Gellner’s Triple Lens and the Rise of Global Authoritarianism
Introduction This book begins with a simple claim. To understand the new politics growing inside today’s technological infrastructure we need philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner’s triple lens of rationalism, nationalism and civil society. Rationalism is a public craft of giving reasons that others can inspect. Nationalism is the standardised high culture that lets strangers work and argue together. Civil society is “that part of society which is not the state. It is a residue,” and the residue that matters is “large, powerful, and organised,” with “membership… optional or revocable,” able “to ensure that the state does its job but no more, and that it does it properly.” The three belong together, they tell us how arguments become binding, how a common idiom is sustained without being monopolised, and how organised counterweights keep offices separate from office holders. The thesis of the book claims that contemporary politics is changing because rationality is mutating, nationalism is being weaponised, and civil society is thinning. The model is simple. i. Enlightenment rationality arose as an abstract expression of bourgeois culture, a way of turning conflict into publicly inspectable reasons through schools, courts, audits, and elections. Over the long durée its philosophical warrant faded, as scepticism about shared standards and the dissolving of truth into perspective lowered the prestige of procedures that oblige strangers. ii. Nationalism began as the bourgeois canopy, a shared high culture that let strangers cooperate and argue; as the bourgeois individual recedes, identity hardens into blood and race. iii. Civil society was the bourgeois social space where the state ended and free associations began, where citizens could say no to the state and win, with entry and exit always open, and where work discipline coexisted with friendship, love, and hobbies that re enchanted disenchanted lives. As the standing of rationality declines, this organised residue loses teeth. The combined effect is a strengthening of the state into political authoritarianism. The speed of change reflects a new technological infrastructure. States and aligned platforms now possess tools that fit this transformation with precision. Five elements matter. i. Sensing through wearables, cameras, biometrics, connected vehicles, grids, and always on phones turns life into continuous signals. ii. Identity formation creates permissioned profiles from harvested data, with reputations and scores deciding access to travel, work, finance, and speech. iii. Predictive modelling forecasts behaviours and beliefs and sends attention, policing, and credit where models expect risk, which steers reality toward the forecast. iv. Real time actuation updates models and profiles and nudges conduct through ranked feeds, cooled links, programmable payments, and access rules, so futures become compliant with the design. v. Legibility then narrates competence through dashboards and scores, making populations machine readable in public and private life. Whoever holds these rails can coordinate at scale. Direct state custody of the stack, as in China, and indirect custody through state platform compacts, as in the United States, both deliver immense leverage over populations. Philosophy in this register becomes anthropology at a high level of abstraction, since doctrines mirror social arrangements with the empirical content set aside. The project is a model, and models seek fruitfulness. The normative test follows from the triple lens. Judge polities by their ability to sustain Enlightenment rationality in practice, to keep nationalism as background canopy rather than foreground blood identity, and to endow civil society with real teeth. On this test China lacks public rationality and lacks an autonomous civil society. On this test the United States under a renewed Trump project shows nationalism turning toxic, civil society being neutralised, and public reason being displaced by design. The remedy is clear. Rebuild culture without monopoly through plural curricula and independent credentialling. Restore procedures that really decide through courts that can surprise power and emergency orders that don’t last forever. Re endow the organised residue with legal personhood, protected funds, independent rails for money, speech, and identity. Only a triple analysis brings us close to the truth of the new politics, and only triple repair can slow the slide into authoritarian rule. The first section gives a genealogical account of bourgeois reason at a philosophical level and the history of its gradual erosion (and throughout the book when I discuss rationality I mean just this precise type of bourgeois, sovereign, Enlightenment rationality). For Gellner, philosophy is abstract anthropology where philosophical ideas are stylised portraits of social life with the empirical content set aside. The falling prestige of rationality tracks its falling social prestige and the rise of post-truth where design begins to replace argument in everyday governance. The middle chapters set nationalism and civil society on this foundation. Nationalism supplies the standardised high culture that industrial life requires, a common language and mass education create modular citizens whose skills and loyalties can travel across roles and regions, and the same machinery funds the schools and courts that rationalism needs. In this section I show how Gellner presents this notion of a bourgeois vision of Nationality and its rival versions. Civil society anchors the arrangement, it is the organised residue outside the state, peaceful and normally unarmed, yet capable of binding power because it owns resources, enjoys standing, and holds rights. Unions, professional bodies, congregations, universities, watchdog media, neighbourhood boards, and parties form an ecology of counterweights, members can enter and leave, leaders rotate, charters protect dissent, and together they make the difference between a busy society and a free one. But as rationality recedes the role of nationalism changes and instead of being the background cultural assumption rarely seen except on rare ritualised, ceremonial occasions it becomes an ideology of the state drawing on non-bourgeois codes usually drawn from an earlier cultural settlement. Similarly civic society has also been co-opted by the state. Its serious role of being able to say “no” to the state has been increasingly eroded where once it flourished, as we see in contemporary USA, or else has not been allowed to develop in places where it never existed, as in China. The section after these discusses the impact of a coercive digital infrastructure that is remaking political life. The comparative chapters apply the lens to different civilisational settings. Throughout the book imagines a dialogue between Gellner and his erstwhile colleague, the historian and anthropologist Alan Macfarlane in order to tease out further insights and reflections about how geopolitical realities are forming, projecting forward to an imagined mid century where it is supposed that authoritarianism will be the dominant political reality unless robust defences of bourgeois rationality, nationalism and civic society are mounted urgently. The aim is clarity. Economic growth and glittering research can coexist with curated public reason and permissioned association. A triple analysis is needed to get close to the truth. Keep all three Gellnerian elements in view at once, a shared high culture that is not captured, a living practice of reasons that really decide, and a civil society strong enough to bind the centre to its proper work. And on top of that understand and counter the threat of the powerful technological infrastructure. Gellner’s clarity about this is a warning, if any limb of his triple account of conditions for liberty is neglected the others weaken in turn, and the same infrastructure that connects us offers power new ways to enclose us. The task for readers is to judge polities through all these lenses and to use that judgment to rebuild the supports on which free citizens depend.
Part 1i. The Sovereignty of Reason: The Collapse of Enlightenment Culture and the Rise of Post-Rational Society Here's a little half baked sermon: We are living through the collapse of a civilisation built on bourgeois rationalism. What once claimed to be the universal engine of progress, clarity, and truth is now faltering, not only as an ideal but as a functioning social order. The modern project, grounded in Enlightenment reason and its institutional embodiments, liberal democracy, science, bureaucracy, education, no longer commands trust or coherence. As contemporary social anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen observes in Overheating , the tempo of globalisation, technological change, and ecological instability has outpaced our capacity to process, regulate, or find meaning in the world. The very mechanisms designed to bring order - rational governance, technocratic institutions, scientific authority - have lost legitimacy in the face of overwhelming complexity and acceleration. Eriksen warns that our societies are “overheated”: stretched between global connectivity and local disintegration, drowning in information while starving for meaning. But this is not just a matter of stress or complexity. It is also the terminal stage of a culture founded on reason. The world imagined by Descartes, Kant, and Weber, one in which knowledge, truth, and system could ground a shared human project, has unravelled. Its failure is no longer academic. It is vividly playing out on the world stage: in the election of Trump, the consolidation of Xi’s digital authoritarianism, Modi’s ethno-nationalist transformation of India, and the rising tide of post-truth populism across the globe. These are not simply political turns; they are signs of a deeper cultural rupture and the breakdown of rationalism as the guiding grammar of civilisation. Ernest Gellner's anthropology of reason revealed that rationality was never truly universal. It was a style of cognition produced by a specific social formation: Industrial society, with its need for impersonality, precision, and continuous innovation. Rationalism, he argued, emerged from a particular cultural ecology: it was not the antidote to culture, but a culture in its own right. It demanded certain kinds of social organisation: literate, mobile, rule-governed, sceptical, and abstract. But now that society is fragmenting. The rationalising institutions of science, bureaucracy, legalism, liberalism are no longer trusted or effective. And their cultural foundation is dissolving under the pressures of digital acceleration, ecological emergency, and mass disaffection. Rationalism has failed not just to provide meaning, but even to sustain its own operational integrity. It could not remain culturally hygienic, as Gellner warned, because it needed its own rituals, loyalties, and shared assumptions to sustain itself. But those have eroded. We now find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: rationalism remains technologically potent but culturally inert. The tasks of reasoning, of calculation, prediction and analysis are increasingly delegated to machines, to algorithms and artificial intelligences. We are becoming, as Eriksen might put it, Cyberians, beings embedded in systems of digital cognition we no longer understand or control. The rationalisation of the world continues in those silos where it is required, such as science and technology, but it no longer requires rational humans to carry it out. In this post-Industrial condition, we are witnessing the withdrawal of rationality from the domain of culture. It no longer grounds our ethics, our politics, or our sense of self. Instead, we are beginning live in a vacuum of meaning filled with algorithmic spectacle, emotional tribalism, and unprocessed existential dread. The dream of Enlightenment reason has ended not with triumph, but with obsolescence. Philosophy, from the sublime Descartes to the ridiculous Derrida, inadvertently and often enthusiastically, chronicled this decline: each stage of rationalist critique peeling away one more layer of justification, until nothing remained but irony, power, and either post-human triumph or despair depending on mood. Gellner helps us see that this was always in the cards. Rationalism undermined the sacred but could not replace it. It displaced tradition but failed to build a sustainable alternative. Now, having eaten through the very cultures that nourished it, reason stands alone as something technically omnipresent but culturally exhausted. And as it recedes, we are left to confront a stark new condition: a world organised by machines, governed by authoritarian politics, irrational passions, and haunted by the ruins of our disenchanted hopes. We are no longer rational moderns. We are post-rational subjects in a post-human order drifting between code and chaos. Ok. End of sermon. So now, I still largely see many things through the lens of Ernest Gellner and I think in a way he foresaw this. Gellner is a social anthropologist and a philosopher, and he combines insights from both disciplines.He argues that it is fruitful to model the history of philosophy not as a timeless sequence of ideas, but a coded reflection of the cultural and material conditions that produce it. He treats philosophy not as the unfolding of absolute reason, but as a series of abstract cognitive responses to the demands of different stages of social organisation. For Gellner, ideas do not hover above history; they crystallise its underlying structures in conceptual form. ii. Philosophy as a Mirror of Social Order: Gellner’s Socio-Economic Reading of Rationalism In this schema, the philosophical systems of any age are intelligible best when read against their socio-economic backdrop. In the Agrarian era, what Gellner calls Agraria, the dominant social logic is one of hierarchy, stability, and ritual. It is a world of fixed roles, sacred orders, and cyclical time. Plato’s thought, with its emphasis on eternal forms, strict caste structure, and intellectual guardianship, maps perfectly onto this world. The realm of Ideas is the cognitive counterpart to the immobile world of castes, temples, and kings. Truth is stable and unchanging because society is meant to be the same. With the advent of modernity, which Gellner labels Industria, this structure is shattered. Industrial society demands mobility, precision, standardisation, and abstract skills. Its citizens must be trained not in ritual but in logic, not in obedience but in competence. Here we find the rise of a new philosophical idiom - rationalism and empiricism. Descartes, with his quest for certainty through methodical doubt, embodies the Industrial need for a stable, reproducible foundation amid a dynamic and transforming world. Hume and Kant follow suit: they try to reconcile the human need for meaning with the impersonal demands of reason and system. Hume reduces knowledge to sense-data and habits, matching the rise of empirical science. Kant rebuilds the structure of the mind as a kind of epistemic factory, processing raw data through universal categories. Philosophy becomes a mirror of the Industrial world’s tensions: individual versus system, freedom versus structure, perception versus reason. Gellner argues that these philosophical debates also make sense of Industria, a society that requires a cognitively disembedded individual, capable of applying rules across space and time, stripped of local loyalty or ritual comfort. Just as industry required the standardisation of parts, it also required the standardisation of minds. Philosophy (inadvertently and unconsciously) models this ideological infrastructure. Thus, for Gellner, philosophy models the intellectual form a society gives to its own self-understanding. Plato’s metaphysics cannot be transplanted into an Industrial world, just as Descartes’s radical doubt would be unintelligible in a peasant village. The history of thought is, in this view, a map of socio-economic evolution abstracted into a model. It is not that philosophers knowingly do this but rather that they express, in purified cognitive form, the tensions and transformations already underway in their material world. Gellner offers an interpretation of our modern philosophical condition as a tension between rationalist and romantic visions of human cognition and social life. Rather than engaging with philosophical doctrines purely on their own terms, Gellner treats them as civilisational manifestations, intellectual styles rooted in social structures and historical transformations. At the core of his account is what he identifies as the doctrine of the “Sovereignty of Reason” (SOR), a project begun by René Descartes, most fully crystallised in the work of Kant and subsequently challenged by romantic, historicist, and communalist currents of thought. The Sovereignty of Reason is therefore a specific form of rationality emerging in a specific social milieu. I’m not denying that rationality didn’t exist before – clearly medieval Christianity and Islam, the ancient Greeks of Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and so forth were rational – but this Sovereignty of Reason type is different from those earlier versions. This is the specific type of reason developed in and for the emergence and continuation of modernity and for the rest of the essay I’m only discussing this modern form beginning somewhere around the seventeenth century. Through this lens, Gellner stages a confrontation between two opposing ideals of reason and culture: the individualist, classicist, bourgeois rationalism of Descartes and his heirs, and the historicist, organic, emotional countercurrents represented by thinkers like Hegel, Herder, Heidegger, Dewey and late Wittgenstein amongst others. Gellner sees Cartesian rationalism as the founding gesture of modernity, a radical disembedding of the self from inherited tradition, custom, and communal belief. The Cartesian method, famously anchored in the principle cogito ergo sum, is not merely an epistemological tactic but a cultural gesture. It is a turning inward, a stripping down of belief to its absolute minimum, in search of the indubitable. Descartes’s rationalism reflects what Gellner calls “bourgeois cognitive possessive individualism”: a commitment to order, clarity, stepwise progression, and the methodical reduction of all problems into discrete, manageable parts. The ideal philosopher becomes a cognitive accountant, proceeding “in orderly fashion from the simple to the complex,” ensuring that “all issues [are] divided into as many parts as possible” and “subjecting performance to accurate and searching accountancy using clear, intelligible criteria.” The Cartesian mind mistrusts haste, confusion, prejudice, and the murkiness of collective emotion. It strives for intellectual hygiene with a methodical, restrained, almost Pelagian belief in the capacity of individual effort to yield truth. This rationalist culture, Gellner argues, is profoundly classicist in temperament. It values systems, buildings, and legal orders that bear the mark of a single, deliberate author. It is opposed to the messy accretion of tradition or the slow sedimentation of custom. “History is pollution,” Gellner writes in paraphrase of this worldview; unconscious growth is anathema. The ideal structure is one whose every part can be accounted for and justified. In this sense, Cartesian rationalism mirrors the values of a certain kind of social class: the sober, disciplined bourgeoisie, with its preference for clear lines, cognitive cleanliness, and personal responsibility. Yet Gellner also recognises that this ideal generates deep tensions. The Cartesian gesture requires one to treat culture itself - custom, example and tradition - as a source of error. Truth lies in what can survive the fire of doubt; everything else must be discarded. Descartes’s inner compulsion to find the indubitable, the pure and distinct idea, becomes the only legitimate form of reason. All other forms - mystic, orgiastic, communal and emotional - are not merely suspect but defined as antithetical to reason. Only this inner compulsion is reason, Gellner notes, and the other kinds it fights off as murky, turbulent, obscure, trance, mystic, orgiastic, emotional excess and undecorous indulgence. Reason becomes a sword drawn against the whole messy realm of culture, history, and sentiment. This purification of reason provokes its own backlash. Iii The Romantic Rebellion: Culture, Community, and the Limits of Reason Against this, the Romantic tradition, emerging in the wake of Enlightenment rationalism, stages a counterrevolution on behalf of the organic, the historical and the communal. Figures like Rousseau and Herder argue that reason cannot be disembedded from the cultural lifeworld; that we are not abstract minds but social beings formed by language, tradition, and feeling. Gellner sees this as the beginning of the 're-enchantment industry' in philosophy where philosophy seeks to find the handrails for life that rationality has removed. Gellner’s reading of this reaction is laced with irony. He cites Alfred de Musset: “It is human reason which has destroyed all illusions; but reason herself wears mourning for it, so as to induce us to console her.” Reason, in this vision, is no longer triumphant but bereaved. It has shattered meaning and left itself desolate. Similarly, Gellner invokes Immanuel Kant’s poignant observation: “Many develop a certain measure of misology, i.e. hatred of reason, because they find that they had won weariness for themselves rather than bliss, and so in the end they tend to envy, rather than despise, the commoner run of men, who grant but little influence to their reason…” Here, Kant, normally the emblem of rationalism, acknowledges the psychic costs of reason's dominance. Those who pursue truth through the isolation of mind may discover not enlightenment but exhaustion. David Hume’s remark that “Our reason must be considered as a kind of cause, of which truth is the natural effect” forms the epigraph to Gellner’s inquiry, yet it also marks its ambiguity. For if reason is a cause, then it is shaped by its conditions - social, cultural, and psychological - and its effects may vary accordingly. Gellner’s deeper anthropological insight is that the Cartesian project conceals its own historicity. It claims to transcend culture while being a cultural product itself. Its image of the isolated, reasoning self is not universal, but historically and socially specific. This modern rationality is a style of thought made possible by a particular kind of society: one that valorises individual effort, linear progress, private property, and accountability. Gellner’s analysis is not merely descriptive, therefore, but also diagnostic. He aims to show that what we call “reason” is itself a culturally saturated ideal, one that reflects the needs and anxieties of a world undergoing rapid transformation. The modern world, with its demand for mobility, clarity, and impersonality, favours the Cartesian model. But it cannot suppress entirely the romantic impulse, the desire for rootedness, for meaning grounded in shared traditions and collective identity. Thus modern philosophy swings between these poles: from the cognitive purity of Descartes to the organic nationalism of Herder, from Kant’s rigorous metaphysics to Hegel’s historical dialectic, from the analytic to the existential. Gellner exposes this tension. He frames modern philosophy as a civilisational battleground, structured by a basic polarity between the reason of the sovereign individual and the culture of the embedded community. What makes Gellner's approach so compelling is its refusal to grant either side a final victory. Instead, it illuminates the contradictory demands we place on reason itself: to be pure and yet humane, disembedded and yet meaningful, critical and yet comforting. In the end, reason may destroy illusions but, as de Musset saw, she does so while wearing mourning. Following Descartes, the history of reason moves into more turbulent waters with David Hume, who both inherits and quietly subverts the Cartesian legacy. Gellner treats Hume as a pivotal figure, an empiricist who carries out the Cartesian programme of epistemic purification, but without the metaphysical optimism or theological scaffolding. Where Descartes had believed in the power of clear and distinct ideas to certify both self and world, Hume dismantles that confidence by transforming the very substance of cognition. Ideas are no longer pristine intellectual constructs guaranteed by divine reason. Instead, they are reduced to perceptions, fragmentary, fleeting, and subjective impressions that arrive unbidden and inescapably to consciousness. As Gellner puts it, Hume “replaces concepts with perceptions as basic building blocks” of cognition, reasserting in extreme form the old Scholastic thesis that “nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses”, but without the Aristotelian teleology or Thomist moral universe. iv. The Disenchantment of Cognition: Gellner on Hume, Kant, and the Cultural Limits of Reason This reversal is radical. Descartes had tried to purge the senses in favour of the indubitable intellect, believing that rational inspection alone could yield truth. Hume takes the opposite view: the only authority an idea can claim is genealogical, derived from its descent from some original impression. Gellner memorably formulates this as: “The validating lettre de noblesse of an idea is its documented descent from an ancestral impression.” Cognition thus becomes a kind of audit: “item by item scrutiny is imposed in the cognitive audit”. A genuine idea is one that can produce its credentials, traced back to the “strength of progenitor sensation.” No impression, no cognition. No ancestral sense data, no cognitive legitimacy. Descartes’s solitary reasoner, armed with the pure light of reason, is replaced by Hume’s psychologically passive receiver, visited by inevitable perceptual events. And yet, as Gellner observes, Hume remains a rationalist in a peculiar sense. He retains the Cartesian ambition to purify knowledge from the taint of tradition, even while he replaces its epistemic foundations. Humean empiricism becomes “doing the rationalist enterprise à la Descartes” but with different tools. Rather than beginning with an indubitable idea, one begins with inescapable sensation. Rather than assuming divine harmony between mind and world, one acknowledges only custom and expectation. Hume still seeks to isolate the individual mind from the cultural field and to construct a vision of the world through methodical inspection of elementary experiences. This remains a lonely enterprise. Gellner likens it to the predicament of Robinson Crusoe: the rational individual stranded on the shores of cognition, forced to rebuild a world out of minimal resources, without the social or metaphysical guarantees of older systems. But crucially, Gellner sees Hume’s world as historically different from Descartes’s. Descartes could assume that the rationalist project would inherit the warm coherence once provided by a unified Christian cosmos. He imagined the cognitive individual possessing both a stable self and a reliable world, underwritten by God’s benevolence and a culture of order. But by the time of Hume, that cohesion had eroded. The Cartesian repudiation of culture had succeeded so thoroughly that now there was nothing left to inherit. “The banks of custom of an ongoing culture, spurned because they were culture,” had collapsed, Gellner writes, leaving the rationalist individual isolated, without the stabilising narratives and shared frameworks that previously made cognition feel meaningful. Rationalism had won, but at the cost of the home it once presumed. This raises a deep paradox at the heart of modern epistemology. Rational cognition, as Gellner shows, eventually became itself a culture, a set of expectations, institutions, norms, and discourses embedded in the social world. Cartesian individualism, which had aimed to liberate reason from all such cultural embedding, turned out to require a cultural infrastructure to be sustained. Hume lives in this transformed world, where the Cartesian method is no longer an act of radical rebellion but a shared habitus. “The culture of rational cognition had been adopted to a large extent,” Gellner notes; “so it was now the lived culture.” But if reason requires a sustaining culture, then the whole Cartesian premise collapses: there is no culture-free cognition, and, crucially, there is no genuine vindication of any world. We must choose between cognitive certainty and cultural inhabitation, but never both. This insight opens up the possibility of a new formula, one that Gellner expresses with chilling concision: “no culture-free cognition AND no genuine vindication of any world.” This is not a comfortable place to stand. The human desire is not just for knowledge, but for a world in which one can feel “securely at home.” But this, Gellner insists, is now impossible. Rationalism, having displaced myth, religion, and tradition, leaves behind not a firmer world but a bleaker one. “A culture that provides immense knowledge but feeble illusions,” he writes, is the best we can hope for. The disenchantment is complete: “Feeling securely at home in the world is something that will not be granted to it”. Hume, unlike Descartes, recognises this disenchantment. Gellner credits him with a sharper awareness of the epistemic and existential cost of rational inquiry. “Hume had come to perceive the acute difficulty of vindicating, underwriting, guaranteeing the world attained by rational exploration”. Where Descartes believed in an interlocking world and self, underwritten by divine clarity, Hume saw only perceptions, habits, and expectations, useful, perhaps, but never certain. The rational self does not inherit the world; it assembles it provisionally, out of fragments. The epistemic solitude that Descartes had embraced as liberation becomes, in Hume, something like homelessness. Gellner’s point is not to praise Hume’s scepticism but to trace its origins in a broader civilisational shift: the triumph of rationalism undermines the very conditions that made reason livable. In seeking to liberate cognition from culture, the moderns succeeded only in replacing thick illusions with thin comforts. The rationalist may know much, but she no longer belongs. The transition from the chaotic perceptual data that floods our senses to the seemingly stable and manipulable world we inhabit is not only precarious but profoundly puzzling. For Hume, this transition is not guaranteed by logic, metaphysics, or divine authority. Instead, it is achieved by custom, habits of mind that are not culturally relative, but rather, as Gellner notes, “something pervading all minds.” These customs are not chosen or justified; they are what cognition is. There is no luminous certainty, no a priori guarantee that the external world exists or behaves regularly. The best we get is psychological compulsion: this is simply the kind of creature we are, and this is how we process experience. Descartes had offered a formula for how cognition should function - clear and distinct ideas, illuminated by the divine light of reason, would guarantee the correspondence between thought and world. But Hume demonstrates the hollowness of that promise. The manifest image, the orderly, manipulable world of experience, cannot be derived or guaranteed from the buzzing confusion of sensation. Gellner articulates the point with sharp clarity: Hume’s great lesson is that “there are no guarantees written into the data, just customs of the mind that we have to use.” The transition from impressions to the world we inhabit is not epistemologically secure, it is psychological, habitual, and inescapably human. This rupture carries consequences not only for the world but also for the self. Descartes had famously begun with the self, cogito, ergo sum, as the indubitable foundation. But Hume tears even that away. The self, for Hume, “is, notoriously, a bundle, accumulated with a suggestion of passivity on its own part.” There is no entity behind the impressions, no metaphysical anchor. The self is not a substance but a function, a placeholder, a convenient fiction that gathers the shifting elements of perception. Kant agreed: the self is not an object represented in consciousness but an activity that synthesises experience into a coherent whole. The Enlightenment thinkers- Descartes, Hume, Kant - were united in their refusal to ground knowledge or identity in tradition, authority, or cultural inheritance. Even Descartes’s respect for the Church had less to do with its historical continuity than its clarity and univocal authority: it resembled his epistemic ideal more than it appealed to his cultural allegiance. This is the fundamental character of modern rationalism: it treats knowledge as a problem that must endorse no inherited world, no unexamined custom, no culturally received assumptions. Only claims that can be rationally justified and internally validated by the operations of reason are admissible. But as Hume and Kant both showed, that very purity strips away the external guarantees that once made knowledge feel secure. Descartes could still believe in a world of order and clarity, made by God and reflected in the structures of human reason. But by the time of Hume and Kant, that metaphysical safety net had vanished. They lived in a world that was actually ordered thanks to the success of science, commerce, and bureaucracy but they knew that no non-circular justification for this order was available. As Gellner remarks, “Hume and Kant lived where an orderly world was actually lived in but without secure justification.” Descartes was confident; Hume and Kant were uneasy. And rightly so. The cognitive foundations of modernity had become a tangle of internal mechanisms, no longer God-given light but psychological or transcendental structures. There was no longer a sacrament to bind us to the world, only habit and functional adequacy. “We are bound to our world,” Gellner writes, “only by a common law marriage, based on customary and well-established cohabitation, and not by some divinely underwritten sacrament”. There is no eternal vow, only long-term convenience. This cognitive cohabitation might work, but it lacks metaphysical romance. Kant accepts this. He offers no external validation, only a transcendental account of how the mind must structure experience. The order of the world is not discovered but imposed. It is the product of categories and forms of intuition: space, time, causality. For Kant, these are not derived from experience; they make experience possible. Hume had also located the source of order in the mind, but he offered no transcendental necessity, only psychological habit. Kant wants to prove that we cannot think otherwise; Hume merely observes that we do not. In Gellner’s view, the difference between them is not foundational but stylistic. They are “internal validators” with different accents. Hume is the psychologist, Kant the philosopher-mechanic. Hume’s mind is “putty or clay,” malleable and shaped by the force of impressions, which echo faintly in ideas. Kant’s is “all pulleys and levers, wheels and catches, a machine,” a precision device that imposes necessity on the flux of sensation. But for all their differences in metaphor and temperament, the philosophical stakes remain the same: the mind must supply what the world no longer gives. And this raises a further anthropological question, which Gellner hints at: was this mind, whether putty or machine, still recognisably the same human mind as had always existed? Or was it a new construct, a culturally specific apparatus that emerged under certain civilisational pressures? If so, then even the cognitive structures described by Kant or Hume might themselves be artifacts of culture, not eternal features of reason. It is, he suggests, a question for “social anthropologists,” whose task is to investigate how different forms of consciousness emerge from and sustain different modes of life. In that sense, even the Enlightenment mind, the mind of precision tools or of passive bundles, might itself be an artifact, the byproduct of a peculiar civilisation. The very project of rationalism, far from escaping culture, might turn out to be its most refined expression. Comparing minds across cultures reveals the inadequacy of the Enlightenment’s internalist accounts of cognition. While Hume and Kant each attempted to explain the emergence of order from within the mind, neither could account for the sheer compulsiveness, the binding force, of the conceptual schemes that make human worlds stable and communicable. v. The Ritual Roots of Reason: From Durkheim’s Categories to Weber’s Rational Spirit Durkheim’s anthropological intervention, especially in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915), dismantles both projects. Hume, for Durkheim, was radically wrong: associationism cannot explain why we are compelled to see the world in certain ways. Bundles of impressions, even if habitually connected, lack structure; they are accidental coagulations, not frameworks. The mind, under Hume’s account, is merely an echo chamber, reverberating faintly with past experiences, but incapable of constructing the stable world of obligations, meanings, or shared reality that we actually live in. As Gellner remarks, “Associationist psychology and anthropology hope to explain amazing well-organised structures via an appallingly undisciplined mechanism... It cannot be done”. Kant does better. He recognises that cognition operates under constraints, that space, time, causality are not derived from experience but constitute it. But his system, too, ultimately rests on an "if." If the world is orderly, then we must think in terms of these categories. But Kant cannot say why the world should appear orderly, or why we should be compelled to think it so. His package deal lacks a cause: “If we bought one item we had to buy them all, but there’s no reason for buying the deal except for wanting the deal.” This inability to account for conceptual irrationality or deviance, why some minds do not fit the structure, or how a culture could fail to conform to it, leaves Kant’s an elegant but ultimately circular system. And it cannot explain the massive variations in world-construction between societies. Durkheim offers what neither philosopher could: an external, social, and ritualistic account of how compulsive thought-forms arise. He rejects the introspective method of the rationalists and the laboratory empiricism of the psychologists. Minds are not forged in solitude or in the sterile environment of the lab; they are shaped in the furnace of collective life. The site of that forging is ritual. Through ritual, societies imprint shared categories onto their members. These categories are not mere beliefs but binding constraints - they feel necessary. “The morning after the rite,” writes Gellner paraphrasing Durkheim, “the savage wakes up with a bad hangover and a deeply internalised concept”. This is not metaphorical: rituals install the structures of mind, the ways we think, feel, and parse the world. And because rituals differ between societies, different societies produce different compulsive thought-forms. Anthropology, not philosophy, provides the answer. Indeed, the anthropology of sympathetic and homeopathic magic, as catalogued in Frazer’s The Golden Bough, is itself a parade case of the failure of Humean psychology. Frazer, steeped in empiricism, tried to explain magical thinking through Humean association: like is associated with like, and contiguity creates belief. But, as Durkheim sees, this just doesn’t work. If association is free, it is directionless. Nothing constrains it; anything can be associated with anything. “Associations are born free but are everywhere in chains.” Why the chains? What enforces them? Empiricism has no answer. Ritual does. Ritual disciplines the mind. It makes associations compulsive, not optional. It binds the flux of experience into structure. Kant noticed this compulsiveness but could not explain it. He took it as a given, as something built into reason. But Durkheim shows that it is installed by society. Ritual, repeated performance, ecstatic solidarity are the mechanisms by which the voice of society becomes the voice inside our heads. This also explains how societies, wildly different in their cosmologies and practices, nevertheless each enjoy remarkable internal conceptual coherence. The human mind is not universal in structure; it is universally structured by ritual. What appears rational is the residue of irrational processes of collective bonding. The consequences of this view are dramatic. We become human not by thinking clearly, but by participating in rituals that embed collective categories into us. These rituals may be symbolic, theatrical, orgiastic, or mundane but they are the engine of cognition, the ground of social life. “Creatures like us control our intolerable volatility via collective rituals that constrain them.” Through ritual, cohesion, communication, and cooperation become possible. The constraints of reason, the capacity to share a world, are not natural givens, they are cultural products. The Enlightenment sought to escape this fact. Descartes in particular tried to leave the social behind, to found knowledge on the private clarity of reason alone. But even he was trapped by the voice of the collective. “Descartes seems to have tried to escape the social only to have been tricked into using concepts that were the social working inside of him.” His clarity, his distinctness, his idea of the cogito, these were not innocent. They were rituals of a new kind, secular rites of the mind, internalised forms of social authority. Still, Descartes might object: his concepts were not just any concepts; they bore the marks of logic, necessity, clarity. Surely no ritual sustains that? This is where Durkheim needs Weber. For if Durkheim explains how concepts become compulsive within a society, Weber explains how types of rationality emerge historically, through the evolution of ritual into rule, charisma into bureaucracy, myth into method. The cogito, far from being the asocial kernel of thought, may instead be the historical outcome of a specific civilisational trajectory, a ritual of disciplined introspection, born not in the forest clearing but in the study, in a society already on its way to becoming bourgeois, bureaucratic, and rationalised. In that case, Descartes’ clarity is itself the residue of social rituals. He may have banished the Church and tradition from the epistemic stage, but their voice remained, transfigured, sublimated and internalised. Reason, it turns out, may be the most cunning ritual of all. Durkheim asked why all people are rational, and not merely passive receivers of arbitrary associations. His answer was ritual: collective practices that install