited role, but on decontextualised, codified tasks. Meaning is no longer derived from context or inherited status but from formalised procedures. “Context-free messaging” is hard, but it is the necessary foundation for industrial coordination - hence the need for mass schooling. It necessitates a near-universal literacy and the displacement of folk or “low” cultures. High culture, once the preserve of a clerisy, is democratised. It becomes national. And this, precisely, is what nationalism seizes upon. It is the homogenised high culture of industrial society that becomes the bond of political legitimacy, the mark of full citizenship, and the condition for social and economic participation. Gellner summarises the transformation in a single, crystalline contrast: “...an agrarian social order in which differences and nuances of culture underwrite a complex system of statuses, but do not indicate the limits of political units, and another one, in which a mobile anonymous mass of participants share the same ‘high culture’, relatively free of internal nuances, but linked to political boundaries of the unit with which it is identified...”. 

This is the core of his theory of nationalism which is understood not as an expression of ancient loyalties or primal ethnic ties, but as the necessary ideological form of a modern, industrial society requiring interchangeable citizens, formal equality, and symbolic coherence. But this transformation was not instantaneous. Industrialisation did not produce a single global culture. Rather, it generated a multiplicity of national cultures, each shaped by the local preconditions of its own transition into modernity. So while industrialism encourages cultural convergence, it does not lead to pure uniformity. There remains room for the expression of difference but within limits set by the needs of coordination and communication. 

Liberals and Marxists, despite their ideological differences, have often believed in the eventual erosion of nationalism. The logic goes like this: ethnic hostility depends on cultural difference; industrialism erodes cultural difference; therefore, industrialism will erode nationalism itself. The “withering away” of nationalism is, in this view, a natural corollary of economic rationality. But for Gellner, the very conditions that produce cultural homogeneity also make it politically charged. Nationalism does not merely wither in the face of similarity, it thrives on enforcing, policing, and institutionalising that similarity. Industrialism gives rise to a world in which difference is scandalous and thus its suppression becomes a moral and political imperative. The promise of equality creates the anxiety of deviation. Culture, once vertical and plural, is now horizontal and singular. And the new order must constantly reproduce its legitimacy through this anxious unity. 

Liberals believe that industrial society, with its need for standardised culture and anonymous, mobile individuals, can be harmoniously sustained through individualism and the market. The idea is that the “Hidden Hand” will coordinate interests, smooth tensions, and generate prosperity through spontaneous order. Each individual, pursuing their own ends, will unknowingly contribute to the common good. Marxists see this vision as ideological, an illusion that obscures real, material conflicts. The market, for them, doesn’t reconcile interests; it mystifies domination. Beneath the appearance of equality lies exploitation. Internationalism, on the Marxist view, can only emerge once the proletariat is immiserated to the point that it reclaims its true nature, its Gattungs-Wesen (species-being), an Aristotelian idea redeployed by Marx to indicate the essential nature of humanity distorted by capitalism. 

But Gellner dismisses both as false. Neither liberal nor Marxist models explain the real forces that have kept large-scale wars at bay since 1945. It is not the triumph of international trade nor the solidarity of the workers of the world, but rather Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that has preserved peace. Nuclear deterrence - basically coercive force -  not economic interdependence or class consciousness, explains the absence of major war. The Marxist vision of a rising, international working-class nationalism is especially hollow. The global proletariat never became the universal political subject Marx anticipated. Nor did the market's hidden hand control nations. Nationalism is neither an ideological smokescreen for class identity nor the inevitable outcome of an economic superstructure but arises from cultural and territorial forces. This directly undermines the “single melting pot” thesis. 

Industrialisation did not spread evenly. Its effects, benefits, and timing were staggered across the globe. Early industrialisers solidified their dominance, while latecomers faced dependency, marginalisation, or outright exploitation. In this uneven world, cultural and political fragmentation became not a tragedy but a strategy. For the late industrialisers, hiving off into their own sovereign units made rational sense. Independence allowed them to modernise under a protective umbrella, shielded from lethal global competition. The dialect that was once a sign of provincial backwardness is now spoken with pride. A local language becomes a badge of identity, a justification for sovereignty, and a medium of national renewal. 

This benefits the intellectual class most of all. In a newly defined meritocratic cultural zone, intellectuals monopolise key social, academic, and administrative positions. They no longer have to compete with established elites from the dominant culture of the old polity. Nationalism, then, is not only a response to economic modernisation but also a vehicle for elite formation. Local intellectuals seize the opportunity to control their own linguistic and cultural infrastructure. Culture is not just a badge of authenticity, it becomes an instrument of access, influence, and power. German nationalism offers a clear example. It did not begin as imperial chauvinism but as a kind of Herderian protectionism, a romantic valorisation of rustic cultures and folk traditions. It aligned with Friedrich List’s advocacy for protective tariffs and the nurturing of nascent industries. German nationalism fused cultural and economic self-defence. It was the attempt to foster industrialisation and empower a rising bourgeoisie without being overwhelmed by stronger, earlier modernisers like Britain and France. It was nationalism as a developmental shield. 

Nationalism also appeals to vulnerable minorities in urban, literate, commercial populations, those especially well-equipped for modernity, but also particularly exposed to exclusion or ethnic violence. For such groups, nationalism becomes a necessity. It is in their interest to secure a territorial political unit of their own. The Jews, long marginalised in European states yet often well integrated into the commercial and intellectual spheres, exemplify this logic. A national homeland becomes not just a dream but a strategy of self-preservation, an answer to both vulnerability and opportunity. Thus, nationalism is not a mere relic of the past or a sentimental atavism. It is a rational response to the structural conditions of industrial modernity, especially its uneven spread, its demands for cultural standardisation, and its opening of elite pathways via education and language. It is as much about securing advantage as it is about expressing identity. The melting pot never existed; instead, we have a patchwork of cultural-political zones, each seeking to match the boundaries of culture with the boundaries of the state. The dream of a single, global, homogeneous culture dissolves in the reality of asymmetrical development and competitive modernisation. 

The transition from agrarian society to industrial modernity occurred unevenly across Europe, and Central Europe exemplifies the staggered stages of this shift. The first phase, following the Congress of Vienna in 1815, reveals a political world completely devoid of nationalism. Territories like Sicily and Sardinia, Lombardy and Belgium, Norway and Finland, were exchanged as though they were chess pieces, with no regard for language, ethnicity, or cultural bonds. What mattered to statesmen was not national sentiment, but administrative competence and continuity of rule. As Kedourie wrote in 1960, “The only criterion capable for public defence is whether the new rulers are less corrupt and grasping, or more just and merciful, or whether there is no change at all, but the corruption, the greed, the tyranny merely find victims other than those of the departed rulers.” Political legitimacy still belonged to dynasties, not peoples. 

The second stage, irredentism and the first stirrings of nationalism, was already evident in the early nineteenth century. The Greek uprising in Romania marked the beginning of nationalist revolts, though significantly, Greece had not yet industrialised. Its strength came not from modern production but from its intermediary social class of Greek Christians acting as brokers between the Muslim Ottoman overlords and the Balkan peasantry. The entire region posed a problem for classical nationalist theory, since it lacked the economic base thought necessary to sustain nationalism. But these movements were not merely local uprisings; they were culturally charged rebellions by Christians against Muslim imperial rulers. The nationalism emerging here was not yet industrial, but it was certainly ideological. The turbulence between local chiefs and distant imperial centres was increasingly framed as a conflict between kinds of men, kinds of life, and ultimately kinds of culture. Nationalism was approaching. 

Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic affect both converged on this transformation ironically as Christian heresies. This explains why the Romanovs modernised more effectively than the Ottomans. They created a class of messianic intellectuals capable of imagining and implementing change but this same intelligentsia ultimately destroyed the imperial system in 1917. Nationalism in these cases didn’t always succeed in creating strong political outcomes, but as a cultural force it was irresistible. Literature and art carried its ideals even when politics failed. By 1914, nationalism was the dominant ideology across Europe and it had become unavoidable. 

The third phase, the Versailles moment, was formal and disastrous. Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to institutionalise nationalism by creating states based on ethno-linguistic lines after 1918 was structurally weak. Most of these states collapsed at the first sign of geopolitical pressure. Only Finland managed to resist both Adolf and Joseph. Who succeeded and who failed depended less on the principle of national self-determination than on military luck and geographic fortune. Wilsonian nationalism was resurrected in the 1990s to deal with the collapse of Yugoslavia, and again it failed. The assumption that drawing clean lines between peoples would guarantee peace proved deeply flawed. 

The fourth stage was the most brutal: ethnic cleansing. At the core of nationalism is the principle that political and cultural units must be congruent. This requires a shared culture: one people, one state. But how is such congruence achieved? There are two paths. The first is slow, organic, and historical, a thousand years of gradual amalgamation during which people forget their mixed origins. As Gellner jokes, “The average Frenchman knows he drinks wine, has a decoration and knows no geography.” National feeling becomes habitual, embedded in daily practice and unexamined. But the second path is more violent and far more common in the twentieth century: ethnic cleansing. In the 1940s especially, congruence was forged not by memory but by murder- mass killings, forced migrations, and intimidation that induced flight. National homogeneity was achieved through terror. 

The fifth and final stage - attenuation of national feeling - is both a reality and a mirage. On one hand, cultural convergence has advanced significantly, particularly among youth through shared consumer tastes, music, and media. Phonetic diversity may persist, but semantic diversity shrinks. However, the deeper emotional and symbolic pull of nationalism remains. Culturally distant migrants still experience and provoke intense nationalistic feelings. Affluence and stability can bribe populations into tolerance. But when those bribes are withdrawn, as when when growth stalls or states weaken, violence often follows. 

This is what happened in the Habsburg, Bolshevik, and Yugoslav systems. These empires held together diverse peoples through bureaucratic incentives, subsidies, and coercion; when those mechanisms failed, so did the peace. Most ethnic conflicts are about territory. Ukraine is a recent example. But in the post-1945 world, what determines power is usually not land but economic growth. Japan, Germany, China, and the USA became dominant not by acquiring new territory, but by developing high-growth economies. This structural shift should, in theory, reduce nationalism’s virulence. After all, industrial societies are built around the semantic nature of work and require a codified, literate high culture that is both standardized and educationally transmitted. This dependency on a shared code creates pressures toward homogenisation and dampens old, tribal loyalties. 