inescapable conceptual compulsions, binding individuals into shared mental worlds. But his theory alone could not explain the variations in rationality across cultures. For that, we need Weber, who asked a different but complementary question: why are some people more rational than others? What historical, cultural, and institutional conditions produce not just order, but systematicity, precision, and an all-encompassing rational style of life? Suppose, with Weber, a community that has shifted from magical religion to a transcendent, jealous god, one that forbids all magical dealings and replaces them with moral and natural laws. This deity cannot be bribed; no amulets, no sacrifices, no favours. It is a god of rules, not patronage. Such a theology installs a moral order premised not on ritual ecstasy but ritual solemnity, which penetrates the entirety of life. All men become priests. Daily activities take on ritual gravity. The sacred is no longer limited to the temple, the oracle, the seasonal festival, it is diffused across every aspect of mundane existence. Such a religion, as Weber describes, is scriptural. Writing itself becomes sacred. Context-free statements emerge, statements that treat all men equally, abstractly, apart from concrete status or rank. The form of the statement, its universal reach, replaces the particularity of myth. Exemplary stories give way to legal prescriptions. The community now communicates its meanings and moral obligations not through tales, but through rules. And rules demand consistency. They invite systematisation. Disputes over interpretation become possible, even necessary. Theoretical justifications grow. Rival theories proliferate. Heresy appears. To be wrong is no longer just to be deviant or impure, it is to violate internal consistency. Faith becomes something one has rightly or wrongly. It is no longer sufficient to be loyal or pious; one must be doctrinally precise. This shift from narrative to theory, from story to scripture, coincides with a socio-political transformation. Commercial relations become widespread. The division of labour is extensive. Political order is stable. Contracts replace kinship loyalties; clan or chief no longer structure obligation. Rule of law, not personal patronage, organises society. Under these conditions, the rituals that maintain respect and cohesion shift too. Status-based respect must be periodically dramatised in emphatic, theatrical rituals. But contract-based respect is quiet, diffuse, even-tempered. It is not periodic but continuous. Trust and cooperation become habits, not performances. The entire social atmosphere changes: solemnity becomes sobriety, spectacle becomes routine. Durkheim’s compulsive categories change their form in this new context. They no longer impose a specific concept, this tree is sacred, that word is taboo, but rather instil reverence for a formal order. “Sacredness adheres to a formal order, not to selected items in the world”. What is sacred now is not the content of belief, but the method of belief: consistency, system, seriousness. The sacred becomes symmetrical, unselective, evenly distributed. No longer restricted to high days and holy places, it is now everywhere and always. The ecstatic becomes the sober. And the absence of visible symbols becomes the mark of the highest faith. What used to be a specific rite now becomes a disposition, an ethos. A reverent attitude to all action. A structured seriousness. A devotion without theatre. This transformation explains why rational planning becomes possible. Curiosity is no longer sated by oracles or revelations; it is extended by doubt, driven by discipline. Miracles are not expected. Knowledge is earned, slowly and rigorously. Theory addiction emerges. Thought becomes compulsive, not optional. Faith must be coherent, not comforting. Anxiety replaces magic. The individual cannot manipulate the divine, cannot trade or plea. They can only look for signs. And the best sign is the sober and successful performance of one’s calling. Hence, individuals throw themselves into their work, not for money, or prestige, or pleasure, but to allay fear. Inner torment replaces external bribery. The need for reassurance becomes internalised. This is the birth of a new kind of rationality. Its root is not reason but unreason. Not calculation, but terror. People do not act rationally because they are enlightened, but because they are haunted. “They aren’t in it for the money, the success, the riches and power, they’re there to allay inner fear.” This fear cannot be soothed by rituals of forgiveness or acts of loyalty. Only consistent, rule-bound behaviour offers the hope of salvation. Even then, predestination means nothing is guaranteed. But the compulsions of work, duty, consistency, these now become spiritual in nature. This, paradoxically, breaks the collective action problem. In most societies, being the first to follow the rules doesn’t pay, it makes you vulnerable. But in this new spiritual economy, the compulsions are internal. No one needs to monitor you. The fear is in you. The voice of society has become your conscience. This allows for unprecedented levels of cooperation, rule-abiding, and productivity. It lays the foundations of what Weber called the “rational capitalist spirit.” It is not pleasure, nor utility, that drives it but a terrified, theory-laden search for reassurance in the face of a silent God. Durkheim’s notion of the sacred has here undergone a total inversion. Where once the sacred was occasional, ecstatic, symbolically rich and spatially defined, it is now universal, sober, abstract, and constant. The whole of life becomes religious but in a new form. Not via symbols but via formal constraints. Ritual solemnity no longer clings to particular practices, but permeates all practice. The sacred becomes procedural. Society is no longer stratified by sacred hierarchies, but unified by abstract norms. Trust becomes cognitive, not affective. Rational planning becomes possible because faith now demands theory, consistency, and duty. One must forsake the world in order to gain it. And thus, irrational torment produces the most rational society in history. vi. Sacred Compulsions and Universal Reason: Weber’s Diagnosis and Gellner’s Defense of Rationality Is this Weberian theory true? No one knows. But if it is, then it answers a deep philosophical worry posed by Descartes and latent in all attempts to ground knowledge in first principles: where do our compulsions come from, and why do we trust them? Descartes thought he had escaped culture by submitting all claims to the court of reason, stripping away everything but what could be known with absolute clarity and distinctness. But Weberian sociology tells another story, one in which Descartes, far from escaping culture, codified a particularly intense and historically contingent one. He systematised a compulsion already socially installed. “He feels compelled to submit ideas to symmetrical treatment.” The Cartesian imperative, to treat all concepts in formally equivalent ways, to distrust partiality and demand clarity, is not a universal birthright of the human soul. It is, in this reading, a product of a particular form of ritual life: one in which inner sobriety replaces outer ecstasy, and symmetry becomes sacred. “Cartesianism now becomes Webero-Durkheimian: nothing other than formal, symmetrical compulsion is authoritative. That is what Pascal could not forgive him”. Pascal, with his intuition of divine mystery, recoiled from Descartes’ cold geometries. But Descartes wasn’t denying the sacred; he was transferring it. The sacred had moved from the heavens to the structure of argument. The commandment was no longer “Believe,” but “Be consistent.” In this view, Descartes did not invent rationality, he gave ritual sanction to a new kind of unreason. “Sobriety is the excitement of the puritan”. The intoxication now came from formal coherence, the ecstasy from abstraction. Durkheim had placed Reason on top of Unreason, showing that all categories, even the most rational, are formed through shared compulsions. But Weber reversed this again: in the heart of modern Reason, he found Unreason. “Durkheim located Reason under savage Unreason: Weber identified Unreason under modern Reason”. Thus, the compulsive categories of modern Cartesian man, which seem detached from any ritual or communal practice, are in fact deeply embedded in a diffuse but potent form of ritual solemnity. They are not tied to a temple or priesthood, but they are no less sacred. The universal, context-free nature of scientific and philosophical propositions, their impersonality, their symmetry, their claim to be valid for all, is not the mark of their purity from culture, but of a particular kind of cultural success: the transformation of religious terror into theoretical addiction. The inner torment that once led the Calvinist to search for signs of election now leads the scientist to seek coherence, the philosopher to fear contradiction. Descartes didn't escape culture, he crystallised it. He formalised the compulsions of a new civilisation. If this is right, if reason is rooted in social custom, then we can ask: is it an illusion? Is it merely a dummy erected by a historically specific order? If so, should we abandon its claims to universality? Gellner refuses this relativist slide. For him, rationality is a historically contingent development, but one whose internal structure allows it to transcend its origins. “Cosmic exile is an illusion,” he writes, but exile from pre-scientific culture is not. We are not aliens in an absurd universe, but we have left behind the worlds of myth, magic, and kin-based truth. We are exiles from them. Reason, for Gellner, is real. It is universalistic, generic, and potentially present in everyone, though often inhibited by custom, authority, or ritual. What distinguishes it is its symmetry: it applies the same standards to all claims, subjects all evidence to the same logic, and acknowledges no privileged knower, no hidden oracle, no sacred text exempt from scrutiny. There are no privileged locations. No person, no institution, no tradition possesses incarnate knowledge. There are no “others” who speak for the divine, no initiated who know what the profane cannot. “All cognitive claims are equal and judged by the same criteria,” Gellner insists, “which in principle can be applied by everyone.” This is not merely a political egalitarianism, but a cognitive one. Rationality demands that every claim be tested, every theory scrutinised, every source questioned. And this demand, once internalised, spreads outward: from symmetry among people to symmetry among concepts, and finally to symmetry among phenomena. The world becomes a single system, governed by the same laws everywhere. What applies to one part must apply to all. There is no place where different rules hold. This is the true revolution of rationality: not its emergence from pure reason, but from compulsions that demand impersonal consistency. Rationality is a system of rules, formal properties, and rituals of justification that emerged from fear and discipline and gradually came to monopolise the space of legitimate thought. And once established, it tolerates no rivals. It is not one language game among others as the late Wittgenstein might argue, rather, it is a system that abolishes language games. It doesn’t appeal to custom, it doesn’t bend to community, and it doesn’t make exceptions. It is, in Gellner’s view, a cold, jealous god: one that offers no comfort, but unrelenting order. And in that, perhaps, it is more religious than any religion. vii. Reason’s Five Rivals: Tradition, Authority, Experience, Emotion, and Trial-and-Error Reason, as Gellner frames it, opposes five rivals: tradition, authority, experience, emotion, and piecemeal trial-and-error. It is not content to share space with them. It seeks to replace them, to submit all truth claims to a single criterion. But this monotheism of method, this insistence that there must be one and only one test for truth, raises its own uncomfortable question: where does this single criterion come from? Can we assume it, simply because it feels inevitable? Wittgenstein didn’t think so. He imagined the world not as a coherent system, but as a patchwork of incommensurable practices, language games with no final rule, no meta-language to adjudicate between them. There is no “single touchstone,” no unifying principle that can legitimate them all. A baker doesn’t need a philosopher to know how to bake; a priest doesn’t need a physicist to know how to pray. Wittgenstein’s late philosophy denies any super-framework, denies even the possibility of one. Rationalism, then, appears not as the culmination of reason, but as one peculiar language game among others, albeit one that has become imperial. Hume too considered such a fragmented world. But unlike Wittgenstein, he recoiled from it. His scepticism was always tethered to an underlying optimism about the uniformity of human nature and the generalisability of empirical method. But even so, Hume never offered a justification for the single criterion. He assumed it, even as he undermined it. This tension remains alive in all post-Enlightenment thought: we act as though the world is structured by one coherent method of inquiry, but we rarely justify the assumption. “It is in this sense,” Gellner writes, “that Rationalism looks as if it might be the offspring of monotheism: a single and exclusive deity led us to the notion of a unique and homogeneous fount of truth. Jealous Jehovah taught mankind the Principle of Excluded Middle. Once deeply internalised, the idea becomes detached from its theological root”. The idea that all truths must be either true or false, that there are no mysteries, no ambivalence, no plural truths, stems not from reason itself but from a particular theological worldview: one God, one Truth, one Law. Rationalism is monotheism in secular dress. And like its theological ancestor, it is jealous. Tradition Its first target is tradition. Rationalism replaces organically grown, multi-layered, culturally embedded structures with single-plan designs. Instead of a slow accretion of local knowledge, it seeks total clarity and abstract justification. Common law, with its layered precedents and case-specific adaptability, is Romantic and traditional; Roman law, codified and systematic, is rational. So too in architecture: Gothic cathedrals reflect time, place, improvisation; Haussmann’s Paris is rationality imposed from above. Rationality prefers grids. Authority Its second target is authority. If you follow a command because someone told you to, this contradicts reason’s core premise: that truth must be seen, not obeyed. Authority often justifies itself as the conduit of unique revelation - God, the State, the Nation, the Prophet. But even tradition is more honest: it doesn't claim to be unique, just old. Authority claims to be both - and its demand to not be questioned is what reason rejects most violently. But here authority begins to collapse under its own weight. As Gellner puts it, authority is self-defeating: “If there’s a reason for following authority, it’s the reason, not the authority, that matters.” And if there isn’t, then it’s coercion. Still, those who speak for authority often resist this logic with passionate bitterness. Cardinal Newman mourned that many harboured “a real antipathy against revealed truth, which it is distressing to think of.” But this is circular: if truth is revealed, it can’t be argued. If it can be argued, it’s not revealed. The same logic torments theologian Barth: “The Judge is the Saviour,” he writes, trying to reconcile justice and mercy. But authority’s ultimate claim is to be beyond argument and in that lies its unreason. Sometimes, this unreason cloaks itself in science. Psychoanalysis once claimed special knowledge of the unconscious, inaccessible to ordinary methods of verification. The more unfalsifiable, the more authoritative. The triangle of rationalism, centralised religious authority, and freelance superstition is unstable. “In the seventeenth century,” Gellner notes, “contrary to the Weberian theory on which we have in the main relied, the wilder forms of superstition were often aligned with the new rationalism. Alliances will no doubt continue to oscillate”. Today, political populism flirts with science-sounding nonsense, post-truth conspiracy, and techno-gnosis alike, proof that authority, rationalism, and superstition may be rivals, but they are also uneasy bedfellows. Experience Reason also opposes experience, or at least the fetish of personal experience. For rationalism, what matters is not whether you saw it, but whether anyone could. This makes it incompatible with the sacred event, the revelation, the miracle. Once again, the sacred cannot be shared, and that which cannot be shared cannot be scrutinised. Trumpism exemplifies this collapse: the appeal to sacred sources disguised as reason. The “I feel it in my gut” becomes political epistemology. Experience becomes untouchable. Rationalism responds: no gut feelings, no visions, no witnesses, just hypotheses and evidence. Therapies, political or psychological, are expelled by rationalism. The philosophers see this tension most clearly. What method should the mind use to seek truth? Clarity and deduction (Descartes)? Or experience and inductive learning (Hume)? The rationalist insists that clarity wins, that the mind can, with enough effort, abstract itself from error. But even this clarity, as we've seen, may be haunted by inherited ritual: sobriety-as-ecstasy, symmetry-as-faith, coherence-as-salvation. Reason, then, does not merely oppose tradition, authority, experience, emotion, and trial-and-error. It replaces them with something structurally theological: a total system, a jealous standard, a single principle of evaluation. But unlike its predecessors, it does not confess its sacredness. It claims only neutrality, impersonality and universal applicability. And in doing so, it hides its origins. Chomsky’s conception of a pre-wired mind - Cartesian in the sense that it exists independently of experience - may explain the source of our mental structures, but it says little about the validity of what those structures produce. Just because we are predisposed to make certain kinds of inferences or generate specific grammatical forms doesn’t mean those inferences or sentences are true. Chomsky’s model helps account for the architecture of cognition, but not its justification. What if our minds are wired to affirm certain ideas, not because they’re true, but because we can't help it? Even if a conclusion is psychologically inescapable for me, that does not make it valid. Cognitive inevitability is not epistemic legitimacy. This confuses, as many frameworks do, the source of an idea with the justification of that idea. Behaviourists make the same error from the other side. They reduce the mind to stimulus-response chains, a pattern of reactions wholly explainable in terms of experience. But empiricism here becomes self-defeating, it begins with experience and ends by theorising, a priori, about how all mental life must emerge from it. Thus, it becomes a metaphysical dogma: the mind must be shaped from the outside. The behaviourist denies pre-wiring to defend the sovereignty of experience, while Chomsky affirms pre-wiring but with no capacity to justify its outcomes. Both fail to distinguish between how we come to believe something and why we ought to. So we are left with the fundamental question: what validates a cognitive claim? Do facts validate reasoning, or does the cogency of the reasoning itself do the validating? In either case, the answer lies not in the source, not in experience, tradition, emotion, or divine decree, but in a structure of argument that no person or authority can finally possess. No individual, no sacred text, no institution can claim the role of terminal authority. As Popper insists, science is not a source of final truth but only a mechanism for eliminating falsity. We edge closer to truth not by discovering it directly, but by discarding error. This asymmetry leaves us in a world without oracles. "Corrupt judges are useless", and experience, Wilde quipped, is just “the name people give to their mistakes.” But can experience be purified, abstracted enough, to perform this eliminative function? Or is it too contaminated by our desires, our priors, our symbols? What appears to be "evidence" is never raw, it is always interpreted. The judge, to borrow Gellner’s phrase again, cannot be clean. In such a system, Reason has to act without guarantee: it investigates, eliminates, revises, but never settles. This is clearest in the uneasy relation between Reason and Emotion. Romanticism treated this division with suspicion, seeking to reintegrate feeling into truth-seeking and moral life. Emotion seemed appropriate to life’s deeper decisions. “Reason is appropriate in finance,” Gellner writes, “but less so in the choice of marriage partner”. Yet this neat dichotomy collapses. People rationalise their feelings and emotionalise their reasoning. Descartes tried to keep them separate seeing thinking as a cool substance and feeling as disruptive whilst Spinoza attempted a synthesis, crafting a rational ethics that would bring the soul into alignment with the order of the universe. But this sage-like life of fulfilment-through-reason remains more fantasy than method. Hume and Kant, though often seen as opposing figures, both exposed the limits of this rational project, albeit differently. For Hume, feelings were not irrational but non-rational, they were “existences” in us, autonomous, not subject to logical derivation. We can observe our preferences, but we cannot reason our way to them. Calm passions might appear rational, but they are simply less noisy feelings. Reason can’t tell us what we prefer, it only tells us how to pursue it. Thus, for Hume, morality begins with affect: with the felt experience of pain and pleasure, not with deduction. Utilitarianism grew from this soil: it locates value in feelings, not ideas, and seeks to optimise them. Rationality plays an instrumental role of selecting means, not ends. Kant, in contrast, viewed sensations as contingent and unstable, incapable of grounding moral law. Feelings come and go; they are accidental, even shameful. “You might as well identify with your National Insurance Number”, Gellner quips, mocking the arbitrariness Kant saw in basing identity on emotion. For Kant, morality comes from reason because only reason is impersonal and universal. The self isn’t a bundle of passions; it is a form, structured by laws it gives itself. Kantian identity is fastidious and aloof, a product of purification, not personality. Like a customs union without a home, the Kantian soul is nowhere in particular. We are visitors to nature, not participants in it. In both Kant and Durkheim, the legitimacy of knowledge and the formation of a valid self are entwined. But if reason detaches us from culture, example, and organic belonging, what does it provide in return? The rational world is one of suspended certainty, endless revision, unstable roles. In a society governed by reason, there are no inherited statuses, no obvious scripts. Each individual must navigate without a map, their identity unanchored, their moral standing unconfirmed. Emotion The world is cognitively fluid, impersonal, and cold. The reason-emotion debate took on new life after Darwin, when nature herself became a source of authority and a more forgiving one than Kant’s disembodied Reason. The lower faculties of instinct, drive, libido acquired new prestige. Nietzsche and Freud emerged not as post-Romantics, but as Darwinised moralists, turning from reason toward energy, will, and repression. They abandoned the idiom of cool reflection and law-bound autonomy in favour of buried forces, dynamic tensions, and dark economies of the self. Freud, with his instinctual drives, and Nietzsche, as his more powerful philosophical precursor, both suggest that the architecture of the mind is not a rational system, but a battlefield. In this world, the rational ego becomes a manager of chaos, not a sovereign legislator. The dream of moral self-grounding through Reason recedes. We become interpreters, not authors, of ourselves. And if this is the case, if truth, value, and selfhood are not derivable from one single rational method, then rationalism itself begins to look less like the culmination of intellectual history, and more like one myth among others: a final relic of monotheism, haunted by its dead god. Trial and Reason Reason stands opposed not only to tradition, authority, experience, and emotion, but also to the humble, adaptive processes of piecemeal trial and error. In this confrontation, Reason is system and method - deliberate, coherent, seeking unity - while trial-and-error is spontaneous, partial, reactive, shaped by circumstance and contingency. The latter evolves, the former designs. Where Reason aspires to structure and generality, trial-and-error learns from mishap, improvises, and forgets. American pragmatism – for example Pierce, Dewey, James, Quine - attempted to valorise the piecemeal approach without regressing into tradition. It looked like empiricism, but with an American twist, flexible, forward-looking, self-correcting. “It commends opportunism with an American face”, Gellner notes, capturing both its democratic optimism and its shallow utilitarianism. There is no final method, only what works now. Inquiry becomes a permanent experiment, answers provisional. Truth is what survives, not what corresponds. Yet this pragmatism, however adaptive, still smuggles in Reason: it watches, selects, reflects, keeps a ledger of its failures. Even in its messiest form, it cannot help but observe itself. Gellner offers a sketch of Reason not as a person or an ideology, but as a kind of impersonal moral figure. She is generic in her procedures, systematic, and self-disciplined. Her demands are painful and seldom rewarded. She does not speak of values, as Hume reminded us, remaining silent where others proclaim. Her validity comes not from a set of prior truths, but from the style of her operations. She is self-justifying, but not arbitrary - what she does could be otherwise, but isn’t, because only this path preserves consistency, transparency, and impartiality. She is symmetrical in her dealings. She offers the same judgment to all who pose the same question, no matter who they are. She recognises no priesthood, no caste, no entitlement by status or lineage. She does not confer truth by decree, but by procedure. Her even-handedness is not tolerance but discipline. Her independence from personal interest, social embeddedness, or historical contingency marks her as transcendent, but not in the religious sense. Rather, she is untethered. She does not belong to any organism, biological or social, within which she might happen to operate. Her functioning is not reducible to her context. Because of this, Reason threatens every personal hierarchy. If all must argue and none may pronounce, then no one may rule by fiat. The moment reason enters, the spell of sacred persons breaks. And yet, this same universality can seem cold, inhuman, detached. Reason does not confer belonging. It levels. It excludes particularity. It offers no home, only rules. No heritage, only equality. The noble ideal of symmetrical availability can seem, in practice, like exile. We are recognised only when we are no one in particular. Reason, in this sense, resembles the state in its modern form being abstract, impersonal and normative. It doesn’t love you. It doesn’t need to. viii. Cunning Enemies: Hegel, Marx The enemies of Reason are not always dogmatic priests, irrational mobs, or occult mystics. Sometimes they are quiet, ordinary and mundane. The very tools and systems Reason creates to clarify the world - concepts, disciplines, ideologies - eventually begin to obscure or even exclude it. From Descartes’s luminous clarity to Weber’s rational bureaucracy to Kant’s moral law, Reason was once cast as the calm arbiter of truth, detached from emotion, tradition, and authority. But there were always wilder shores beyond this cool lucidity. Hegel responded to Kant’s tidy world by dragging Reason into the hurly-burly of history. For Hegel, Reason isn’t a static mirror for truth but a historical force, a protagonist in the drama of time. It grows, develops, suffers, contradicts itself, becomes alienated and reconciled. Order, for Hegel, is the self made rational; disorder is the alien intrusion that threatens our self-possession. The mind-body problem is rewritten as the dialectic: how the rational self interacts with the sensuous natural self across the ages. In this movement, rationality itself becomes the secret of history. The world becomes a theodicy of impersonal Reason, guiding human life through culture, error, conflict, and reconciliation toward the eventual fulfilment of Spirit. “The real is the rational,” Hegel declares in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1837). This historical cunning mimics Adam Smith’s invisible hand: the private aims of individuals unknowingly fulfil a greater, rational design. Even culture, once a source of distortion for Descartes, is here transformed into an instrument of Spirit, the medium through which error is transmuted into wisdom. In Hegel’s schema, every setback is a prelude to synthesis, every contradiction the seed of a higher unity. The implications are grand: meaning is real, history has a telos, and rationality redeems it. Marx and Engels refused to grant Spirit such primacy. In The German Ideology, they posed the decisive counter-question: is history driven by metaphysical Reason, or by material needs and human activity? Their answer was blunt - materialism. Human life is shaped by work, by production, by the satisfaction of needs. Ideas are not autonomous spirits floating above history but the ideological foam produced by its economic surf. But in asserting this, Marx also narrowed the horizon. He assumed, somewhat hastily, that economics dominates all. Coercion, however, is not always reducible to economic relations. The state, ideology, war, and law all exert autonomous force. Marx, despite railing against idealism, developed his own kind: one in which the proletariat carries the eschatological burden once shouldered by Reason itself. This synthesis - bourgeois rationality blended with Hegelian teleology - was both compelling and flawed. It lacked the luminous clarity and impartial discipline of earlier Reason. Its rationality was historically contingent, infused with mysticism, and at times opaque. It absolutised a particular process within history and elevated it to the status of a universal principle. In doing so, it became a deviant form of Reason, no longer procedural and impartial, but historical, goal-oriented, and self-justifying. Still, this Cunning of Reason must be understood in relation to what Gellner calls Sovereignty of Reason Reason, a version that is tidy, even-handed, transcendent, and not embedded in the very history it seeks to explain. Kant, by contrast, offered no such theodicy. His dualism between Reason and Nature echoed Descartes’ cosmic exile. Reason can know only what is tidy, formalisable, categorisable. Thus, Nature, to be known by Reason, must be tidied and arranged into a system, bureaucratically organised, “no facts escape a shared order”. But in doing this, Reason builds a world that has no place for itself. In this world-machine, everything is mechanism: input, output, law-bound motion. There is no room for autonomous beings who freely conceive and obey laws and no room for morality, for identity, for the person. “It has room for mechanisms which obey natural laws: it has no room at all for beings which autonomously conceive laws, natural and moral, and which freely and rationally choose to conform to the latter”. Reason, in Kant’s vision, is extra-territorial: it belongs neither to Nature nor to experience. It bears our identity and gives us our values, yet it lives in exile from the world it helps to construct. We cannot know it directly, only infer its presence through the fruits of its labour. The paradox is sharp and painful: “Reason is self-devouring, because it engenders a world in which there is no room for itself”. The mundane enemy of Reason is thus not fanaticism, but the very system that results when Reason’s methods are too faithfully applied. In tidying the world, Reason expels itself. This, finally, is the tragedy: Reason, untethered from tradition, unanchored by authority, unmotivated by feeling, unable to dwell in experience, and hostile to piecemeal improvisation, constructs for itself a kingdom of logic where it can no longer live and remains in a cosmic exile of its own making. ix. Naturalism: Nietzsche, Freud Hegel tried to close the gap that Descartes and Kant left yawning, between Reason and Nature, by claiming that Reason itself grows into Nature, that the divide is historical, not ontological. Spirit becomes flesh, gradually, dialectically. But Schopenhauer abandoned even the attempt. His rejection was starker and deeper. In The World as Will and Idea, he declared all willing to be bad. Will, for him, was not moral agency or rational striving, it was the brute metaphysical substrate of life itself. Action was an expression of this blind force, and therefore inherently corrupt. Morality meant inaction. The good life became a life of passive contemplation: aesthetic, detached, almost inert. Here, Schopenhauer fused Buddhist renunciation with Platonic valuation of contemplation over action, filtered through the lens of 19th-century aestheticism. Salvation was no longer ethical striving or rational clarity, it was more like admiring a beautiful object. “As spectator, the collection-owner fuses with the sage”. This wasn’t simply epistemic retreat, it was moral inner emigration. Pessimism replaced progress. The good became not improvement of the world but flight from pain. Knowledge was no longer an ambition, it became irrelevant in the face of a metaphysics that made striving pointless. For Schopenhauer, Nature is causal, biological, proto-Darwinian and driven by a metaphysical Will that’s brutal, voracious, insatiable. It wants, consumes, exhausts, then begins again. A Will that never rests, never ceases and that knows no peace or pleasure. “There is only the mathematical, extensionless boundary between as yet unsatisfied, hungry, unfulfilled, tormented craving, and weary, depressed, satiated exhaustion. He altogether seems to ignore temporally extended pleasures, such as lying in a hot bath”. In place of Hegel’s cunning machinery, Schopenhauer offered the raw mechanics of lust. But if Will is forever thwarted, it must eventually turn on itself. Nietzsche agreed, but inverted the judgment. If this is what Nature is, why call it bad? Why denounce it? In whose name? Nietzsche's brilliance lay in showing that even the ascetic moralist, even Schopenhauer himself, is merely Will in disguise, Will playing tricks on itself. Ascetic morality is not the defeat of lust, but its mutation. The priest is a seducer of the soul, and guilt is just another pleasure, more cunning than carnality. This vision blew apart the old Platonic hierarchy of higher and lower, reason and appetite. All of it is Will, Nietzsche insisted. The priest and the pornographer serve the same master. It was a message that rang true and had great psychological depth. Nietzsche stood Schopenhauer on his head, just as Marx stood Hegel on his. But even as he celebrated the Will, he could not avoid a covert valuation. He preferred lions to foxes, strength to cunning, boldness to trickery. But on what grounds? If everything is just Nature, if Will is all, there is no vantage point left from which to declare one mode of Will superior to another. Why is devious cunning less admirable than open violence? Nietzsche’s answer was aesthetic: cunning is ugly, it leads to decadence and decline. But this is a cheat. Aesthetic fastidiousness carries no more justification than the moral strictures it seeks to replace. It is simply another taste, one no more grounded in reason than the rest. Freud took this whole edifice and naturalised it in medical, bourgeoise, scientific terms. He took the Will and its system of unconscious drives and gave it rituals, techniques, practitioners. Freud lacked the philosophical coherence of Kant or the Dionysian grandeur and philosophical depth of Nietzsche. Yet he disseminated these ideas with astonishing effectiveness. Sexuality became the vehicle, the hidden engine of identity. But he didn’t see how deeply these ideas undermined rational values. Why repress or redirect the drives? In the name of what? Reason? But Reason, too, was now just another cunning disguise of the Will. If identity lies not in Reason, not in alignment with historical destiny, not in aesthetic contemplation or Stoic/Buddhist self-control, nor even in antinomian indulgence, then it lies somewhere else, somewhere indeterminate, private and unfixable. No Cartesian certainty, no Kantian consistency, no utilitarian calculation can deliver personal truth. Even Spinozan, Stoic or Buddhist serenity through rational self-acceptance is ruled out. The Unconscious devalues autonomy altogether. Inner convictions may be nothing but cunning instincts. The self becomes unknowable, not because it is too complex, but because the means we use to know it - reason, evidence, morality - are now suspect. They too may be forms of deception. In Freud’s therapeutic procedure, there is no public tribunal, no rational appeal. There is only the judgment of the Practitioner. And this, paradoxically, mirrors the ancient mystery cults. “In the therapeutic procedure, the sustained inversion of all the canons of Protestant-Cartesian rationality - orderliness, restraint-marks and highlights the special condition, just as heightened formality and/or sartorial abandon had done in the more collective rituals of earlier mysteries”. Rationality is no longer the guide, but the barrier. Therapy is not a science, but a rite. And so the long arc that began with lucid, systematic Reason - symmetrical, impartial, independent - curves back upon itself in ritual, in psychology, in myth. The old enemies of Reason were fanatics and tyrants. But its new enemies are gentler and more intimate: curators, collectors, therapists, and sages. They do not burn books; they explain them away. They do not assault Reason; they dissolve it from within, through empathy, through irony, through suspicion. And so Reason, having purged the world of mystery, finds herself excluded from the world she made. In the name of freedom, feeling, therapy and identity, Reason is retired - not slain, but gently, politely set aside. Freud’s revolution represents not simply a content-shift in self-image, from rational agent or moral subject to a nexus of instinctual drives, but also a methodological inversion of Enlightenment norms. The self is no longer accessed through introspective rational clarity, nor through Spinozist acquiescence to necessity, but through confessional speech filtered by a licensed practitioner. “In the therapeutic procedure,” as Gellner notes, “the sustained inversion of all the canons of Protestant-Cartesian rationality, orderliness, restraint, marks and highlights the special condition, just as heightened formality and/or sartorial abandon had done in the more collective rituals of earlier mysteries.” What has emerged is a new pastoralism, a secular therapeutic culture grounded in appeals to authority that are no longer theological or epistemic, but affective and institutional. The Freudian unconscious is a kind of universal cognitive original sin, an always-present, hidden force that disrupts rational self-certainty. The key is not whether the self can know itself, but whether it can trust its inner convictions, convictions now always already suspect as disguised expressions of deeper, unconscious compulsions. The implication is devastating: “Nothing can tell her whether an inner conviction isn’t cunning Will. Only a Practitioner can tell her and there is no appeal against the verdict.” The role of reason, under this schema, is not to adjudicate but to submit and to surrender to the interpretive monopoly of the therapeutic guild. Freud thereby stands at the culmination of the naturalisation of man. As Gellner puts it: “Freud does indeed stand … at the culmination of the progression which established the naturalisation of man, the definitive inclusion of man in Nature, and the refusal to grant him extra-territorial status.” A moralistic world is retained which is saturated with therapeutic meaning, coded in layers, and promising salvation through revelation, but the guarantor of legitimacy has shifted from God or Reason to Nature. “A cosy, morally saturated, cognitively hierarchical, salvation-promising world is constructed; but its cognitively privileged realm, this time, seems to be provided by nature.” Freud’s irrationalism has a dual structure: content and method. In terms of content, the moral agent is displaced by a being of instinctual needs, whose fulfilment lies not in rational duty or utilitarian calculus, but in emotionally intense, libidinally charged relations. In terms of method, Freudian free association dismantles rational convictions through the active suspension of belief, creating a chaotic textuality decipherable only by the initiated interpreter. As in Marx, sovereignty is restored not in heaven but in the world: for Marx, in the class structure of history; for Freud, in the Unconscious. But where Marx retained a progressive teleology, Freud retreats into diagnostic pastoralism. No politics of emancipation emerges, only therapeutic mastery. That therapeutic mastery also comes with a political valence. While the liberal intelligentsia adopted Freud in the name of permissive moral liberalism, loosely arguing that if repression is bad, then all repression should be removed, this vulgar Freudianism missed the mark. Freud never argued that instinctual drives could or should be entirely liberated. The deeper truth of Freudianism, as Nietzsche grasped before him, is that these drives are cunning, protean, and self-deceiving. They don’t simply need unleashing, they require interpretation. But the fact that interpretation requires institutional gatekeeping (and yields no external test for validity) makes the whole enterprise deeply anti-Cartesian, anti-Enlightenment, and in its own way, authoritarian. This pastoral, therapeutic irrationalism has slowly come to replace the older rationalist vision. Its core authority is no longer found in Reason or divine order but in instinct, feeling, and intimate interpersonal relations. This tradition, deeply shaped by Freudian thought, is irrational not just in what it teaches (its content), but also in how it operates (its method). The Freudian shift transforms the self-image: we are no longer rational calculators or lovers of noble, abstract ideals. We are bundles of instinctual needs, governed by unconscious drives and haunted by repressions. Satisfaction now lies not in virtue, reason, or equality, but in the successful management, or strategic sublimation, of our lusts and attachments within tightly-knit affective groups. All the old masks are stripped away. Cunning ascetic codes, priestly disciplines, Enlightenment ideals are now all reimagined as instruments of repression, mystifications of our base impulses. Rationality becomes yet another disguise of the libido, one more elaborate system of denial. Cold Reason can no longer save us because, in this view, there is no rational self to be saved. As Gellner puts it: “Lusts and relations are everything”. And yet the irony is profound. This surrender to the primacy of instinct does not deliver peace or pleasure. It simply renders politics, justice, and even freedom incapable of satisfying us. Egalitarian participation cannot quench these deep, ceaseless appetites. Nor can the liberal promise of wealth and gratification. Desire leaks through every structure. Rationalist political ideologies, both left and right, are quietly, fatally undermined. And so, a certain vision of the Right begins to reassert itself, not the classical liberal or free-market Right, but something far older and more visceral: Romantic, illiberal, hierarchical, authoritarian, emotive, violent, and ritualistic. This Right meets the new Freudian picture of the self more honestly than the rationalist left ever could. It draws not on the clinical tameness of Freud, but bends Nietzsche's naturalistic moral psychology into a wild, Dionysian metaphysics of power and domination. Freud may have naturalised the unconscious, but this distorted Nietzscheanism glorified it. This idiom is poetic, not medical. The appeal is not to the therapist, but to the warrior-priest. Liberal intellectuals, however, often take up Freud with a superficial moral permissiveness. If repression causes neurosis, then liberation must be the cure: remove all repressions. That becomes the crude syllogism. But Freud never argued this. He saw repression as necessary, even inevitable. Civilisation, for him, was precisely the work of repression. The problem wasn’t the presence of restraint, it was the hypocrisy and invisibility of it. Freud’s project was not emancipation, but unmasking. And the unmasking is methodologically radical. Freudian method suspends all previous beliefs and replaces them with free association, a stream of unfiltered, uncontrolled utterance, deliberately designed to devalue and delegitimate all prior convictions. The process is not logical, not empirical, not falsifiable. It is hermeneutic and confessional. Just as Marx replaced transcendental Reason with the historical unfolding of class interest, so Freud replaced reason with the unfolding of the unconscious. Sovereignty is no longer exiled, but returns lodged now in the hidden depths of the psyche. Gellner notes that “[t]he Unconscious is like universal cognitive original sin.” We are not just irrational; we are structured by our irrationality, and its source is metaphysical, not simply psychological. For humans now fully naturalised there is no transcendence, no rational soul beyond the world. We are fully inside it, and its laws are not noble, but cunning, carnal, deceitful. Nature, having absorbed man, now devours Reason. Darwin had already begun this process. His unification of the biological world abolished the old ontological divides. Nature became seamless. And yet, Reason always imagined itself as standing apart as an exception. Nature, however, allows no exceptions. Reason becomes, therefore, a fraud, a part of Nature masquerading as its judge. The naturalisation of Reason turns out to be the annihilation of its claims. Some theorists still attempt to salvage Reason through pre-established harmony or through pragmatism. Hegel offered one route: a dialectic in which Reason and Nature were stages in a developmental whole. x. The Suicide of Reason: Quine, Popper, Feyerabend, Khun But others, like the American Pragmatist and logician Quine, pursued a more pragmatic reconciliation. For pragmatists, there is no cosmic exile. Reason is simply a function of evolved cognition. We need not distrust our cultural inheritance. In From a Logical Point of View (1953) and Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (1969), Quine offers a very American kind of optimism. There is no tragedy in our absorption into Nature. Knowledge and Nature were made for each other. Important truths are simply there, waiting to be discovered “in this happy period”. This is the contrast: Freudian naturalisation vs. Quinean naturalisation. Freud is a siege mentality rationalist. He suspects Reason. He treats it as a neurotic symptom. Quine is a providentialist. He believes Reason is at home in Nature. “Reason is the pawn of Nature, but Nature is so arranged that our Reason tells us the truth about Nature”. Both positions are naturalist, but they offer different answers to the same question: is there a cosmic guarantee for our commitment to Reason? The siege mentality answer is No - Reason is an illusion or a self-deception. The providentialist answer is Yes - Nature has arranged itself so that Reason can perceive its order. The trouble is that if Nature is all, then legitimacy must be ceded to it. And if Nature is fundamentally irrational, driven by lust, power, chance, and compulsion, then irrationalism is more at home in it than Reason. This is the dangerous pivot. The old Enlightenment dualism of Nature and Reason, body and mind, fact and value crumbles. What remains is either a flattened pragmatism (in Quine) or a naturalistic irrationalism (in Freud and Nietzsche). In both cases, Reason loses its throne. It becomes local, historical, contingent. In one, it becomes humble and domestic; in the other, it becomes neurotic and doomed. But in either case, the Enlightenment dream is over. The appeals to authority now come not from Reason, nor even from God, but from Nature, recast as the source of all drives, all meanings, all norms. And Nature does not argue. It whispers, hungers, deceives. The suicide of reason proceeds not only through absorption into nature, but through a more direct and devastating route: the impotence of reason to fulfil its own promises. This form of irrationalism arises not from metaphysical commitments to instinct or naturalism, but from within the performance of reason itself, its inability to deliver what it claims. This is the impotence argument: that the tools of reason, logic, mathematics, inference, verification, are insufficient or self-defeating. They collapse from within, and in doing so, drag down with them the structures of science, philosophy, and objective knowledge. There are many versions of this argument. Some point to the fragmentary nature of data. We simply do not possess enough secure information to warrant confident inferences. Others point to the formal limitations of mathematics and logic themselves, where incompleteness theorems and undecidability have rendered the foundational aspirations of logicist and formalist projects permanently inadequate. Gödel, Turing, and others showed that the dream of a fully self-justifying rational system was impossible. In the philosophy of science, this crisis becomes even more explicit. Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959) tries to retain a Cartesian rationalism through the principle of falsifiability. Scientific theories cannot be confirmed, only refuted. But even this negative method turns out to be undermined. The problem lies in the role of empirical data. Data are never neutral; they are theory-laden, situated and contestable. What counts as a falsifier is often vague or disputed. And this leads Popper, unwittingly, into irrationalist territory. As Gellner notes, “whilst he succeeds in securing this for a ‘pure’ science, purified in accordance with his recipe, he does at the same time actually highlight the irrationality of our faith in the very extensive and important practical application of science, normally treated as an integral part of science”. That is, Popper secures the purity of science only by separating it from the real-world institutions and expectations of science and consigning those to irrational belief. The very idea of a "fact" begins to fracture. Facts are not innocent. They are always “theory-saturated.” No single fact can definitively falsify a theory, because the fact itself is understood within a theoretical frame. Thus, even Popper’s vision begins to dissolve. Lakatos tries to rescue some rational structure by proposing “research programmes”, bundles of theories, heuristics, and protective belts, but even he must admit this is a rough and flexible model, not a rigid methodology. As Gellner remarks, “It is difficult … to see it as anything other than near-abandonment of the attempt at providing science with a rational base”. Feyerabend takes this further. In Against Method (1975), he famously declares that “anything goes.” Science, for him, is not governed by a universal method but by an anarchic proliferation of ideas, tools, and tactics. Rationality, as a single standard, collapses. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn does not just describe the progress of science as cumulative. He reframes it entirely. Science, he argues, proceeds through paradigm shifts, periods of normal science governed by a shared conceptual framework, punctuated by crises that lead to revolutionary changes in that framework. Paradigms are not cumulative; they are incommensurable. The shift from one to another is not guided by shared rational standards, because the standards themselves change. Scientific truth, then, becomes historically situated, embedded in linguistic and institutional paradigms that cannot be judged from outside. Kuhn insists that later paradigms are “better” than earlier ones, but his theory offers no basis for this judgment. Improvement becomes a gesture of faith, not a rational conclusion. This is not a local or technical problem. It cuts across all domains of human inquiry. Collingwood, in An Autobiography (1939), makes a similar claim in a different idiom. Cultures, he argues, are self-sustaining and incommensurable. Each is embedded in its own presuppositions. One cannot step outside culture to assess it objectively, because the act of questioning is itself culturally determined. This is a parallel form of irrationalism: not that reason is absorbed into instinct or biology, but that it is trapped in linguistic, historical, or cultural worlds that render all standards local and provisional. Whether through Freud's suspicion of Reason, Kuhn’s shifting paradigms, or Popper’s internal collapse, the result is the same: the Enlightenment model of autonomous, self-justifying reason dissolves. We are left with competing authorities - nature, instinct, culture, paradigm - none of which can be validated from a neutral standpoint. The suicide of reason is not a single event, but a gradual self-disassembly. Reason turns on itself, reveals its internal contradictions, and exits the stage. What remains are the fragments: therapeutic instincts, naturalised selves, shifting scientific regimes, and cultural enclaves. Each has its own logic. None can claim universal authority. And so the modern world, deprived of Reason’s sovereignty, must improvise its legitimacy elsewhere through charisma, aesthetics, affect, or power. xi. Language: Wittgenstein and Chomsky Another blow to the sovereignty of reason comes not from biology, psychology, or the history of science, but from language itself. The Wittgensteinian revolution, particularly in its late phase, undermines the liberal dream of transparent communication and rational discourse by reasserting the primacy of communal forms of life. In Philosophical Investigations, language is no longer a logical scaffolding onto which the world is mapped (as it was in the Tractatus) but a set of overlapping, ritualised practices embedded in specific cultural contexts. The world we live in is not one of gesellschaft , an abstract society of rational contracts and rule-governed communication, but rather of gemeinschaft , of closed, status-bound communities where meaning is inherited, not reasoned. “As an account of the languages of primitive man, prior to literacy, or the emergence of an elaborate division of labour, or of doctrinal theology and conceptual centralisation,” writes Gellner, “this is not at all bad, though this is not how it was presented; so, without intending it, Wittgenstein had turned himself into quite a good theoretical anthropologist”. That is, the later Wittgenstein inadvertently becomes a chronicler of closed, traditional societies, whose rules cannot be rationally justified but only followed. Forms of life, for Wittgenstein, are given. They can be described, perhaps compared, but not justified. The very notion of rational justification presupposes a standpoint outside the form of life, which is precisely what cannot be obtained. The idea that one could appeal to neutral criteria of truth or correctness collapses. Language games are sovereign; their internal rules are absolute for those who play them. Competing systems of meaning are, in the strictest sense, incommensurable. There is no meta-language that can mediate between them. Thus, the Wittgensteinian move is not merely descriptive; it is epistemologically devastating. It dissolves the liberal hope for consensus through reasoned discourse. We inhabit communities of sense, not neutral arenas of truth. The similarity to American Pragmatism, particularly in the form expressed by Richard Rorty, has not been lost on contemporary philosophers and he is increasingly being seen as the European cousin of that particular tradition. This tradition runs parallel and in tension with Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics. Whereas Wittgenstein points to the external social embeddedness of meaning, Chomsky highlights the internal, mental architecture that makes language possible at all. His work reveals that languages, despite surface differences, share deep structural properties, and that these rules are largely unconscious. “Languages are disciplined and rule-bound,” Gellner summarises, “and rules are unknown to users. Language has reasons the mind doesn’t know.” Like Durkheim’s observation that the categories of society are imposed upon individuals without their consent or awareness, Chomsky’s linguistics identifies a compulsiveness at the heart of cognition. We obey the imperatives of grammar without knowing we are doing so. Syntax is not learned inductively; it is triggered by exposure. It emerges from a pre-programmed structure of the mind. And this, in turn, suggests a kind of irrationalism: if the rules that govern language, and hence thought, are opaque to us, then the transparency of reason is a myth. We do not speak language; language speaks us. Gellner captures this with reference to Georg Lichtenberg’s formulation: not “I think,” but “it thinks.” The Cartesian ego is displaced. There is no sovereign self scrutinising its thoughts; there is only a system processing symbols through rules it cannot inspect. Language is “not just a ritual, but a ritual which makes a modular use of limited equipment, so as to produce an infinity of articulable and intelligible assertions”. But the capacity for infinite articulation is precisely what undermines the rationalist ideal. If thought is structured by unknowable and perhaps irrational constraints, then reason itself is no longer self-legitimating. Cartesian clarity vanishes into the black box of mental architecture. Chomsky’s pre-wiring puts limits on our thoughts not only in terms of structure but also in terms of intelligibility. The deep irrationalist implication here is that we are in the grip of a machinery we neither control nor fully comprehend. What appears to be rational discourse may only be the surface play of deeper, unconscious constraints. We can generate endlessly new thoughts, but we cannot step outside the system that generates them. Confronted with the Chomskyan revolution, the Cartesian ideal of thought asserting the luminous clarity of ideas deduced from first principles evaporates. In its place is a mind driven by unknown rules, a language running through us, a thought that no longer belongs to the thinker. This convergence of Wittgenstein and Chomsky completes the portrait of modern irrationalism. Whether in the historical succession of paradigms, the unconscious drives of Freud, the limitations of scientific method, or the structural compulsions of language, the Enlightenment model of reason is eroded from every angle. What began as a critique of metaphysics becomes a decentering of the subject itself. We are no longer rational agents evaluating the world from a secure position. We are inhabitants of language games, products of instinct, nodes in puppets of causality, networks of paradigms. There is no neutral ground, no Archimedean point, no cosmic guarantee underwriting our faith in reason. Whether absorbed into nature or fragmented by its own tools, reason no longer rules. And so we return, ironically, to the realm of myth, ritual, and community but now disenchanted, reflexive, and haunted by the dream of a rational order that never was. Reason Abandoned Julien Benda’s La Trahison des clercs (1927) stands as a poignant indictment of modern intellectuals who abandoned the timeless pursuit of truth in favour of transient, local commitments. He laments the “collective treason” of the clerisy, those once detached thinkers who, instead of remaining universal, transcending ethnicity and class, succumbed to the pull of factional identities and partisan passions. Originally, clerics were imagined as free spirits, dedicated solely to eternal verities, unencumbered by mundane attachments. But with the rise of nationalism, class struggle, and ideological fervour in the 19th and 20th centuries, this ideal dissolved. Marxists, pragmatists, Nietzscheans, and existentialists alike substituted identity and commitment for verifiable truth, because proof no longer seemed attainable. Instead of objective grounds for belief, what held sway were the urgencies of identity, belonging, and passion. Yet Benda’s own defence of reason is undercut by his failure to grasp why irrationalism flourished. The intellectuals he castigates were not cynics or charlatans but often anguished rationalists who confronted the collapse of classical certainties honestly and earnestly. As Gellner reflects, “They were sensitive to the rational argument that no other truth is ever genuine, and mundane bondage is the only kind of truth available to us. It is the only kind which gives us real satisfaction, which corresponds to nature”. This acknowledgment, that truth is always embedded in, and limited by, the conditions of lived reality and social identity, is a key insight that Benda misses. The turn to irrationalism is not mere folly or betrayal but a tragic consequence of the suicide of reason itself, a phenomenon “announced and preached by people who were, by temperament, honest thinkers”. Nietzsche, often invoked as a precursor or architect of modern irrationalism, pursued his critique of reason with a rigour and sincerity that cannot be dismissed as mere reaction, camouflage or bad faith. Benda’s defence of reason rests not on an intrinsic or philosophical justification but on its practical advantages, its utility as a tool for social progress, peace, or stability. This pragmatic stance, while understandable, offers no rational grounding for reason’s claim to supremacy. It is a defensive posture rather than a positive epistemology, one that begs the question: why privilege reason at all if it cannot guarantee truth beyond contingent interests? In this sense, Benda’s book betrays itself, articulating a pro-reason stance that ultimately fails to confront the deeper dilemmas modern thought faces. Thus, the landscape of modern intellectual life is marked by a tragic paradox. On the one hand, reason remains the ideal, the beacon of enlightenment and universalism. On the other, the very conditions of modern existence, historical, social, psychological, render reason impotent or compromised. The intellectual’s predicament is no longer one of ignorance or superstition, but of confrontation with the limits of rationality itself. The legacy of thinkers like Freud, Kuhn, Wittgenstein, and Chomsky has been to show that reason is embedded in frameworks and unconscious structures beyond transparent control, that scientific method is provisional and paradigm-bound, and that language itself is a social ritual rather than a pure medium of truth. Reason’s suicide is thus not a simple fall from grace but a profound crisis at the heart of modernity, where the aspiration to universal truth collapses into the fragmentation of identity and the tyranny of situatedness. In this light, the “betrayal” of the clercs is less a moral failure and more an existential condition. They are heirs to a rational tradition whose premises no longer hold unchallenged. Their shift to local commitments, partisan causes, and passionate identifications is a response to the emptiness left by the death of universal reason. They trade proof for identity because proof is no longer available; they anchor themselves in communal realities because the rational foundations of truth have dissolved. This is not mere abandonment but adaptation, even if it appears as a descent into irrationalism. The crisis is not only epistemological but also ethical and political: how are we to live and act meaningfully when reason no longer commands allegiance? The answer remains contested, but what is clear is that the suicide of reason is not the triumph of irrationality, but its anguished companion, the shadow cast by reason’s own limitations and failures. The landscape of irrationalism reveals itself as a complex constellation of challenges to the classical ideal of universal, sovereign reason. Popper and Feyerabend highlight the problem that competing theories remain empirically underdetermined, making no rational method available to decisively adjudicate between them. The regress argument shows that foundational premises themselves escape rational justification, leaving reason caught in an infinite loop. Collingwood and Kuhn emphasise that paradigms, self-contained and incommensurable, cannot be governed by any single, overarching rational principle. The insights of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud expose the dark recesses of the mind, where unconscious forces undermine rational clarity and trustworthiness in conduct. Hume’s sceptical demonstration that no rational validation exists for aims or values leaves passions as arbitrary, opaque, and potentially devious drivers of human behaviour. Wittgenstein dismantles the notion of a universal framework of conduct, revealing a plurality of “forms of life” where universal rationality dissolves. Chomsky and the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis show how language and thought are structured by rules beyond conscious knowledge or control, further fracturing the claim to transparent rationality. The Quine/Duhem problem complicates the empirical test of theories by interconnecting hypotheses so tightly that a failure can never clearly identify which part is to blame, adding further uncertainty. The holistic and romantic vision of society articulated by thinkers like Oakeshott insists on immersion in particular social contexts, rejecting any universal, trans-social standpoint. Rapid societal change only compounds this difficulty, making it impossible to isolate units for rational evaluation or to “learn from experience” in any straightforward way. Finally, notions of value incommensurability challenges the possibility of rational policy altogether, since competing values may resist any common metric or conversion. Taken together, these points form a checklist of the myriad ways in which reason’s claim to sovereignty has been undermined or complicated. They sketch a world where universal reason gives way to pluralism, contingency, unconscious drives, and situatedness. The classical Enlightenment dream of a single, rational standpoint from which to govern knowledge, values, and social order is replaced by a dispersed, fragmented, and often opaque reality. This renders the project of pure rationality not merely incomplete but structurally compromised, demanding new ways to understand human thought, culture, and politics beyond the ambitions of traditional rationalism. Reason, as a mode of legitimation, extends beyond mere intellectual assent; it shapes an entire way of life, a disciplined and orderly approach to both thought and conduct. This lifestyle is marked by precision and calmness, a steady and measured tone that refuses to be swept up in emotional excess or hysteria. It separates issues clearly, addressing them one by one without conflating matters or descending into muddle. Equality before reason means treating like cases alike, governed by stable and impartial criteria that exclude caprice and arbitrariness. The rational individual augments their capital, both cognitive and financial, not for immediate gratification, pleasure, or status, but as a matter of prudence and investment. This person acts on good reasons alone, recognising that genuine reason obviates the need for appeals to authority or ecstatic revelations. Restraint and self-governance define their comportment. Such reasons are systemised, embedded in simple but robust criteria for success in any given domain. The desacralisation of life and thought replaces superstition and arbitrary custom with habitual orderliness and an orderly division of labour. Rationality entails a sober, accountancy-like approach to measuring success and failure, where efficiency is the cardinal virtue. Social interactions are contractual, founded on mutual recognition of reasoned terms rather than tradition or status. It is the vision underpinning the discrete charm of the bourgeoisie. Sociology of Reason This vision insists on the necessity of dialogue between sociology and philosophy: where Weber provides a sociological account of a rationality-pervaded society, Descartes begins the philosophical groundwork for rational cognition. The economic dimension of rationality unfolds in two registers: production and consumption. Capitalism, as the archetype of rational production, crystallises aims with remarkable clarity, perpetual maximisation of accumulation through ruthless efficiency, including the mobilisation of human labour within expansive infrastructures. This system displaces tradition, custom, status, and simple technology, relying instead on the complex but calculable logic of market relations. Yet capitalism shares with political rationality the challenge of navigating modern complexity, where diverse, often incommensurable considerations defy simple quantitative assessment. Affluent societies have managed, in some cases, to temper capitalism’s ruthlessness by protecting workers against traditional exploitation and the harsher edges of modern Industrial discipline. Gellner notes that societies influenced by Confucian and Buddhist rather than Calvinistic values, such as Japan, suggest alternative models for the future, emphasising hierarchical, feudal-Industrial attitudes that temper market logic with social restraint. Cognition, particularly science, parallels economic ruthlessness in its ceaseless exploration of the world, unconstrained by social or moral limitations. It generates powerful technologies that amplify productivity both materially and intellectually, fuelling the ongoing expansion of capitalist production and scientific knowledge alike. But the rational economy of production is counterbalanced by the economy of consumption, which has undergone profound transformation from early to late modernity. Early modernity was marked by frugality and restraint; late modernity, however, depends on mass production paired with mass consumption. Keynesian economics champions consumption as an engine of growth, but this raises the question: is mass consumption rational? Pre-Agrarian humans may have been rational in their economic behaviour, restrained in their needs and demands as Marshall Sahlins famously argued in Stone Age Economics (1974). Agrarian life, by contrast, was trapped within Malthusian limits where shadows of starvation shaped human existence. Modernity breaks free from such constraints, creating affluence beyond immediate needs and demands, yet this surplus tends to serve status enhancement rather than basic survival. Affluent humanity, living in a world saturated with the fruits of rational production, is paradoxically prone to embrace facile metaphysics of user-friendly universes promising easy cognitive access and quick understanding. As this society revels in the benefits of rational technology and efficiency, it simultaneously indulges in the wildest excesses of unreason within its culture. Rational production coexists uneasily with irrational consumption and cultural life, where the thirst for meaning and identity often escapes the sober constraints of reasoned calculation. Cognition retains the sovereignty of evidence as a crucial survivor from Cartesian ideals of clear and luminous ideas. While nature and society remain distinct realms, and despite the dominance of various irrationalist trends in theories about science, the actual practice of science continues to rely on evidence-based reasoning. This distinction marks a tension between theory and practice: irrationalism may flourish philosophically, but scientific endeavour itself often resists it. Culture, however, has never been fully dominated by rationalism. Max Weber noted this tension vividly: the country where rational production first emerged was also deeply committed to a messy, untidy Common Law tradition and resistant to the tidy codifications of Roman Law. Culture is absorbed rather than pursued with a clear aim or specification. People learn social norms less through explicit rules than by avoiding gaffes, those vague, intuitive missteps that we feel rather than precisely define. Strangers risk faux pas, and reason serves as a subtle form of social control, with gatekeepers enforcing norms. Even language reflects this: the irregularity of verbs and grammatical idiosyncrasies act as barriers to outsiders, preserving group boundaries. Culture, then, is akin to buttermilk, a symbolic residue left over once serious cognitive work like science is done. In power and politics, procedural rationalisation pervades, especially in bureaucratic institutions where language serves utilitarian ends. Yet when it comes to major uncertainties, such as Brexit or other crises, politics often shifts toward charismatic forms of leadership that reject logic and rational debate. Charisma is dramatic, unreasoning, authoritarian, and spurns the need for logical justification. Nonetheless, charisma and bureaucracy can coexist at the top levels of governance, as exemplified by Napoleon, who combined the charisma of command with the creation of orderly legal codes and efficient administrative systems. Politics remains less amenable to rationalisation than economics. Charisma often draws on communal arguments, emphasising life as participation in a shared culture rather than a series of market transactions. Oakeshott captures this with his contrast of community versus enterprise, emphasising that political life is about belonging and shared values, not bargaining and calculation. The “Dark Gods” argument suggests that real passion and political energy cannot be contained by finely tuned calculations or procedural rationality. This fusion of Dark Gods and communalism can escalate into dangerous ideologies when genetic or racial assumptions are introduced, as in fascism and Herderian romantic nationalism. These movements appeal to irrational attachments to blood, soil, and myth rather than reasoned discourse. Varieties of rational experience emerge from two primary limitations: first, reason cannot prove the soundness of its own procedures; second, it cannot impose those procedures uniformly beyond cognition. Though there is no absolute proof that rational procedures work, the astonishing growth of technology and scientific knowledge shows that they do function effectively in practice. However, ethics and broader aspects of life remain largely outside the purview of rationalist underpinnings. It remained entirely conceivable to Gellner back in the 1990's that rationality would one day retreat to a limited “ghetto,” confined to productive and cognitive domains, while other spheres of life continue to be governed by different, perhaps irrational, principles. I think this is what is happening right now. The label ‘Prometheus Perplexed’ captures the fundamental loss of autonomy that Descartes once aspired to secure through rationalism and self-creation. Rationalism, dubbed “the philosophy of the new broom,” aimed to sweep away superstition and tradition with clear, distinct ideas and autonomous self-legislation, but it ultimately failed to deliver on that promise. We cannot conjure ourselves ex nihilo; the dream of pure self-creation remains unattainable. Instead, we are a “race of failed Prometheans,” condemned to live within the limits rationalism sets even as it shapes our destiny. This new culture is marked by the separation of referential cognition from all other activities, a systematic submission of cognitive claims to an extra-social, centralised court of appeal, be it the demand for clear and distinct ideas or the primacy of experience, and the establishment of a single currency of reference that ultimately fractures the very limits of knowledge. Viewed sociologically, the philosophy of rationality reveals a unique and unprecedented form of Custom and Example, an internally consistent system that governs thought like a social practice. We become Descartes/Crusoe figures, isolated in an intellectual wilderness where history unfolds in three stages: first, the age of ritual, dominated by tradition and embedded practice; second, the age of spurious proof, where proof is sought but never fully trustworthy; and third, the age of absence of proof, where philosophy charts the terrain of scepticism and the limits of certainty. The crucial link is between autonomy and transcendence where independent knowledge is the condition for the autonomy of the individual knower, and that autonomy in turn underwrites the objectivity and transcendence of knowledge itself. Rationalism and empiricism are thus complementary components of a transcendent rationalism. To break free from traditionalist thinking, empiricism must serve as the final court of appeal, repudiating pre-scientific beliefs that evade critical scrutiny as a corporate body. The counterargument, that all observations are inevitably culture-soaked and subject to interpretive bias, is simply false. The denial of objective facts on grounds of social interest or historic positioning, as Sartre famously did in denying the existence of the Gulags, fails under scrutiny. The Gulags, Pol Pot’s genocide, and Hitler’s atrocities all happened independently of whether observers’ beliefs or social needs acknowledged them. The empirical data-base overrides psychic or social needs in establishing reality. Conclusions Rationalism, then, functions like the public relations department of a highly turbulent and internally divided organisation. It issues Cartesian, Humean, and Kantian codes of conduct and knowledge, projecting an image of clear reason and structured knowledge. Yet behind this polished exterior lies the intimate, often chaotic psychic life of the organisation, irrationalities, passions, and power struggles that rationalism’s public face attempts to conceal or smooth over. Rationalism’s grand narrative thus serves both as a beacon and a veil, promising autonomy and clarity while masking the enduring complexity and opacity of human knowing and being. The parricide argument captures a deep irony: reason, in its relentless drive to scrutinise and dismantle all claims to knowledge, ends up destroying its own foundations, its progenitor, the very conditions that made reason possible. In trying to justify itself through pure rational proof, reason undermines the assumptions and intuitions it originally relied on, pulling the rug from beneath its own feet. This self-destructive tendency reveals reason’s fragility, highlighting that its claims to universal authority rest on premises it cannot secure without contradiction. Closely linked is the impotence argument: reason cannot be definitively proved to be effective or reliable. No ultimate rational justification can establish the soundness of reason itself, because every attempt to do so either assumes what it seeks to prove or loops back in an infinite regress. This impotence leaves reason suspended, powerful in practice, indispensable to modern life, yet philosophically and culturally vulnerable. Its authority is never absolute but contingent, always open to doubt and revision. Finally, the suicide argument brings this all to a climax: reason is mad, insofar as it kills itself by the very act of self-reflection and critique. It dismantles the certainties that give it life, revealing itself as a system that cannot ground itself without contradiction or despair. This maddening self-negation does not imply reason’s uselessness but rather exposes its tragic condition, its brilliance entwined with its own undoing. Together, these arguments form a stark reckoning with reason’s limits, capturing the paradox that rationality, while central to modern knowledge and culture, is also intrinsically vulnerable, self-subverting, and inescapably entangled with the irrational forces it sought to overcome. Think of the Bunuel film The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie and the Resnais film Last Year At Marienbad as exquisite representations of these tragic contradictions. Far from being a heady abstract purely philosophical issue the fragility of rationality has been ruthlessly exposed by contemporary shifts in social arrangements. Philosophers use the term ‘bullshit’ as a philosophical term of art to express the position of someone who doesn’t care whether what she says is true or false. Regimes of bullshit, fake news, post truth and the like capture the erosion of the status of rationality in the public square. In the USA this looks chaotic but in China it is equally present though better camouflaged through the suppression of countervailing voices. It will be part of the argument of the book that this exploitation of the fragility of rationality has been aided by the rapid development of a technological infrastructure that works to replace rationality with affect-based performativity across all dimensions of society. The infrastructure, once captured by the state, becomes a control tool of vast scope over whole populations. To continue this thesis it’s important to ask where all this is taking place and I assume most of the world’s populations are housed in nation states or try to because an inability to secure a national canopy over ones identity is deadly. It is important then to interrogate this arrangement so that we can understand the link between the fate of rationality. As such it’s important that we understand what nationalism is and why it’s proved to be such an important component of modernity. So that’s what we turn to in the next section.
Part 2 Nationalism It is no accident that nationalism runs through Gellner’s work. He treats it as the cultural machinery that makes the social organisation of rationalism possible. Though his cases are mainly European, the model is general and forms a central leg of his three part theory of modernity. 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 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 where productive capacity is capped, even as populations grow. As Gellner puts it, in this situation “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.” 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. Gellner’s own trajectory suggests that philosophy itself might best be rethought not just as arguments, but as anthropology done in abstract. 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 and though necessary were not sufficient for nationalism to emerge in the modern form. 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 appalled 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. Homogeneity requires entropy, the disappearance of difference. Racism and sexism are forms of scandal because they refuse the founding charter of homogeneity upon which modern culture rests. Racism and sexism are rooted in irrational caste- endorsing agrarian sensibilties and strike most modern sensibilities as being as out of place as religious belief (except of course modern muslims who are a fascinating and unique case of modernism blended with religion). 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 5 Staging Posts Along the Winding Road to European Nationalism: 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 standardised 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. The Five Zones of European Nationalism 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 lies Zone Five, where 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 given the current invasion by Russia. 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.) Toxic Nationalism As noted, since 2008, the economic bribes that kept nationalism in check have weakened. 9/11 and the never ending ‘war on terror’ and Covid have exacerbated the problem, as Macfarlane points out. 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. Macfarlane makes the startling claim that China never actually 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 melding thesis Japan, arguing that 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, as we’ve seen, 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. Romanticism and Nationalism 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 or University 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. The Exceptionalism of Islam and Why Soviet Marxism Failed 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 collabourative (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 standardised 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 is the advantage of having an other worldly religious ideology and 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. Do Nations have Navels? Some European Examples. 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. Nationalism and Conflict 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. Functionalism In all this it's worth unpacking Gellner's understanding of functionalism, which he defends with characteristic sharpness and subtlety and which is the approach he takes to ground his understanding of Nationalism. 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. For Gellner, the challenge is neither to naturalise 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, favourable 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 behaviour 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.