Yet since 2008, those stabilising forces of economic growth, affluence, institutional confidence have eroded. The old bribes no longer play as well. Nationalism, once attenuated, begins to creep back. Its virulence grows in the cracks left by stalled modernisation and uneven globalisation. The world of Gellner’s high modernity, once imagined as converging toward shared rational norms and a universal culture, is again fragmenting into competitive identities, rooted in grievances as much as in aspirations. Nationalism, far from withering, is mutating. 

As already noted, the relationship between state and culture, central to nationalism, did not unfold uniformly across the globe. It developed in distinct historical time zones, each shaped by a different set of preconditions and trajectories. The way a people comes to marry their political unit with their cultural identity, what Gellner calls giving a high culture a “political roof”, depends on whether that culture already existed, whether the state already existed, and how violently the two had to be forced into congruence. Gellner sketches how in space this mapped out in Europe. It would be interesting to see how this spatial zoning extends across the rest of the globe.

Zone One encompassed the western Atlantic edge of Europe - France, England, Spain, Portugal - where longstanding dynastic states already corresponded, more or less, with linguistic communities. These polities had centuries of institutional continuity, and when nationalism arrived, it required relatively little upheaval. The state was already there; so was the high culture. Nationalism merely married them formally. As one observer put it, “To understand the political map of Western Europe, it is still more important to know about the dynastic conflicts of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to know something of Louis XIV’s campaigns, than to be familiar with the ethnographic map of Europe.” The people more or less knew what nation they belonged to before nationalism told them. Nationalism in these regions confirmed rather than constructed identity. 

Zone Two, roughly corresponding to the Holy Roman Empire and its cultural offshoots, had rich high cultures but no coherent political units. Germany had Luther, Italy had Dante, and music and philosophy flowered in dozens of small courts and cities. Yet the political roof was missing. When the modern state arose, it did so in the form of Prussia and Piedmont, states built not out of primordial ethnos but around the project of unifying cultural-linguistic zones already semi-consciously national. The violence needed for these unifications was not radically more than the wars of dynastic competition that had preceded them. They were not especially ethnically motivated. Italy and Germany were forged by bureaucrats, generals, and poets not ethnic cleansers. The horror of Nazism was not structurally inevitable; it was, tragically, optional. 

Zone Three begins east of Trieste and marks a profound shift. Here, neither state nor high culture existed in a ready-made form. There was no Dante or Luther around  to unify , and no long-standing state structures capable of mapping cultural zones onto political boundaries. The nation had to be invented entirely, imagined from fragments, and the state created to fit it, or vice versa. Poland was an exception. Even under Lithuanian rule, it maintained a coherent high culture, and Lithuania was itself absorbed into the Polish cultural project. But most of the region lacked this coherence. The Balkans, parts of Ukraine, and the Carpathians were a chaotic mesh of tongues, faiths, and loyalties. The state could not rise neutrally above these. To create a nation-state in these zones required violent simplification. Here, as Plamenatz put it, the horror of ethnic cleansing was not optional. (It's difficult to know whether the optional or non-optional version is the more tragic.)

Zone Four emerged from the Soviet experience, a region where the state was total and the culture flattened under the weight of a secular religion. Sovietism suppressed nationalism by replacing it with a universalist ideology. The USSR carried out brutal and massive population transfers, but these did not create clean ethnographic maps. The only exceptions were Poland and the Czech lands, where postwar expulsions simplified the ethnic geography. 

Elsewhere, the end of the Cold War presented a stark choice: proliferation of small, weak, minority-haunted states; a return to the horrors of ethnic cleansing; or an attenuation of national feeling. In Yugoslavia, the choice was made in blood. The multiethnic state collapsed into civil war and ethnic expulsion. In other places the picture was more ambiguous. In Ukraine, nationalism did not disappear but evolved amid a hybrid political and cultural environment, and its trajectory remains uncertain. The ghost of Zone Three haunts the borderlands between East and West. The critical question remains: when does nationalism turn murderous? It does so when high culture is not merely institutionalised but is violently installed where no coherent cultural-political union previously existed. 

So where nationalism must create both the roof and the house, it tends to do so with fire. But where a high culture already exists, transmitted by schools, codified in law, standardised in language, it can often be politically housed with less coercion. Nationalism, in this sense, is the political recognition of an already operational cultural system. In the Soviet Union, that recognition was thwarted by a totalising ideology. Marxism served as a secular religion, capable of overriding national identities at least temporarily. But as the faith in this universalist religion declined, nationalism crept back into the void. (Something similar appears to be occurring in China. For decades, the Communist Party operated like a secularised church, subordinating ethnic and cultural pluralism to a common economic and political project. But as this secular religion begins to lose its hold, nationalism slowly ascends to take its place, less a firebrand than in Europe’s Zone Three, and more persistent and more systematic. Marxism begins to resemble a supercharged version of Anglicanism: official, mild in tone, but embedded into the organs of the state as older, traditional, agraria- inflected cultural systems are grafted on, such as Confucianism.) 

Since 2008, the economic bribes that kept nationalism in check have weakened. Affluence, growth, stability, these once served as tranquilisers. But they are no longer guaranteed. Where they are withdrawn, identity rushes back to fill the void. And nationalism, that old modern god, continues to mutate, sometimes seductive, sometimes virulent, never gone. Nationalism becomes murderous when it undergoes a specific series of mutations - economic, cultural, and ideological - that cause it to abandon its earlier romantic modesty or liberal civic hope and transform into an instrument of purification, dominance, and vengeance. 

The process is not inevitable. It occurs when particular conditions align: the failure of affluence, the intensification of distress amid modernisation, the salience of cultural traditions centered on honour and martial masculinity, and the ideological transition from universalism to blood-based romanticism, culminating in a lethal fusion of culture and biology. The first condition is material and structural. Nationalism becomes violent when the failure of economic modernisation intensifies ethnic consciousness rather than dissolving it. Industrialisation brings promise but also vast dislocation such as urban migration, occupational collapse, the shattering of peasant life, and the emergence of uneven development between communities. If those economic cleavages correspond with ethnic or cultural boundaries, the risk multiplies. The frustration of modern life is not distributed randomly; it adheres to lines of identity. In such conditions, classes become hyper-visible through the prism of ethnicity. “Classes without ethnicity are blind; ethnicity without class is empty.” 

Where the sense of social grievance is racialised or nationalised, the blame for one's dispossession is no longer an abstract such as capital, system or fate, but concretely and violently assigned to the Other. But material stress alone is not sufficient. The cultural substrate matters. Nationalism turns virulent more readily in societies where the dominant cultural code prizes honour, vengeance, and self-enforced legality. These are cultures where morality is enacted not through semantic persuasion, contractual negotiation, or formal bureaucracy, but through swift, visible action, where dignity is won through courage, not legality. In such societies such as parts of the Balkans, much of India and Pakistan, Afghanistan, public esteem depends on a performance of strength, often underwritten by martial or tribal codes. Violence in these contexts is not a breakdown but a form of ethical speech. Nationalism in such settings easily adopts the idioms of revenge, purity, and honour, bypassing the liberal lexicon of rights and procedures. When economic frustration enters this cultural landscape, the stage is set for militancy. 

The deepest roots, however, lie in the ideological metamorphosis of morality itself. The first moral stage - agrarian morality - is a morality of station and duty. In such a system, justice means performing one’s given role, defined by one’s place in a sacred or hierarchical order. It does not matter whether that hierarchy maps onto a nation, ethnicity, or class; what matters is fidelity to position. This morality is essentially anti-universal: your obligations arise from who you are, not from any shared human essence. Plato’s guardians, merchants, and workers exemplify this where fulfillment comes through role performance, not freedom. If you look at China today this seems to actually describe the society. Social anthropologist and historian Alan Macfarlane makes the startling claim that actually China never modernised but is an Agrian civilisation that has grafted on the required technological/scientific  expertise whilst maintaining its agrarian civilisational form. In this sense, China is not modern. (Macfarlane adds to this mind minding thesis: Japan isn't modern either for the same reasons, although of course Japan's agrarian society is, unlike China's, a tribal set-up.)

Elsewhere, the Enlightenment brought a second morality, one which was individualistic, universal, and egalitarian. Here, duties flow not from one's role or group, but from a shared humanity. Whether articulated through Hume’s sympathy or Kant’s reason, this vision of morality was explicitly culture-blind. It dissolved the link between ethnicity and worthiness, challenged inherited privilege, and laid the groundwork for liberal citizenship. It was also deeply corrosive to ethnic and communal forms of solidarity. Universalist morality undermines the emotional and institutional foundations of tribalism, aristocracy, empire and, crucially, of the sacred community. But universalism did not have the final word. It was followed and eventually overpowered by Romanticism. 

Born in the revolutionary and Napoleonic era, Romanticism began as a literary and aesthetic movement but evolved into a moral and political worldview. It rejected Enlightenment detachment in favour of passion, belonging, and difference. Where Kant sought abstract universality, Herder celebrated the specificity of cultures, languages, and historical communities. Humanity, he said, is not one, but many with each nation a kind of organic whole with its own inner logic and dignity. This Romantic nationalism was not initially violent. It opposed the sterile universalism of both Manchester capitalism and Versailles aristocracy with a kind of humble, poetic pluralism. But the Romantic cult of difference did not remain benign. As Darwinian ideas of competition were grafted onto Herderian respect for cultural distinction, a new doctrine emerged, one that treated cultures as quasi-biological organisms, locked in a struggle for survival. 

The humility of early Romanticism gave way to a more Homeric celebration of strength, vitality, and conquest. What mattered was not merely being different, but being the strongest, the most virile, the most “authentic.” Culture became racialised; race became the medium through which excellence was measured. The bloodless universalism of the Enlightenment, in this view, was not just misguided but dangerous. It was “the low cunning of the weak,” a secular continuation of Christian meekness, “the old whining religion of the feeble.” It was an illness - pathogenic and pathological. This fusion of Romantic culturalism with Enlightenment naturalism reached its apex just as capitalism and industrialism placed maximal stress on traditional societies. It triggered a backlash, not just against cosmopolitan elites or abstract liberalism, but against the very idea of shared humanity. 

Nationalism thus ceased to be about mutual recognition and became a struggle for survival. The community was no longer just culturally unique, it was biologically sovereign, psychically entitled, morally elevated. The state became not a protector of rights, but a purifier of blood. The land was no longer a jurisdiction, it was a womb. At this point, nationalism became not just assertive or militant, but lethal. It was not a misfire or excess of an otherwise reasonable process, it was a transformation of its very ontology. It no longer aimed to give culture a political roof; it aimed to cleanse the house. It no longer simply opposed empires or classes; it sought to eliminate all rivals to its myth of organic unity. The Other became not just an obstacle, but a disease. 

In this form, nationalism justifies mass expulsion, forced assimilation, and genocide. It does not mourn the loss of diversity, it demands it. This is not an accidental feature of modernity; it is one of its possible outcomes. When economic failure meets martial honour, and Enlightenment morality is supplanted by Romantic biology, nationalism ceases to be a claim to self-determination and becomes a weapon of annihilation. Nationalism's emotional energy and moral resonance are not grounded in reason, but in the fantasy of roots. Where Enlightenment morality sought legitimacy in rationality or shared humanity, the nationalist ethic turns instead to origin myths, genealogies, the soil, and the hearth. In this schema, to be rooted is to be real, to be pure, authentic and trustworthy. Rootlessness becomes not merely unfortunate but pathological. The déraciné, the cosmopolitan, the migrant intellectual who can mimic any accent and owes allegiance to none, becomes the figure of ultimate suspicion. Their very mobility, once celebrated as freedom, becomes evidence of fraudulence. They are seen not as liberated but as unmoored, opportunistic, and inauthentic, disguised manipulators peddling an unnatural moral universalism. The cosmopolitan is not just stateless but, in the nationalist imagination, soulless. 

This suspicion extends even to their supposed loyalties. These figures, it is believed, may convert their religion, adapt their politics, change their dress but what reveals them is the residue of their grandparents, their true and ancient origins. The moral stain is intergenerational. Blood remembers. The cosmopolitan’s adaptability becomes not a sign of openness but of deceit. Underneath the polished performance lies an unchanging essence, concealed but never erased. The Enlightenment dream of individual reinvention is recast as a nightmare of hidden duplicity. What emerges is a paradoxical social structure: the modern nation, which is in fact a Gesellschaft - a mobile, anonymous, bureaucratic society - masquerades as a Gemeinschaft, a close-knit, organic community. It adopts the emotional idiom of the traditional village while operating through the mechanisms of centralised statehood, impersonal institutions, and mass literacy. It educates its members to imagine themselves as descendants of peasants and warriors, even as they live in suburbs and work in offices. 

The illusion is potent because it allows the benefits of mobility and centralisation to coexist with the emotional security of belonging. But that illusion has limits, and the tool that sets those limits is the language of roots. Roots define who can fully belong, and who is merely visiting. The ideology of nationalism depends on the ability to draw this boundary. It doesn’t demand complete stasis - modern nations are too mobile and complex for that - but it demands the appearance of rootedness, a plausible myth of ancestral continuity. This myth is sustained not through real historical memory but through its substitution by biology and vitalism. History, which allowed for complexity, compromise, and hybridity, is supplanted by the mytho-poetic language of blood, race, and soil. Biology becomes destiny; culture becomes heritable; and vitality is imagined to flow from connection to land, manual labour, and the hardiness of peasant stock. 

This is deeply ironic, because the very disappearance of the peasantry and the erosion of outdoor labour, the modern conditions that necessitated nationalism , are now glossed over by nationalist aesthetics. The society that produced nationalism is one where physical toil has receded from everyday experience, where industrial and bureaucratic modes have replaced organic, embodied life. Yet nationalism gestures backwards, romanticising the very things it helped to destroy. In doing so, it sacralises a loss and turns it into a weapon. The rhetoric of vigour, health, and labour covers over the reality of sedentary, literate, desk-bound modernity. It blames the cosmopolitan for what the nation itself has become. Thus nationalism cloaks modern anonymity in ancient intimacy. It permits a society of strangers to imagine itself as a family. 

But not everyone can be included in that fantasy. The price of belonging is proof of origin, of ancestral rootedness. Mobility, instead of being a shared modern condition, becomes a moral dividing line. Those who can trace their lineage to the national myth are affirmed; those who can’t are cast as outsiders, pretenders, or worse. And because the myth requires exclusion to function, it always needs someone to play the part of the déraciné. The universalist becomes a traitor, the foreigner a threat, the hybrid a danger to the purity of the communal soul. In this way, the nationalist project resolves the contradiction between modern mobility and traditional belonging by inventing a past that justifies selective inclusion. It uses the language of community to manage a society that is anything but communal. It preserves the emotional comfort of Gemeinschaft while operationalising the efficiency of Gesellschaft. And when tensions rise be they economic, political, or cultural the metaphor of roots hardens into the logic of blood. 

What began as an aesthetic of belonging becomes an ethic of expulsion. The cosmopolitan, once tolerated, becomes the scapegoat. The society of strangers demands a myth of kinship, and that myth is built on the exclusion of those who do not and cannot pretend to be kin. The modern individual within the nationalist framework becomes primarily concerned with aligning their personal identity, specifically their internalised, literate, codified “high culture”, with the bureaucratic structures that surround them. This isn’t merely a passive alignment but an existential project. In an industrialized and bureaucratised world, where social legitimacy flows through standardised institutions, schools, state offices, and legal codes, the individual must internalise the cultural language of power. If you want to understand Gaza, Putin's Russia or Modi's India this strikes me as a very fruitful (and depressing) lens.

This is the deeper function of nationalism: to create a congruence between subjective cultural identity and impersonal systems of administration. It is no accident that the clerk, once a marginal figure, becomes emblematic of the new social order. In a world of forms, files, and rules, it is the clerical, bureaucratic ethos that provides the model for modern citizenship. The Protestant Reformation prefigures this logic. It transformed religion from a set of communal rituals and inherited practices into an individual interior discipline, where faith, doctrine, and scripture, not priests or sacraments, became the basis of legitimacy. Every man became his own priest. This shift did not only break ecclesiastical hierarchies; it elevated the vernacular, translating the sacred into the language of everyday people. The Bible in German, English, or Swedish was more than an act of linguistic accessibility, it made the local tongue capable of expressing absolute truth. 

In doing so, it created a model for what nationalism would later do: elevate the vernacular into a high culture, but this time in the service of the nation rather than God. Nationalism thus inherits the structure of Protestant religiosity, but channels its energy differently. Where Protestantism made the vernacular sacred through faith, nationalism makes it sacred through loyalty to the state. Both movements bypass the intermediary - priests in one case, aristocrats or imperial administrators in the other - and demand direct, unmediated allegiance. Both are deeply textual, requiring internalization of codified doctrines, be it the catechism or the constitution. Yet, though structurally similar, they are not identical. One speaks in the idiom of salvation, the other in the language of citizenship. The result is a secularisation not in the sense of the disappearance of religion from life, but in the transference of its forms and fervour into the political realm. 

This is why, despite secularisation, nationalism retains deeply religious forms. In France, avowedly secular nationalism has long been shadowed by Catholic chauvinism. In Poland and Russia, religion and nationalism fuse explicitly, Polish Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy becoming national identifiers rather than just systems of belief. In the Balkans, religion is the symbolic code by which Croats, Serbs, and Bosniaks mark their mutual difference. But are these still religions, or have they become merely symbols of communal belonging? When Orthodoxy becomes Serbdom, and Catholicism Croathood, faith is eclipsed by identity. What was once the path to God becomes the path to nationhood. 

Islam offers a counter-model, not because it is more spiritual or pure, but because it did not require this fateful separation between vernacular, faith, and nation. By the 20th century, Islamic high culture had already served both religious and national functions. The caliphate, sharia, and the Arabic language formed a historically unified symbolic system. The separation of Church and State, so central to European nationalism and secularism, never mapped easily onto Islamic societies. This wasn’t a failure of modernisation, it was a different genealogy. The Islam most people lived was embedded in local, often rural, communities mediated by saints, shrines, and oral traditions. These were communal religious lifeworlds in the Durkheimian sense: the sacred was not an abstract metaphysical doctrine but the symbolic glue of social cohesion. Saint cults represented social continuity, ritualised memory, and divine presence localised in space and practice. Alongside this existed the Islam of the scholars: literate, scripturalist, rationalizing. It was more akin to Protestantism and focused on textual fidelity, personal piety, and puritanical discipline. 

The relationship between these two Islams, folk and scholarly, was complex. Sometimes collaborative (many scholars emerged from saintly lineages), sometimes adversarial (as with the 18th-century Wahhabi purges of saint-worship in central Arabia),  the 20th-century Islamic reform movements emerged not only from within this tension, but in response to global humiliation. Why had Muslims fallen behind the West? This became the obsessive question. Reform bifurcated: Westernising modernisers sought to integrate liberalism, nationalism, or Marxism; others turned inward, towards a purified, scriptural Islam stripped of syncretic traditions. Nationalism and Islam coexisted for a time in a tense synchrony, especially in places like Egypt or Pakistan. The Arabic language, already sanctified by the Qur’an, became a vehicle for both Islamic solidarity and Arab nationalism. But was it Islam holding the Arabs together, or Arabness giving Islam political flesh? In Pakistan, the inverse question applied: was the Islamic state a new national form, or was the nation simply a vessel for Islam? 

Ultimately, nationalism required the replacement of diverse, embedded communities with standardised, mobile, anonymous societies. It did not simply represent people; it produced them. This was especially visible in the Islamic world. The eclecticism of regional Islam with its saints, shrines, and local dialects was increasingly displaced by codified, scriptural, urban Islam. This wasn’t just about religious purity. It was a functional adaptation to the modern state: mass literacy, standardised education and centralised bureaucracies. Islamic high culture adapted more easily than folk traditions. It could produce citizens as well as believers. But this meant that the true high culture in many Muslim-majority societies was not nationalism per se, but a modernised, textual Islam capable of aligning itself with bureaucratic rationality and mass society. The reformist ulama did not need to invent myths of blood and soil. They already had divine revelation, universalist ethics, and standardized law. Their nationalism didn’t need to be Herderian because it was rooted in theology, not peasantry. There was no need to sacralise the vernacular when the Qur’an had already done so. Where European nationalism forged myths to fill the void left by secularisation, Islamic modernity fused revelation and statehood without ever fully relinquishing its claim to divine truth. 