Part 3 Civil SocietyMacfarlane and Gellner Alan Macfarlane places Ernest Gellner in a rare company of intellectuals who consistently addressed the largest and most enduring human questions. In his view, many scholars confine themselves to resolving smaller, manageable issues, but Gellner persisted in asking the childlike yet profound questions about the meaning of liberty, wealth, and human existence that most academic training tends to suppress. This was, for Macfarlane, part of Gellner’s affinity with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment tradition: the capacity to engage in sweeping, unfashionable inquiries into the purpose and structure of human life. Macfarlane saw in Gellner the embodiment of Lord Acton’s dictum to study problems rather than periods. Gellner’s scholarship, like that of Marc Bloch, was led by the scent of human conflict, regardless of disciplinary boundaries. His curiosity took him across philosophy, sociology, and anthropology, and across cultures, Islam, communism, North Africa, while remaining rooted in the monotheistic West. In this, Macfarlane compared him favourably to figures such as Max Weber, noting that Gellner ranged more widely than most anthropologists. Such breadth of comparative method allowed him, Macfarlane believed, to illuminate what he called “the tides of history”: the large, structural tendencies that shape human societies over time. This Gibbon-like vantage point enabled Gellner to discern recurrent patterns, most famously the tendency for societies to become increasingly predatory as they grow wealthier, thereby providing a moving vision of historical dynamics. Reflecting on their conversations, Macfarlane identified two central questions he wished he could have explored further with Gellner: the origins of liberty and its contemporary trajectory. Gellner, he thought, possessed a clear sense of what liberty consisted in, namely, the separation of different spheres of life so that no single authority, whether political, religious, or familial, could dominate. Yet his explanations of how liberty emerged were, in Macfarlane’s judgment, less convincing. Gellner’s own accounts, such as the theory of conflicts between priests and rulers, did not fully address the historical mechanisms that could generate a civil society robust enough to sustain liberty. Macfarlane suspected that this gap stemmed from Gellner’s intellectual affinities, perhaps more with Adam Ferguson than with Adam Smith or Alexis de Tocqueville, leading to insufficient historical grounding. After Gellner’s death, Macfarlane encountered the work of F. W. Maitland, whom he came to regard as both the greatest historian of England and one of the most profound political philosophers. In a set of overlooked essays, Maitland traced the roots of English liberty to a fourteenth-century legal innovation: the Trust. Originally devised to circumvent aristocratic death duties, the trust evolved into a legally recognised but non-incorporated entity, lying between the state and the individual. This form allowed people to organise collectively around shared responsibilities and purposes without direct incorporation by the state. Though briefly abolished under Henry VIII, trusts proliferated in the sixteenth century and, according to Macfarlane, underpinned the development of English civil society. Trusts, he argued, provided a legal foundation for political opposition (notably among the Inns of Court in the conflict with Charles I), for religious independence (as in the Methodist, Baptist, and Quaker movements), and for economic and intellectual enterprise (from the joint-stock companies and Lloyd’s of London to the Royal Society and the British Academy). They sustained a distinctive associational culture in Britain, praised by Tocqueville in America, which relied on interpersonal trust as both a legal and a moral principle. This culture of trust, Macfarlane suggested, was instrumental in shaping not only the British Empire but also the democratic associationalism of the United States. He conceded that Gellner might have challenged the idea’s uniqueness to Britain, perhaps by pointing to analogues in Islamic or other societies, but maintained that the historical specificity of the English trust was hard to refute. From this foundation, Macfarlane turned to the question of liberty’s future. Here he saw Gellner’s stance as ambivalent: on the one hand, liberty was fragile and contingent, almost extinguished in the Second World War; on the other, there was a guarded confidence that once liberal civilisation was established, it would not regress. Macfarlane doubted this second assumption. Drawing on Tocqueville and Montesquieu, he noted two historical conditions that had shielded liberty in the West: geographical insulation (as with England and the United States before the First World War and 9/11) and the absence of perpetual warfare. Both conditions, he argued, had collapsed. The erosion began when Britain was drawn into the European land war of 1914 and when the United States was pulled into a globalised security environment after the terrorist attacks of 2001. In Macfarlane’s view, the “war on terror” represented a qualitatively new threat: a never-ending, borderless conflict against an invisible enemy, providing governments with indefinite justification to curtail civil liberties. He cited contemporary developments in Britain, the weakening of the separation of powers, the erosion of jury trials, the effective abolition of habeas corpus, as evidence that liberty was “nearly dead,” a view shared by some constitutional scholars who considered the country an elective monarchy in all but name. Macfarlane acknowledged that Gellner might have responded with counterarguments or a more tempered assessment, but he felt the urgency of the problem justified a more pessimistic stance. The conversation, of course, could not take place. Yet for Macfarlane, continuing to think with and against Gellner- asking the large, unfashionable questions, comparing across cultures, tracing the deep tides of history - remains both a tribute to their intellectual exchange and an ongoing task in the face of liberty’s uncertain future. What follows is what I imagine such a conversation might have involved. Firstly I want to pivot to Gellner’s views about civic society and then through that prism draw conclusions about its future, drawing it together with his models of rationality and nationalism that I’ve sketched in the first two sections and reflect on how Macfarlane and he would have seen how our contemporary geopolitical context is panning out. The Civil and the Sacred On March 20, 1990, Ernest Gellner took the stage at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum for an event titled “The Civil and The Sacred in Marxist, Muslim, and Other Societies.” The evening formed part of his Tanner Lectures on Human Values, and it set a clear agenda to explain how different social orders handled the sacred, and to explain how a distinctive civil order sustains freedom through a specific social architecture. The theme of the talk was part of Gellner’s long project of clarifying what makes a liberal, plural order structurally possible, in other words, he wanted to work out how a civic society worked and what were its components. He wanted to know which social arrangements generate durable liberty. He gave civil society a sharply sociological meaning that cut through moral sentiment and romantic nostalgia. He approached the topic not as a mere ideal, and not as a vague “nice-to-have,” but instead as a system of institutions with distinctive preconditions, rivals, and mechanisms that anchor modern freedom. Gellner opens by locating Atlantic civilization, as it existed at the time on both shores of the North Atlantic, within a shared self-understanding organised around “political, economic, and ideological pluralism.” These “pluralities are interdependent in various complex ways” and display moments of tension in practice since “ideological pluralism requires the toleration of political trends hostile to economic pluralism.” The common ground across these domains is the presence of “something called ‘civil society,’ a notion which has acquired a new salience in recent decades,” and his aim is to clarify its “contemporary content” and the features of the present that give it weight. He begins with a spare definition that quickly thickens. Civil society is “first of all that part of society which is not the state. It is a residue.” The term applies only where the residue is distinctive in scale and capacity: “this residue is large, powerful, and organised.” The qualifying features matter since “an atomized or powerless residue would fail to qualify,” and some other residues also fall short. The society in view “possess[es] this much-prized entity,” and the pride is anchored in a functional claim: civil society is positioned “to ensure that the state does its job but no more, and that it does it properly.” This entails institutionalized accountability such that “the personnel occupying state positions are periodically rotated in a manner only partly influenced and above all not controlled by the personnel themselves.” The authority of office is distinct from the authority of officeholders, so “the personnel can be called to account for the performance of the duties linked to their posts.” Getting the Right Kind of Pluralism: Why Segmentary and Feudal Pluralisms Are the Wrong Sort That constitutional architecture links back to pluralism. The ability of the civil residue to check and control government depends on more than formal procedural rules, such as elections. The residue must house persons, groups, or institutions possessed of resources sufficient to enable them to take advantage of the formal procedural rules, which gives material bite to pluralism. It also seems to require ideological pluralism, since any institution claiming a monopoly of truth or access to truth would license procedures that validate power in ways that preclude criticism. The sacred receives respect within civil life, with two stabilizing limits: civil society does not actually preclude its members from revering the sacred and also does not allow them to invoke it too much, or with excessive insistence, in political debate. The public expression of moral outrage remains open, while the use of outrage as a terminal decision procedure in debate remains closed. This is presented as commonplace, a sketch offered merely for purposes of contrast, since the project is to illumine civil society by viewing contexts where it is wholly or in part, absent. At the time he wrote the vantage point was geopolitical as well as conceptual. “Atlantic society… has two neighbours on its eastern and southeastern borders: Marxist and Muslim societies,” and these neighbours are described as endowed with weak (on occasion, some observers have claimed, nonexistent) civil societies. The Soviets have disappeared now of course, but China remains an interesting case of a state lacking a civil society and so Gellner’s critique remains important. His inquiry proceeds historically through two influential intellectual ancestors, Machiavelli and Tocqueville, whose assertions are diametrically opposed. The divergence is fruitful since both are very perceptive and profound, so the disagreement helps mark the terrain. Machiavelli, in The Prince, proposes a dichotomy of rule: principalities governed either by a single “prince to whom everyone is subservient” or by “a prince and by nobles” whose standing rests on “ancient lineage,” each noble holding “states and subjects of their own.” He identifies “ancient Persia and contemporary Turkey” as exemplars of the centralized type. Such polities are “difficult to invade and conquer,” but once overcome “easy to maintain in a state of subjection,” since the concentration of power leaves “nothing left to oppose and challenge the new rule.” France supplies the other template, “fragmented into subunits” with local rulers holding robust power bases, which enables entry through a disaffected baron and also perpetuates precariousness at the apex. Tocqueville reaches a strikingly different reading from his North African observations. “An emir does not command, like the kings of Europe, individuals… but tribes that are small nations, fully organised,” which means the ruler confronts collective actors rather than isolated individuals. The “greatest difficulty” for a prince over a confederation of tribes is the constant presence of “an organised force that resists him.” Campaigns unfold across a mobile landscape where “there are no towns or important positions that one can permanently occupy,” so “war therefore cannot end with a single blow,” and if Abd-el-Kader falls, “the bundle of his power will be loosened rather than broken.” Gellner characterizes Machiavelli’s sighting as a “patrimonial state” and Tocqueville’s as a “segmentary” order. These plural forms differ in structure and ethos, and they frame the central concept by contrast. “Notwithstanding their shared pluralism, neither of these contrasted social orders really qualifies as a ‘civil society.’” The decisive criterion is “status-rigidity.” The civil society that is “known and loved” contains “civil liberties,” including the expectation that persons are not “firmly locked into a given social position.” The imagined modern citizen resists being confined to feudal status or bound to “patrilateral cousins” as a totalizing rule across “economic, legal, political, marital, and ritual” life. Civil society displays two elegant paradoxes: it “constitutes a countervailing force to the state” and remains “peaceful and, normally, unarmed,” and it “contains powerful associations, institutions, and groupings,” while none carry a “preemptive, prescriptive right over its members.” “Membership is optional or revocable,” and even the vestiges of oath-bound entry appear as “rare and residual exceptions,” often “folkloristic.” The genealogy question then follows: are the segmentary or feudal pluralisms ancestors of modern civil society. Segmentary societies exhibit “egalitarian and participatory” traits, often voicing “the rhetoric of liberty,” which encouraged actors in the French Revolution to look to the “segmentary classical society” as a model. Fustel de Coulanges’s Ancient City answers that analogy with a historical disentangling. The ancients talked of “liberty and liberties,” while daily life was embedded in a ritualized web of memberships that a modern citizen would “find… intolerably stifling.” The modern subject may enjoy “a touch of theatre” in a lodge or fraternity, with “not taking it altogether seriously,” and reacts against a total life patterned by obligatory subdivision. The record shows “no… direct transition from a segmentary society to modern civil society.” A “complex historical development” lies between the classical and medieval cities and the modern associational order. The southern Mediterranean preserves a longer arc of segmentation among “the Muslim tribes of North Africa,” and Gellner turns again to Tocqueville to trace a pathway toward unification. Tocqueville notes that “Abd-el-Kader… acts toward the tribes precisely as our kings… acted against feudalism. He creates regular companies [standing units].” Regular units generate an independent force that “destroys one by one the little powers.” The parallel with European state-building highlights a key difference in ideological charter. In the North, “state-building was not a crusade” in the period Tocqueville analyzed; across the southern shore, unification “very characteristically did assume the form of a jihad.” Plural local powers could be delegitimised as “heretics,” forming a religious frame for centralization. Tocqueville offers the underpinning: “The only common idea… is religion,” and a prince grows “all the more powerful” as “he exalts [it] more,” which aligns with the observation that “one has never been able to make the Arabs accomplish great things together except by this method,” in the manner of “Muhammad,” the early “caliphs,” and successive medieval rulers along the African coast. Fustel de Coulanges describes a comparable transformation for the classical Mediterranean, with segmentation giving way to unity under a centralised faith. The pattern across the “traditional Muslim world of the arid zone” shows a distinctive rhythm. The transition appears “always temporary,” yielding “a permanent oscillation,” a “flux and reflux” in which urban centres display centralised faith and tribal zones retain segmentation, each waxing and waning without full disappearance. David Hume’s Natural History of Religion supplies a conceptual lens: an “eternal pendulum swing” between “monotheistic centralism” and a more “tolerant pluralism.” The analysis focuses on doctrinal psychology, and the social picture maps onto “segmentary society.” Tocqueville concentrates on a transition he could see forming in Algeria; Fustel attends to a decisive ancient transformation; Hume “explicitly formulated a general theory of this kind of transition.” The first section therefore delivers a compact framework: Atlantic civil society rests on a large, organised, resourceful residue that checks the state, rotates officeholders, and protects plural association and belief, and the clearest insight into that form arrives through historical configurations where status remains rigid, membership remains prescribed, and oscillations between segmentation and centralisation define the political field. Gellner asks “A transition to what?” and sets out that segmentary society does not directly generate the civil society at issue. The recurrent alternative is an Umma, a society unified by an ardently held faith, ordered and codified, with a clearly dominant apex, which presupposes scribes and the social technology of writing. He keeps the frame opened by Machiavelli and Tocqueville: a central monarchy competes with more than one kind of plural fragmented political world, and ecology matters since in the arid, pastoral zone segmentary orders display a permanent oscillation rather than any irreversible and definitive transition. He then reads Hume, who stages a second internal tension across The Natural History of Religion and the essay Of Superstition and Enthusiasm. The core schema in the Natural History links pluralistic, tolerant, unpuritanical, unscripturalist city religion to segmentary community, and monotheistic, monopolistic, puritan, exclusive, scripturalist faith to a charismatic, proselytising society. Hume’s sympathies flow toward the first because it promoted civic virtue and mutual toleration, a stance he shares with Gibbon and, in a later synthesis of psychology and ethnography, Frazer. Gellner notes a methodological accent: excessively psychologistic deduction from the proclivities of the human heart, and also a strength, since Hume formulates it all as a general theory. Hume illustrates the Augustan preference with a polished passage: “The tolerating spirit of idolaters… is very obvious,” since Delphi could recommend “Those which are legally established in each city,” the Romans “adopted the gods of conquered people,” and “The intolerance of all religions, which have maintained the unity of God, is as remarkable as the contrary principle of the polytheists.” This positions civic polytheism as a friend to urban pluralism and monotheism as a friend to unitary zeal. Gellner then highlights Hume’s awareness that lived history includes another pattern. Europe produced Protestant societies that are predominantly scripturalist and also tolerant. In the Natural History Hume remarks with brisk candor that English and Dutch toleration proceeded from the steady resolution of the civil magistrate, a concise note that does not yet account for the durable civic settlement. The later essay addresses the puzzle with a trio of propositions after clarifying vocabulary, enthusiasm as scripturalist, puritan zeal; superstition as the mix of magic and ritual attributed to paganism and to popery. First, superstition favours priestly power, whereas enthusiasm undermines it even more than does rational skepticism, since levelling the priesthood diffuses clerical monopoly. Second, enthusiastic movements routinise: they begin “fast and furious” and then settle into order, while superstition keeps a “steady level of excitement.” Third, “enthusiasm favours civil liberty, and superstition harms it,” a thesis Hume develops with the French case: “The Molinists[1], conducted by the Jesuits, are great friends to superstition… and devoted to the authority of the priests,” while “The Jansenists are enthusiasts… and… preserve alive the small sparks of the love of liberty.” The tempering image is memorable: the fury of enthusiasm is “like that of thunder and tempest, which exhaust themselves in a little time, and leave the air more calm and serene than before.” The historical settlement reflects alignments that Hume himself records: “The leaders of the Whigs have… been… friends to toleration,” the “sectaries… concurred with that party in defence of civil liberty,” High-Church Tories long shared a sensibility with Roman Catholics “in support of prerogative,” and later “the tolerating spirit of the Whigs” reconciled Catholics to that coalition. The pattern links confessional dynamics, party competition, and a political economy that rewards havens for minorities and fosters institutional balances in which “mutual toleration” becomes a wise bet. What A Marxist and Islamic State Lacks Gellner then returns to his stated aim of deepening the sense of civil society’s preconditions by viewing settings where it is “lacking or is insufficiently present,” with Islam and Marxism as principal terrains. Tocqueville’s forecast for Algeria has in fact come to pass: Algeria achieved unity not merely in the superficial and political sense, the fragmented and warring subcommunities receded, and former segments came to make common cause by means Tocqueville called shared ideas, which a later tradition would call collective representations. The same broad movement appears throughout the Muslim world, with local variations. Gellner marks a salient global fact: within an overall secularising trend, one major part of the world remains resolutely secularisation-resistant: the world of Islam. “The hold of Islam… is at least as great as it was one or two centuries ago,” and in some respects “more, not less, powerful.” A familiar Western label, fundamentalism, does not map well onto this configuration because the term grew inside a world where many believers place religion in some realm disconnected from ordinary conviction, call assertions symbolic, or treat faith as related to commitment not to evidence and reasoning, and where a literal, straightforward interpretation is out and is held to be a bit uncivilised and coarse. In that scene fundamentalists appear as “strange and uncouth” margins. Gellner’s closing clarification in this section is crisp: “If this is what fundamentalism means, then in a sense, there are few if any fundamentalists within Islam.” Those who hold a literal sense are not marginal or underprivileged, not an awkward exception to a cultural consensus. “Within Islam, firm and literal belief… is the norm,” and those who depart “are exceptional and are obligated to camouflage themselves.” The upshot preserves the analytic thread that opened the section: segmentary orders and scriptural unities generate distinctive political potentials, and the Umma configuration operates through doctrine, writing, and an apex that can integrate former segments, creating a durable field for faith and authority that modern secularization does not easily dissolve. Gellner distinguishes the phenomenon he previously called fundamentalism by proposing, to distinguish it from its Western variant, to call it rigorism. The key contrast in practice aligns less with modern disbelief and more with excessive folk belief, meaning ideas, rites, and accretions not licensed by the properly defined corpus of the faith. The modern transformation across Muslim societies appears as the displacement of folk superstition, including the previously widespread practice of saint worship, by a more proper, scholarly, puritan, scripturalist pattern. A long-standing high culture that had coexisted with a low culture gains predominance under modern conditions, so the book-and-law-implementing society linked with the city and the Umma defines public life with new reach, and the label “fundamentalists” remains an outsider’s description that “for reasons indicated, the term is liable to be misleading.” He asks how this consolidation came about. One account begins with “underdevelopment,” where inferior “technical, economic, military, and administrative equipment” produces domination by better-endowed rivals. Members of the disadvantaged society often divide into “Westernisers” or “modernisers,” who seek to acquire the successful techniques, and “romantics or populists,” who reaffirm local values. The world of Islam already knew an internal tension that resembled this choice, between the austere, demanding Great Tradition and the more communal Little Tradition of meditation, cult, and ritual. When reform became urgent, an indigenous model was available, one that had “always” been present in the sense of long residence in the culture, so change could proceed without an attitude of self-spurning imitation. The existing high-culture model was genuinely “indigenous,” and it was also well fitted to modern life in the Weberian sense: fewer magical claims, a formal ethic of rule observance, a remote and orderly deity approached through scripture, and representation through a learned corps rather than a hierarchy of ritual specialists. Islam did not generate modernity through autonomous civic power, since commercial groups relied on central protection against nearby segmentary forces, and autonomous civil society did not consolidate; once modernity arrived by external pressure, the high culture already in place matched the new requirements and could define the whole society rather than a small elite. Participants often describe the revival as a return to the pristine purity of the Prophet and his Companions, which functions as a charter for reaffirming and disseminating an urban scholarly style with deep historical roots. This path avoids a stark choice between Westernisation and an implausible elevation of village custom, since a “high” form that fits modern conditions is also native. A former minority style becomes pervasive, and lower groups take it as a sign of social ascent. The fit extends to the dynamics of nationalism. Where the Reformation in the West prepared the ground for nationhood by vernacularisation and literacy, revivalist unitarian reform in Islam appears alongside nationalism; the essence of nationalism lies in a literacy-based, school-transmitted high culture as the medium of social life, and Islam supplies a formal idiom through which individuals can communicate with anonymous fellow citizens in mobile, urban settings. A “nation” such as the Algerians forms as the sum of Muslims within a territory, distinguished from non-Muslims, and the generalized high Islam also articulates the masses relative to “over-Westernised” elites, as the case of Iran vividly displayed. The upshot is a direct movement from the segmentary community to the Umma, not as a temporary swing, and he asks what this implies politically. The Umma is a charismatic community of equal believers under God, governing itself by God’s law as revealed in Holy Writ, with interpretation by scholars and, on one pole of the traditional spectrum, authority vested in members of the House of the Prophet. Shi‘ite veneration of martyrdom gives remarkable mobilising force, and Khomeini drew on these elements to overturn the ancien régime, then organised rule as the impartial and unwavering, incorruptible application of the law, with the presence of the Hidden Imam not decisive for governance. In that construction “Sacred Personality became politically irrelevant, which in effect “Sunnified Shi’ism,” reinforcing the sense that Weberian sober-bourgeois features - unitarianism, scripturalism, a juristic ethos - support secularisation resistance. He then asks how the unitarian, puritan, scripturalist order works as politics. The formal question is whether this is truly a government not of men but of lawyers, with an ethic of rule observance supplanting an ethic of loyalty. Practical organisation relies on networks of personal allegiance, since communities require concrete apparatus. The contemporary nucleus is no longer the pastoral tribe and arises instead from combinations of kin, region, and reciprocal obligation. These networks, rather than imported constitutional forms, express the everyday structure of power; they coexist with the legal-moral ideal of the Umma. The two elements function together, since public violation of the abstract ideal invites coalitions that claim to uphold the faith, and networks operate within limits acknowledged by belief. The rivalry of networks reflects segmentary origins: the competing units seek office, are not anchored in fixed economic specialisms, and politics carries a “winner take all” quality in which political power provides the main route to wealth. The whole order stretches between an all-embracing Umma, the bearer of legitimacy grounded in a shared revelation accessible to all, and power associations that rule de facto without full avowal. Identification with the Umma remains strong, and everyday governance moves through networks that respect religious forms. The closing observation brings the pattern into focus: “there is a plethora of faith and little craving for civil society.” Gellner sets the scene by saying that if this sketch of the southeasterly Muslim neighbor holds, it forms a neat contrast to the Soviet Marxist eastern one, where a virtually total erosion of faith meets a strong, in many cases passionate, yearning for civil society, and where the very vogue of the term comes from that region’s political-intellectual life. He reconstructs the Marxist claim that “civil society is a fraud,” because the visible plurality of nonstate bodies supports one “category (‘class’) of people,” while the “apparent neutrality” of the state is “quite spurious,” since coercion protects the institutions that maintain unequal control. In this diagnosis both the plural institutions and their protective machinery possess no “raison d’être” beyond sustaining the class order, so their removal under advanced productive conditions brings “no disaster whatever” and indeed proves “beneficial.” The destination is a humanity that “could eventually manage and manage much better without both civil society and the state,” since “both would be pensioned off,” the state serving at most as a “temporary measure during the transitional period.” Soviet Marxism He reads 1917-1989 as one of the great experiments in human history, an attempt to implement a secular “theocracy,” or in Raymond Aron’s language an “ideocracy.” The Enlightenment’s “secular Heavenly City” had faltered after the French Revolution; the later theory that rose from those failures shaped Marxism as a blend of “brutal realism, bourgeois fantasy, and human utopianism.” The “bourgeois fantasy” asserts that “work was the very essence of man,” that institutions restraining this essence are “inherently pathological,” and that the primacy of production would culminate in “total human fulfillment through free, spontaneous, unconstrained labour,” requiring “no state” and “no civil society.” He links this projection to a middle-class ethos of vocation, setting Pascal’s “divertissement” beside Weber’s account of anxious diligence and reinvested profit, and notes that Marxism generalises the trait to the “human soul as such,” treating “work…[as]… our genuine essence and our time fulfillment.” From this messianic horizon follows an absence: “Marxism possesses no theory of either civil society or of the state.” Both are ultimately “redundant,” and in the meantime both are “fraudulent,” which removes the language needed to articulate the central political problem. He divides Soviet history after the transition into “two main periods, Terror and Squalor,” with liberalisations between them. The first period pairs total coercion with faith: terror “confirmed the validity of the faith,” since such unprecedented horror could only herald “some complete transformation of society,” a kind of “Second Coming.” Across the wider world “Marxism succeeded in securing a near monopoly of the critique of liberal theory and practice,” especially in the 1930s, when crisis and fascist violence raised its standing. He details a “self-maintaining” circle of ideas that discounts hostile evidence as the product of a “capitalist press,” and that elevates the “overriding need for the victory” of the emancipating class beyond any other principle, so that “nothing can trump the imperative of human liberation.” These circles endure when two conditions hold: internal coherence without self-denial, and segments that offer great insights and deep psychic reward. The critique of “waste, inequality, unnecessary poverty, and frequent fraudulence” strikes home, and social thought becomes organised as “The Great Contest,” a dual interpretation of industrial society with each side armed to discount the other. He notes formal echoes of earlier confrontations, “wars of religion” and the clash between “the Enlightenment and traditional religion”, where one side offers a “negative consensus” and the other a codified faith with a clerisy. Marxism becomes the first secular counter-faith “formally adopted by large, populous, and important societies,” providing the strongest evidence yet about the viability of an overtly secular religion. The “Marxist Circle” is breached twice from the inside. Khrushchev concedes facts about Stalin while declaring them aberrations and keeps the faith itself intact. A period of Stagnation follows, marked by increasing comfort and cynicism that remains private. Gorbachev’s reform “took off the lid,” and a faithless atmosphere becomes visible. Gellner offers a vivid scene: in the Institute of Philosophy a Lenin “hadith” declares, “Marxist doctrine is all-powerful because it is true,” and any Moscow intellectual who hears the line “smil[es].” He asks “What is Perestroika about?” and aligns its origins with economic failure while insisting that it is “about the rebirth of Civil Society.” Stalinist terror had “destroyed” civil society and Brezhnevite stagnation had not revived it. Under Stalin the single hierarchy that embraced production, order, and belief “was also an Umma,” pervaded by faith; under Brezhnev it “quietly ceased to be an Umma,” entering with faith and exiting “wholly devoid of it.” He then names three paths. A return to “authoritarian centralism” conjoined with faith rebuilds an “Umma” if liberalisation yields conflict without economic relief. A continuation “in its faithless way while retaining a centralised authoritarian polity” produces “domination without legitimation,” a “kind of nuclear Haiti.” A continuation “in its faithless way” while allowing “the withering away, partial or total, of the centralised political structure” reacquires “civil society,” defined as “a set of institutions strong enough to check the state, yet not… mandatory enough” to oppress individuals. He adds one more theoretical possibility: a return to an Umma “based on a different faith,” such as a blend of nationalism with traditionalism or authoritarianism. Sadly this last option was the one actually taken in the end by Putin and his cronies. Gellner says the driving impulse is “this striving for the civil-society option,” even as “economic improvement” remains both desirable and a precondition for success. He asks “by what paths did Russia arrive at this predicament? without faith, without much in the way of civil society, with an overblown but incompetent state machinery running a sluggish economy,” and proposes “a checklist of the factors or preconditions” behind it. The first is a distinctive cast of the founding ideas: an ideocracy “more than Caesaro-Papist” that “fused not only the political and ideological functions but the economic one as well.” The doctrine, “strictly speaking,” held that the state should “wither away” and truth should be “sustained by its own luminous and manifest truth,” and the historical outcome is a “unique political and ideocratic apparatus” that “fused state and church with the centralized economic management.” He lays down a functional premise for modern order. Industrial life presupposes a single peacekeeping authority: citizens can go to and from work without arming themselves or dodging firefights among rival mafias or police forces, and know whom to obey. The implication is that modern society cannot find its pluralism in the political or governmental sphere, since order-agencies cannot be genuinely independent bodies, liable to use their instruments of violence on each other. So such pluralism as we need must have its base in either the economic or the ideological sphere, or both. This is where the Marxist settlement forecloses options, since the modern state does indeed have the monopoly of legitimate coercion, and when full-blooded and passionately embraced Marxism prevails, it is not allowed to emerge in economy or ideology. The creed monopolises faith and the state and, via denial of private ownership of the means of production also monopolises the economy. The result is that it thereby makes civil society impossible. He emphasises that Marxism does not avow hostility to intellect: “it is impeccably high-minded and highbrow,” and a Lenin “hadith” exhorts that “one cannot be a good Communist unless one has mastered the cultural wealth of humanity.” The “appalling, stifling straitjacket on intellectual life” flows from “the logic of its ideas when implemented.” The reason is twofold. Messianism makes a “unique revelation” see rivals as “agents… of those with a vested interest in opposing and delaying… liberation,” and “siege mentality” plus “circular thinking” produces “intellectual monopoly and Gleichschaltung[2].” He notes that “many religious systems” also claim exclusivity, and recent practice shows that some have learned how to accommodate themselves to a religious pluralism.” A second vector is economic centralism. One tendency warms to “planning” to remedy “free-for-all” chaos, reinforced by wartime pressures that discourage “release” of resources. Another tendency imagines “spontaneous, unenforced harmony” and inspires experiments in “workers’ self-management” and decentralisation, most persistently among “the first opters-out from Stalinism, the Yugoslavs.” The experiments face a structural fork: if “decentralised units are genuinely independent,” that is “capitalism under a new name,” and if “not genuinely independent,” the result is “a cosmetically modified… socialist centralism.” The underlying constraint is crisp: “either independent units, genuinely in control of their own resources and their own profits, meet freely under the law in a market, or there is central direction.” “Economic liberty and pluralism” cannot be reconciled with “the abolition of private property,” since “the property and resources taken away… do not disappear into thin air; someone has to control them,” and “this dislocated control devolves to the unique power centre.” Perceptions also shift over time. In the 1930s “planning… seemed automatically to mean something good,” while by the late 1980s the “administrative command” system is seen as “the root of all evil,” and the market as “infallible holy water.” In the command-admin world “those responsible” advance through “political alignments, alliances, and intrigues,” and in production “in the absence of a market” they rely on “informal network connections,” so “political connections, reciprocal services, are what really count” and “serious socialism” proves “highly inefficient.” He gathers the threads: the faith “imposed a triple centralism, political, ideological, and economic, on society, a kind of Caesaro-Papism-Mammonism; and at the same time, the faith itself evaporated.” It “attained monopoly and lost its own soul: it ended as the monopoly of a nonfaith.” He asks “just why did faith evaporate?” and raises possibilities. Is a secular doctrine “more vulnerable to empirical refutation”? Is a creed that “claims… only about this world” more exposed to facts than one whose “centre of gravity is in some other world”? Is a faith that promises “a coming advanced production stage” undone by “humiliating demonstration of its economic ineptitude”? Is salvation “excessively collective,” offering “no hope, no consolation to the individual sufferer,” and therefore forfeiting the “escape clause” that prophecy usually provides when “prophecy fails”? He leaves the answer “less than clear,” while underlining the outcome: “This secularism has been secularised, this charisma has been routinised to the point of invisibility.” Compare and Contrast: Marxism and Islam He then proposes a comparison “with the traditional faith which is so marvelously resistant to both routinisation and secularist erosion, namely Islam.” A “Muslim ideocracy does not attempt to unify and centralise economic life,” even as it “regulates it in some measure,” and while a Muslim state may seize “commanding heights,” it does not do so “in the name of an absolute principle” that must be “follow[ed] out to its full logical consequences.” It “is concerned with a justice only in the context of existing economic custom.” The key may lie not in “transcendent” versus “immanentist,” and more in “aspirations for reform in this world” that are “so very overextended.” The reforms “failed by attempting and promising too much,” since Marx notoriously wanted to change the world rather than merely understand it, and those changes became excessively exposed hostages to fortune. One Marxist central intuition retains force in a very loose interpretation: there is a connection between the technological level of the forces of production and social organisation. The more specific claim that socialism is the institutional accompaniment of a superior technology now appears absurd, so the major and tenable Marxist premise, in conjunction with the conspicuously falsified Marxist minor premise, has engendered the conclusion which is fated for Marxism. Gellner notes that “Western capitalism has indeed been overtaken,” and the “overtaking was carried out by the Shintoists or Buddhists or Confucians… of East Asia, and most emphatically not by the Marxists,” a refutation “felt where it hurts” that helps explain “the dramatic and total erosion of Marxist faith.” This is doubly interesting as we consider the rise of China whose economic miracle largely took place after Gellner’s untimely death. Although formally still a Marxist Communist state it seems no form of Marxist orthodoxy holds and that Chinese nationalism , Xi’s personality cult, and increasingly under Xi, Confucianism, are its most important legitimating ideologies. He adds that Marxism’s failure to supply “rituals and solaces for individual tragedy” alongside a “collectivist eschatology” also matters. Islam appears as “almost a mirror image,” since its daily disciplines give the believer “a handrail through life,” while imposing no obligation “to transform the organisational principles of the economy” or to validate reform through “a brilliant… economic performance.” He returns to the comparative claim: “Both have weak civil societies,” meaning institutions “which are not the state but which can stand up to it and limit its power,” while remaining “optional from the viewpoint of any one individual.” The arc of social thought moves from debates over “capitalism,” then “industrialism,” to the “preconditions of civil society.” On this measure “the two civilisations… do rather badly,” with one marked by “a total… loss of faith” and the other by “an astonishing plethora of it.” One “seems relatively at ease with the absence of civil society,” while the other carries “a strong sense of need for civil society.” He invokes Hume’s contradiction. In the Natural History of Religion Hume imagined a world bounded by segmentary society and the Umma, condemned to oscillation. There is no direct line of transition from a segmentary world to civil society, and a setting where segmentary organisation coexists with an ideocratic unitarian Umma tends toward a blend of Umma and government by quasi-segmentary patronage networks. The same logic holds intellectually: there is no straight path from tolerant ritual pluralism without doctrine to the tolerance of intellectual diversity bound to argument and truth. The historical path runs through an intolerant Umma that inculcates respect for unique truth, after which a political stalemate transmutes this into toleration, especially in a multistate system where more tolerant polities benefit from the economic prowess of the puritans and prevail internationally. He asks what went wrong where weak civil society is combined with weak faith, leaving ideocratic institutions without benefit of the faith which engendered them. The suggested clue is that what civil society seems to require is an individualist, not collectivist, eschatology, one that does not interfere in economic practices too much, and that is defeated, but not too badly, enabling a compromise between believers and worldly power. The theological egotism of the enthusiasts that offended Augustans turns out, in favourable circumstances, to be politically and economically beneficial. He then poses the present question: after a highly conspicuous demonstration of just what happens when it is absent, the desire for civil society becomes ardently desired. He asks whether that desire can be realised amid overconcentration of power, acute economic malaise, and explosive ethnic confrontations. At the time he cautioned against dogmatism saying that the deliberate erection of civil society from the shabby squalor of failed Marxist society was something so totally novel that confident predictions that it would fail lacked warrant, even though by now we can see that it didn’t succeed under Putin. Even then though he acknowledged genuine reasons for pessimism, since moving from rule by command and fiat to rule by consent and persuasion amid acute ethnic tension and economic deterioration is hard work. He also weighed considerations on the other side. He thought that the Russian intelligentsia’s passionate love affair with the ideals of the Enlightenment persisted, and further thought that only civil society can satisfy that passion. Economic realities were mixed: the majority were not hungry or cold, were decently clad, not too badly housed, and educated, so people did stand to lose something. The state of the Russian soul remained unknown at this crucial moment – remember Gellner was writing just as the USSR was collapsing: once the lid was taken off, he saw the options as being the emergence of a savage Slav beast, or a politically sophisticated and mature citizen, perhaps a humour-tinged preference for a ‘Party of Mild Progress within the Limits of the Law?’ Again, in hindsight we can see that the savage Slav beast seems to have survived in what has matured into a kleptocracy fed by extreme Chicago-style monetarism initiated by Reaganist/Thatcherist enthusiasts imported to make big bucks for themselves in the ruins. But at the time this wasn’t a forgone conclusion. There’s a tragic irony in all this: the imposition of an false economic ideology had brought the Soviet Union into being, and the imposition of a similarly false economic ideology brought about its wretched successor. Gellner closes with an image drawn from Bulgakov’s Heart of the Dog: after a transplant, “the heart of the dog prevails over human reason”. The prophets of gloom may be proved right, (and they have been) but this would show only that they stumbled on the regrettable truth. The final line affirms a stance: “Hope remains rationally permissible, and I for one will continue to indulge in it.” I think sadly by now he would be reconciled to the crushing of that hope. Gellner is clear: even back then he saw that “Western capitalism has indeed been overtaken,” and the overtaking arrived from “Shintoists or Buddhists or Confucians,” so the emblematic East Asian case invites a test of whether spectacular growth ushers in that “civil society” which is “that part of society which is not the state,” and which must be “large, powerful, and organised,” capable of keeping government to “its job but no more.” China’s record is undeniable in the economic register and over four decades official data collated by the World Bank credit the country with having lifted nearly 800 million people out of poverty, an achievement that redefined global development and moved the country to upper-middle-income status. The world continues to be rightly astonished by and impressed by China’s economic, technological and geopolitical rise, but its failure to achieve a civil society and autonomous individuality would profoundly disturb Gellner and anyone who values the peculiar rationality and pluralism sketched earlier. Gellner’s reasoning turns on where pluralism can live. In industrial conditions, the peacekeeping institution must be unique, so political pluralism is not the place to look; the diversity that matters must arise in the economic or the ideological sphere, or both. Where a full creed monopolises faith and the state and, through command over the means of production, monopolises the economy, the residue that ought to be civil society cannot accumulate enough strength to counterbalance power. Read through this lens, contemporary China exhibits a deliberate knitting-together of polity, doctrine, and production. Party committees, once a background presence, are now written into the internal life of firms, shaping decisions in the name of supervision of the domestic economy, while policy shops describe a new model of corporate governance that puts the Communist Party inside the command chain of nominally private companies. Empirical and analytic work alike record this insertion as a structural feature of the Xi era. The same fusion appears in law and ideology. In March 2018 the National People’s Congress adopted constitutional changes that added “Xi Jinping Thought” to the constitutional text and removed the two-term limit on the state presidency, consolidating leadership tenure and folding supervision commissions into the constitutional order. Gellner’s triple centralism that defines authoritarianism, the centralising of the political, ideological, and economic, gains a contemporary institutional form through this constitutional consolidation. The residue that might have grown into an organised counterweight remains curated. Two cornerstone statutes set the perimeter for association: the 2016 Charity Law defines the space for domestic philanthropy, and the 2016 Overseas NGO Law places foreign-linked civic activity under public-security management, channelling registration, funding, and programs through designated supervisory organs. Scholars and monitors describe a tightening environment for both international and grassroots organisations under these frameworks. Lawyers who tried to convert legal professionalism into organised accountability faced a decisive blow in the nationwide “709” crackdown [3], and a decade on, rights-defence attorneys still report disbarments, surveillance, and prosecutions. Labour NGOs and student-worker alliances that attempted to build durable associational life likewise met coordinated enforcement in 2018 around the Shenzhen Jasic case[4], which rights groups and researchers mark as a watershed in delimiting independent labour organisation outside the state-run union. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions remains the sole legal union centre, preserving a monopoly that channels worker representation into party-state structures. A similar logic governs the boundary of the public sphere online and in universities. Feminist and #MeToo networks repeatedly find their mobilisation capacities narrowed through censorship, prosecutions, and the enforced dormancy of campus groups, even as discussion of gender and rights continues to circulate in curated cultural channels. Research on digital contention documents the strategies activists adopt to survive within these constraints, which illustrates a pattern Gellner would recognize: a lively residue that is powerless nor permitted to become large, powerful, and organised. Across the border in Hong Kong, a formerly robust associational ecosystem shows the same doctrinal perimeter. The Beijing-imposed National Security Law of 2020 criminalises secession, subversion, terrorism, and foreign collusion, and the city’s own Article 23 legislation of March 2024 broadens offences to treason, espionage, and external interference; civil-society monitors describe a far-reaching contraction of assembly, advocacy, and media. The combined legal architecture demonstrates how a security-first reading of politics recodes open organisation as regulated activity, and it illustrates how quickly a residue can lose the features that make it a civil society in Gellner’s sense. Why economic success did not translate into civil society follows directly from Gellner’s insistence that the sovereign monopoly of coercion in advanced economies is normal and even necessary, so pluralism must be cultivated in economy and ideology. China’s strategy has been to reap growth while ensuring that neither sphere coagulates into a countervailing power. Party organisations in firms secure line-of-sight into corporate decisions; philanthropy and NGOs receive permissioned channels; independent trade unionism remains off the menu; courts and bars operate under rules that keep the personnel occupying state positions from being called to account by an autonomous legal guild. The result is a populous residue that is rich in initiatives and communities and lean in structural autonomy, which means the liberal triptych Gellner linked together - political, economic, and ideological pluralism - never quite forms a triangle with civil society at its centre. Gellner also offers language for the belief-structure that underwrites this design. Where the Marxist case became the monopoly of a nonfaith after routinisation, his text still allowed for an Umma based on a different faith, for instance, on some blend of nationalism and either traditionalism or authoritarianism. Contemporary China presents exactly such a blend: a civilisational nationalism, a codified ideological canon, and a pedagogy of patriotic virtue that yields a “handrail through life” without requiring a revolutionary refit of the economy’s ownership architecture. Constitutional change and party-in-firm governance amount to a modern ideocracy that is secular, nationalist, and managerial rather than soteriological[5], and this is enough to keep the residue from challenging the state as a coequal power centre. The same framework clarifies why the growth story alone does not tip the balance. The World Bank now speaks of structural headwinds and the need for deeper reforms in social protections and the household registration system; analysts of corporate governance describe a continuing thickening of party oversight in the private sector. In Gellner’s terms, prosperity can expand the residue’s size, education, and urbanity, while control of organisational chokepoints prevents the residue from becoming large, powerful, and organised in the way that can both ensure that the state does its job and leave citizens free to join and leave associations at will. This reading neither forecloses evolution nor promises it. Gellner closed his own account of what happens after the collapse of the Soviet system with an avowed refusal to dogmatise and with the simple line that “hope remains rationally permissible.” The Chinese case fits his structure closely: economic modernity secured through a monopoly polity, pluralism drained from the ideological and economic spheres by design, and a vivid, energetic social residue that engages, adapts, and persists without inaugurating the institutional counterweight that he called civil society. The spectacular rise demonstrates how thoroughly an industrious, literate, and urban population can transform living standards under a disciplined party-state, and the same rise illustrates how civil society, in Gellner’s precise sense, remains a distinct achievement requiring a redistribution of organisational autonomy that growth, by itself, does not supply. So far, then, China remains stuck without a civic society. What happens next is as difficult to call as when the USSR fell but there’s little to suggest that a civil society is in the offing any time soon. The USA’s Attack On Its Own Civil Society The USA under Trump seems to be working hard to take a wrecking ball to its own. The United States still speaks the Atlantic idiom of political, economic, and ideological pluralism, and still prizes something called ‘civil society’, that part of society which is not the state, and, crucially, large, powerful, and organised enough to ensure that the state does its job but no more. The question for today is whether the second Trump administration has been rearranging institutions so that the non-state residue becomes large in numbers yet thin in autonomy, busy in activity yet weak as a counterweight. Start with architecture. In an advanced economy the peacekeeping institution must be unique, so the live arena for pluralism is either the economic or the ideological sphere, or both. A presidency that pulls both levers at once tends toward his triple centralism of the political, ideological, and economic perfectly instantiated by China. This is what the Trump presidency is attempting to achieve. This weakens the very ecology that lets associations call to account those who temporarily occupy office by blurring the boundary between neutral administration and party command. The law’s ambient temperature matters just as much. In July 2024 the Supreme Court announced that a president enjoys absolute immunity for a core of official acts, presumptive immunity for other official acts, and no immunity for unofficial ones, a rearrangement of incentives around accountability that Gellner would call the terms of rotation and answerability. Days earlier, the Court had also overruled Chevron deference[6], shifting interpretive authority from agencies to courts. Taken together, broader presidential immunity and reduced agency discretion recode where contestation lives; layered on top of executive orders revoking the 2021 competition order, they tighten the presidency’s hand while thinning independent administrative ballast. “Civil society,” in his sense, must then do more work with less leverage. Foreign policy has been used to redraw the civic field at home and abroad. In January the White House froze foreign aid, moved to dismantle USAID, and is now asking the Supreme Court to lift an injunction requiring disbursement; global health analysts have tracked the resulting scramble across HIV, TB, and maternal-child programs. From Gellner’s angle, this shrinks the transnational associational web that normally buttresses domestic civic action universities, medical consortia, press-freedom NGOs, election-support groups by starving counterpart networks that circulate money, talent, and legitimacy. Domestic philanthropy outlets now advise on “survival strategies to help nonprofits adapt to the tumultuous funding environment,” a quiet recognition that the residue needs new lifelines when state pipelines close. The administration has also steered symbolic law toward a more unitary public square. New orders on flag desecration seek to narrow the space that Texas v. Johnson[7] carved out as protected political expression, with the Justice Department instructed to test the boundaries; parallel reporting describes a short emergency order asserting federal command over D.C. policing for an alleged crime surge. For Gellner, these gestures signal a preference for sacralising national symbols and centralizing order, moves that substitute executive will for the messy bargaining by multiple organised publics that civil society requires. The courts so far have shown both friction and restraint, which is itself part of the Gellnerian balance. A Trump-appointed judge dismissed an unprecedented Department Of Justice suit against all Maryland district judges over a habeas-related deportation pause, warning of a “constitutional crisis” and pointing the executive back to ordinary appellate channels.[8] In parallel, election-law groups warn that blueprints aligned with Project 2025[9] contemplate criminal exposure for officials who expanded access in 2020, an attempt to discipline the very professionals and nonprofits who make the modular, role-plural public sphere function. From Gellner’s perspective, the test is whether diverse non-governmental institutions remain strong enough to counterbalance the state, not just in theory but at choke-points like elections, policing, and immigration: current developments suggest that rapidly the counterbalance is collapsing. The associational economy has been re-indexed to executive priorities. Party cells in Chinese firms are not America’s model, but the logic of closer presidential command travels through other routes: Schedule F[10] for personnel; rapid-fire executive orders, nearly two hundred so far, relocating policy from rulemaking to the President; and managerial orders to “modernise” publication and clearance that compress public-comment and transparency windows civil groups use to mobilize. In Gellner’s terms, the residue is busy yet intermittent, its access points narrowed just as the demand for organised scrutiny rises. The digital public square, meanwhile, is being re-drawn by courts and agencies rather than parliaments of associations. The Supreme Court upheld a Texas age-verification regime for sexual content, a ruling civil-liberties groups call a blow to freedom of speech and privacy, even as lower courts field new library-purge and platform cases. These are the thick places where Gellner’s modular person learns and practices citizenship: libraries, school boards, local papers and niche nonprofits. The more these venues are jurisdictionalised and filtered, the more the non-state residue looks like a set of audiences rather than countervailing institutions. Disaster governance reveals the same pattern. Analysts and survivors argue that FEMA[11] staffing cuts, equity rollbacks, and AmeriCorps disruptions are hollowing out the volunteerist spine that historically links neighborhoods, city halls, and the federal state in crises; in Gellner’s frame, the civic “schools of self-government” are losing capacity just when climate shocks demand thicker networks. The point is not whether every forecast of risk is right, but that the associational infrastructure by which citizens turn outrage into organised competence is being thinned. Abroad, the administration styles these moves as restoration of presidential control and anti-bureaucratic vigour; at home, they are defended as overdue course corrections. Gellner’s vocabulary helps separate motive from mechanism. Civil society is not supine and powerless vis-à-vis the state because of a fabric of associations able to check and control government with resources, standing, and legal footholds to use formal procedural rules. Schedule F weakens this neutral expertise and an immunity-expanding Court alters accountability incentives; aid freezes and regulatory sprints cut the oxygen to organisations that translate expertise into standing; security-framed orders and litigation push sensitive questions from plural fora into executive hands and although each change is discrete together they re-weight the bargaining power between office and association. Gellner would also look for the counter-tendencies that make liberal orders resilient. Judges have pushed back in immigration; nonprofits have rerouted funding; local and state actors have treated federal flux as a prompt to exercise their own associational muscle; and even within conservatism, new flag-speech orders drew rare public dissent. Gellner ended his own comparison of ideocracies with that modest credo - “hope remains rationally permissible” - not because hope is a plan, but because civil society’s survival has always depended on publics that keep inventing venues for contestation faster than power can absorb them. The contemporary American test is whether the country’s dense web of bar associations, philanthropy networks, local media, universities, churches, unions, professional societies, election administrators, and neighborhood groups remains large, powerful, and organised enough to ensure that the state does its job but no more, even as the presidency, the courts, and the administrative state are being re-wired in ways that make that job definition less a matter of plural bargaining and more a matter of will. Civil Society and the Rational Individual I began by discussing Gellner’s notion of sovereign reason and now we can see how Gellner links the sovereignty of individual reason to the social architecture that lets it breathe. He starts from a crisp institutional claim: civil society is first of all that part of society which is not the state. It is a residue, and the residue that matters is large, powerful, and organised. Sovereign rationality flourishes where this organised residue keeps rulers inside a frame of law and answerability, to ensure that the state does its job but no more, with the personnel occupying state positions periodically rotated and with those same personnel called to account for the performance of the duties linked to their posts. The independence of offices from officeholders gives reasoning citizens a stable target: they press claims to institutions, not to persons. He fills that architecture with a psychology of agency. The modern citizen is not welded to a single role; rather, membership is optional and revocable. This portability of identity makes room for critical choice. Individuals enter and exit associations, try projects, assemble coalitions, and learn to reason publicly because no single ascribed status has the authority to pre-empt their judgment. Gellner captures the anthropological core: genuine civil society requires not only procedures but the modular person. Modularity is the institutionalisation of exit and recombination. It generates citizens who carry their sovereignty with them across settings, workplace, congregation, union, neighbourhood board so judgment is trained through practice rather than conferred by birth. The training ground is dense associational life. The capacity of the civil residue to check and control government depends not only on ballots but on persons, groups, or institutions possessed of resources sufficient to enable them to take advantage of the formal procedural rules. Resources and organisation allow individuals to act as more than solitary voices. Unions, professional bodies, local media, charities, congregations, learned societies, and watchdog NGOs translate private conviction into durable leverage. In this ecology, sovereign rationality is not a philosophical stance alone; it is a learned competence: drafting bylaws, keeping minutes, setting budgets, auditing leaders, arguing reasons, counting votes. The public sphere becomes a school of practical reason because associations ask their members to give and hear reasons in institutional time. Importantly, civil society’s way of handling belief keeps reason sovereign without expelling conviction. Civil society does not actually preclude its members from revering the sacred, and at the same time does not allow them to invoke it too much in political debate. Citizens can feel moral outrage, but they also avoid using outrage as a terminal decision procedure in debate. This shared restraint is an ethic of argument. It treats passion as a motive for entering public life and treats reasons as the currency for deciding within it. Sovereign rationality is thus a civic convention secured by law and by habit: speak from your deepest commitments, and when decision time arrives, submit to procedures that all can inspect. Rather than Utilitarianism then perhaps a related Consequentialism is the ethical style that captures this best. Education and culture give this convention its muscle. Gellner’s modernity builds a literate, portable, impersonal high culture through schooling. Individuals acquire skills and scripts that travel across settings, so they can read contracts, interpret rules, and contest claims with shared references. A standardised school culture is not the enemy of autonomy; it is the toolkit that lets ordinary people operate institutions without deferring to personal patrons. This is why he keeps returning to the image of the residue that is organised. Organisation turns literacy into leverage; it lets individuals move from solitary belief to collective reasoning with traction. Sovereign rationality also rests on the cleanliness of the line between the authority of offices and the charisma of occupants. “The authority of government as a set of institutions is not identifiable with the authority of the persons temporarily occupying governmental posts.” That distinction keeps disagreement safe. Individuals can say that a policy is wrong, that an official has erred, and that a procedure should be revised, while affirming the standing of the office itself. It enables you to kill the message without having to kill the messenger, which strikes me as an improvement on the older approach where the two were less easily separated. Civil society’s counterweights ensure that this stance is not merely tolerated; it is expected. A free press, adversarial advocacy, and judicial review make the giving of reasons consequential. The ecology includes an intellectual pluralism that protects inquiry. Gellner speaks of “ideological pluralism,” not as a marketplace of slogans, but as a structural bar against any “monopoly of truth or access to truth.” When no doctrine can close the conversation in its own name, individuals can think aloud without fear that dissent will be ruled a cognitive trespass. Philosophy, science, social criticism, and investigative reporting all take place under this umbrella. The result is not uniform mildness; the result is routinised contention that keeps refining the terms on which citizens justify claims to each other. Association teaches the dramaturgy of sovereignty. Meeting procedure, terms of office, transparent finance, open minutes, and rotating chairs convert abstract autonomy into routines. Citizens practice being both rulers and ruled, speaking, counting, losing, returning, persuading. The loss of a vote does not annul rational sovereignty; it reassigns it to work inside the process that might produce a different outcome next time. This rhythm cultivates patience and tenacity, which are the temporal virtues of public reason. Gellner’s historical vignettes illuminate the path to this arrangement. He watches segmentary worlds of kin and locality and notes their participatory warmth and their “status-rigidity,” then points to the civil condition where none of these social subunits posses a preemptive, prescriptive right over its members. He watches scriptural revivals and notes how routinisation can calm zeal into law, turning fervor into discipline, and discipline into teachable procedure. He watches modern administrations and underlines why the monopoly of legitimate coercion is normal in modern life, which is why the pluralism that matters must be housed in economy and ideology. In each scene, sovereign rationality appears not as a solitary enlightenment but as an equilibrium of institutions that refuse to absorb the citizen into any single role. The same lens clarifies why prosperity alone does not manufacture rational sovereignty. Rising incomes enlarge the residue and fill it with educated people, and the residue becomes civil society only when those people can found, fund, and defend organisations that they may enter and leave freely, and that can still stand up to the state when it matters. The grammar of civil society is freedom of association plus institutional traction. Without both, individual reason is either mute or merely expressive; with both, it is sovereign in the only sense that matters politically: it counts. Gellner’s closing mood is plainspoken. Civil society is a practice, not an ideology. It is the web of non-state bodies that is strong enough to counterbalance the state, the habits that keep outrage from ending the conversation, the legal forms that let people bind themselves today and unbind themselves tomorrow, and the civic pedagogy that turns dissidents into committee-chairs and back again. The sovereignty of individual reason lives inside that choreography. It is the freedom to judge, to organise, to revise, and to try again, carried by citizens who are many things at once and who keep their institutions honest by insisting, again and again, that the state do its job but no more. From London looking across the Atlantic, the question is whether America’s current style of leadership is converting plural publics into a single chorus by moralising national symbols and delegitimising rival institutional voices. Gellner’s rule is crisp: the ecology that guards freedom is not an atomised or powerless residue but associations with resources, standing, and access to procedures. When a movement treats executive will as the people’s undivided voice and recodes competing associations of press, unions, universities, watchdog NGOs, professional bars as suspect or subordinate, the civil residue remains populous yet becomes thin in autonomy. Sovereign offices drift toward the persons who occupy them, rather than remaining independent targets to which citizens can direct reasons and remedies. Gellner’s language points to the hinge: liberal orders survive when ideological pluralism refuses monopoly of truth or access to truth, when citizens may revere the sacred yet are not really allowed to use it as a terminal decision procedure in debate. Where a national creed is invoked as a final word, closing argument rather than opening premise, public reason loses oxygen, and the modular citizen loses room to manoeuvre. Macfarlane gives a rich reading of all this and makes clear that the bourgeois as a class formed by inner worldly asceticism lives a double life where the disenchantment of work doesn’t end up consuming all of her life. He suggests that actually the English were for a long time disenchanted in many of the ways Gellner suggests long before the seventeenth century and were adept at finding ways to resist the threat of disenchantment becoming all-consuming. I’ve used the term disenchantment a few times without really explaining what is meant. So, what do Weber, Macfarlane and Gellner mean when they talk about disenchntment? Well, as we’ve seen, the Calvinist idea of vocation turns ordinary work into a standing test of grace, so discipline, punctuality, bookkeeping, and mastery of rules become moral acts as well as economic techniques. Rational calculation spreads from the ledger to the timetable and to the conscience, and with it comes disenchantment, which is a thinning of magic and a suspicion of excess. The same ethic shapes tone as much as toil, it prefers sobriety to rapture, clarity to splendour, and treats self command as a civic virtue. In this frame the bourgeois learns to live inside procedures, to distrust miracle and frenzy, and to make rigour a habit that governs the week. Macfarlane makes much of the counter current, by which this class re-enchants its own life. Hobbies give room for play after the ledger closes, gardening, model making, music, collecting, cycling, cookery, reading, decorating, sport, palates, music, cinema, travel and so on, the list is endless and each an island of absorbed attention that does not need a profit and restores a sense of mastery without audit. Humour is dry and disrespectful rather than ecstatic, a safety valve that keeps zeal at bay. Friendship is non contractual in Durkheim’s sense, gifts and favours circulate without invoice, and romantic love is cultivated as a sphere where calculation has no authority. Social nuance works through class rather than caste. People read one another through accent, dress, schooling, neighbourhood, the car on the drive, the books on the table, food habits, and manners at the counter. A clipped Home Counties voice carries a different signal from Scouse or Brummie or a soft Edinburgh lilt. A Barbour at the rugby ground speaks one language, hi-vis on the early train another, quiet knitwear in a design studio another again. School histories matter: comprehensive or grammar, independent day or boarding, Oxbridge or red-brick, each opening different doors through alumni and custom. Postcodes cue stories of central affluence, commuter towns, new-build estates, coastal arts places or post-industrial wards. A Volvo estate on the school run does not say what a battered Transit says; a folding bike in Zone Two says something else. Reading choices signal too, from the LRB and TLS by the kettle to back pages in the barber to Substack essays in a co-working space. Diet and drink mark worlds, from sourdough and natural wine to supermarket meal deals to halal butchers and veg boxes, with Sunday roasts and tasting menus sitting in other niches. Manners round it out: queuing without being told, thank-you cards rather than emojis, the greeting to shop staff, the use of sorry as social padding, eye contact that fits the room. Leisure and the home stage these differences. National Trust boots in a muddy car park, package weeks in the Med during half term, a February ski trip, a music festival with a campervan, fishing on a cold river, junior football touchlines on a Sunday, each paints a scene. Inside the house you find gallery walls or framed school photos on the stairs, houseplants and scented candles, a hobby room for sewing or a turbo trainer for cycling, a shed that doubles as an office. Technology speaks too: an iPhone with a minimal case or a rugged Android with extra storage, Facebook neighbourhood groups, TikTok cleaning hacks[12], a vinyl turntable beside a Sonos bar. Pets do their bit: a working cocker, a rescue greyhound, a French bulldog, horses on the edge of town, a cat. Shops and memberships complete the picture, Waitrose deliveries or Aldi big shops, farm-shop deli counters or outlet villages, tailoring that lasts or fast-fashion returns, parkrun at nine, golf lists, five-a-side leagues, climbing gyms under the arches, reformer Pilates, a boxing club that opens before dawn. None of these signs rules alone. Together they form a language that most people read without noticing they are doing it. Class works like a board of snakes and ladders. People move up and down as fortune, skill, education, luck, marriage, illness, or migration shift the pieces. Accents soften or sharpen, wardrobes change, new postcodes appear on envelopes, reading lists and recipes evolve, habits of speech and leisure travel from one set of rooms to another. A redundancy can send a family down a few squares; a scholarship or a successful small business can lift them; a move to a thriving metro region can do more than either. Caste, by contrast, resembles chess. Positions are fixed, roles are scripted, movement is tightly bounded, the board assigns each piece a permanent identity with set lines of action. Class can sting and exclude, yet it allows ladders to appear and snakes to be dodged. Caste assigns squares and keeps them. The British ear for class hears tiny cues because the game permits motion. The point of attending to these signals is not to sneer or to worship them, it is to see how a mobile hierarchy sorts strangers in daily life, and how often small signs decide which door opens next. In this alternation between rigour and mild enchantment Macfarlane finds the everyday style of the bourgeois world, disciplined enough to build modernity, humane enough to resist extremes. This is all part of the civil life which allows for free entries and exists. Places with civil society tend to have free spaces such as parks open to all in order to facilitate this. I think all these - and no doubt you can think of many, many more elements - are the parts of what we mean by rational autonomous individuality that is often overlooked when political scientists, economists and political philosophers try and grasp what it is. Hume’s remark that, after staring into the philosophical abyss, he shut his books and played backgammon neatly acknowledges how reason, the self, and everyday civic sociability hold one another in place. Resistance to The Authoritarian Turn I’m suggesting that we’re living at a hinge moment where the geopolitics of authoritarianism is taking a form hold globally. Gellner would describe the anthropology of resistance in the same civic society vocabulary. A free order needs modular people not a single-role partisan. Modularity is the permission to enter and leave associations, to recombine identities across workplace, congregation, union, party, and neighbourhood board. If campaign and state become interchangeable, if loyalty asked of citizens seeks to trump the loyalties they owe to their multiple circles, modularity shrinks and with it the sovereign judgment that civil society teaches in committee rooms, court filings, audits, and ballots. The UK’s own Atlantic inheritance then reads as the patient work of keeping the residue organised enough to check the centre while keeping membership optional or revocable, so that citizens carry their sovereignty with them rather than handing it to patrons. On Islam he would recognize the continuity he already charted. The long modern reformation he described as a shift from shrine-centred folk superstition to a modern, scholarly, puritanical, scripturalist version of the faith has not reversed; it still offers believers a high-culture idiom and a handrail through life. He saw that Islam had moved straight from the segmentary community to the Umma, and that in many settings there is a plethora of faith and little craving for civil society. That description was analytic, not pejorative: the point was that a codified faith can unify and mobilise without demanding a full redesign of economic institutions. In present conditions he would keep two ideas side by side: firstly, that civil society does not actually preclude its members from revering the sacred, and also it does not allow them to invoke it too much in political debate. The first sentence secures the dignity of conviction; the second secures the language of reasons that strangers can share. When he turns from yesterday’s Soviet Union to today’s China, the substitution is conceptually direct. He once called Soviet history “Terror and Squalor,” and diagnosed how a secular ideocracy imposed a triple centralism, political, ideological, and economic and at the same time, the faith itself evaporated, leaving the monopoly of a nonfaith. He also foresaw an alternative end-state: a return to an Umma based on a different faith, for instance, on some blend of nationalism and either traditionalism or authoritarianism. Russia opted for authoritarianism. Contemporary China has a creed that is managerial and nationalist rather than soteriological; the organisational fact is the same: party, doctrine, and production are braided so that pluralism cannot take root in the two realms where modern societies need it, either the economic or the ideological sphere, or both. The result is a curated residue of lively communities, foundations, firms, and clubs that are real to participants and carefully corralled at the chokepoints where they could become large, powerful, and organised. In his terms, the peacekeeping institution remains unique (as it must in an industrial order), while the two necessary sites of plurality are supervised. Civil society in the precise Gellnerian sense does not consolidate, not because growth fails but because organisation is not permitted to coagulate into countervailing power. Placed together, these three vistas, the UK looking outward at a national-populist America, Islam’s enduring high culture, and China as the ideocratic successor to the Soviet role, bring his central mechanism into one frame. The Atlantic condition still depends on an institutional choreography in which parties alternate, courts and bars keep procedure honest, media and universities contest narratives, unions and firms bargain, charities and congregations mobilize, and citizens move among these circles as “modular” persons. Trump is rapidly destroying this. The Islamic condition still shows how a scriptural high culture can unify without demanding a total economic refit, giving many societies moral depth and social idiom while not, by itself, generating the specific residue that checks the state. The Chinese condition still shows how spectacular development can proceed while pluralism is thinned in the only two places where it can safely live once the modern state holds the monopoly of coercion, producing a set of institutions strong enough to check the state only in embryonic, permissioned form. He would measure American turbulence by a single question: have the diverse non-governmental institutions kept the standing and resources to use formal procedural rules to call rulers to account? He would measure Chinese stability by another: has prosperity created citizens who can build organisations they enter and leave freely that still stand up to the centre when it matters? He would measure the UK’s own stewardship by a third: do law and political custom continue to protect the optionality of membership and the routinisation of disagreement, so that moral outrage may be voiced but not used “as a terminal decision procedure in debate. I think he’d be very pessimistic when he looked out to try and answer those questions. Civil society is in trouble. The thread running through each case is his unromantic insistence that the sovereign rationality of individuals is not a private spark alone but a public craft rehearsed in associations. Civil society is the craft’s workshop. It turns literate competence into institutional traction; it turns conviction into arguments that count; it keeps offices separate from their occupants; it teaches losing without leaving and returning with better reasons. The alternatives are familiar in his pages: ideocratic unities that confer identity and purpose while preventing the residue from maturing into a counterweight, or oscillations between local patronage and central doctrine that leave scant appetite for the intermediate layer of voluntary bodies. Against those patterns he kept a small sentence for the end of difficult chapters: Hope remains rationally permissible. He meant hope of the modest kind that organises resources for the residue, widens the channels through which citizens can found and fund bodies they may exit at will, and keeps the sacred welcome in public speech yet secondary in public proof. In that balance the UK remembers what it is for, America remembers why rotation is a virtue, Islam continues to dignify a way of life while sharing the procedural field, and China demonstrates once more that the creation of civil society is not an automatic by-product of growth but a separate achievement, one that only comes when a state agrees to be strong at peacekeeping and weak at monopolising the other two realms where freedom actually lives. Conclusions We can now see how his theory of nationalism completes his overview. Gellner ties three strands into a single modern weave. The first is a shared high culture sustained by schools, media, and a common idiom; the second is a temper of rationalism that privileges rule-bound procedure over charismatic fiat; the third is the associational choreography he calls civil society, that part of society which is not the state but a residue. Civil society is where this residue is large, powerful, and organised. Nationalism supplies the cultural stage, rationalism supplies the script, and civil society supplies the actors who know their cues and their exits. Modern life (Gellner called it industrial life but I think it’s fair to expand this to capture how most people have to live these days) all requires strangers to cooperate at scale. How do we do this? Gellner’s answer is via a standardised, literate, portable culture that equips people to move across roles and places without losing their bearings. Nationalism is the political principle that the state should guard and embody this culture; it gives the schoolroom and the bureaucratic file the dignity of a shared world. The same process fashions the citizen as a modular person, unshackled from inherited stations and able to compose a life across many circles. Gellner never tires of reminding us of the institutional payoff: Membership is optional or revocable. A person can form a union on Tuesday, petition a council on Thursday, stand for a committee on Monday, and step back next month without forfeiting standing in any other sphere. This portability underwrites individual sovereignty in practice, since judgment becomes a daily craft exercised across associations rather than a single loyalty absorbed once and for all. Rationalism, in his vocabulary, is not a metaphysical creed. It is the public habit of asking for reasons that others can inspect and the readiness to submit decision to procedures agreed in advance. The moral centre is plain: civil life honours conviction and channels it through rules. Civil society does not actually preclude its members from revering the sacred, and at the same time it does not allow them to invoke it too much, or with excessive insistence, in political debate. Citizens may register moral outrage, so long as they do not use outrage as a terminal decision procedure in debate. This is how rationalism enters the bloodstream: oaths give way to minutes and audits, private fervour finds public speech, and victory takes the form of counted votes and reasoned judgments that can be appealed. The architecture lifts those habits above the level of good intentions. The residue counts only when it can ensure that the state does its job but no more, and that it does it properly. Offices are distinct from officeholders, so the personnel occupying state positions are periodically rotated in a manner only partly influenced and above all not controlled by the personnel themselves, and the personnel can be called to account for the performance of the duties linked to their posts. Associations keep rulers inside that frame because they possess resources, standing, lawyers, newspapers, dues, buildings, and reputations strong enough to activate formal procedural rules, such as elections and everything that supports them between elections. The result is a lawful traffic between rulers and ruled, not an episodic spasm. Nationalism and civil society meet again in the division of labour between the state and its publics. An advanced order rightly concentrates the instruments of peacekeeping; Gellner calls this the ordinary monopoly of legitimate coercion. Pluralism then has its home in either the economic or the ideological sphere, or both. Nationalism builds the common field where this pluralism can operate at scale providing the shared language, curricular canons, news routines and the ordinary grammar of public life. Civil society fills the field with unions, professional bodies, churches and synagogues and mosques, neighborhood boards, learned societies, charities, parties, and press. Rationalism is what these bodies practice when they work: budgets balanced, bylaws amended, reasons recorded, decisions published and remedies sought. His historical vignettes give the story a genealogy. Tribal segmentary worlds teem with assemblies and honour, and they bind the person to kin, place, and rite. Scriptural revivals radiate moral purpose, and they elevate a universal law. The modern settlement draws on both energies and routinises them into institutions that people can enter and leave without asking a patron’s leave. Gellner loves the paradox: civil society constitutes a countervailing force to the state and remains peaceful and, normally, unarmed; it contains powerful associations, institutions, and groupings, and none carry a preemptive, prescriptive right over its members. The paradoxes are resolved by procedure. Associations are strong toward rulers and gentle toward members because they command resources upward and honour exits sideways. The link to nationalism carries a further dividend. The national culture disenchants magic in everyday transactions and re-enchants loyalty at an abstract level of flag, language, shared memory, so that strangers can feel bound to finance schools, courts, welfare, roads, and defence. Civil society then translates that diffuse loyalty into practical accountability: bar associations that can discipline prosecutors and defend defendants, unions that can bargain and strike, watchdogs that can sue and publish, congregations that can mobilise neighbours, editors who can assign, auditors who can insist. Sovereign reason becomes a public craft because the institutions train it. Gellner’s insistence on ideological pluralism seals the connection to rationalism. Civil society seems to require ideological pluralism, since any institution claiming a monopoly of truth or access to truth would transform procedures into rituals of validation and preclude criticism. The modern classroom teaches a shared language and also the habit of dispute in that language; the modern court sits in robes and also reasons in written judgments; the modern chamber sings a national anthem and also tallies ayes and nays. The anthem dignifies, and the tally governs. I’m arguing that contemporary theorists attracted to East Asian success stories gain clarity when they utilise this full standard rather than a thin proxy. Growth enlarges the residue and populates it with educated people, and the residue becomes a civil society when those people can found, fund, govern, and defend organisations they can enter and leave freely, and when those organisations retain the capacity to stand up to the centre and oblige it through law, budget, and public reason. The test is not bustle alone, nor the presence of many forums, nor a choreography of consultations, nor economic growth or technological innovation alone. The test is countervailing power carried by bodies with optional membership and durable legal personality, able to stop a policy, to force disclosure, to protect a dissenter, to rotate an official, and to continue thriving afterward. China offers a formidable lesson in how to secure prosperity under disciplined central institutions that connect doctrine, party, and production. The lesson fascinates Macfarlane, but Gellner’s lens keeps the fascination analytic. The modern state’s monopoly of force is ordinary; the question is whether pluralism flourishes in the other two realms where it must live. He would ask about exit without personal peril, about budgets outside administrative tutelage, about litigation that binds agencies, about press that can investigate with remedies, about unions outside government supervision, about universities whose intellectual life includes the right to refuse the ideology of the centre. When these predicates are missing - and they are missing at the moment - the lively residue has energy and reach but lacks the specific autonomy that turns it into a counterweight. The achievement remains spectacular on its own terms but remains different in kind from the liberty that civil society secures. Gellner would remain alarmed. The moral of his linkage is practical. National schooling and a national idiom enlarge the circle in which strangers can cooperate; rationalism gives them the habit of offering reasons and accepting outcomes they dislike; civil society gives them the levers that make those habits consequential. The three together compose the craft through which individual sovereignty becomes real. The theorist who keeps all three in view sees why standardised culture is the precondition for a national public, why plural belief within a shared language is the lifeblood of public reason, and why the strength of the residue lies in the organisations that can call rulers to account and then meet again next week in the same rooms to do it once more. China has not achieved all of these yet.