All this made Islamic nationalism structurally distinct. Its root was not the volk or the soil, but the sacred text. And when the people failed to live up to that text, when folk practices deviated too far from doctrine, they were seen not as the soul of the nation but as its fall from grace. Populism in Islam could never achieve full moral legitimacy. The true Islam was always already elsewhere: in the scholars, in the cities, in the scriptural core. The reformers looked not to the people for legitimacy, but to revelation. Unlike Russian Slavophilism, which sacralised the peasant soul, Islamic reformers saw the people as fallen, impure, in need of correction. The nationalist myth could coexist with Islamic universalism, but never fully overwrite it. 

Islam and Marxism: two systems often set in opposition, yet both function as total worldviews, as alternative modernities with strong internal moral architectures. One is a revealed faith resisting secularism, the other a secular faith that once demanded and briefly achieved total commitment. Yet their trajectories diverged sharply. Islam persisted, adapted, revived. Marxism collapsed, rapidly and almost embarrassingly. This was not the collapse of a government but of a belief system, an entire metaphysical order dissolving seemingly overnight. It had once been assumed that Marxism would follow the typical path of modern ideologies: it would lose its revolutionary fervour but retain its sanctity, a cold orthodoxy replacing the heat of insurrection. But this did not happen. Marxism did not become a stable religion of bureaucratic ritual. Instead, once desacralised, it hollowed out. Its priesthood became absurd; its doctrines no longer inspired even lip service. The Brezhnev era - grey, tired, corrupt - marked the death not of the revolution but of the belief in its necessity. Stalin's terror, paradoxically, did not destroy Marxist faith, it tested and preserved it. But Brezhnev's mundanity did. When the sacred collapsed into the routine, belief followed. The system could survive bloodletting but not boredom. China's survival rests upon its ability to graft itself onto an already existing Agrarian centralised civilisation wherein the Emperor was replaced by the Party. As the secular religion faded China was able to maintain its older civilisational form. Its subsequent miraculous economic success has restored the bribes required to maintain itself despite the hollowing out of its official ideology.

Islam's durability lies partly in its refusal to sacralise the world. It dominates and regulates social life, yes, but it does not deify it. The sacred remains distinct from the profane. This makes Islam remarkably resilient, and “astonishingly modern,” as Gellner notes. It avoids the fatal flaw of Marxism: the temptation to collapse transcendence into history. Marxism demanded that heaven be built on earth. When it turned out to be unbuildable, its followers were left not with disappointment but disillusionment. Islam, by contrast, is severe in its monotheism, stripping away magic, rejecting intermediaries, disallowing the sanctification of charismatic figures. Its anti-idolatry is not just theological but social: all believers stand in symmetrical relation to the divine. This absence of mediation, of priestly castes, of mystical hierarchies, places it surprisingly close to the rational egalitarian spirit of modernity. It embarrasses Hegel, who had envisioned Christianity as the highest religion, culminating in the Spirit's realisation of itself. But Islam, coming after Christianity, more logically consistent, more stripped-down, feels, in Gellner’s view, like a purer form of moral modernism. 

It is also a challenge to Weber. If the spirit of capitalism was born in the anxious discipline of Protestant sects, why didn’t Islamic monotheism produce its own industrial bourgeoisie? The scriptural clarity is there, the absence of ritualism, the emphasis on law, order, individual responsibility. Perhaps, Gellner suggests, it’s because Islam lacks the deep, neurotic anxiety of Calvinism. There is no doctrine of predestination to torment the soul, no desperate need to demonstrate grace through worldly success. Without that angst, the compulsive work ethic does not emerge. Still, Islam remains more functionally modern than many of its critics allow. Unlike Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism, which had to be secularised in order to serve modernity, Islam remained whole. It absorbed the functions of nationalism without abandoning its universalism. The Umma, though not an ethnic group, serves many of the same cohesive functions as the nation. It offers a shared identity, a common language of morality and law, and a translocal solidarity. God may speak Arabic, but His audience is not Arab. Islam manages to be both supranational and socially integrative. 

Marxism never had this balancing act. It rejected nationalism outright, seeing it as a bourgeois delusion, an obstacle to proletarian unity. Where Islam absorbed the nation by performing its functions of myth, identity, law, Marxism tried to destroy it entirely. For a time, it succeeded. But once the revolutionary telos vanished, nothing remained to fill the void. Marxism’s legitimacy was tied to a redemptive future that never arrived. When that future was indefinitely postponed, the present became unbearable. Unlike Islam, which retains its power by not demanding utopia now, Marxism tethered its moral legitimacy to historical deliverance and fell when history failed to deliver. What remains is this strange reversal: the faith once expected to wither under the advance of reason endures; the rationalist ideology that sought to replace it has withered. Islam, by avoiding the deification of the mundane, preserved its sacred core. Marxism, by sacralising the profane - industry, production, planning, history - ended up desecrating itself. Its heaven was earth, and when that earth turned to dust, nothing was left but ideology without belief. Islam still commands belief often because, paradoxically, it refuses to promise too much of this world. 

Is sense of ethnicity - identification with a nation - something ancient and ever-present, or fundamentally modern? The question hinges on continuity: cultures do persist, but they also change, evolve, and sometimes fade. Evidence can be marshaled on both sides, yet neither explanation decisively outweighs the other. Given the near universality of national pride and feeling, the cause likely cannot be found solely within the internal dynamics of each culture or nationalism; rather, the explanation must be external, tied to broader social, political, and economic conditions. Today, nationalism is neither the only force shaping identity nor always the dominant one. It competes with other affiliations and ideologies, and its grip varies historically and regionally. 

Still, some tentative conclusions emerge from comparative observation: cultural homogeneity alone is unlikely to determine political boundaries in pre-industrial agrarian societies, where political control is often more fluid, patchy, and based on patrimonial or feudal relations. However, in industrial societies, where literacy and education become pervasive, cultural homogeneity strongly influences political boundaries and national identities. The transition from agraria to industria can be understood partly as a shift from a high culture that is the preserve of elites, literate, codified, privileged, to a widespread culture permeating the entire society, transmitted through education, media, and bureaucracy. This shift creates conditions for national identity to become more rooted and politically significant. 

Nations differ in their relationship to historical continuity, or what Gellner calls their "navels", their origins, their sense of rootedness. Some have genuine, ancient navels; some have navels invented or constructed by nationalist propaganda; and others are navel-less altogether. Take the Czechs as a case somewhere in the middle. Their relationship with the Prague polity was partially rooted in medieval Bohemia, the lands of Wenceslas, a political unity connected to a Czech language and culture with a literary tradition. Yet after the 17th century, Bohemia’s political independence was lost, and Czech lost prestige, becoming the language of peasants while German dominated high culture and administration. The Industrial Revolution revived Czech-speaking populations and restored the language’s cultural status. Unlike Estonians, who are navel-less in this sense, Czechs could reach back to a medieval historical core, a “navel” of national identity. The University of Prague, founded in the 14th century, Hussite rebellions against papal and imperial authority, and the modern philosopher-king Tomas Masaryk all gave Czech nationalism a historical pedigree and a moral vision. 

Masaryk conceived of history as a progression from authoritarian and clerical dogma to liberal democracy, enlisting Hussite egalitarianism as a proto-democratic tradition. He rejected Palacky’s romantic “Austro-Slavism,” which sought Slavic unity to resist German and Russian dominance. Instead, Masaryk forged a national narrative that was both moralistic and rational, setting the stage for the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918 and the creation of a nation with a genuine, if constructed, navel. Yet, this was not uncontested. Charter 77 dissidents like Jan Patocka viewed this narrative skeptically, seeing Masaryk’s navel as an invention rather than genuine continuity. For Patocka, the real roots lay in the 18th-century reactions of Catholic peasants against the rationalising Enlightenment bureaucracy, as these peasants moved into urban centers. They selectively appropriated Hussite egalitarianism but fundamentally rejected the notion that Czech culture was the avant-garde of liberal modernity. Their lineage contradicted the dominant myth of Czech nationalism as inherently progressive and democratic. 

After World War II and the Communist period, that modernist myth was largely shattered. Economic consumerism, not ideological commitment to liberal progress or anti-authoritarian struggle, drove the revival of modernity. When the post-Communist Czech Republic aligned itself politically with laissez-faire economics and Catholic conservatism, Patocka’s more “navel-less” or peasant-rooted nationalism was arguably closer to the reality of Czech identity than Masaryk’s idealized moralist vision. 

At the other end of the spectrum lie the Estonians, who are “navel-free.” Until the 19th century, Estonia lacked a strong political or national identity. The rise of Estonian nationalism was not rooted in an ancient state or cultural unity but constructed through cultural institutions like the ethnographic museum in Tartu, which astonishingly collected one artifact per ten inhabitants, and national theatres and schools. Estonian culture survived Soviet domination despite having no deep historic polity or “navel” to claim. Its national identity brazenly requires no ancient origin myth. Meanwhile, Belarus contests its “navel” with Lithuania, as questions linger over whether the Duchy of Lithuania’s ruling language, a Slavic dialect ancestral to Belarusian, makes that polity truly Lithuanian or Belarusian. Such ambiguity highlights how fluid and constructed many national boundaries and identities remain, particularly in regions shaped by shifting empires and multicultural polities. 

At the other extreme, nations like England and France possess what feels like genuine, deep navels, long-standing political unities tied to language, culture, and institutions that have persisted over centuries with relatively less rupture. The question of whether nations have navels is thus not only about historicity but about how modernity reconfigures the meanings and uses of history, culture, and identity. Nationalism invents, revives, forgets, and reshapes roots depending on political needs and social contexts. Some roots are ancient, some are newly planted, and some are consciously fabricated, but all serve the function of binding people into political communities. 

Nationalist conflict presents no easy solutions. There is no magic bullet capable of neutralising the tensions that arise when cultural identity, political boundaries, and economic inequalities become entangled. Gellner is clear: in societies where nationalism is deeply embedded, those unable or unwilling to acquire the high culture necessary for participation in the dominant national discourse are effectively condemned to second-class status. In such cases, marginalisation is not accidental; it is structural. This is not the result of some universal territorial instinct or primordial kinship drive erupting into political form. The discontents of nationalism are specific and should not be confused with other classic modern discontents such as Weber’s “iron cage” of rationality, Durkheimian anomie, or broader post-Enlightenment alienation. The unease nationalism generates is not existential in the abstract but practical and political: it emerges wherever cultural pluralism intersects with enduring inequality. Political stability has real value, and in this respect, Gellner concedes, conservatism is not entirely wrong. Stability is not to be discarded lightly in the name of some abstract ideal. Sudden and radical transformation of a state structure, especially where multiple cultures coexist unequally, tends to end in catastrophe. The violent aftermaths of the Habsburg Empire’s collapse, the Soviet Union’s disintegration, and the fragmentation of Yugoslavia stand as cautionary examples. Change is often necessary, but it should be gradual, negotiated, and attentive to historical and social complexity. 

There is, in most cases, no straightforward or “just” resolution to ethnic conflict. The principle of national self-determination, often cited as a right, is in practice almost impossible to implement fairly. How do we decide what determines a nation’s right to self-rule - demographics, historical claims, geography, military strength? The criteria are incompatible and constantly contested. Security concerns complicate the matter further. If a nation has been invaded or subjugated in the past, it may feel existentially threatened by the idea of ceding land or sovereignty even if that land is now populated by others. Kosovo is emblematic: can Serbia “hand over” the site of its greatest historical trauma merely because its current demographic majority is Albanian? To the Serbs, that’s not just territory; it’s sacred loss. But to Albanians, it's home. Ukraine is another urgent contemporary example.  No formula, no demographic threshold, no historical timeline, no cartographic logic, can reconcile these. Thus, justice alone cannot be the metric for resolving nationalist disputes. Stability and continuity must be considered, not out of a belief that the real is inherently rational, but because the real contains embedded structures that, while imperfect, may have practical merits. 

Affluence also plays a stabilising role. In general, societies with greater material security are less prone to descend into nationalist violence. Material well-being doesn’t extinguish identity, but it does mitigate desperation. Looking forward, advanced industrialisation and globalisation may create a kind of “cantonisation” of the political world. Global threats such as climate collapse, nuclear proliferation, pandemics, artificial intelligence, bioweaponry and so on do not respect national borders. Their management will demand supranational authority. Simultaneously, the infrastructure of the modern state is often “lumpy” where resources and administrative attention are distributed unevenly. This unevenness invites regionalisation: local groups demand more control over how national resources are deployed. As a result, we may see the return of a split reminiscent of agrarian empires: super-ethnic coordination at the top (for global threats and strategic planning), and sub-ethnic autonomy at the bottom (for welfare, education, and cultural reproduction). In this future, love of land may give way to love of GDP. National pride may attach less to exclusive control over a territorial homeland and more to economic performance, innovation, or cultural vitality. Folk cultures might be celebrated as heritage without becoming the basis for claims of sovereign exclusivity. 

The key challenge is how to allow cultures to flourish without insisting they must rule or dominate their own patch of soil. In places where cultural pluralism is a fact on the ground and that is increasingly the case globally there are only two options: either we defetishise territoriality, abandoning the idea that sovereignty must be coextensive with ethnicity, or we slide toward ethnic cleansing. The choice is stark. There is no middle ground. Either identity becomes disarticulated from sovereign geography, or bodies will be made to move, suffer, and disappear in the name of impossible purity. Defetishising territory delinking cultural pride from land claims is not a utopian dream. It is the only viable response in a world where cultures mix, borders blur, and the stakes of exclusion keep rising. 

In all this it's worth unpacking Gellner's understanding of functionalism, which he defends with characteristic sharpness and subtlety. Functionalism, for Gellner, is not as defunct as many contemporary sociologists and anthropologists argue. It continues to offer useful insights into social organisation and change. Gellner’s assessment of functionalism rests on a measured view of social explanation. He resists the tendency to treat functionalism as a purely structural or static account, and instead defends it as a dynamic tool. Contrary to claims that it merely explains what is by reference to its utility or role in a system, he insists that functionalism can still serve in understanding how societies operate and evolve. For him, there is no grave “problem” with functionalism, its value lies in its clarity and the kinds of questions it helps formulate. 

He distinguishes this from what he calls “evolutionism,” which he sees as often conflating explanatory modes. He finds it peculiar and somewhat mistaken when scholars treat evolutionism as an answer to a “what” question. In his view, evolutionism more properly addresses “how” something came to be: it traces the line of development, the genealogy of a structure or institution. It answers the question “Why is a society the way it is?” by tracing its trajectory. That is, it explains the present by recounting its lineage, anchoring it to its historical origin. In doing so, evolutionist thinking often borrows from a genealogical mode of explanation where to explain something is to tell the story of its emergence. This form of explanation has deep appeal because it seems to offer both causality and intelligibility. It mirrors Darwinian logic: the mechanism of natural selection is paired with a hypothetical narrative of how things came to be, which serves as a substitute for the older theistic explanation i.e., that societies (or species) were simply created and placed in a fixed order. The power of the Darwinian paradigm, in Gellner’s account, lies in this synthesis: the replacement of a theological stability thesis with a historical development thesis. However, this synthesis also introduces a confusion. The how and the what, the cause and the structure, are blended too easily. This makes it seem as though merely tracing a path to the present is sufficient explanation for why things are as they are. But this, for Gellner, is a critical mistake. 

He notes that stability is often taken as self-explanatory, as if once a society is said to have emerged, it requires no further justification. This, he says, is a dreadful mistake. It echoes the assumption that if something was put in place at the beginning - whether by God, nature, or historical necessity - it need not be explained in terms of ongoing conditions. That is, continuity is treated as a given, when it should in fact be interrogated. Thus, Gellner’s functionalism is careful. It neither falls into the static determinism that functionalism is often accused of, nor into the romantic genealogical storytelling of evolutionism. He uses functionalism to ask real and grounded questions about how societies reproduce themselves, how institutions persist, and how cultures interact with the material and political infrastructure of the modern world. For him, the goal is not to tell a neat story of development, but to understand the specific configurations of culture, power, and history that bind modern societies together. 

Now, the great achievement of functionalism, as Gellner sees it, was its capacity to deliver a kind of intellectual shock therapy, a conceptual jolt meant to unsettle the assumption that social stability requires no explanation. Its true power lay in its insistence that even when a society appears stable, its continued existence is not self-explanatory. Stability is a problem, not a given. Even if there had been a sociological equivalent of the Book of Genesis, a mythic origin story in which the Creator placed a number of fully formed societies at the beginning of time and they simply remained in place, it would still not absolve the sociologist from the task of explanation. Continuity itself demands analysis. The persistence of forms is not obvious; it is precisely what needs to be made intelligible. Admittedly, functionalism achieved this critical reframing through a somewhat misleading path. It introduced this shock by pairing its challenge to naïve assumptions with a false and contradictory theory, namely, the claim that societies are stable. 

Early functionalists, especially the first generation, often claimed in nearly the same breath both that we don’t know what the past was like (due to lack of records) and that the societies in question were stable. This contradiction was hidden by ambiguity in language: the word “stable” implies that things now were the same N years ago, yet it makes no reference to any actual dates. The claim seemed modest or methodological - if we don’t know the past, let’s assume continuity - but in doing so, it became just as speculative as any historical hypothesis. Saying that a society “evolved” is just as conjectural as saying it “persisted,” yet the latter seemed, on the surface, to carry less interpretive risk. In this way, functionalism advanced a contradictory doctrine: on the one hand, it forbade speculative history; on the other, it relied on the speculative assumption of past stability. But for Gellner, this was not its fatal flaw, it was more like a necessary disguise. The real contribution of functionalism was not the stability thesis itself, but the methodological standard it set. 

What mattered was that it made the mere fact of stability something that needed to be accounted for. It raised the threshold for what counts as explanation in the social sciences. Functionalism institutionalised the idea that the basic unit of explanation is the contribution that any given practice, institution, or norm makes to the overall stability of the social system. The very act of framing explanation in these terms - what function X performs in maintaining system Y - was transformative. It embedded the problem of persistence into the structure of sociological reasoning. Even if it did so by sneaking in a quasi-mythological hypothesis about continuity, it forced future sociologists to reckon with the idea that society is not self-sustaining by default. Every norm, every rule, every ritual, had to earn its place by explaining its functional contribution to the reproduction of the whole. 

That, for Gellner, is the enduring intellectual legacy of functionalism. So it’s not, as some critics would have it, that functionalism simply asserted as a major premise that “society is stable.” On the contrary, its real maneuver was more subtle and methodological: instead of openly declaring stability as a premise, it embedded the expectation of stability within the criteria for what counted as a successful explanation. A good piece of sociological work, under this model, was one that showed how, say, inheritance procedures or succession rituals contributed to the reproduction and continuity of a social structure. The demonstration of this functional contribution was the marker of explanatory adequacy. Stability wasn’t posited, it was the silent demand driving the explanatory method. 

The common charge leveled against functionalism, that it is circular or tautological, Gellner finds unconvincing. If one reads the analysis “backwards,” the structure becomes straightforwardly causal. One shows how an institution contributes to the overall equilibrium, and how other institutions or internal features help to maintain it in place. There’s no mystery here, nor any formal logical fallacy, just a reorientation of how cause and function are connected in systems thinking. The deeper contribution of functionalism, then, wasn’t in the questionable stability assumption it smuggled in, but in the way it fundamentally altered what counted as a sociological puzzle. It raised the bar for what needed to be explained. 

Evolutionist theories, by contrast, tended to take stability for granted. They focused on change, assuming that the present required explanation through the past, but they didn’t pause to question why social systems endure at all, why some customs or institutions reproduce themselves seemingly without alteration. Functionalism, by wrongly universalising stability, rightly forced sociologists to treat persistence as a phenomenon requiring explanation, not as a default. And once that standard has been raised, once stability becomes a problem, not a given,there’s no reason that it cannot be applied equally to unstable or dynamic contexts. You can dispense entirely with the misleading, quasi-theological assumption that stability is the natural state. Some societies are stable, some are not, some are stable in different ways or degrees. The illusion of permanence can be abandoned. What should remain is the methodological advance: the idea that institutions, behaviours, and norms must earn their explanation by showing their function in the reproduction (or disruption) of the broader system. 

This, for Gellner, is the core achievement of functionalism. Not a theory to be blindly followed, but a shift in what we demand from explanation. A cleanup is needed: strip away the superficial errors, the misleading implications, the smuggled-in metaphysics. Retain the elevated standard. From there, the question becomes: where does one go next? The cost of this methodological advance, this new explanatory standard, was a narrowing of focus. Functionalism, in its most effective form, became deeply micro-sociological. It looked closely at one society at a time, burrowing into specific rituals, kinship structures, and symbolic systems. But in doing so, it risked reinforcing the very illusion it had hoped to dissect: the idea that each society is a self-contained, stable whole. Gellner’s provocation is that the time has come to move beyond this narrowness. The raised explanatory bar must now be extended outward and across, across time, across space, across societies. That means re-engaging with the grand questions of evolution, diffusion, and transformation, not with the naivety of earlier sociological theories, but with the new discipline, the refined standards of analysis that functionalism helped establish. We need a dynamic, comparative sociology that refuses to romanticise stability, that recognises variation and change, that builds its insights through a richer, more demanding inquiry into why things persist and how they shift. 

This is the unfinished task. The functionalist breakthrough was real but its promise is only fulfilled if it now expands its lens, shedding the stability dogma and turning its heightened sense of explanation toward the complex, shifting patterns of history and culture that it once bracketed off. The future lies not in repeating functionalist mantras, but in advancing its methodological spirit into a broader and more dynamic terrain. The evolutionist approach, in its classical form, operated on what Gellner calls the "Ledger principle": the idea that once an institution or innovation is entered into the historical account, once it appears, it need not be explained further. Its mere appearance becomes sufficient justification for its continued existence. Once it is "in the book," its persistence poses no further puzzle. 

This principle, stated so baldly, is of course absurd. The problem is not simply when and where something first appears, but why and how it manages to endure, to spread, to take root, or, often more importantly, why it fails to. The correct move, then, is not to abandon the idea of cumulative development, but to render the “Ledger” itself more sophisticated. Not all institutions are alike in their capacity for endurance. Some are sticky: once invented, they more easily persist. Others are fragile, requiring very specific preconditions to maintain themselves. And even the most durable-seeming institutions are contingent on supporting structures. What’s needed is a theory of the Ledger that distinguishes among types of entries, a theory that asks not only who made the mark and when, but what sort of paper it was written on, with what ink, under what conditions, and whether the page was likely to be turned or torn out. 

Take, for example, the problem of state formation. The Marxist approach treats the emergence of the state as a necessary development once certain material contradictions arise: the moment of origin is decisive, and what follows is treated as if on autopilot. Once centralised power is instituted, it simply continues. But Gellner notes that others are far less puzzled by the fact of concentrated power, they take it as almost self-evident. For him, the challenge is neither to naturalide nor to absolutise such formations, but to understand the precise conditions under which they are formed, maintained, transformed, or undone. Different Ledgers, so to speak, respond to different inks, some to blood, some to bureaucracy, some to ritual. The task is to integrate the Ledger principle with a structural-functionalist sensitivity to mechanism and context: to ask what kind of material absorbs what kind of inscription and why. Some features of human societies arise organically and reproduce themselves almost automatically; others must be invented, and even once invented, require great care, favorable conditions, and institutional scaffolding to remain in place. Writing, cities, states, markets, none of these can simply be “entered” into history like a line item and left alone. Each depends on a whole ecology of practices, habits, cognitive frames, and political conditions. 

The diffusionist error parallels that of the evolutionists. The diffusionist fantasy imagines that once something is visible, once one tribe or society innovates, the rest will naturally emulate. It assumes that the mere sight of a successful technique is sufficient for it to spread. One chimp uses a stick, another sees it, and the behavior propagates. But again, this view is far too crude. Some things diffuse widely, others do not; some cultures are receptive to certain practices, others resist them. Diffusion depends on compatibility, infrastructure, need, symbolic fit, and a host of other factors. Structural-functionalism, for all its faults, rightly turned attention to these internal micro-mechanisms, the gears and levers that enable or inhibit persistence and transmission. And so we return, after the detour through stability, function, and the raised explanatory bar, to the big questions: How do institutions accumulate? What governs their persistence? What underlies major transitions, such as state formation or the rise of literacy? These questions are not answered by ledger-entry logic or by naïve diffusionism. They require a hybrid method, one that combines the evolutionary time-sense of older theories with the fine-grained mechanisms of structure and function. In this, the real task begins. 

The sermon, then, is not a eulogy for functionalism, nor a nostalgic call to resurrect evolutionism, but a demand for synthesis: a demand to keep the gains of explanatory discipline that functionalism bequeathed, while reopening the historical and comparative horizon that evolutionism once tried, however crudely, to chart. The problems of persistence, transformation, and cumulative change remain with us. The tools, refined by critique, must now be set to them with fresh precision. 

There’s a certain quiet disappointment running through Gellner’s remarks when it comes to Marxism, not in its historical importance, nor in its grand ambition to explain human social development, but in the persistent intellectual loyalty it seems to command from people he otherwise respects and admires. He speaks of “talented and able and sincere people,” who remain preoccupied with Marx’s specific theses. That commitment, he reflects, always seems to him “regrettable.” Not because Marxism is trivial, but because it often leads into a kind of theology. A sacred text is being defended, reinterpreted, and perpetually amended rather than discarded when it fails to illuminate. There’s a fork in the road, as Gellner sees it. Either one extracts clear, testable propositions from Marx’s claims, in which case, one is straightforwardly a Marxist, with all the empirical and theoretical baggage that entails, or one refines the propositions so heavily, qualifying and stretching them to incorporate counterevidence or non-Marxist insights, that the result becomes vacuous. The language remains - “modes of production,” “base and superstructure,” “forces of production” - but the analytical power fades. If one insists that production is always primary, then one is simply reproducing the core of the doctrine; but if one concedes that the forces of coercion, communication, or even ritual are equally important, then what remains of the Marxist framework is more label than substance. 

Gellner's  tone is not polemical but weary when he reflects on why Marxism continue to exert such a grip. Why this theological tenacity, the endless effort to save, to rephrase, to preserve the system from refutation? It becomes, in his words, an “endless theological attempt to save it.” His tone carries unmistakable exasperation, a kind of reluctant estrangement from fellow travelers. This mild but persistent dissatisfaction carries over into his critique of situational logic. Gellner worries that this approach veers into a kind of conceptual complacency. It assumes that human actors possess clearly articulated aims and unproblematic perceptions of their circumstances, from which their actions can be logically deduced. But this, for Gellner, ignores the deep problem of conceptual formation itself: how do people even arrive at their aims? How do they construe their situation at all? Both the Marxist and the situational-logical approaches share a common flaw: they overstate the transparency of social life. 

Marxists, in his view, risk ignoring the force of conceptual questions, treating aims and categories as given rather than constructed. The situational logic model, meanwhile, projects a particular kind of rational, goal-oriented actor that belongs more to modern Western individualism than to the broad range of human societies. It assumes that people always act with reference to explicit goals and accurate assessments of constraint, whereas Gellner insists that this picture is deeply ethnocentric. There’s no animosity in his tone, but there is unmistakable distance. Gellner is not waging war against Marxism or situational logic, but he does refuse their comfort. He wants something harder, more disenchanted, more attuned to the paradoxes and discontinuities of conceptual life. He is not content with systems that pretend to know too much in advance. He recommends  philosophical fidelity to awkwardness, to contingency and to the untidy mechanics of how ideas and institutions emerge, persist, and occasionally unravel. 

Hence Gellner’s criticism of Marxism is a layered interrogation of both its sociological assumptions and its political consequences. He begins by observing that contemporary, conscientious Marxists face a fundamental dilemma. They can either revise the doctrine, keeping the Marxist “bottle” while pouring into it a more permissive, liberal “wine”, thus retaining the form but abandoning the substance, or they can cling to a more traditional, orthodox version that remains intellectually coherent and distinctive, but is, in Gellner’s view, fundamentally mistaken. He finds the second path more compelling, not because it is correct, but because the lines of disagreement become clear. It retains a distinctive conceptual structure that allows one to argue meaningfully about its claims. One knows what is being said and why one disagrees. 

At the heart of Gellner’s critique lies the Marxist assumption that there exists an identifiable economic substructure that fundamentally determines the rest of the social formation. He does not dispute the obvious truth that all societies must reproduce the material conditions of life. that people must be fed, clothed, and housed, and the means to achieve this must be sustained. What he challenges is the leap from this truism to the Marxist claim that economic mechanisms are always the primary or determining factor in achieving it. He identifies a slippage in the logic of Marxist argument: from the undeniable fact that societies must ensure material reproduction, it is inferred, without sufficient justification, that economic forces must therefore be the central mechanism by which this is done. For Gellner, this move is neither analytically nor historically justified. Instead, he suggests that in much of human history, it is at least arguable if not obvious that other mechanisms have played a more decisive role. The means of coercion, and often the means of conceptualisation by which he refers to ideological systems, religious beliefs, and frameworks of legitimation, may have been far more significant in maintaining the social order than economic forces. While material needs must be met, the way in which people are compelled to participate in the system that meets those needs, and the way in which they come to accept the resulting distribution of resources and roles, is not necessarily governed by economics. It is often power, and the structures of violence and belief, that play the decisive role. 

Thus, Gellner resists the Marxist tendency to universalise the primacy of economics, arguing instead that the mechanisms of social reproduction vary and that it is an open sociological question, one that must be asked anew in each historical context, what role the economic plays relative to coercion and ideology. This theoretical dispute leads directly into a deeper moral and political criticism of Marxism, one rooted in its failure to account for the realities of Stalinism and related forms of authoritarianism. For Gellner, the great political tragedy of Marxism is not merely its theoretical reductionism but its inability to grapple with the problem of power. The horrors of Stalinism or Mao are not anomalies , it is a consequence that any adequate theory must confront. 

Yet Marxism, in its classical form, lacks the conceptual tools to do so. It cannot explain how a supposedly emancipatory project gave rise to such repression, because its analytical framework obscures the autonomous role of power. This becomes all the more tragic in the case of Russian and Chinese communist intellectuals and reformers, who, because they remain trapped within Marxist conceptual language, are rendered incapable of fully articulating or confronting their own historical trauma. Marxism, in Gellner’s view, has left them with no idiom in which to think about the structures that dominated them. The very vocabulary that was supposed to liberate them has become a conceptual prison. Thus, Gellner’s critique is not merely an academic dispute about sociological theories. It is a critique of Marxism’s explanatory failure and its historical irresponsibility. By misidentifying the mechanisms of social cohesion and control, and by denying or underplaying the independent force of coercion and ideology, Marxism becomes not only theoretically inadequate but morally compromised. It cannot account for the persistence of power, and in failing to do so, it leaves its adherents unequipped to understand either their past or their present. 

He argues that Marx's mistake, the overemphasis on economic determinism,  cannot be fully understood simply by attributing it to the familiar influences of his Jewish prophetic heritage or German Hegelian philosophy. These influences, while significant, have perhaps been overstated in standard interpretations. Instead, Gellner provocatively suggests that some of the most fundamental errors in Marx's thinking were distinctly British or Scottish in character. Marx, he argues, inherited a peculiarly British schema that placed undue faith in the primacy and autonomy of the economic sphere. This belief was not an innovation unique to Marx but rather something he shared with the liberal economists of the Scottish Enlightenment, most notably Adam Smith. In this sense, Marx’s “errors” are errors he shares with his intellectual host culture. This cultural inheritance was shaped by the historically unusual conditions of 18th and 19th-century Britain. At that time, Gellner observes, there was a peculiar separation of economic and political power. The people who held the sword, who had access to organised coercion, neither wished nor were able to interfere substantially with those generating economic wealth. The economic producers, the rising bourgeoisie, were largely free to operate without being compelled to transform their resources into coercive power or direct political dominance. 

This apparent separation of economy and polity was, Gellner insists, an exception, not a norm. It was characteristic of early industrial capitalism in Britain, but it is untrue for most of human history and is no longer true in the modern world. Marx, having internalised this British anomaly, mistook it for a universal historical principle. Gellner drives this point further by comparing Marx’s assumptions to those of later economic thinkers such as Milton Friedman, who also posit the existence of an autonomous economy functioning independently from politics and coercion. This belief in a self-contained economic logic is, for Gellner, one of the major errors in modern social thought, inherited equally by the Marxist left and the libertarian right. 

To illustrate the limitations of this economic determinism in concrete sociological terms, Gellner draws on a case study by Alan Macfarlane, specifically his ethnographic work on social transformation in a region of Nepal. The case Macfarlane presents involves a dramatic shift from slash-and-burn agriculture to wet rice cultivation, and from shamanistic belief systems to Hindu structures of authority and meaning. At first glance, this might seem like the kind of transformation that Marxist theory could explain in terms of changing productive forces. But as Gellner points out, the technological means required for this transformation had long been available in the region. There was no significant innovation in the material forces of production. What changed, rather, was a combination of ideological and coercive mechanisms: a new political leadership capable of mobilising and offering ideological legitimacy, and a recruitable peasantry willing to exchange military service and loyalty for access to cultivable land and increased agricultural returns. In this example, the driving force of social transformation is not a shift in economic base, but the recombination of political and ideological structures. The change was rapid, radical, and enduring, yet it was not rooted in technological or economic innovation. This directly contradicts the Marxist expectation that fundamental social change must be rooted in shifts in the economic substructure. 

Macfarlane’s case thus serves, for Gellner, as a concrete and empirical counterexample to Marxist theory: it demonstrates a profound social reorganisation driven by forces Marxism is ill-equipped to recognise or explain. This example, Gellner suggests, is not merely an academic curiosity but is emblematic of a broader pattern. History is replete with transformations brought about by configurations of power, belief, and coercion, rather than by alterations in the material economy. To cling to the Marxist schema in the face of such evidence is to misread the logic of history itself. Thus, Gellner not only critiques Marxism’s economic reductionism but also argues that it blinds its adherents to the real engines of historical change. In this way, Marxism fails both as an analytic framework and as a guide to political action, trapped in a vision of society that emerged from a particular British historical moment, mistakenly elevated into a universal law. 

Summarising his critique Gellner refers to a question posed in an article by Moses Finley: why did Aristotle, who seemed to write about nearly everything, say so little about economics? The question, Gellner suggests, is fundamentally misframed. The real puzzle is not Aristotle’s omission, but why later thinkers, particularly in early modern Europe, began to treat the economy as an autonomous domain worthy of specialised analysis. Aristotle, in this view, was right not to elevate the economy into a separate sphere. The error lies not in his silence, but in the modern tendency, beginning with Smith and inherited by Marx and then neo-liberals of the right such as Thatcher and Reagan and by leftist Marxists and their heirs, to regard economic life as the foundation of all social explanation. The question is not why Aristotle failed to invent political economy, but why Smith thought it needed to be invented at all. 

This intellectual reversal is central to Gellner’s critique of Marxism. It is not merely that Marx overemphasised the economy, but that the very framing of the economic as a self-contained analytic object capable of driving history independently is an historical anomaly, born of specific European circumstances and mistakenly universalised. In this regard, Marx is not the radical outsider he is often portrayed to be, but rather a consummate product of his British intellectual environment, sharing with classical liberalism a commitment to economic schematisation that distorts the complexities of social change. 

Gellner’s criticism extends to Marxist class analysis as well. While he acknowledges that inequality and domination are central issues in any sociological inquiry, he is wary of assuming that these must always be expressed in terms of class defined by relations to the means of production. That is, the orthodox Marxist view, which takes property and production as the fundamental axes around which class is organized may fail to grasp the nature of stratification in many societies. There are contexts, he argues, where the decisive social cleavage lies not in ownership or control of productive forces, but in access to coercive capacity. If one defines class strictly in terms of production, one risks overlooking forms of social hierarchy structured primarily by power, violence, and the organisation of force. 

He points to work like Fallers’ study of East African political systems, where state formation and social hierarchy are governed more by the distribution of coercion than by economic production. Fallers, best known for his East African fieldwork among the Baganda is emblematic of anthropological inquiry that highlights how authority, ritual, prestige, and state formation can govern hierarchy independently of property or production. In Uganda, Fallers documented how leaders maintained dominion and integrated social systems not through capital accumulation, but through symbolic power, ritual legitimacy, and institutional innovation. These were not “economies” in the classical sense, but systems of power encoded through titles, authority, and allegiance. Gellner sees this as deeply consonant with broader patterns in African societies, West African as well as East, where the essential axis of inequality arises not from class defined by means of production, but through access to political-military power and ideological legitimation. Though Fallers did not write a definitive work on West Africa, his methodologies and comparative frameworks, whose influence is acknowledged by thinkers like Jack Goody, offer a critique of Marxist economism applied beyond its historical context. Goody even praised Fallers for avoiding the use of European categories like "feudalism" when interpreting African polities.

In such cases, the Marxist frame does not collapse entirely, but it must be reframed or expanded. Rather than presupposing the primacy of production, social analysis must remain open to the possibility that the means of coercion and their articulation with ideology, ritual, and kinship are often the more decisive factors. When approached in this way, the stark dichotomy between Marxist and non-Marxist theories of class begins to dissolve. The task becomes not to defend a rigid economic model of class, but to explore how power, production, and coercion interact in historically contingent configurations. 

Gellner’s larger project, then, is neither a rejection of Marx’s ambition to systematise historical change nor a blanket denial of the importance of class and inequality. Rather, it is a call to re-anchor our analysis in the full complexity of human social life where ideology, coercion, belief systems, and material interests are tightly intertwined and not reducible to a single a priori foundational cause. He reminds us that the autonomy of the economy is not a natural fact but a historically specific illusion, and that the social sciences must be prepared to think in terms that exceed the economic and not rule out without empirical evidence  the primacy of political and cultural forms in shaping the conditions of human life.

How relevant is Ernest Gellner’s thought today? This is a question that John Hall, who worked alongside Gellner at the LSE when I was there and who has written an intellectual biography of Gellner, poses. He admits to having a mixed and somewhat ambivalent response to the question. On one hand, some critics, like the American nationalism theorist David Leon, have suggested that Gellner essentially describes his own life and calls it sociology. Hall thinks there’s some truth to that; his work emerges deeply from the particular circumstances of a Central European Jewish intellectual navigating the turbulent 20th century. Yet while the context has certainly changed, it hasn’t done so completely, which makes Hall reluctant to dismiss his ideas outright. 

He recalls some of Gellner’s background. He was born into a highly complex and layered cultural environment in Central Europe, where ethnic and national identities overlapped and conflicted sharply. Jews, Czechs, and Germans in Prague all lived in a fraught balance of assimilation and exclusion. Gellner’s family itself embodied this ambiguity, rooted in German culture, flirting with Czech nationalism, and touching Zionist aspirations, but never fully at home in any one identity. His experiences during the rise of Nazism, his escape, and the tragic loss of much of his family in the Holocaust profoundly shaped his worldview. Later, his disillusionment with postwar Central Europe, especially the ethnic homogenisation and nationalist expulsions he witnessed, further complicated his relationship to national identity. These personal and historical experiences fed directly into his sociological theories. 

Hall notes his functionalist explanation linking nationalism to the needs of industrial society. Hall agrees that this was a powerful way to understand nationalism as a social process shaped by economic and structural forces, rather than simply ideology or politics.However, Hall thinks  that functionalism can be overdone and risks flattening the role of individual agency and historical contingency. Hall claims Gellner moves between description and prescription, sometimes seeming to hope for the endurance of multinational states despite his theory suggesting their fragility. He thinks Gellner's later reflections feel a bit ad hoc, attempts to patch the theory rather than fully overhaul it. Still, despite these weaknesses, Hall finds value in his functionalist core insight that nationalism cannot be fully understood apart from the socio-economic structures that shape human experience. Hall argues that although it may not explain everything, and sometimes simplifies too much,  it provides a useful lens, especially when combined with an awareness of historical context and individual agency.

Responding to the same question as Hall, i.e. how relevant is Gellner's thought today, the social anthropologist Hyland Eriksson highlights several key points. First, he points out that Gellner’s focus is almost exclusively on Europe and a bit on North Africa, which is a very narrow empirical scope that leaves out much of human experience. He thinks that this does not necessarily invalidate his theory, which might still hold as a general framework, but it limits its applicability. Eriksson notes that Gellner is controversial and somewhat unpopular within social anthropology, largely because he ventured into philosophical generalisations without the detailed ethnographic backing that anthropologists typically expect. Many anthropologists believe one should focus on detailed case studies rather than broad theorising, following Malinowski’s approach. However, Eriksson takes a different view, valuing general theory and social philosophy for providing necessary philosophical premises that help frame empirical questions more clearly.

Eriksson still recommends Gellner’s work to students, finding it useful, especially in contexts like Mauritius, where ethnic complexity and colonial legacies create unique challenges for nationalism. In Mauritius, English was chosen as a neutral national language to avoid favouring any ethnic group, a pragmatic compromise often overlooked in nationalism theory. Eriksson finds Gellner’s ideas about labour market changes diminishing the importance of ethnicity helpful, though in practice both ethnic importance and decline can occur simultaneously, much like second-generation immigrants in Europe having diverse identity expressions.

Eriksson criticises Gellner’s identification of nations with ethnic groups as unnecessary and empirically incorrect since many nations (e.g., France, the United States, Argentina) function effectively without ethnic nationalism and goes on to assert that  Gellner’s claim that ethnic boundaries should align with political boundaries is problematic today because much identity politics is transnational and not confined to states. I'm not sure there's anything in my reading of Gellner that couldn't accommodate these insights.

Eriksson contrasts Gellner with Benedict Anderson, who views nationalism more as a symbolic integrative force and downplays ethnicity’s role. He thinks Anderson’s more global perspective and his insight that nationalism shares traits with religion and kinship rather than ideologies like socialism make his theory more applicable to contemporary global identity politics. Again, I think Gellner can be read as aligning with this perspective much more than Erikson claims. Eriksson also highlights contemporary phenomena such as migration, transnational labour markets, and diaspora communities that challenge traditional nationalist theories focused on fixed ethnic or state boundaries. Examples include seasonal workers in Europe maintaining ties to their homelands while participating in foreign labor markets, and the complex cultural and economic exchanges this entails.

Erikson argues that we know that cultural similarity does not necessarily translate into unity at the level of identity, nor does cultural diversity always lead to division. People can be culturally similar yet feel deeply divided in identity, or they can be diverse and still united, fighting the same wars and loyally paying taxes. There is no simple one-to-one correlation between culture and identity. This complicates any straightforward understanding of nationalism or identity politics. Erikson gives a striking example of this by looking at how in Norway there's a deep cultural division between the general population and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Jehovah’s Witnesses oppose many aspects of mainstream culture, such as entertainment and medical practices like blood transfusions. Though they are not officially recognised as a cultural minority, their beliefs mark them off as different and deserving of special accommodation. For Erikson this example highlights how identity differences can persist and require recognition even without institutional codification. Once more, I think Gellner's theory can accommodate and explain this: Gellner: ' Do the Jehovah's Witnesses think of themselves as Norwegian Jehovah's Winesses?'

Erikson: 'Yes"

Gellner turns back to his typewriter. 

His theory requires a single nation, not that dual identities cannot exist within that single nation. 

Erikson also argues that a process of cultural homogenisation or “modalisation” can paradoxically strengthen identity differences. It is often when a culture feels threatened or lost that identity becomes crucial. The metaphor of a fish unaware of water until it is taken out illustrates how loss triggers a reflexive, intensified awareness of cultural identity. Groups only develop theories and defense mechanisms around their identity once they perceive it at risk, leading to essentialising and politicising culture. I don't think Gellner would disagree.

He thinks a major shortcoming in Gellner’s theory is its lack of a nuanced theory of meaning. Identity is inherently reflexive and interpretive; it cannot be fully explained by institutions or social processes alone. To understand why individuals from the same background may respond differently - one sister wearing a hijab, another frequenting discos - Erikson thinks we need a phenomenological or hermeneutic approach to identity that considers how people interpret their life-worlds differently. Gellner was quite stubborn and did not incorporate this layer of meaning-making, which remains a key theoretical gap. Well, maybe. 

Nevertheless, despite this and other necessary updates, Erikson thinks much of Gellner’s work on nationalism remains relevant. Mass communication can create shared cultural identities and social homogeneity without the necessity of industrialism, as Gellner initially emphasised. Modernity, rather than industrialisation per se, is the broader context within which nationalism emerges. Transnational identities like global Islam demonstrate powerful homogenising effects and demand adherence without being tied to a specific territory or state-building project. In many societies, immigrant or minority communities function well with minimal integration into the majority culture. For example, first-generation Tamil immigrants in Scandinavia often live securely within their communities, working and paying taxes, yet show little interest in local politics. Their loyalties and identities lie elsewhere, challenging nationalist assumptions about integration and identity.

Gellner also highlighted that it is precisely the sharing of language and cultural codes among groups that makes conflict possible, a counterintuitive but profound insight. Shared cultural modes increase the visibility and salience of differences, intensifying identity conflicts. While much identity-based politics today may not be nationalist in the strict sense - many groups are not committed to state-building - Erikson is clear that Gellner’s theory offers tools for analysing what we might now call the “politics of identity.” His prediction of conflict between diasporic elites and established nations when the latter consolidate power finds support in contemporary studies, such as Amy Chua’s World on Fire, which documents the victimisation of elite minorities amid democratisation in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines.

Erikson also points out that communication and standardisation remain crucial conditions for shared identity. Two centuries ago, dialects and identities across the Scandinavian peninsula were highly localised and fragmented. Today, while dialect differences have diminished, national identities and clear borders have become more pronounced. In other words, Erikson agrees with Gellner that nationalism redefined a world once marked by many small differences into one dominated by a few large national distinctions.However, current trends toward globalisation, increased movement, ambivalence, fundamentalism, and transnationalism suggest a re-emergence of a more fragmented world with many small differences, a potential reversal or transformation of the national order Gellner described. 

In conclusion, I continue to find Gellner’s theory both powerful and necessary especially as we try to make sense of the enduring and often intensifying role of nationalism in a period marked by fragmentation, crisis, and transformation. Since his untimely death, the dynamics he identified have not receded; if anything, they have mutated and deepened in ways that make his structural insights more, not less, relevant. Even in cases like China, often described as a civilisation-state rather than a nation-state, we see the machinery of nationalism taking over as Marxist-Leninist ideology fades into ritual. The functional logic Gellner outlined, of homogenisation, standardisation, loyalty, and bureaucratic integration, remains central to understanding the shape of power.

It is in this context that I think Gellner’s work remains essential for philosophy of education. He allows us to question some of the more idealist (as opposed to functionalist) assumptions that often dominate educational discourse, assumptions that suggest schooling exists to promote flourishing, autonomy, equality, or ethical development. While these may be real outcomes in some cases, they are not the structural causes of education’s emergence or persistence. As Gellner makes clear, those ideals are the product of deeper systemic functions rather than their original aim. To treat them as causes is to reverse the causal logic of the modern state.

Mass school education arose, historically, because modern industrial society demanded a certain kind of person: literate, mobile, abstract-thinking, impersonal, trained to function in bureaucracies and markets. This is the Weberian subject, the rational, rule-following, credentialed individual. The nation-state, needing to bind strangers together into a functional unit, required a homogenised culture, a standardised linguistic and symbolic world, and a population trained in abstraction and deferral. Mass schooling became the key institutional mechanism for producing this kind of citizen. Its normative commitments - autonomy, critical thinking, civic virtue - should be understood within this functionalist frame, as emergent properties of the system rather than free-standing moral truths.

Moreover, education in disenchanted states, those shaped by secular rationalism and bureaucratic order, was tasked not only with producing disenchanted, Weberian individuals, but also with re-enchanting them, often through the arts and humanities. This dual function was crucial: the same system that stripped the world of meaning and turned society into an impersonal mechanism also had to find ways of helping individuals cope with the resulting anomie, alienation, and loneliness. Literature, music, philosophy, and aesthetics were not just decorative add-ons; they were the emotional and existential supplements that allowed modern rationalised societies to survive themselves.Yet this framework is under visible strain. As modern states change their character, the Weberian assumptions underlying mass education are being eroded. Increasingly, states no longer demand rational, rule-bound citizens who can navigate impersonal systems. Instead, they often cultivate emotional loyalty, reactive identities, and conformity to narrow ideological scripts. 

This is especially evident in countries where nationalism is reasserting itself in toxic, authoritarian forms, places like Hungary, India, Russia, China, Turkey, and the United States. In such contexts, education becomes less about creating a mass of autonomous subjects and more about shaping compliant, myth-bound citizens and a small elite of technocratic experts. The ideal of a public sphere governed by reason and mutual recognition is displaced by media-driven echo chambers, culture wars, and appeals to ethnic or religious essentialism.

The old model of modernity as a liberal, bureaucratic, technocratic society grounded in Weberian rationality is visibly fraying. What replaces it is postmodern pluralism re-tribalised within politics of myth, identity, and resentment. Education in such a context cannot be understood with the same tools we used even two decades ago. Philosophers of education must therefore confront two intertwined tasks: first, to re-examine normative claims about what education is for, in light of changing political and sociological realities; second, to describe and analyse what education is actually doing in specific cases, especially where it is mobilised to serve authoritarian or ethno-nationalist ends. In doing so, we need both empirical vigilance and structural models. 

Gellner offers a crucial bridge between these: his account of the homogenising nation-state remains a robust starting point for analysis, even as its empirical expressions mutate. His work reminds us to ask the deeper causal questions such as why systems look the way they do, how institutions emerge from the needs of power, ideology and production, and how ideals may be structured by material imperatives.

I remain in a state of uncertainty, stumbling through the contemporary landscape, trying to grasp its speed, contradictions, and volatility. The world changes faster than our theories can absorb, and the causal structures we once relied upon become hazy, tangled, or reversed. It is in this disorientation that I find myself returning to philosophy, sociology, and anthropology, not for certainty, but for frameworks that help me hold complexity without collapsing into confusion. Gellner, in particular, continues to offer one of the clearest and most unsentimental diagnoses of the modern condition. And though the condition itself may now be changing, his insistence on function, structure, and historical realism remains indispensable, especially for those of us trying to think seriously about education not just as an ethical promise, but as a social and political fact.