Section 4 Megalomania: Introducing Gellnerian and Macfarlian Themes for the Consolidation of Authoritarianism 2050 Building on Macfarlane’s original worry about the origins and fragility of liberty mentioned at the start of the last section, I now recast the question in Gellner’s idiom of rationalism, nationalism, and civil society. The wager is interpretive and speculative at once: what would these two theorists of modernity say about our present developments, and what might they predict for 2050, especially about authoritarian resurgence and the thinning of liberty and democracy. I imagine a dialogue in which Macfarlane’s “island thesis” meets Gellner’s industrial-national theory of culture and his strict standard for civil society as first of all that part of society which is not the state. It has to be a residue, and, crucially, a residue that is large, powerful, and organised, able to ensure that the state does its job but no more, and that it does it properly. Macfarlane would see the last decades as confirmation that liberty is a precarious historical arrangement rather than a natural equilibrium. The insulation that once allowed the United States to develop without a permanent war footing has dissolved into global entanglements, and the security paradigm since 9/11 has normalized emergency as routine. In his Tocquevillian register, this erodes the buffer that protected republican habits, yielding a soft authoritarianism that retains elections and some legal pluralism while saturating everyday life with surveillance and constraint. Gellner would translate that into an institutional key: the peacekeeping function of the modern state is necessarily monopolised; pluralism must therefore live in either the economic or the ideological sphere, or both. When a permanent security frame reclassifies dissent as risk, the non-state residue may remain numerous yet lose the organised autonomy required to counterbalance the centre. Projecting toward 2050, Macfarlane would expect this soft authoritarianism to be unstable, swinging back to liberty or congealing into overt domination. Through Gellner’s lens, the hinge is whether the associational ecology can still marshal resources, media, and law to call rulers to account, with the personnel occupying state positions being periodically rotated and called to account for the performance of the duties linked to their posts. If that choreography persists, reversals remain possible. If not, the residue ceases to be large, powerful, and organised, and democracy’s forms carry less civic substance. It’s not in place in China, nor Russia and is being rapidly eroded in the USA. A joint view also clarifies how to read non-Western modernities. Macfarlane would argue that China and Japan developed oases of cognitive liberty inside centralised political orders: merchant guilds, artisanal communities, scholarly networks, domains of technical practice that operated with practical independence while remaining morally integrated into a hierarchical order. In China especially, adaptive statecraft tolerated semi-autonomous spaces so long as they did not threaten dynastic stability. This permitted a compartmentalised modernisation: scientific and commercial dynamism without a wholesale reordering of political authority. Gellner would acknowledge the effectiveness of such oases and then ask whether Industrial society, in the long run, imposes deeper cultural requirements. His “industrial society thesis” treats standardised, literate high culture as a structural necessity of modern production: mass schooling creates the portable skills and shared idiom that make strangers legible to each other, which is why nationalism arises to protect and embody that culture. The same process fashions “modular” persons for whom “membership is optional or revocable,” enabling them to join, exit, and recombine associations. A society that delivers industrial performance by schooling and mobility thereby manufactures the human material on which civil society depends. Here the dialogue becomes most pointed. Macfarlane would contend that enclaves can substitute for systemic separation; the state can permit cognitive autonomy in science, engineering, and logistics without letting it metastasise into political liberalism. Gellner would counter that the very high culture industrialism needs tends to spill beyond technical domains. A modular, literate population will press its claims across the board; civil society seems to require ideological pluralism, since any monopoly of truth or access to truth turns procedures into rituals of validation and precludes criticism. Where doctrine retains the last word, the associational residue can be lively and productive without becoming the lawful counterweight that keeps the state to its job but no more. Both would use this frame to read contemporary China. The party-state has connected doctrine, administration, and production to prevent pluralism from taking root in the only two places it can safely live given the state’s normal monopoly of coercion: economy and ideology. The result is a curated residue that is energetic, innovative, and thick with organisations whose lifeworlds are real to participants, and bounded at the chokepoints where they might become large, powerful, and organised. Macfarlane would describe this as an intensified version of imperial pragmatism that recalibrates the size and permeability of oases to sustain dynamism without conceding structural autonomy. Gellner would ask whether such recalibration can persist indefinitely in an industrial order that keeps training modular citizens and circulating standardised culture. If the oases stay narrow, innovation risks sclerosis; if they widen, associational autonomy begins to look like civil society. Nationalism links the threads. For Gellner, modernity needs a standardised national high culture to staff its roles; nationalism names the principle that the state should guard that culture. Rationalism is the public habit that lets citizens disagree in a shared idiom; civil society does not actually preclude its members from revering the sacred, and also does not allow them to invoke it too much in political debate. Civil society is the field where these habits get traction: unions, bars, churches and mosques and synagogues, universities, parties, media, neighborhood boards, watchdogs, each with enough resources and legal standing to use elections and courts and budgets to bind office, not persons. Where the three align - national high culture, rationalist procedure, organised association - individual sovereignty becomes a practice rather than an ideology. Seen this way, the present global trend is a stress test of the whole package. Macfarlane’s island thesis warns that geopolitical insulation once protected liberty in the Atlantic world and is ebbing everywhere. Gellner’s schema warns that when security frames colonise the ideological sphere and corporatist arrangements colonise the economic sphere, pluralism has nowhere to live. Both would agree that liberty, whether system-wide or enclave-based, is fragile because it depends on how power, culture, and economy are arranged and on whether citizens keep the grammar of public reason alive. Gellner would also caution contemporary theorists drawn to East Asia’s success to keep the full standard in view: growth enlarges the residue, and the residue becomes civil society only when associations can be founded, funded, and defended by citizens who may enter and leave freely, and who can lawfully stop the state when it exceeds its job. Without that countervailing capacity, nationalism supplies solidarity and rationalism supplies technique, but liberty lacks its institutional home. How Things Might Look In 2050 Reading the road to 2050 through Gellner’s triple lens of nationalism’s standardised high culture, rationalism’s rule-bound public reason, and civil society’s organised counterweights, yields a sober picture of states and platforms tightening their grip as security becomes a standing condition. Macfarlane’s “island thesis” sharpens this: once no great power lives behind a moat, a permanent emergency logic settles in. Gellner would translate the same drift into institutional terms. In advanced societies the peacekeeping apparatus must be unique; real plurality must live either in the economic or the ideological sphere, or both. When cyber-entanglement, supply-chain fragility, and low-grade conflict justify expanded surveillance, exceptional policing, and procedural shortcuts ratified by public fatigue, those two spheres are quietly colonised. Liberty contracts by increments as the non-state residue stays populous but loses the organised autonomy needed to keep the state to its job but no more. At the core is culture. Gellner’s industrial society thesis assumes a literate, mobile, standardised national culture not captive to one orthodoxy, a high culture made by schools and anchored in law. By 2050 the universal school is joined or overshadowed by universal platforms: a few operating systems for work, credit, health, identity, and news. The same standardisation that once unlocked mobility now arrives through private rails the executive can steer. If credentialing (the process by which institutions certify skills and award qualifications), hiring, and public speech all run on interoperable rails (shared technical standards that make systems click together), the cultural autonomy industrial society needs can be curtailed even if constitutions never change. Macfarlane’s comparative move adds how “enchanted” civilizations modernise without liberalisation. China and Japan, in his telling, carved oases of cognitive liberty, merchant guilds, research institutes, artisan networks, inside centralised orders, instead of separating power, culture, and economy wholesale. Extended to 2050, Beijing refines a method of compartmentalised permissiveness: city-regions, research corridors, and sovereign data zones (special districts with their own data rules) get wide latitude to push materials, biomedicine, and automation, provided political spillovers are contained. Mass culture tightens under a civic-national story; high-yield niches loosen and tighten with the business cycle and security needs. It is not a prelude to systemic liberalisation; it is a technique of rule. Gellner would push back, using the full triple lens to argue this is a new form of hard authoritarianism. First, nationalism. Industrial life needs a standardised high culture so strangers can cooperate; nationalism is the principle that the state should guard that culture. In China, the high culture is standardised, but guardianship fuses with party authority. Ideological pluralism is replaced by a canon claiming a monopoly of truth or access to truth, so doctrine, not public argument, sets the last word. Second, rationalism. Civil life does not actually preclude its members from revering the sacred, yet it also does not allow them to invoke it too much in political debate. Where orthodoxy closes debate by principle, reasons are performative rather than decisive. Third, civil society. He defined it as that part of society which is not the state. It is a residue, and, crucially, one large, powerful, and organised, with membership optional or revocable, able to ensure that the state does its job but no more. Macfarlane’s oases do not meet this standard. Their charters and funding are permissioned; exit depends on patrons; success rarely becomes lawful capacity to bind office. This is plurality without countervailing power. Gellner would therefore predict frictions by mid-century. If frontier innovation stays strong, he’d predict that either enclave autonomy is quietly enlarging toward systemic significance, or global production is shifting to need less broad cultural autonomy and more synthetic training data, more automation of tacit skills, more importation of core discovery. If productivity stalls, that confirms his wager that the cultural sphere cannot be sequestered indefinitely. Modernity’s human raw material is the modular individual, for whom membership is optional or revocable. Suppress modularity and it becomes harder to get the open-ended recombination complex innovation demands. Macfarlane’s rejoinder is to spell out how oases remain productive without liberal spillover. Administrative pluralism without political pluralism lets multiple regulators and municipalities compete over methods and standards while nested in a single hierarchy. Elastic legality creates special economic and research zones with bespoke contract and IP rules, bespoke meaning custom-built, to insulate collaboration and capital formation while keeping contention out of general courts. Moral integration supplies a civic-national story that valorises technical excellence as service to collective flourishing, converting elite ambition into reputational capital inside the regime rather than against it. Under these conditions, enclaves refresh themselves without coagulating into a counter-power. So Macfarlane can answer Gellner’s assumption that the oases might well be able to function as scientific and technological hubs, but in doing so he ignores the civil society issue. And Gellner of course would answer that none of this substitutes for civil society in his precise sense. It is corporatist segmentation: sectors and zones are recognised and organised from above, not built as independent counterweights from below. The triple centralism he once flagged - political, ideological, economic - becomes a design principle: party sets doctrine, doctrine legitimates administration, administration allocates capital. Nationalism supplies solidarity; rationalism supplies technique; the residue stays curated. That is a coherent model of modern authoritarian statehood; it is not a credible alternative to liberty. He would also map the likely equilibria elsewhere. One is authoritarian high modernism: heavy investment, strong central coordination, enough enclave freedom to keep the frontier moving, with a brittle public sphere and a thin civic layer. Another is a bifurcated liberal archipelago: islands of robust freedom and creativity in a sea of procedural democracy with pervasive surveillance, where liberties are geographically and professionally uneven. A third is managed stasis: stability without dynamism, trading growth for control. His markers remain concrete: who writes and owns curriculum in STEM and the humanities; whether independent credentialing markets proliferate; whether mid-life retraining is possible outside state-platform channels; whether courts preserve zones of unpredictability where power can lose; whether associations with optional membership still have the legal teeth and resources to force disclosure, halt projects, and rotate officials “in a manner only partly influenced and above all not controlled by the personnel themselves.” Macfarlane would track diagnostics keyed to his island thesis and a Maitland-style story of intermediate bodies. Are new civic institutions arising with legal personhood and endowments (protected pots of money that cannot be yanked by annual politics), for example, data fiduciaries, civic cloud co-ops, municipal insurers of last resort, or are intermediaries mere extensions of state or platform. (A “data fiduciary” here means an entity that, by law, must act in the best interests of those whose data it holds, the way a trustee must act for a beneficiary.) Do emergency measures expire on schedule, helped by “sunset clauses,” the automatic expiration dates that force renewal votes, or are they recursively normalised. Is local taxation and adjudication thickening relative to central transfers and administrative tribunals (executive-branch courts with streamlined procedures). His forecast is that, absent credible strategic restraint and redundancy in supply chains and data governance, soft authoritarianism tightens. Both would end with workmanlike prescriptions that fit Gellner’s lens and translate the technical nouns. Re-empower intermediate bodies with genuine endowments and charters rather than one-off program grants, so the residue is indeed “large, powerful, and organised.” Make those sunset clauses constitutional, with the burden of renewal placed on executives, so rationalism remains procedure, not rhetoric. Diversify certification and research funding away from single gatekeepers, so the national high culture cannot be captured by one doctrine. Treat the biggest tech platforms like legal caretakers with duties to users and the public, not as informal arms of the state; require transparency, auditability, and conflicts-of-interest rules the way we do for trustees and utilities. None of this is a grand reversal; it is coarse carpentry that reopens civic oxygen in a world with no islands. If 2050 leaves room for hope, it will be because nationalism’s shared idiom, rationalism’s procedural discipline, and civil society’s counterweights have been refastened to each other so modern states remain strong at peacekeeping and weak at monopolising the two realms where freedom actually lives. The Establishment of Authoritarian Modernity By 2050 A single map of authoritarian modernity toward 2050 comes into focus when Gellner’s triple lens is kept steady: nationalism’s standardised high culture, rationalism’s rule-bound public reason, and civil society’s organised counterweights. The shared pressures are already visible, permanent security entanglement, infrastructural interdependence, and the organisational demands of high technology. Macfarlane would say the end of islandhood removes a historical shelter for liberty; Gellner would add that the cultural autonomy industrial society needs is being squeezed by states and platforms that can standardise education, identity, and coordination at scale. The result is not a march to liberalism but a family of enclosure strategies: each tradition narrows political space while keeping just enough cognitive oxygen to sustain innovation. In the West, the nineteenth and twentieth century separation of power, culture, and economy remains on paper while hollowing out in practice. Emergency governance, platform intermediation of work and speech, and critical infrastructure exceptionalism compress liberties by degrees. Innovation clusters in privileged archipelagos, metropolitan regions, research corridors, and public and private consortia, where legal carve outs, procurement streams, and reputational insulation backstop risk taking. Civil society survives, yet the older counterweights, trusts, clubs, learned societies, are overshadowed by securitised utilities and platform governance. Macfarlane would call this soft authoritarianism that hardens as crises stack; Gellner would call it the implosion of the autonomous cultural sphere on which industrial dynamism depended. The decisive question for the West by 2050 is whether archipelago freedom can compensate for systemic narrowing. If these islands refresh talent, diversify certification, and keep courts unpredictable enough for power to lose, innovation may persist. If not, incrementalism and rent extraction will dominate while civic oxygen thins. East Asia’s enchanted modernity proceeds by partition, not by full separation. China exemplifies a centralised order that expands and contracts oases of cognitive liberty, special zones, sectoral exemptions, elite universities, while refusing generalised pluralism. Administrative pluralism without political pluralism, elastic legality in designated zones, and moral integration that converts elite ambition into service to the regime allow technical frontiers to advance while ideological control deepens. Japan’s version is quieter, dense coordination among state, firms, and bureaucracy, with enough legal pluralism to satisfy a cultural autonomy test and enough administrative steering to fit the enclave logic. The fork by 2050 is plain. If enclave autonomy quietly grows, with wider intellectual property commons, more independent standards bodies, and diverse funding channels, the system can continue to deliver frontier gains without liberal spillover. If coercion bleeds into technical governance, productivity stalls and the oases wither. Islamic polities face a distinct equilibrium because the sacred is an independent and transnational source of authority; the location of cognitive oxygen is negotiated beneath that canopy and narrows when security imperatives rise. The most plausible settlement is a patchwork of authoritarian leaning modernities, each differentiated by where it places the oxygen valves. Western systems preserve liberty unevenly through legally armed archipelagos. China sustains frontier sectors through state tuned oases. Islamic polities maintain hybrid zones under sacred authority. None of these restores the systemic liberty of the late twentieth century. This is precisely why Gellner’s standard must be kept in the foreground. Civil society is, as he put it, “first of all that part of society which is not the state. It is a residue,” and the residue that matters is “large, powerful, and organized,” able “to ensure that the state does its job but no more, and that it does it properly.” Its members retain mobility, “Membership is optional or revocable,” and its culture resists any “monopoly of truth or access to truth.” If people do not work to keep all three conditions present at once, a standardised high culture that is not monopolised, a public rationalism that governs decisions by reasons rather than charisma, and strong voluntary bodies with legal teeth, then civil society is in trouble in every scenario. Run the American case through that triple lens and the warning clarifies. The forms of separation between power, culture, and economy remain, but substance drains away when courts, agencies, and the civil service are politicised; when independent institutions are intimidated or financially captured; when media ecosystems are repurposed into loyalty pipelines. Competitive elections can still yield executives unchecked by law or countervailing institutions if the autonomous cultural sphere has been folded into state and platform alignment. Once education, information, and law sit under executive will, the culture industrial society needs becomes an instrument of power, and the move from soft to hard authoritarianism becomes easier and less visible. Without an external cultural mainstream to articulate alternatives, the only effective constraint is the executive’s own calculation of cost and benefit. Apply the same lens elsewhere and the convergence differs in texture and is similar in outcome. In China, a standardised national culture is fused to party guardianship, debate closes by doctrine rather than public argument, and the celebrated oases are permissioned pluralities that do not add up to countervailing power. The model is coherent and productive; it is not civil society in Gellner’s sense. In the Islamic world, the sacred field can never be fully internalised by the state, which creates room for negotiation and also for coercive closure when security rises. In each case, the cultural space that industrial modernity once required is drawn into political purposes unless it is actively defended. What follows is less prophecy and more a list of repairs that keep Gellner’s conditions alive. Nationalism’s shared idiom must remain shared rather than captured; curricula and credentialing need multiple authors and independent standards. Rationalism must stay procedural; courts must be able to surprise power; sunset clauses must actually sunset; emergency orders must expire unless renewed for public reasons. Civil society must be re endowed; unions, bars, local media, congregations, professional societies, watchdog organisations, and universities need legal personhood, protected endowments, and open channels to raise and spend funds, so they can sue, audit, publish, and organise without permission. The aim is not to preserve islands for elites, it is to keep the non state residue “large, powerful, and organized,” with enough resources and standing to use elections, litigation, budgets, and publicity to bind office rather than persons. Offices must remain distinct from office holders, “the personnel occupying state positions are periodically rotated,” and they “can be called to account for the performance of the duties linked to their posts.” Gellner’s paradoxes still hold. Civil society “constitutes a countervailing force to the state,” and is “peaceful and, normally, unarmed.” It “contains powerful associations, institutions, and groupings,” and none has a “preemptive, prescriptive right over its members.” These paradoxes do not sustain themselves. If people do not fight for all three pillars, a national high culture without monopoly, rationalist procedure without exception, and organised associations with real teeth, the residue becomes busy and harmless, the culture becomes standardised and obedient, and the language of reasons becomes a ceremony. If they do fight for them in the intervening years, archipelagos can remain schools of freedom rather than reservations; oases can be nurseries of autonomy rather than showcases of compliance; and the sacred can be honoured without being made “a terminal decision procedure in debate.” That is the difference between a world that merely innovates and a world in which individuals remain sovereign because they can organise, speak, lose, return, and win by reasons that count. Conflict in 2050 If the 2050 world unfolds along the authoritarian-convergence lines imagined here, Gellner and Macfarlane would both see the coming decades as fertile ground for new forms of conflict though they would diagnose their roots and predict their trajectories differently, reflecting their divergent emphases on cultural structure and historical contingency. Gellner, with his functionalist-Industrial lens, would look first at the contradictions between the technological needs of advanced production and the cultural arrangements of fully securitised states. He would note that authoritarian convergence does not remove the deep structural diversity between Western post-liberal states, East Asian “enchanted” modernities, and Islamic sacred polities. The common erosion of cultural autonomy does not make their modes of legitimacy compatible, it simply constrains their internal flexibility. This, he would argue, makes conflict more likely in three domains: over resource corridors (especially water and rare-earths), over control of migration flows triggered by climate shocks, and over the global allocation of cognitive capacity, talent, research, and educational infrastructure, when innovation is a matter of strategic survival. He would anticipate that wars in such a system may be less about ideology than about securing functional monopolies in energy, fresh water, agricultural stability, and AI platforms. Macfarlane, focusing on the loss of insulation and the fragility of liberty, would see conflict as emerging from the interplay between collapsing buffers and the persistence of historically rooted cleavages. Climate change, mass migration, and demographic shifts especially aging populations in the global North and East Asia create political stresses that authoritarian regimes will manage by deflecting grievances outward. He would predict increased “pressure-valve conflicts” at the peripheries: border militarisations not only to repel migrants but to turn the act of repulsion into a performative demonstration of sovereignty; proxy wars in resource-rich regions, particularly in Africa and Central Asia, where younger populations and remaining unexploited reserves become the object of long-term enclosure strategies. For Macfarlane, the new conflicts would be shaped by the political geography of the enclaves, zones of relative openness or economic vitality targeted either for capture by rival powers or for sabotage to prevent them becoming autonomous nodes. On political structures, Gellner might speculate about a revival of something akin to “first, second, and third worldism” but stripped of Cold War ideology and grounded instead in civilisational-authoritarian blocs. The new “First World” would not be liberal democracies but the high-capacity, high-surveillance states, Western post-liberal systems, China, advanced Gulf monarchies, that control global production nodes. The “Second World” might be the mid-tier authoritarian states with some Industrial capacity but dependent on technological and security guarantees from the first bloc, states like Turkey, mid-income Latin American polities, or parts of Southeast Asia. The “Third World” would be those regions left structurally subordinate: climate-fragile states in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and parts of the Middle East whose youthful populations become labour and migration reservoirs, and whose resources are managed through semi-formal protectorate arrangements. He would emphasise that, unlike in the Cold War, alignment here would be transactional and flexible, driven by resource flows and supply chain security rather than ideological solidarity. Macfarlane might reframe the same development less in terms of three worlds than of three degrees of political insulation from systemic shocks. The “core-insulated” states are those with strong internal food, water, and energy security and the administrative capacity to manage demographic aging without political breakdown, here climate change is a challenge but not an existential crisis. The “permeable” states are those whose security rests on vulnerable trade corridors or fragile resource access; their politics will be shaped by dependency management, oscillating between submission to stronger patrons and opportunistic balancing. The “exposed” states are those whose combination of climate stress, youthful demographics, and weak institutions make them permanent sources of outward migration and conflict spillover. For him, this framing would make clear that the new global order is not just authoritarian but stratified by the degree to which states can defend their populations from environmental and demographic shocks without losing control. Both would agree that climate change reintroduces scarcity as the primary driver of global politics. Gellner would underline the way such scarcity compels even post-Industrial societies to behave more like Agrarian empires, with strategic depth measured in food basins, river control, and secure hinterlands. He might foresee alliances not unlike medieval trade leagues, consortia of high-surveillance states pooling resources and policing trade routes, perhaps even jointly managing climate migration flows as a security function. Macfarlane would stress that the island thesis is inverted here: there are no true islands, so all powers behave as if they are continental states under siege, fortifying borders, projecting force forward, and treating every migration flow as a potential political destabiliser. The aging of populations in the high-capacity authoritarian core would produce another axis of conflict. Gellner would expect talent wars: active recruitment and coercive retention of high-skill migrants, coupled with efforts to sabotage rivals’ ability to attract or educate them. Macfarlane would warn that the legitimacy of the core states will depend on how they manage the political optics of importing labour while suppressing broader migration. This creates openings for middle-tier states to play labour-broker roles, gaining leverage by controlling access to their human capital, echoes of Cold War-era alignment games, but centred on demography and skills rather than ideology. In the end, neither would see these as stable equilibria. Gellner would predict that the authoritarian convergence masks deep incompatibilities between the legitimating orders - Confucian technocracy, post-Christian secularism, Islamic sacralism - and that as climate and demographic pressures intensify, the blocs will fracture along those lines. Macfarlane would be less certain of fracture, but more certain that liberty in any systemic sense would not re-emerge from these conflicts. At most, new political spaces might open within the cracks, revived enclaves of autonomy in a few cities, new transnational associations bound by mutual trust and resource pooling but these would remain exceptions in a world where hard power and environmental survival dictate the primary forms of political order. From the 2050 vantage point, the first decade would be defined by the consolidation of the authoritarian convergence rather than its fracture. Western post-liberal states refine their archipelago model, with metro-regions and research corridors still productive but increasingly tied to national security frameworks. China tightens the integration of its oases into central planning without shutting them entirely, preserving enough frontier research to maintain parity in strategic technologies. Islamic states settle into their chosen modes: Gulf monarchies continue high-tech enclave building under dynastic-clerical legitimacy, Iran refines its sacral modernist template, and nationalist religious regimes fuse ideological mobilisation with military-led Industrialisation. Climate change moves from an abstract driver to a material political constant, with recurrent droughts, water shortages, and crop failures in Africa, South Asia, and parts of the Middle East creating permanent migration flows toward Europe, East Asia, and the Americas. These flows are met not only with militarised borders but with forward deployments into transit regions, where great powers fund security regimes to manage and redirect population movements. By the early 2060s, these arrangements generate the first sustained conflicts. Water basin control becomes the main trigger in Central Asia and East Africa, with upstream states backed by core powers diverting flows, and downstream states facing famine and internal revolt. Climate-induced displacement now moves millions annually, not episodically, forcing receiving states to negotiate formalised labour-migration exchanges with origin countries in return for aid and security guarantees. The demographic imbalance between aging core states and youthful peripheries drives a new form of geopolitical competition: rather than ideological bloc alignment, states are classified by their ability to supply or absorb human capital. Middle-tier “labour broker” states in North Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America play patrons off against each other, using migration policy as leverage. Through the 2070s, the authoritarian convergence begins to strain. Gellner would read the strain as the inevitable result of cultural incompatibilities: Confucian technocracies, Islamic sacral states, and post-Christian secular orders can cooperate on resource extraction, migration control, and climate engineering, but each resists deeper integration that would undermine its legitimating narrative. Joint climate adaptation projects, geoengineering, ocean desalination, polar ice management become sites of rivalry, with disputes over intellectual property, environmental side-effects, and control of the new infrastructures. Macfarlane would see the same tensions through the lens of insulation and its absence: with no buffers anywhere, each crisis ricochets across the system, forcing all powers to treat each other less as long-term partners than as provisional collabourators in a permanent emergency. In this decade, political violence shifts form. State-on-state warfare remains limited because of the cost to tightly interwoven supply chains, but proxy wars over water, food corridors, and mineral deposits intensify, fought largely in “exposed” states unable to defend their own resource sovereignty. Urban uprisings occur in labour-importing cities when managed migration systems falter under economic downturns; in response, authoritarian regimes experiment with new urban governance models, sealed districts, biometric rationing, predictive policing, that lock dissent into controlled zones. These become exportable products: cities in different blocs purchase each other’s control architectures, further converging governance styles. By the late 2070s, the convergence has produced a recognisable planetary political order. The “first world” is no longer an ideological category but a functional one, comprising high-capacity authoritarian states with secured water, energy, and food systems, advanced climate adaptation infrastructure, and monopolies over certain critical technologies. The “second world” consists of dependent but stable regimes trading strategic resources or demographic surplus for protection, technology access, and enclave development funds. The “third world” is a patchwork of zones under climate triage managed by external powers through aid-security packages, acting as population buffers and extraction sites. This is not a Cold War revival: alignment is fluid, and states may shift categories as climate shocks, demographic swings, or technological breakthroughs alter their value to the system. Conflict in this world is no longer framed in the language of democracy or revolution but in the register of allocation: who controls rivers, desalination plants, food synthesis facilities, climate stabilisation platforms, and migration corridors. Gellner would note that even without ideological cleavages, these struggles remain existential because they determine the ability of regimes to maintain their legitimacy and survival in the absence of cultural autonomy. Macfarlane would observe that liberty has not re-emerged anywhere in systemic form; what survives are localised, conditional freedoms in well-protected enclaves whose autonomy is tolerated because they produce outputs, scientific, technical, or financial, that the central power cannot replace. Neither would mistake this for stability. The system is self-maintaining only while climate engineering and migration management work as designed. A failure in either whether through ecological feedback loops, a technological collapse, or a coordinated uprising in a broker state could trigger rapid de-alignment, as powers revert to unilateral control over life-support resources. In that sense, the 2080 world carries within it the seeds of its own fragmentation, but both would stress that such a collapse would be more likely to usher in new authoritarian consolidations than a revival of open, systemic liberty. Ideology 2025 Gellner would begin by rejecting the idea that the end of ideology necessarily means the end of ideological forms. In his framework, nationalism is not an anachronism but a functional tool of modern states, especially in the authoritarian convergence described for 2050. His classic argument that nationalism is the political principle which holds that the political and the cultural unit should be congruent remains relevant, but in the converged authoritarian order it works in a more instrumentalised way. Nationalism, Hindu revivalism, or other ideological idioms serve as binding agents for loyalty in systems where the cultural sphere is no longer autonomous but entirely state-embedded. They supply the emotional legitimacy and moral narrative that pure technocratic management cannot provide. In a world where AI infrastructures and mega-cities run daily life, the core of governance is technical, administrative, and resource-driven, but Gellner would say that the “software” of legitimacy still has to be cultural. In his analysis, modern Industrial and post-Industrial societies can be run without open ideological contestation, there’s no real space for competing doctrines, but they cannot be run without a unifying symbolic idiom. Nationalism and religious revivalism become performance layers: curated narratives that provide citizens with a sense of belonging and historical continuity, even though the underlying governance logic is the same technocratic authoritarianism across zones. Hindu nationalism in India, Orthodox nationalism in Russia, and civilisational Confucian patriotism in China would thus be less about shaping economic or administrative policy than about giving state control an affective and historical register that is legible to the population. Macfarlane would see this persistence of ideological forms as perfectly consistent with the historical patterns he studies. He would argue that liberty’s fragility means that in the absence of strong counterbalancing institutions, rulers revert to tried and tested legitimating frameworks, religion, nation, dynasty, because they have deep historical resonance and can be adapted to centralising power. In his “island thesis” terms, when there is no insulation from global pressures, the political order becomes defensive and needs rallying symbols to unify the population against perceived threats. Ideologies like Hindu nationalism in India, or nationalist religio-political narratives elsewhere, become tools for converting central authority’s security agenda into popular identity. For Macfarlane, these ideological languages function as the cultural veneer on a structural convergence toward the same kind of integrated AI-administered authoritarianism. In the West, this might be framed in terms of national security and constitutional patriotism; in East Asia, in terms of civilisational revival; in Islamic states, in terms of defending the ummah. The key point for him is that these narratives are no longer open ideological battlegrounds in the nineteenth- or twentieth-century sense, they are controlled mythologies, broadcast and adapted by the same state-platform infrastructures that deliver food, water, and policing. Both would agree that ideology in this future is less about policy content and more about symbolic legitimacy. Gellner would stress that in earlier Industrial modernity, competing ideologies could genuinely influence governance because the cultural sphere had autonomy. Once that autonomy is gone, ideology becomes a monopoly product: the state manufactures the single authorised narrative, tweaks it for regional or religious sensibilities, and uses it to mobilise, integrate, or pacify. Macfarlane would add that, historically, this kind of monopoly ideology is a symptom of liberty’s absence; it survives because it is useful to power, not because it is open to genuine contestation. This helps explain why the 2050 authoritarian world can be “post-ideological” in structure while still being saturated with ideological imagery. The machinery of governance, AI management, enclave economies, resource allocation, does not require ideological pluralism. But the human need for meaning, belonging, and identity is still politically exploitable. Nationalism, Hindu revivalism, or Islamic solidarity thus become what both would likely call mobilising myths: emotionally potent, centrally curated, and endlessly adaptable to the needs of a regime that in reality shares far more with its authoritarian peers than it admits in its own story about itself. Gellner would argue that even in a converged authoritarian world, regimes will still use ideological difference externally because it offers a convenient and low-cost way to frame geopolitical rivalry in terms that mobilise their populations. He would see this as a continuation of the pattern in which nationalism is outward-facing as much as inward-facing: while domestically it legitimises central authority by binding culture and politics together, internationally it serves to distinguish “us” from “them” even when both sides run on the same structural model of AI-administered technocratic authoritarianism. For him, the content of these external ideologies would matter less than the fact that they are functionally equivalent instruments, deployed to make competition over resources, migration corridors, or strategic technologies appear as civilisational struggles rather than as contests between similarly structured states. He would note that this externalised ideological competition can be useful for maintaining domestic legitimacy. A nationalist government can explain resource shortages, AI-infrastructure breakdowns, or unpopular population-management measures as necessary sacrifices in the defence of “our” way of life against hostile civilisations. Even if the real conflict is over desalination plant control, rare-earth mining rights, or AI patents, the framing in nationalist or religious terms keeps public opinion aligned with the regime. Gellner would stress that this is not genuine ideological pluralism but competitive myth-making between regimes whose underlying governance logic is the same. Macfarlane would argue that such ideological posturing between structurally similar regimes is entirely in keeping with the long history of “family quarrels” between polities of the same basic political form. In his terms, the loss of insulation means that every regime is exposed to the same global pressures - climate migration, water scarcity, demographic imbalance but each needs to maintain a unique narrative to avoid appearing interchangeable with rivals. This necessity drives the cultivation of “civilisational brands” that can be turned outward in rivalry. Hindu nationalism can be projected as a bulwark against Islamic expansion or Chinese encroachment; Islamic solidarity can be mobilised against Western decadence or Hindu chauvinism; Chinese civilisational rhetoric can frame competition with the West as a 21st-century version of resisting colonialism. He would also point out that in such a world, these ideological distinctions can harden at the level of public perception even while elites privately recognise their shared technocratic-authoritarian structures. Citizens may genuinely come to see their own bloc as ideologically and morally distinct from others, because every cultural signal they receive is filtered through the state-platform infrastructure. This makes the ideological competition more stable than it might seem: since liberty is absent, there are no independent domestic spaces to interrogate the gap between the external rhetoric and the internal reality. Both would see the practical function of this external ideological competition as twofold: it mobilises the home population for sacrifice and loyalty, and it creates negotiating space in resource and migration politics by allowing concessions to be framed as victories over ideological adversaries. For example, an Indian water-sharing deal with China could be sold domestically as a triumph of Hindu civilisational resilience over Chinese overreach, even if in reality it is a straightforward allocation of glacial meltwater rights between two technocratic megastates. Gellner would caution that while this external ideological signalling can be stabilising in the short term, it also carries the risk of hardening into genuinely irreconcilable identity conflicts if propaganda outpaces elite control. Macfarlane would agree but might place more emphasis on the historical precedent: many long-lasting empires and states maintained stable rivalry narratives for centuries, only occasionally tipping into open war when external shocks - famines, migrations, technological disruptions forced a recalibration of the balance. In the 2050-2080 authoritarian convergence, both would expect ideological competition to be an ongoing, managed performance that shapes the theatre of global politics without changing its backstage architecture. In South Asia, the India-China-Pakistan triangle becomes the archetype of managed ideological rivalry masking resource politics. New glacier-management accords over Indus–Ganges–Brahmaputra meltwater are negotiated under security umbrellas while each capital frames outcomes as civilisational victories. India sells concessions as Hindu civilisational resilience and border guardianship; China presents them as responsible Confucian stewardship of “Asian modernity”; Pakistan wraps its stance in Islamic justice and downstream rights. Gellner would say the ideological packaging is a mobilising veneer over highly technocratic bargains about flow schedules, desalination capacity, and geoengineering risk. Macfarlane would stress that the absence of insulation means every drought or flood ricochets through these narratives, giving executives pretexts to tighten controls in mega-cities like Delhi or Chongqing and to discipline peripheral regions under the banner of national honour. The real deterrent to open war is not mutual affection but mutual dependence on AI-run river basins and satellite climate services that none can afford to see sabotaged. Across the Himalayas and into the Indo-Pacific, maritime choke points turn into theatres for ritualised confrontation. Indian Ocean patrols, PLA Navy “escorts,” and U.S. freedom-of-navigation transits stage rival ideologies, Hindu civilisational renaissance, Chinese rejuvenation, American guardianship of an “open order” even as all three quietly coordinate on piracy suppression, data cable repair, and oil-spill response. Gellner would underline the functional convergence: identical ships, interoperable satellites, similar officer-training regimes; the slogans differ, the operating logic does not. Macfarlane would read each incident as grist for domestic consolidation, with televised standoffs feeding metropolitan control dashboards that fine-tune subsidies, curfews, and crowd control across AI-governed megacities. In the Gulf and greater Middle East, ideological registers - Islamic solidarity, anti-imperialist resistance, civilisational pride - frame contests that are, beneath the surface, fights over desalination plants, green-ammonia export terminals, and migration corridors. Gulf city-states showcase pious high-modernism; Iran emphasises sacral sovereignty; Turkey performs neo-Ottoman tutelage. Gellner would call this sacral branding for resource brokerage: whoever narrates the moral purpose of water and energy infrastructures wins compliance at home while selling reliability abroad. Macfarlane would emphasise enclave management: elite technopoles remain productive because they are buffered by religious legitimacy and security exemptions, while the broader polity is tightened through moral–legal narratives that delegitimate dissent as betrayal of the ummah. In North and East Africa, the Nile and interior aquifers turn into diplomatic metronomes. Ethiopia, Egypt, Sudan, Sahel states, and outside patrons - the U.S., EU, China, Gulf - rotate between crisis and pact, each resolution celebrated as ideological vindication: civilisational guardianship of the river, African sovereignty, Islamic stewardship. For Gellner the real coin is remote-sensing data, dam-operating algorithms, and insurance backstops. For Macfarlane the recurrent “victories” justify domestic states of exception and metropolitan securitisation in Cairo, Addis, and Khartoum, with liberties traded for water guarantees. The Arctic is Russia’s prime stage. Moscow narrates Orthodox–Eurasian guardianship of the north; Washington recasts its presence as rule-of-law navigation; the EU as ecological trusteeship; China as polar scientific modernity. Underneath, they bargain transit slots, the purchase and lifting of liquefied natural gas from a project by a buyer under a contract, seabed mining blocks, and ice-cap geoengineering tolerances. Gellner would emphasise the sameness of their technics and crews, post-ideological operators running similar kit to serve different flags. Macfarlane would see Russia’s siege mentality confirmed: ideological dramaturgy for public consumption and permanent emergency for domestic control. Flashpoints remain bounded because all sides fear systemic cascade from an Arctic infrastructure failure. Europe’s eastern marches become the classroom for performative ideology with hard resource cores. NATO and the EU speak of democratic frontiers; Russia answers with civilisational defense; Turkey layers its own historical claim. Grain corridors, gas interconnectors, and refugee routing dominate actual negotiations. Gellner sees it as a competition between nearly identical administrative states for control of allocation pipes. Macfarlane sees the repeated crises as serving to ratchet executive power in Warsaw, Berlin, and Moscow alike, while municipal liberties survive as narrow exceptions inside wealthy metros if at all. The United States is both stage and producer of the global script. Externally it performs constitutional patriotism and “free world” leadership; internally it has settled, in this scenario, into a post-liberal soft-to-hard authoritarian order with archipelago freedoms in major metros. In the Western Hemisphere, Washington frames migration governance and Amazon stewardship as democratic stewardship against narco-populism or foreign meddling, while the material instruments are AI border grids, labour-broker pacts, and climate-insurance compacts with Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil. In the Indo-Pacific, the U.S. leans on alliance ideology, Indo-Pacific “values”, but its bargaining chips are semiconductor resilience, naval logistics, and layered export controls. Gellner would say American ideology persists as a high-status brand that oils transactions; what matters is the embedded corporate-state platform that standardises allies’ tech stacks and security practices. Macfarlane would treat U.S. nationalism as the legitimacy glue for permanent emergency governance at home; federalism preserves pockets of liberty, but each external crisis such as a Taiwan scare, an Arctic incident, or a migration surge feeds new layers of domestic centralisation. The ideological export remains potent for coalition-building, even as internal governance converges with other authoritarian cores. In Central Asia, ideology is a rotating mask for water and corridor brokerage. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and their neighbours sell multi-vector identities such as Turkic renaissance, post-Soviet sovereignty, Islamic heritage to balance Russia, China, the U.S., and Turkey. Under the hood are contracts for river allocations, lithium, uranium, and rail–fibre routes. Gellner would point to the functional role of universities and think tanks as state organs producing just-in-time narratives for deals struck by engineers and quartermasters. Macfarlane would note how each “civilisational” pivot is domestically monetised to compress dissent in cities like Almaty and Tashkent under the rubric of guarding the national course. Latin America becomes an arena where green developmentalism and social-Christian or indigeneity narratives are mobilised against or with U.S. and Chinese bids for lithium, copper, and biodiversity credits. Ideology travels well online; contracts travel better. Gellner would see convergent provincial governance dashboards from Santiago to São Paulo managing protests and rationing; Macfarlane would stress the tug-of-war between empowered city-regions and central executives using security–climate pretexts to claw back power. Across all these theatres, both would underline the meta-pattern. Ideological rivalry remains vivid in flags, speeches, and school curricula because regimes require affective legitimacy; but the conflicts themselves are administered through interoperable technocratic systems - AI water exchanges, corridor security APIs, carbon–food insurance markets that render the backstage nearly identical. For Gellner, that sameness is the telltale sign of a post-ideological structure wrapped in ideological skins. For Macfarlane, it is the historical signature of an uninsulated world in permanent emergency where liberty has been reduced at most to enclave exceptions and public myths do the everyday work of rule. The United States, far from being an exception, exemplifies the model: a powerful producer of ideological narration abroad, a manager of archipelago freedoms at home, and a principal architect of the very infrastructures that make the global convergence run. Identity Politics 2050 Gellner would begin by situating identity politics within the structural dynamics of the new hard authoritarian world. For him, the disappearance of deep ideological divides such as capitalism versus communism does not mean the end of mobilising symbols; rather, it produces a vacuum into which culture-based identities naturally flow. He would see nationalism, ethnolinguistic pride, and religious affiliation as the most resilient organising principles in a world where centralised states need emotionally resonant justifications for rule but no longer have a coherent universal ideology to offer. In this sense, identity politics becomes the low-cost, high-yield legitimacy tool of authoritarian regimes: it is flexible enough to be tuned for domestic cohesion, yet powerful enough to channel dissent into safe, state-manageable forms. In Gellner’s modernist terms, these identities are largely manufactured, products of state schooling, media choreography, and selective historical mythmaking but they feel authentic to those who inhabit them. He would note, however, that the hard authoritarian convergence creates a curious dynamic: identities are intensified domestically yet flattened internationally. In each zone - China’s Sinic civilisationalism, India’s Hindutva-inflected nationalism, Russia’s Orthodox-Eurasianism, America’s constitutional patriotism - identity is a performance for internal audiences, while the global backstage is post-ideological and technical. This makes identity politics an instrument, not an existential driver, of the system. Resistance movements in this setting, Gellner would predict, risk being trapped within the same grammar: oppositional groups will often frame their dissent in counter-identitarian terms (reviving suppressed languages, regional traditions, religious minorities) but will be constrained by the infrastructural dependencies of the hard authoritarian order. Transnational solidarities may form around environmental crises, indigenous rights, or minority protections, but they will be subject to rapid infiltration and co-optation because the very digital and logistical systems they rely on are owned or monitored by the regimes they oppose. Macfarlane would see identity politics through the lens of insulation and the historic fragility of liberty. In his reading, the erosion of buffers between political power, economic organisation, and cultural life means that identity politics will rarely emerge as genuinely autonomous civic expression; instead, it will often be curated from above as a safety valve. He would draw analogies to the way religious sects in early modern England flourished only insofar as the political order tolerated them, and how the same organisational forms that made them vehicles of liberty could also be harnessed to central power. In the AI-managed megacity world of 2050, identities will be embedded in algorithmic governance , given space to breathe in certain districts, festivals, and online zones, but switched off when they threaten the stability of the metropolitan order. This will produce a strange duality: on the one hand, citizens may feel a heightened sense of group belonging in their ethnic, religious, or ideological niche; on the other, these niches will be administratively legible, datafied, and subject to behavioural scoring systems that make true political resistance extraordinarily difficult. Macfarlane would emphasise that hard authoritarian regimes, aware of their vulnerability to mass unrest, will study past insurgencies and re-engineer urban space, media flows, and associational life to prevent spontaneous coalition-building. Resistance, when it does occur, may look less like grand ideological mobilisation and more like hyper-localised refusals: neighbourhood mutual-aid networks, digital sabotage cells, migrant-worker solidarity pacts, or environmental micro-defences against destructive infrastructure. Yet each of these will face the problem that the regime’s own legitimacy narratives will co-opt their language, casting them as patriotic initiatives or local cultural expressions rather than political opposition. The management of such resistance will be granular: targeted arrests, subsidy withdrawals, reputational downgrades in social-credit systems, all carried out without the visible mass repression of earlier dictatorships, allowing regimes to maintain a façade of pluralism while structurally neutering dissent. Both would agree that in this 2050 world, identity politics will mutate into a form of managed pluralism, a set of curated, state-readable cultures and causes that provide texture to otherwise centralised orders. Gellner would frame this as the continuation of nationalism’s functional role in modernity, scaled down to micro-nationalisms and lifestyle-ethnicities, each operating as a contained zone of loyalty-production. Macfarlane would frame it as the erosion of the very civil society that once made identity a possible engine of liberty, with the state now controlling the trust-like spaces in which identities operate. Resistance 2050 Genuine resistance, in their shared analysis, would be rare, fragile, and often invisible, emerging in the interstices of the system, only to be absorbed or destroyed once it became legible to the central power. Gellner would see any future global resistance networks in the hard authoritarian world as emerging from the same structural pressures that produce nationalisms, but with an additional transnational dimension imposed by climate change, mass migration, and resource scarcity. He would expect them to form not out of abstract ideological commitments, but from the concrete solidarities of displaced peoples, diasporas, and marginalised groups that cross borders by necessity rather than design. In his analysis, these solidarities could acquire a kind of proto-national character - Kurdish, Tuareg, Rohingya, or climate-refugee identities - that begin as survival communities and develop political consciousness in response to exclusion from host states. However, he would stress that such formations are deeply vulnerable to infiltration and manipulation, both by the regimes they oppose and by rival authoritarian powers seeking leverage. They would be too fragmented, too dependent on digital infrastructures, and too reliant on clandestine logistical chains to achieve the kind of sustained mobilising capacity that older nationalist or ideological movements enjoyed. Macfarlane would approach this from the historical problem of insulation. He would argue that in earlier centuries, resistance could flourish when there were spaces, geographic, institutional, or cultural, beyond the reach of the central state. In 2050, with AI-administered mega-cities and planetary surveillance integration, such spaces are almost non-existent, so resistance must find temporary, shifting forms. He would expect new underground structures that borrow from the organisational logic of medieval merchant guilds, secret religious fraternities, and the trust-like entities he sees as the origin of civil society. Migrant workers, for example, might form rotational labour-sharing compacts that are invisible to official metrics but enable survival in cities where automated economies have left them excluded. Environmental collapse could generate illicit water-sharing networks or seed-exchange cooperatives that function both as mutual aid and as quiet defiance of state monopolies. These networks would be intensely local but connected through deniable channels family ties, encrypted exchanges, smuggling routes creating a thin but resilient membrane of transnational resistance. Gellner would see climate change and resource scarcity as having a double effect: driving mass movements of people that force authoritarian states into either selective assimilation or militarised exclusion, and creating a planetary underclass with a shared experience of dispossession. This underclass could become the substrate for global resistance identity, but he would caution that it will lack the institutional base to challenge the macro-structures of power. It could disrupt, embarrass, or slow authoritarian regimes, but it would rarely be able to supplant them. Instead, its existence might be used by regimes themselves to justify harsher control measures - framing the “migrant threat” or “water insurgency” as a reason to centralise even further. Macfarlane would add that demographic imbalances - aging populations in core zones like East Asia and Europe, youth bulges in parts of Africa and South Asia - will give resistance movements different character depending on their origin. In the aging zones, resistance might be led by younger migrant populations excluded from citizenship but necessary for economic functioning, producing quiet forms of leverage through labour withdrawal or urban disruption. In youth-heavy zones, resistance could take on a more militant, insurgent form, but would be channelled by regimes into proxy conflicts or regional rivalries, much as in earlier imperial systems. Both would see the defining feature of such resistance in 2050 as its hybridity - part humanitarian survivalism, part cultural preservation, part political defiance. But they would also agree that it will exist under constant pressure to be co-opted or crushed, because in a world without insulation, any network that grows large enough to matter will become legible to power. Gellner would end on a sober note: that the new authoritarian order will be adept at turning even resistance into a functional component of its own stability, using it as proof of pluralism and as a training ground for counter-insurgency capacity. Macfarlane would add that the only resistance likely to escape such a fate will be that which remains so small, so embedded in everyday exchange and trust, that it can pass beneath the thresholds of detection for years at a time. Gellner would interpret the technological landscape of 2050 as the most advanced apparatus of social control ever constructed, but also as an inherently unstable terrain because of the constant interaction between the monopolising drive of central authorities and the decentralising tendencies of innovation. He would see AI infrastructures- governing transportation, communications, healthcare, commerce, and even personal relationships - as functioning in the same way as the centralised schooling systems of modernity, only vastly more totalising. These systems would not merely produce the linguistic and cultural homogeneity that Industrial society required; they would calibrate behaviour in real time, rewarding conformity and flagging deviance before it reached political expression. In such an environment, overt ideological conflict would be minimal because dissent could be anticipated and redirected long before it became organised. Yet he would also note that the same integrated networks that allow authoritarian states to manage populations create vulnerabilities: a single flaw in a code base, a compromised data node, or a sympathetic insider in an infrastructure hub could have consequences on a scale unimaginable in earlier political struggles. Resistance could emerge as a kind of cyber-guerilla warfare, carried out by actors without territory or conventional armies but capable of inflicting material and symbolic damage. Macfarlane would approach the same reality by emphasising how AI systems and biotech could be used to close off the very spaces where civil society once flourished. In his reading, the trust-like institutions that historically insulated liberty from the state’s reach are replaced by digital platforms whose ownership is either directly in the hands of the regime or embedded within its regulatory and surveillance apparatus. These platforms might allow highly visible diversity of opinion on trivial matters, but questions of power, coercion, and legitimacy would be algorithmically deprioritised or socially stigmatised. The effect is not the theatrical repression of twentieth-century totalitarianism but the gradual normalisation of obedience through personalised, data-driven environments. Biotechnology, particularly in the areas of genetic enhancement, neuro-modulation, and population health monitoring, would be framed as benevolent public policy but would, in practice, allow authoritarian states to track, predict, and influence individuals at the level of physiology. Gellner would expect technology to be used by authoritarian regimes to reinforce the divisions between core and periphery zones, creating graded rights of access. In the core megacities citizens and approved migrants would live in hyper-regulated environments where AI governance promises security, efficiency, and convenience in exchange for complete informational transparency. In the peripheries, whether inner-city slums, refugee corridors, or climate-ravaged rural zones, access to such systems would be partial, intermittent, and politically contingent, creating an incentive for populations to seek inclusion on the state’s terms. This asymmetry would reinforce loyalty in the centre while keeping the periphery dependent and surveilled. Macfarlane would focus on the paradox that such total integration makes regimes brittle as well as powerful. The more dependent a society becomes on centralised AI infrastructure, the more catastrophic any systemic disruption could be, whether from internal sabotage, external cyberattacks, or environmental shocks. He would predict that in some cases, resistance movements might emerge not as explicit political campaigns but as parallel systems of provision - underground mesh networks, off-grid energy sources, biohacked medical treatments - that begin as practical workarounds but evolve into subversive alternatives to the state’s monopoly on services. However, he would caution that the regimes themselves are likely to anticipate such developments and use them as laboratories for perfecting countermeasures, folding successful underground innovations back into the centralised framework under controlled conditions. Both would agree that by 2050, technology will have redefined the very nature of political legitimacy. In a world of hard authoritarian convergence, legitimacy will be measured less by the delivery of ideological promises and more by the delivery of seamless, uninterrupted infrastructural functionality. Resistance, therefore, will often take the form of disrupting that functionality, whether by degrading a water distribution algorithm in a desert megacity, scrambling facial recognition in public spaces, or manipulating the data inputs that AI systems use to forecast dissent. Gellner would see this as a new kind of high-modernist warfare between states and their subjects, fought in code and sensors rather than slogans and barricades. Macfarlane would see it as the final proof that liberty’s survival depends on preserving - or reinventing - the insulated, trust-based spaces that allow human communities to organise outside the total gaze of central power, even if those spaces now exist in the flicker of an encrypted channel rather than the walls of a medieval guildhall. Gellner would see the cultural and psychological consequences of such a technological-authoritarian order as a deep acceleration of trends he had already identified in modernity: the decline of deep, organically embedded cultures and their replacement with a manufactured, standardised, and constantly refreshed symbolic environment. Under the conditions of AI-administered life, cultural production would be not merely standardised but dynamically tailored to reinforce the behavioural patterns the regime desired, collapsing the space between entertainment, socialisation, and political conditioning. Nationalism, which in Gellner’s analysis was the modern world’s dominant form of political legitimacy, would persist but as a curated performance within the digital sphere, always flexible enough to integrate migrant elites, emerging economic actors, and carefully managed cultural pluralism. He would see this as producing a curious psychological state: individuals would experience constant stimulation, constant affirmation of belonging to the national story, yet simultaneously a hollowing out of any independent civic or moral identity. The central irony would be that the intense personalisation of experience would coexist with a deep structural uniformity, producing what he might call “algorithmic patriotism”, loyalty sustained not through ideology in the old sense but through the micro-engineering of habit and affect. Macfarlane would look at this through the lens of historical disembedding. In earlier centuries, he would note, people derived meaning and solidarity from the enduring frameworks of religion, kinship, and local economy, and even in modernity these persisted in altered form within civil society institutions. By 2050, under hard authoritarianism, those frameworks would survive only as heritage displays or controlled micro-communities, permitted to persist as long as they were politically neutral and economically functional. The human capacity for trust, central to his account of liberty’s origins, would be eroded in daily life, replaced by reliance on system-mediated verification. Relationships, transactions, and even intimate communications would require algorithmic authentication, producing a subtle but pervasive alienation in which spontaneous solidarity is viewed with suspicion. In such a climate, resistance in the form of genuine human connection, friendship networks, clandestine intellectual circles, unrecorded acts of mutual aid, would be politically subversive in themselves. Gellner would predict that identity politics, rather than disappearing, would mutate into regime-sanctioned diversity frameworks, where identities are celebrated as long as they remain compatible with the broader national narrative and the infrastructural order. In the same way that nationalism in the modern period could absorb and domesticate regional cultures, the 2050 authoritarian order would absorb identity politics as a spectacle of pluralism, using it to showcase the system’s tolerance while preventing those identities from forming cross-cutting solidarities that might challenge the core power structure. Minority identities would be recognised, celebrated, and algorithmically amplified, but only in forms that reinforced loyalty to the regime and avoided any critique of its legitimacy. Macfarlane, however, would stress that even in such a constrained environment, identity can be a seed of resistance if it retains embeddedness in alternative structures of meaning. He might point to historical cases where religious or cultural identities persisted for centuries under hostile or controlling states, maintaining languages, rituals, and moral codes in semi-clandestine ways. In 2050, the equivalent might be cultural enclaves that operate as both visible heritage zones and invisible sites of dissent, where encrypted archives, oral traditions, and intergenerational trust networks allow a memory of liberty to survive. Yet he would also emphasise that these enclaves would exist under constant threat of co-option, commodification, or outright eradication, and their survival would depend on an almost monastic discipline of concealment and patience. Both would agree that the psychological consequence of such a world would be a narrowing of the capacity to imagine alternative orders. In previous authoritarian eras, opposition movements could at least draw on visible alternative models - foreign democracies, underground presses, exiled intellectuals. By 2050, the universality of the technological-authoritarian order, coupled with the managed diversity of its ideological expressions, would make such alternatives harder to conceive. Resistance would thus rely less on presenting a competing blueprint and more on sustaining the conditions - material, cultural, emotional - under which the capacity to imagine remains alive. Gellner would frame this as a struggle to preserve the anthropological constant of human adaptability in the face of structural homogenisation. Macfarlane would see it as a battle for the fragile spaces of trust without which, in his view, no liberty has ever survived for long.
Part 4 A New Digital Infrastructure
A New Digital Infrastructure Read through Gellner’s triple lens and the present acceleration of authoritarianism comes into view as an effect of a new digital infrastructure. Nationalism supplies a standardised high culture through which strangers coordinate; in our time that standardisation increasingly rides on platforms that set the formats for education, identity and everyday coordination. Rationalism is the public craft of giving reasons that others can inspect; attention architectures now surround that craft, shaping what is seen, when it is seen, and how it feels. Civil society is “that part of society which is not the state. It is a residue,” and the residue that matters is “large, powerful, and organized,” with “membership… optional or revocable.” The same infrastructures that knit daily life together can also narrow that residue, since association, speech, and mobilisation travel through programmable rails. Earlier tools of power were visible and material. Secret police, prisons, camps and censors left marks that could be witnessed. Late in the twentieth century a different apparatus grew first in markets and then in states. Firms collected behavioural data and turned prediction into profit; the engineering of context replaced the old arts of persuasion. Political actors adopted the same tools. The public square became a personalised feed; argument still occurred and now passed through filters that selected, ranked and timed content according to models that served attention and administrative aims. Foucault’s disciplined subject learned inside enclosures such as school and barracks. Deleuze’s controlled subject moved through codes and permissions that modulated life continuously. Our environment confirms that shift. Authority designs the settings within which action feels natural. The novelty is less a new ideology and more the fusion of behavioural modelling, affective analytics and automated intervention inside ordinary routines. A visible censor striking out a column becomes a recommender that steers millions toward outrage or comfort while they believe they are simply scrolling. The architecture can be described as five entwined domains. Sensing comes first. Phones, cameras, biometric scanners, drones, wearables and connected vehicles turn movement, transactions and pulses into signals. Citizens emit data even when silent. Ambient visibility becomes the base layer on which every other function rests. Identity follows. Digital identity stacks sort people by reputation scores, biometrics, customer ratings and credit histories. Categories are refined continuously. A person is rendered as a set of permissions and probabilities. Rights feel conditional because databases govern who may travel, transact or participate. Modelling supplies anticipation. Algorithms forecast unrest, dashboards track sentiment, predictive systems map expected events. Projection becomes a way to manage uncertainty. The model then organises resources and in doing so shapes the reality it measures. The citizen becomes a variable inside an ongoing simulation. Actuation is the conversion of prediction into behaviour. Interfaces gently steer, connection speeds change, feeds are prioritised or cooled, access is narrowed for some and widened for others, payments glide or pause. Each adjustment is minor; together they set gradients that invite some paths and discourage others. Force does not disappear; the preference is to make environments do the work. Legibility binds the system. Numbers, scores and dashboards present a story of competence and inevitability. States and platforms aspire to make society machine readable in real time. Census and ledger once sufficed; now sentiment, preference and affiliation are inferred and displayed. The citizen is visible, predictable and presented as optimisable. Through Gellner’s lens these five domains compress the three pillars on which liberty rests. Standardised culture is now delivered through a few operating systems that double as custodians of identity and coordination; the risk is cultural capture by a single orthodoxy, the very condition that “preclude[s] criticism.” Public reason still values evidence and argument and must now work inside attention architectures that rank and reward content; the risk is that reasons become ceremony while design makes the decision. Civil society still gathers in unions, bars, congregations, universities, professional bodies and local media; their ability to “ensure that the state does its job but no more” depends on legal personhood, funding, independence of infrastructure and freedom to sue, audit and publish. When the same rails carry work, speech and money, the temptation grows to treat the residue as a set of accounts that can be paused. Authoritarianism accelerates through this infrastructure because it offers efficiency and deniability. Sensing makes life observable. Identity stacks make permissions adjustable. Models make intervention timely. Actuation makes steering quiet. Legibility makes the whole appear rational. The promise is safety, convenience and order, which strengthens acquiescence. Sovereignty becomes a partnership of state and platform. A change to a moderation policy, a tweak to a payment rule, a new identity requirement or a satellite service decision can tilt an election or a war. Power feels distributed and grows more coordinated because the five domains join in a single fabric. The same map points to what must be watched. A standardised culture is essential for a complex society and must remain shared rather than captured. Rationalism is a living practice and needs courts and procedures that can still surprise power. Civil society is the organised residue and needs endowments, independent rails and the right to enter and leave freely. Analysts who judge a country by only one strand will misread the whole. The state of a state is seen when all three are considered together, the national culture without monopoly, the rule of public reasons that decide rather than decorate, and the strength of voluntary bodies that can bind office and keep the centre to its job.
Implications The implications are profound. In the analogue era, even the most authoritarian regimes confronted zones of opacity - whispers, rumours, samizdat, underground networks. Total control was always aspirational rather than real. In the digital era, opacity becomes rarer. Resistance must be reimagined in a context where dissent can be anticipated before it crystallises, where oppositional networks can be disrupted not through mass arrests but through subtle algorithmic throttling, and where belief itself can be shaped by the ambient informational environment long before it becomes political. If we extrapolate to 2050, it is not difficult to see how these infrastructures of power become the pillars around which political authority, markets, and everyday life reorganise themselves. The critical question is not whether these domains will be deployed, but by whom, under what logics, and with what possibilities for resistance. Indeed one key issue will be to rethink the very nature of what opposition and resistance are in such conditions. By 2050, the Internet of Things[13] will have fully matured into the Internet of Bodies. Smart homes, autonomous vehicles, wearable health devices, and environmental sensors will be ubiquitous, feeding continuous data into state and corporate repositories. In China, this sensing infrastructure will be state-led, oriented toward national security, population management, and regime durability. In the U.S., sensing is likely to remain corporate-led but porous to state demands, with platforms like Amazon and Google acting as de facto adjuncts to intelligence networks. The EU, constrained by GDPR-like[14] frameworks, will attempt to regulate sensing through privacy protections, yet its dependence on U.S. platforms and Chinese hardware will erode sovereign control. In the Global South, sensing infrastructures will often be imported, leased, or subsidised by external powers, turning peripheral states into data suppliers for global cores. What emerges is a planetary nervous system - dense in wealthy nations, patchy elsewhere - but in all cases capable of recording far more than any analogue police state could ever dream. Whereas passports or party memberships once defined political belonging, by 2030 digital IDs - biometric, blockchain-based[15], or both - will be the norm. China already integrates identity with payment, travel, and communication; by 2050 this will extend into neural and biometric markers, effectively eliminating anonymity within its jurisdiction. In the U.S., identity will be corporatised: citizens’ profiles tied less to a national database than to platform credentials, social credit scores determined by financial histories, online behaviours, and reputational metrics. The EU will promote a regulated “sovereign ID” meant to protect citizens, but in practice this ID will serve as a universal login across services, centralising control in Brussels. In the Global South, identity will oscillate between empowerment and domination: biometric IDs can deliver welfare efficiently but also exclude dissenters and minorities with a single keystroke. Here, the risk is not only authoritarian capture but dependency on external platforms that define who counts as a “real” person. By 2025 predictive policing and algorithmic credit assessment are already established; by 2050 the model will become the law itself. China’s security state will refine its vast datasets into predictive systems that anticipate dissent before it manifests, using AI-driven “risk portraits” of entire populations. In the U.S., markets will perfect behavioural targeting, nudging citizens toward consumption patterns that indirectly shape political alignments, with predictive analytics absorbed into campaign strategy, insurance pricing, and hiring decisions. The EU will attempt to constrain modelling through ethics regimes, but its very commitment to technocratic management means predictive governance will be quietly entrenched in areas like migration, energy consumption, and urban planning. For the Global South, modelling will be imported via development projects - predictive climate adaptation, resource allocation, public health - often accompanied by strings that lock states into the epistemologies of their donors. Actuation closes the loop by shaping behaviour in real time. By 2050, this will be the decisive arena of political struggle. China’s model of actuation will be overt: the social credit system, travel bans, algorithmic censorship, and the constant calibration of rewards and punishments. In the U.S., actuation will be subtler but no less pervasive: platform architectures will structure choice environments, manipulating attention, consumption, and political sentiment through invisible nudges. Citizens will not be forced but steered. The EU, priding itself on regulation, will institutionalise “responsible actuation” under the banner of sustainability - carbon nudges, dietary prompts, behavioural taxes - thereby normalising a soft form of technocratic paternalism. In the Global South, actuation will be mediated through aid conditionalities, platform infrastructures, and foreign investment projects: participation in the global economy will itself be conditioned on compliance with behavioural scripts defined elsewhere. Authoritarian states will seek perfect legibility: the capacity to see, sort, and decide with minimal friction. Democracies will claim that transparency enhances participation, but in practice legibility often undermines pluralism by collapsing ambiguity into standardised categories and therefore, paradoxically, eroding democracy and establishing soft to hard authoritarianism. By 2050, China may achieve something close to total legibility within its borders, with dissent either anticipated out of existence or integrated into controlled “safety valves.” The U.S. will achieve legibility through the market: citizens are rendered legible to advertisers, insurers, employers, and political parties through an interlinked corporate surveillance infrastructure. The EU’s legibility will take the form of bureaucratic dashboards, where metrics of diversity, sustainability, and compliance replace deliberative politics. The Global South risks being made legible not to itself but to external actors - credit rating agencies, aid organisations, platform corporations - becoming transparent to others but opaque to its own citizens. China by 2050: The Authoritarian Vanguard By mid-century, China’s political order is best understood as an operating system built from our five tightly coupled layers. Sensing is the continuous capture of signals from the world - cameras, phones, vehicles, buildings. Identity is the set of technologies that tie those signals to a persistent person - real-name mobile numbers, biometric cards, and digital wallets. Modelling is the use of statistical and machine-learning techniques to predict what people will do - risk scores, anomaly detection, and forecasts. Actuation is the feedback the system sends back into people’s lives - what you are shown, what is delayed, what is permitted, what is nudged. Legibility is the state’s ability to “see” society in dashboards and reports well enough to intervene quickly. Each piece exists elsewhere, but what makes China distinctive is the state-led integration: the Party and government specify the interfaces, compel data flows, and arbitrate conflicts between ministries and firms so the layers behave as one architecture. The result is not only repression when needed, but a constant calibration of what one can see, do, and access, experienced by many as efficiency and safety rather than as overt coercion. Sensing in China has moved from visible surveillance to ambient instrumentation. “CCTV” in the strict sense - closed-circuit television - was only the start. Across coastal megacities like Shanghai and Shenzhen, high-definition cameras with facial recognition are fused with automatic number-plate readers on roads, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi beacons in transit hubs, and building-access logs in office towers and housing estates. In many county-level towns in Henan or Anhui, rural programs known as “Sharp Eyes” place cameras on village streets and share selected feeds on residents’ TV set-top boxes to encourage communal monitoring. In frontier regions like Xinjiang, the network extends to frequent roadside checkpoints with biometric capture, integrating face, fingerprint, and sometimes iris scans with device identifiers like the phone’s IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity). “Skynet,” a colloquial name for national video networks, is less a single project than an interconnection standard that lets security bureaus from different jurisdictions subscribe to one another’s feeds. Emotion-recognition pilots - systems that infer stress or anger from micro-expressions - remain controversial and imperfect, but trials in transport nodes and petition offices illustrate the direction of travel: the goal is not just to see after the fact but to anticipate. Identity is the backbone that ties all this sensing to real people. China long ago required “real-name” registration for SIM cards, so a phone number is linked to a citizen’s government ID at purchase; many public Wi-Fi hotspots also demand real-name login. The resident identity card embeds a chip with basic biographic details and a face template; health insurance cards, transit cards, and university IDs similarly bind services to a person. The household registration system, hukou, fixes legal residence and access to public services; by 2050 it is digitally integrated, making rural-to-urban status changes and benefits portability more automated but also more trackable. During the pandemic era, province-run “Health Codes” assigned green, yellow, or red statuses to individuals based on exposure risk; their logic, QR-code passes tied to a person’s phone and ID, became a template for other access systems. In large cities, the central bank’s digital yuan, sometimes called e-CNY, acts as a central bank digital currency; because it is issued by the People’s Bank of China, payments can carry standardised metadata about payer, payee, and purpose. “KYC” - know-your-customer rules that require banks and platforms to verify identities - mean financial accounts and mobile wallets are tightly tied to legal identity. In Guangzhou, Chengdu, or Wuhan, a single super-app can authenticate you for metro gates, hospital triage, tax filings, and public-service requests. Convenience is real; so is the near-disappearance of anonymity within Chinese jurisdiction. Modelling is where the system takes a qualitative leap. In coastal tech hubs like Hangzhou, municipal “city brains”, large data platforms run with local cloud providers, ingest traffic, weather, commerce, and social-service data to forecast congestion, hospital loads, or fraud. In inland provinces like Guizhou, which host national-scale data centres, provincial platforms run machine-learning models that classify companies’ credit risks and predict supply-chain chokepoints. At public-security bureaus, predictive-policing models combine simple statistics with more complex algorithms to flag “abnormal” mobility or communications for human review. A risk score is not a verdict; it is a probability estimate, often produced by a model trained on past events and continuously updated. “Anomaly detection” looks for patterns that deviate from a person’s baseline such as night travel on unusual routes, phones clustering that do not usually meet, purchases out of pattern. In minority regions, integrated platforms join more datasets and lower thresholds for alerts; in richer coastal cities, thresholds are higher and reviews more layered, in part to avoid false positives among highly mobile professionals. By 2050 these models influence not just policing but zoning, subsidy allocation, media placement, and social-services outreach. When a forecast of “likely unrest” or “likely contagion” crosses a set confidence level, pre-written protocols execute without waiting for committee debate. This is what it means to say “the model becomes the law”: an algorithmic threshold, not an argument, is often what triggers action. Actuation, the closing of the loop, is the set of instruments that steer behaviour in real time. Some are overt punishments: a court blacklists a “judgment defaulter,” and ticketing systems refuse high-speed rail or airline bookings; a “dishonest” rating on a local credit list compiled from court records or regulatory fines slows business licensing. Others are subtle nudges: traffic-light timing and lane-priority rules managed by the city brain reward compliant driving; jaywalking photos displayed on public screens in some cities shame violators and feed small fines to their mobile wallets; parking, library loans, or depositless rentals are preferentially offered to “model citizens,” people with long records of on-time payments and volunteer service. In online space, content moderation and recommendation - the order in which posts appear, the topics that trend, the comments that surface - shape what is thinkable without needing overt bans. Douyin, the domestic short-video platform often compared to TikTok, uses “down-ranking” to limit reach of borderline content; search engines autocomplete to steer queries into approved frames; automated messages from local police accounts arrive to “remind” organisers of permit rules. In places like Shenzhen and Shanghai, actuation tends to emphasise convenience and privilege for the compliant, because the population is affluent and mobile. In county seats in Gansu or Inner Mongolia, actuation includes more direct admonitions and welfare conditionalities because the state’s welfare lever is stronger than market incentives. In Xinjiang and parts of Tibet, actuation is blunt: frequent ID checks, mandated home visits, and travel restrictions are used not only after events but to prevent them. Legibility is the outcome of knitting the other layers together: the ability of the state to render society as a coherent picture on screen. A dashboard in a provincial command centre will show hospital bed occupancy, school attendance, pork prices, rainfall, intercity bus loads, and keyword spikes from local social media, all aligned on the same map. “PNR,” or passenger name record data from airlines and trains, anchor mobility to identity; “ANPR,” or automatic number-plate recognition, tracks vehicles; real-name SIM registration ties devices to people. What is distinctive in China is not the existence of dashboards but the claim to governability they support. The Party does not ask for agreement about ultimate values; it promises competence: that it can keep growth steady, wages rising, borders quiet, cities functioning. Legibility is part of that promise. In wealthier regions, it appears as fast service delivery; in poorer ones, as orderly distribution of scarce resources; in sensitive regions, as quiet streets. By 2050, a widely shared lesson is taught by practice rather than by slogan: to be seen is to be safe; to be opaque is to be suspicious. Regional variation matters because China is a continent-sized polity with pronounced differences in wealth, ethnicity, industry, and geography, and the same architecture is tuned differently in each place. In the Yangtze River Delta around Shanghai, with dense logistics and finance, the emphasis is on throughput and fraud control; sensing is thick but relatively discreet; identity and payments integration is extensive via digital wallets; modelling is used heavily for traffic, trade, and compliance; actuation privileges speed and elite convenience; legibility focuses on keeping the city’s arteries clear. In the Pearl River Delta of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and the wider Greater Bay Area the private sector’s engineering capacity is deepest; municipal platforms rely on big local vendors, and regulatory sandboxes[16] allow pilots in fintech[17] and transport. There, identity-payments fusion via e-CNY and platform wallets is furthest along, and actuation leans on perks rather than punishments because the population responds to service differentiation. In Beijing and the surrounding Jing-Jin-Ji region, central ministries and national-level security agencies are proximate; sensing is visible near party and government compounds; modelling is used intensively for petition management and event security; actuation includes rapid, sometimes blunt, crowd management during sensitive dates. In interior provinces like Sichuan and Hubei, where large manufacturing and migrant populations mix, the system’s focus is on labour mobility and public health. Health-code logic becomes a template for managing seasonal flows; modelling forecasts strain on hospitals and schools; actuation aims at smoothing return-to-work cycles and distributing subsidies with fewer leaks. Guizhou’s pitch as a “big data” province reflects cheap hydroelectric power and mountain climates that suit data centres; national repositories there support legibility for ministries that lack their own compute. In border provinces like Yunnan and Guangxi, cross-border trade, narcotics control, and migration define priorities; sensors cluster at river crossings and mountain passes, identity tools include more document authentication for foreigners, and modelling is trained on smuggling patterns rather than urban congestion. In Xinjiang, the coupling of layers is hardest: checkpoints force frequent identity presentations; device searches and app scans thicken sensing; modelling thresholds are set low to widen the net; actuation includes mandatory visits, re-education requirements, and travel bans that are triggered not by past crimes but by forecasts. Tibet shares some of these characteristics, though with less Industrial intensity and more focus on monastery management and road networks. In Hainan, a free-trade port, the emphasis is on customs legibility and biosecurity due to tropical agriculture; actuation prioritises compliance with tariff and quarantine rules while marketing ease of entry to tourists. The governance of firms is part of the architecture. China’s largest technology companies maintain internal Party committees that align corporate decisions with political directives. National laws such as the Cybersecurity Law, the Data Security Law, and the Personal Information Protection Law create formal grounds for data localisation and state access while also imposing constraints on purely commercial sharing. This does not mean privacy law in a Western liberal sense; it means the state, not the market, is the final arbiter of how data flows. In practice, a city’s “public security bureau,” roughly the police, can compel feeds from platform operators; a propaganda department can order changes in recommendation logic for domestic platforms; a central bank notice can alter wallet rules across the economy. The integration is smoother in places with well-resourced bureaucracies and long vendor relationships; it is patchier in poorer counties, where off-the-shelf packages and incentive payments are used to raise the floor. Consent is produced by outcomes and by narrative. The narrative is nationalism and competence: in a chaotic world, a strong civilisation-state keeps you safe and prosperous. The outcomes are queues that move, trains that arrive, fraud that declines, epidemics that are contained quickly, and court cases that produce enforceable results. Many urban residents will report that the system feels like calibration rather than oppression: a parking space appears when needed, a hospital slot is assigned, a noisy neighbour quiets after a neighbourhood-grid call. In that same calibration lies the constraint. News that is judged destabilising is down-ranked before most ever see it; a travel plan fails at the booking screen with a non-explanatory error; a protest is diverted by roadworks that materialise overnight; an application sits in “further review” until the moment passes. Explaining the technical terms makes the picture less mystical and more concrete. Facial recognition is just pattern matching between a live image and a database of face templates; it works well in good light, less well in motion and occlusion, and can be tuned to minimise false positives or false negatives depending on what the operator fears more. License-plate readers use optical character recognition on vehicle images and timestamp locations; when connected to toll gantries and city cameras, they reconstruct routes. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi beacons log device probes and can infer crowd flows at low cost; when cross-referenced with real-name SIMs, they become person flows. Machine learning is a collection of techniques that learn patterns from examples rather than being hand-coded; anomaly detection marks outliers against a baseline and is especially sensitive to how baselines are defined. Down-ranking is simply assigning a lower order to an item in a feed; most users never scroll far enough to see demoted content. A central bank digital currency is digital cash issued by a country’s monetary authority; e-CNY transactions can be capped, timed, or tagged for certain uses, which in turn makes subsidies and fines easy to target. “Know your customer” rules require banks to verify identities to prevent fraud and money laundering; when applied across super-apps, they create unified profiles that link purchases, chats, and travel. “An API,” or application programming interface, is the set of rules that let one system ask another for data; in China, public-private APIs are written so that state agencies can subscribe to selected corporate data streams with legal cover. None of these tools is uniquely Chinese; what is unusual is the degree to which a party-state has bound them into a single, state-first stack. The result by 2050 is not a boot stamping endlessly so much as an instrument panel with many dials, continuously adjusted. In Shanghai’s old lanes and Shenzhen’s new towers, in Guizhou’s data farms and Xinjiang’s checkpoints, the same grammar is spoken with different accents. Where growth and mobility are prized, the system leans on rewards and convenience; where security is the priority, it leans on checks and constraints; where capacity is thin, it leans on templates and incentives from above. The common thread is that the state is the editor of reality’s feed. That edit is defended as competence and security. Its power lies in being largely invisible to those who move inside it. Macfarlane sees China 2050 as a “civilisation-state” proof-of-concept: a competent, state-led integration of sensing, identity, modelling, actuation, and legibility that delivers mass prosperity, order, and cultural continuity. He’s tolerant of paternalistic opacity and curated meritocracy if outcomes are broadly benign elite science oases, stewarded curricula, and infrastructural mastery become the modern basis of legitimacy. Gellner reads the same system as the culmination of authoritarian drift. The five domains fuse coercion, economy, and culture; “the model becomes the law”; civil society, free universities, and the humanities lose the autonomy needed to correct power. Even if efficient, such prosperity is brittle because contestation and rule-of-law firebreaks erode. Where Macfarlane bets on benevolent stewardship, Gellner insists on non-fusion and sovereign rationality or freedom withers. Trump’s America: The Neoliberal-Authoritarian Hybrid If China’s path is state-led authoritarianism, Trump’s America (and the broader Trumpist project) represents its neoliberal mirror: authoritarianism routed through the market and culture war, with the state outsourcing surveillance and actuation to corporations. Sensing is not coordinated by the state but by corporate behemoths: Amazon, Google, Facebook/Meta, Apple. By 2050, the Internet of Bodies, smart devices, wearables, connected vehicles etc, feeds an ocean of data into private repositories. Under Trump, state access becomes porous and opportunistic: intelligence agencies and law enforcement gain easier pathways to subpoena or coerce data access. Unlike China’s top-down surveillance, U.S. sensing is fragmented but vast, shaped by consumer adoption and monetised attention. The paradox is that citizens choose to be surveilled because it comes wrapped in convenience, entertainment, and consumer loyalty. Identity becomes corporatised. There is no single Aadhaar or social credit, but there is a de facto identity built from corporate credentials: your Amazon profile, your Google login, your bank account, your phone number. These identities are not neutral; they incorporate financial histories, purchase patterns, political donations, and social media behaviour. Under Trump’s America, these corporate IDs bleed into the political domain. Voting rights may be linked more tightly to state-issued IDs, which are themselves filtered through partisan voter suppression efforts. Meanwhile, reputation systems like Uber ratings, credit scores, employer background checks become de facto measures of belonging. Identity in America is privatised citizenship. Modelling takes the form of weaponised behavioural prediction. Trump’s campaigns already pioneered microtargeting in 2016; by 2050, predictive analytics are fully integrated into political strategy, determining which voters to mobilise, which to suppress, and which messages to tailor down to the individual. But modelling extends beyond elections: insurers, employers, and advertisers absorb behavioural prediction into pricing and hiring, aligning market discrimination with political divides. The result is a world where one’s political alignment can be inferred from consumer patterns and where dissenting identities are gradually priced out of mobility, credit, and healthcare. Actuation is subtler than China’s bans but equally pervasive. It works through platforms: algorithms that amplify outrage, polarise feeds, and steer attention toward preferred narratives. In Trump’s political ecosystem, actuation is openly partisan: government pressure leans on platforms to silence opponents, while propaganda channels (Fox News, Newsmax, Truth Social) flood the infosphere with narratives calibrated to rally the base. Citizens are not “forced” but nudged into consuming, hating, voting, buying, aligning. Actuation is indistinguishable from advertising. Legibility is achieved through the market. To be an American citizen under Trumpism is to be legible to advertisers, insurers, employers, and political strategists. Legibility is not about transparency to the state alone but about being a consumer, a data point, a predictable entity in the market ecosystem. Trump reframes this legibility as freedom. But the effect is the same: dissenters find themselves unbanked, deplatformed, or invisibly deprioritised in algorithmic feeds. So, by 2050 the United States is no longer a contested federal democracy with zones of meaningful institutional autonomy. It is a hard authoritarian state with a federal executive and security apparatus that has absorbed, co-opted, or disciplined every major centre of power, leaving only managed dissent within carefully patrolled boundaries. The transition from soft authoritarianism in the 2020s to full consolidation by the 2040s was gradual but relentless, with every crisis - border, pandemic, economic shock, climate disaster - used to invoke emergency statutes that became permanent governance. This is the final crystallisation of a civilisational state with American characteristics: a neo-enchanted national narrative of destiny, sacrifice, and constitutional scripture retold as catechism, wrapped around the disenchanted machinery of total surveillance, AI-administered resource management, and predictive social control. It is the moment when institutional separations that had been withering for decades are finally dissolved; courts, legislatures, media, universities, and professions no longer function as autonomous correctives but as integral cogs in the executive–corporate complex. The Northeast, once the legal and financial brain, remains a hub of concentrated wealth, research, and culture, but every part of it is integrated into the national apparatus. New York’s banks and media giants are fully enmeshed in state-coordinated compliance regimes; Boston’s universities and hospitals operate under security clearance pipelines and ideological vetting of senior appointments. Macfarlane sees these as the prised oases, zones of competence and prestige the regime nurtures to project civilisation’s excellence. Gellner sees them as gilded cages, where dissent is still performed but only within boundaries policed by funding threats, licensing bodies, and algorithmic content filters. Washington and the Mid-Atlantic have become the undisputed command node of the entire federation. The integration of federal agencies, homeland security, intelligence, AI command-and-control systems, and corporate tech monopolies is seamless. The national ID and payments spine links every citizen and resident to the state in real time; predictive policing, biometric travel passes, and centralised tax–welfare algorithms give the executive live oversight of the population’s economic and social position. This is the guardian’s citadel, the moral and administrative core of the civilisation. It marks the end of modernity’s separation of power spheres: there is no longer a legal or institutional outside from which to oppose it. The Great Lakes and Upper Midwest are reborn as the Industrial arsenal of the regime. Electric vehicle manufacturing, battery gigafactories, nuclear micro-reactors, precision agriculture, and climate-resilient infrastructure are all driven by central funding and direction. Labour unions have been restructured into state-corporate guilds; strikes are illegal under “critical infrastructure” designations. There’s a functional bargain: work, security, and prestige in exchange for ideological alignment. With it comes the loss of all independent worker power, replaced by corporatist structures that mimic representation while enforcing conformity. The Plains and Prairie states are pure extraction and logistics zones, their energy corridors, grain markets, and green ammonia plants run by vertically integrated public-private monopolies aligned with the central plan. Rural life is administered via algorithmic welfare and agricultural quotas; local politics exists but is purely ceremonial. These are the quiet provinces of the civilisation, loyal and productive, zones where even the memory of autonomous local governance has been extinguished. The Mountain West and Southwest are militarised frontier districts. Water, minerals, and border control are under direct federal management; AI basin management determines usage rights, with no appeal beyond the appointed basin authority. Border cities are fortified economic hubs where the labour force is continuously scanned, sorted, and reassigned by immigration-security systems. This is the total normalisation of emergency law as daily governance. Texas is both a jewel and a fortress in the regime’s crown, energy empire, defence-Industrial complex, and ideological showcase. Its universities, ports, and corporate headquarters thrive under immense federal investment, but all operate within the executive’s ideological and security parameters. Dissenting municipalities have been stripped of powers; judicial independence is ceremonial. California is similar in scale but even more deeply fused with the federal-corporate AI complex. Silicon Valley, aerospace, biotech, and climate tech are all tightly integrated into national strategy; legal friction exists only in name. These are both key oases of competence, but their complete capture is more evidence of the newly inaugurated hard authoritarianism. The Pacific Northwest is locked into the aerospace-defence-cloud triangle, its environmental policies subordinated to strategic imperatives. Florida and the Southeast are spectacle authoritarianism under climate siege: reconstruction contracts, luxury enclaves, and tightly policed tourist zones coexist with militarised evacuation and triage systems. The Deep South is fully folded into the national order through logistics, corporate headquarters, and petrochemical energy chains; any municipal autonomy is now a managed privilege granted to compliant city elites. So by 2050, the megalopolitan corridors - BosWash, Chi-Pitts, the Texas Triangle, and the California crescent - are AI-administered fortress-economies. They deliver security, efficiency, and prosperity for their residents but within a closed system where public debate is choreographed, elections are plebiscitary, and all critical decisions flow from the executive’s strategic planning office. In Macfarlane’s telling, this is the best civilisational state to be hoped for given the collapse of genuine democracy and civic society: order and competence with curated freedom in designated cultural and scientific enclaves. He sees in it a mirror image of China. In Gellner’s, it is a brittle machine whose flawless functioning is a matter of survival, because no lawful mechanisms remain to correct its failures. The last traces of the old federal pluralism have been erased. State supreme courts rule only within narrow technical confines; interstate compacts are subject to immediate federal override; municipal home rule has been absorbed into national security planning. Universities have been fully incorporated into national service pipelines; media is consolidated into state-corporate conglomerates; professions are licensed under national security review. There are no meaningful “blue” or “red” strongholds only administrative zones with varying levels of economic importance and ideological enthusiasm. The United States in 2050 is proof that a hard authoritarian civilisational state emerging from a democratic civilisational model to fascist enchantment might preserve high culture, advanced science, and national unity in oases. It is the textbook case of modernity’s fragility: a society that dismantled its own institutional separations, placing independent thought and autonomous individuality under permanent quarantine, with no path back except through rupture. China and Trump’s America are thus mirror-images: China is state-first authoritarianism, using corporate platforms as tools. Trump’s America is corporate-first authoritarianism, using the state as a hammer. Both achieve the same end: populations rendered visible, predictable, and governable, with resistance relegated to the margins. By 2050, the distinction may matter less than we think. Both trajectories converge on infrastructures of control that are frictionless, convenient, and popular enough to feel voluntary. Media Newsrooms keep fighting yesterday’s war. They pour energy into fact-checking lies and disputing bad claims, which is still necessary, but they miss where most of the action now happens: before a story even reaches anyone. On the modern internet, what people see is decided by ranking systems and delivery pipes that act in the first minutes and hours after something is published. The platform decides whether your piece sits at the top of a feed, gets pushed as a notification, auto-plays next, or quietly sinks. That’s where attention is allocated. Fact checks arrive later, after the spike of sharing has already happened. Trying to correct the record then is like arguing with a stadium after the lights are off. This difference matters. “Content moderation” is the visible part, labels, takedowns, warnings. “Ranking and routing” are the hidden parts, how posts are ordered, who gets them first, how fast they travel. If you’ve ever wondered why a measured, well-reported story barely moves while a sloppy rant takes off, the answer is usually in those hidden choices: a model predicts what will grab you, the system tests a few people, sees a burst of clicks, and floods similar users before anyone has checked whether the thing is true. In that world, a newsroom that only writes and corrects is playing defence on the wrong field. It has to learn to measure and influence distribution itself: testing how its work is treated in different feeds, demanding minimum visibility for public-interest items, and designing small frictions, like “read before you reshare” prompts or brief pauses on sudden viral spikes, to stop manipulation-by-speed. A second mistake has been letting platforms define both the audience and the goal. Most outlets now rely on platform dashboards to tell them who they’re reaching and what “worked.” Those dashboards reward one thing above all: engagement. Headlines get sharpened for clicks; videos are cut to maximise watch time; posting schedules chase algorithmic tides. Over time, editorial judgment narrows to whatever a recommender system finds legible. It looks like smart optimisation; in practice it trains the newsroom to please the machine rather than to serve a public. Worse, the audience becomes a black box. The platform owns the login, the identity graph, and the cross-app history. The publisher sees only what the platform chooses to reveal. There is a way to step out of that trap. Collect less data, but collect it on your own terms and with your readers’ consent. Replace the usual surveillance-style analytics with light-touch measurements that answer civic questions: did readers encounter views they usually miss? did they spend time in reasoned discussion? did corrections reach the same people who saw the original mistake? Treat that information as a commons, not a commodity and store it in a community-governed data trust and give people a real right to opt out. Distribute your work through multiple open channels like email, RSS, the fediverse, your own app or progressive web app so no single platform can starve you. Where you must use the big platforms, push for basic guarantees: access to stats that show how public-interest content was ranked, and the ability to audit sudden drops or suppressions. The third failure is subtler. Newsrooms have put their faith in “transparency”: show your sources, publish corrections quickly, demand platform transparency reports, and transparency is good. But the new regime of control doesn’t live in press releases. It lives in the joins between systems most of us never see: the way a real-name login ties your writing to your payment card; the way your location history can be linked to your reading habits; the way a “safety” rule can quietly down-rank whole topics after a spike. Identity, money, movement, and speech used to be separate worlds. Now they are stitched together by contracts, software kits, and government procurement rules. You cannot out-argue an interface you don’t control. For media, that means shifting part of the reporting beat from “what was said” to “how the system is wired.” Which cloud contract gives the city’s police access to platform data, and under what conditions? Which software development kit inside a news app sends location or device details back to third parties? Which standard-setting meeting will decide whether a digital ID can be used to log into comment sections and therefore whether anonymous speech survives? Exposing those couplings is journalism. So is building small counter-interfaces of your own. Offer readers ways to participate without handing over a master key to their identity, pseudonymous credentials that prove “I’m a paying member” or “I’m a local resident” without revealing everything else about them. Make it normal for sensitive conversations with sources or communities to happen in end-to-end encrypted channels. Add visible “why am I seeing this now?” explanations to your own pages, so people learn how distribution actually works. None of this means abandoning the core craft. It means extending it to match how power now moves. A story today needs two layers: the account of events, and the account of the pipeline that carried (or buried) that account. Editors need to think not just about the headline, but about the journey the piece will take through ranking systems. Designers need to think not just about beauty, but about counter-nudges that cool outrage and encourage depth-timed reads before sharing, context cards that travel with the story wherever it is embedded, and “vantage switches” that let readers flip between different, thoughtfully curated orderings of the same material. Audience teams need to trade pure growth targets for civic metrics they can defend in public: exposure to diverse viewpoints, uptake of corrections, the number of people who used a redress link to challenge a decision made by a platform’s model. If this sounds technical, it is, but it is also practical. A small newsroom can create “test readers” that follow the same accounts and interests as real audiences and then watch, hour by hour, where identical stories appear in their feeds. That reveals bias in distribution in a way anyone can grasp. A regional outlet can publish a simple ledger that shows when a public-interest piece was suppressed by a platform’s speed filter and what steps were taken to appeal. A national broadcaster can require, as a condition of distributing its content, a basic audit trail of ranking decisions on election coverage. Even a single columnist can add a short note: here’s why this landed in your feed today. The deeper point is cultural. Authoritarian systems thrive on clean lines and confident closure; their interfaces make the world look simpler than it is. Democratic media should lean the other way: make uncertainty legible without turning it into nihilism; show competing explanations where the facts are complex; resist sanding down every rough edge to please a recommendation engine. Clarity about facts can sit alongside honesty about limits. That kind of page may feel messier, but it trains habits of mind that resist manipulation. Re-grammaring the media does not require heroics; it requires a change of posture. Stop assuming the page is the product and treat the path as part of the story. Stop measuring success only by clicks and start asking whether your work reached the people it needed to reach, in time to matter, and whether it expanded their field of view. Stop trusting that a call for “more transparency” will fix platforms whose power lies in the pipes, not the press release. Build a little infrastructure of your own, enough to teach your readers how the big ones work and to give them a way to stand outside them when they choose. If freedom now travels through interfaces, then journalism has to learn to write for the interface as well as the eye. Why Right Wing Authoritarianism Won Right-wing projects learned the new grammar of power faster than their opponents. Trump, Modi, Putin, Xi and other contemporary authoritarians didn’t just perfect message discipline; they learned to play upstream where ranking, routing and identity decide what anyone sees in the first place. Instead of treating platforms as neutral megaphones, they treat feeds as actuators, outrage as fuel for ranking models, and influencer swarms as distributed routers. They design for the first minutes of a post’s life (when algorithms test and explode content), not for the next day’s fact-check. They seed many slightly varied copies to evade de-ranking, exploit features that lower friction (autoplay, stitch/duet, quote-tweet), and build creator ecosystems that keep engagement hot enough to stay high in the stack. The point isn’t to win a debate; it’s to win the delivery pipeline. Trump-world offered an early template: meme-factories and micro-influencers that could spin dozens of emotionally primed variants of the same line; constant edge-case testing to find the phrasing that spikes sharing; a parallel distribution stack (talk radio, cable segments clipped for social, bespoke platforms) that can route around moderation. “Flood the zone” isn’t a slogan, it’s a routing tactic: overwhelm ranking systems with volume so that corrective material never achieves comparable velocity. Modi’s ecosystem adds Industrial scale and linguistic reach: a standing IT cell, tens of thousands of WhatsApp and Telegram groups segmented by region and language, hyperlocal micro-creators, and seamless hand-offs between the leader’s official channels, party pages, and “independent” booster networks. Elsewhere, Bolsonaro’s[18] WhatsApp storms, Orbán’s[19] capture of domestic media combined with platform playbooks, and Bukele’s[20] TikTok-native aesthetic show the same literacy: design for the interface, not the op-ed page. By contrast, much of the democratic left kept speaking a pre-platform grammar. Campaigns optimised for press hits and neatly argued manifestos while outsourcing distribution to platform dashboards. Newsrooms and NGOs threw resources at rebuttals that arrive after the virality half-life, mistook takedown demands for strategy, and measured success with the platform’s engagement KPIs, training themselves to please the recommender rather than to reach the publics that matter. Organising often stayed channel-monolithic (a Twitter thread, a TV hit), underinvested in creator coalitions beyond the capital-city bubble, and treated encrypted group chats, short-form video vernaculars and local-language micro-networks as afterthoughts. The result has been correct, careful content that too often never cleared the feed’s on-ramp. Countering this requires adopting the same layer of operation without copying the nihilism. Three shifts matter. First, fight at the ex-ante[21] layer. Build rapid-release, high-integrity packets that are designed for the first hour: short, remixable clips with cryptographic provenance[22]; alt-text, subtitles and local-language variants pre-baked; thumbnails and first frames that survive mute/autoplay; companion stills sized for messaging apps. Pair every major release with a “warm swarm” of trusted micro-creators across communities who receive assets and talking points under embargo and post within minutes, not days. Run standing “rank scouts”: volunteers and synthetic test accounts that monitor how key narratives are placed in feeds across geographies and identities and when suppression or brigading[23] is detected, trigger counter-routing, newsletters, SMS, fediverse, community radio, diaspora channels, so reach doesn’t depend on a single platform’s mercy. Second, rebuild distribution and measurement on civic terms. Stop letting platform analytics define the goal. Track civic outcomes (did priority audiences actually see the correction? did we expand viewpoint exposure? did people click redress links to challenge platform errors?) and publish those metrics. Diversify the stack: maintain owned channels (email, PWA/app, RSS/fediverse[24]) and treat big platforms as just one leg. Where you must rely on them, negotiate concrete distribution guarantees for public-interest material (minimum delivery floors, temporary velocity caps to allow verification) and document breaches in public. In parallel, cultivate encrypted, consent-based organising spaces (WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram communities with trained local moderators) that can be activated quickly without exposing members to targeting. Third, change the aesthetic and the interface, not just the content. Authoritarian grammars weaponise purity and closure; democratic counters should normalise uncertainty without dullness. That means prebunks and “inoculation” content that teaches people the pattern of a manipulation before they meet it; UX friction where speed harms deliberation (read-before-share prompts, context cards that travel with embeds, default delays on suspicious virality); and “vantage toggles” that let a reader switch between curated orderings of the same corpus (labour view, rural view, opposition view), making pluralism tangible. Invest in creator alliances outside elite metros and in multiple languages; pay for editing, captions and cross-posting as core infrastructure, not extras. Treat memes and maximalist visuals as political tools, funny, excessive, self-aware, so long as they carry verifiable cores and don’t cross ethical lines. Add a power beat that the right already understands: the pipes. Investigate and litigate the couplings that make control easy such as ID systems tied to speech and payments, moderation rules that quietly de-rank whole topics and procurement clauses that grant backdoor data access. Push “interoperability with warrants”[25]: legal and technical limits on routine joining of policing, credit, identity and movement without narrow, auditable authorisation. Build small counter-interfaces yourselves: pseudonymous membership credentials for comments and donations; auditable “why am I seeing this?” on your own properties; public ledgers that show when a platform throttled election-relevant content and how you appealed. Finally, restructure teams to match the battlefield. Alongside policy and press, stand up: a creator network unit (to brief, pay, and protect micro-influencers), a ranking-audit cell (to run tests and publish findings), a counter-routing desk (to switch channels when a platform closes), and a security/identity team (to default to encrypted comms and limit cross-context tracking of supporters). Replace pure engagement targets with civic KPIs and make them public. When you train spokespeople, train their upload cadence, caption craft, and first-frame design as seriously as their talking points. The right learned first that the interface is the arena and speed is the weapon. The democratic left can catch up without becoming its mirror by learning to act ex-ante, owning enough of the stack to avoid chokepoints, and designing messages, metrics, and interfaces for pluralism rather than for the recommender. Don’t just argue better, arrive earlier, route smarter, and build the channels where democratic speech can survive optimisation. How might Macfarlane and Gellner see the media issue? Macfarlane would begin from outcomes and stewardship. He would recognise that contemporary power now operates upstream through sensing, identity, modelling, actuation, and legibility and he would not mistake this for a merely technical shift. It is a civilisational reconfiguration in which the capacity to coordinate at speed becomes the decisive currency. From that vantage, he would say the new right learned the grammar first because it treated platforms as instruments of rule rather than as neutral conduits of talk. The swarm, the viral half-life, the segmentation of audiences by vernacular and region: these are forms of state-adjacent coordination, and they can be bent to stabilising or destructive ends. Macfarlane’s critique of Trumpist and Putinist projects would remain moral and civilisational, he would see their grammar as optimised for mobilisation without stewardship, a grammar of perpetual war or frenzy, respectively, that cannot deliver lasting order or prosperity. By contrast, he would see in China an uncomfortable but instructive lesson: when the control stack is mastered by a state that also invests in welfare, education, and cultural continuity, the same techniques can underwrite social peace and mass uplift. Hence his prescription for the democratic left would be to stop confusing procedural virtue with capacity, and to build competent, visibly benevolent custodianship over the very interfaces where power now moves. That means public service media that operate ex ante rather than ex post; national and municipal data infrastructures held to high ethical standards but capable of routing truth with the same speed as outrage; alliance networks of creators and local-language communicators that are treated as civic infrastructure, not marketing. He would countenance paternal frictions such as read-before-share prompts, prebunking[26], distribution delays during information spikes provided they are transparently aimed at civic goods and embedded in institutions that can be trusted. For Macfarlane, the strategic failure of much of the left is not only slowness but abstention: a refusal to act at the infrastructural layer in the name of neutrality, ceding the initiative to actors willing to govern the feeds. Gellner would start elsewhere: with the conditions of freedom. He would concede that the right learned the grammar early because the grammar rewards fusion. The new stack collapses boundaries between coercion, economy, and culture; it renders association legible and steerable; it shifts power from courts and assemblies into procurement, standards, and ranking engines. This is precisely the drift he warned against. It’s basically fascism. Where Macfarlane sees an opening for benevolent stewardship, Gellner hears the hinge creak: once legitimacy is grounded in optimisation, speed, reach, predictive accuracy, civil society loses the autonomous footholds from which to correct and resist. In his assessment, the democratic left’s delay is not a failure of tactics but a category error. It kept addressing the public sphere as if it were a single, open space where better arguments could prevail, while the battlefield had moved to the interfaces that decide what can be seen and when. Yet his remedy would not be to embrace paternal opacity; it would be to constitutionalise the interfaces. He would translate rule of law into rule over couplings: warrants not just for access to data but for joining domains; justiciable limits on identity systems becoming universal keys; audit rights over models that govern ranking and eligibility; procurement rules that force contestability and appeal into the administrative pipeline. Where Macfarlane is willing to entrust benevolent states to tune the feeds, Gellner would insist on architectures that keep the feeds from becoming a single instrument and would demand plural protocols, anti-chokepoint remedies in cloud and payments, civic endowments for independent media that do not depend on engagement markets to survive. Gellner would urge newsrooms to stop shaping what you make and how you act so that a platform’s tracking systems can see it clearly and reward it and instead urge them to build counter-infrastructure: federated distribution, consent-based telemetry held in civic trusts, pseudonymous credentials for participation that prevent the universal joining of identities across contexts. He would endorse ranking audits and “why am I seeing this?” explanations not as UX flourishes[27] but as constitutional obligations that make pre-distribution power visible and therefore arguable. And he would relocate the left’s strategic centre from message discipline to interface pluralism: if you do not diversify the pipes, the best argument will arrive too late or not at all. Macfarlane envisages stewarded feeds, Gellner demands many feeds, none able to lock the public sphere into a single grammar. On the right’s success, they would both say it prospered by mastering ex-ante actuation: designing for the first hour of distribution, building layered routing networks that hop across platforms and languages, measuring reach through the platform’s eyes and gaming those objectives. On how to counter, they part: Macfarlane asks for capacity joined to legitimacy - the left must learn to govern the new stack with civic aims and enough cultural authority to be believed, and points to China. Gellner asks for limits joined to plurality - the left must build and defend institutions that keep any one actor, including a well-intentioned state, from owning the stack. Both, however, would reject the left’s comfort with purely ex post rebuttal. Macfarlane would say it concedes the tempo of modern politics; Gellner would say it concedes the terrain. Both would demand a re-training of political and media organisations to act where ranking and routing decide public reality: rapid, multilingual, high-provenance content; creator alliances beyond elite metros; empirical audits of delivery; and a shift in metrics from clicks to civic outcomes. Where Macfarlane is willing to lean on trusted institutions to impose frictions in the name of social peace, Gellner would insist that the same frictions be rule-bound, appealable, and dispersed across competing infrastructures. In the end their assessments amount to two bets on the same facts. Macfarlane believes good governance ends can be served by stewarding the control stack if the stewards are competent, culturally grounded, and visibly oriented to welfare. He doesn’t rule out authoritarian politics from doing this and again, would point to China. Gellner resists any form of authoritarianism and believes democratic ends can survive only if the stack is kept from fusing if civil society owns enough of the pipes, if interfaces are constitutionalised, and if opacity and plurality are protected as public goods. The new right’s fluency with the grammar does not force the left to mimic its cynicism, but it does force a choice between benevolent command and bounded command. Macfarlane chooses the former, with warnings; Gellner chooses the latter, with safeguards. A serious democratic strategy should hear both: build the capacity to arrive early and route widely, and at the same time hard-wire limits that keep even our own victories from becoming somebody else’s instrument of quiet control. Education Authoritarianism gets its strongest hold on education when the five domains of sensing, identity, modelling, actuation, and legibility are fused into a school system that treats culture as an instrument and the arts and humanities as risk vectors. Sensing turns classrooms into telemetry (proctoring, classroom cameras, keystroke and gaze tracking). Identity collapses student, family, and citizenship data into a single spine. Modelling predicts “risk” and “value” in advance in terms of achievement, discipline, loyalty. Actuation steers what pupils encounter through filtered textbooks, ranked learning objects, nudged pathways, and sanctions that follow non-compliance. Legibility wraps it all into dashboards and high-stakes exams so that ambiguity, dissent, and experiment can be penalised at scale. Within that configuration, humanities and arts must either be domesticated as heritage, civilisation or patriotic leitmotifs or thinned out, because their premise of interpretation, plurality, irony and conflicting sources breaks the machine’s confidence. Democracy needs the opposite affordances. It requires civic spaces where interpretation is not pre-scored, where identity does not determine what one is allowed to read, where models are tools rather than laws, where actuation does not silently narrow the horizon, and where legibility does not punish the unclassifiable. That is why the status of humanities and arts is a political barometer: if they can be taught with independence with multiple canons in tension, methods foregrounded over conclusions, creation valued even when it resists straightforward assessment then schools still host the conditions of freedom. When they are instrumentalised as “cultural glue,” democracy is already receding. Gellner argues that strong civil society depends on “sovereign rationality” with institutions whose first loyalty is to public reason, not to the state’s current programme and on a separation of domains so no single centre commands coercion, economy, and culture. Applied to education, that means the curriculum, examination, and cultural life of schools must be protected from both security logics and narrow economic planning. He would see the fusion of the five domains in schooling as fatal drift: data-mined behaviour replacing judgment, pre-emptive discipline replacing pedagogy, a performance regime that turns the humanities and arts into state décor. The practical question is what a democratic education needs to look like inside the same technological weather. First, keep the stack from fusing. Student data should not be the universal key that opens discipline records, welfare eligibility, policing, immigration, and payments. Make cross-domain joins hard: no routine interoperability between education and security databases; ensure warrants, narrow scopes, and external audits when joins are unavoidable. Second, move models back into the status of aids, not governors. Predictive analytics can support teachers, but their confidence and error must be visible to teachers, students, and families, and no model output should be used for tracking or sanction without human review and an appeal route outside the school hierarchy. Third, build actuation that expands rather than narrows. Recommendation systems in learning platforms should expose pupils to competing schools of thought; default settings should access minority and dissenting texts alongside canon; time-to-reflect friction (read-before-submit, discuss-before-grade) should be used wherever speed rewards conformity. A key is to protect the humanities and arts as a method, not a list. A plural canon requirement - multiple, contested lineages in literature, history, philosophy, art - prevents any single national narrative from monopolising meaning. Assessment should include portfolios, exhibitions, and viva-style defences that reward interpretation and revision, not only one-shot tests that tend to convert legibility into obedience. Fund “open studios” and local cultural partnerships as core infrastructure, not extracurricular luxuries; when budgets tighten, humanities and arts typically become the margin so make them the spine by linking them to civic skills (argument, evidence, source criticism) that every discipline needs. Teacher autonomy is a structural safeguard. In fused systems, teachers are reduced to deliverers of content streams; in democratic systems, they are authors of curricular experience. Give unions and professional bodies formal seats in ed-tech procurement and algorithm governance. Require “model cards” and impact assessments for any tool used for grading, tracking, or discipline, with the right to refuse adoption where harms outweigh benefits. Ban surveillance disguised as pedagogy: eye-tracking, continuous audio capture, and always-on proctoring are not neutral aids; they are sensing infrastructures that chill inquiry. Identity should be plural and privacy-preserving by design. Instead of a single student ID unlocking every service and leaving an eternal trail, use selective-disclosure credentials so pupils can prove what is necessary (“enrolled here,” “eligible for this lab,” “over 16 for this resource”) without broadcasting everything. Give students and families a real right to inspect, correct, and withdraw data, and make withdrawal meaningful with no retaliation, no hidden penalties in access. The curriculum must explicitly teach “infrastructural literacy,” just as media studies used to teach how to understand the underlying power codes in newspapers, film and TV. Students should learn to read platforms as power: how ranking, routing, metrics, and interface nudges[28] shape what becomes public; how provenance and manipulation can be tested; how to argue not just in essays but against interfaces. Media studies should be paired with statistics, coding, and philosophy of science so that the humanities and the quantitative disciplines are allies against credulity. This is not STEM[29] versus arts; it is STEM with arts to defend human judgment against automated certainty. Macfarlane would endorse much of this if the stewarding institutions are trusted, competent, and culturally rooted. He would press for a common civilisational frame of national arts, shared symbols, ethical instruction on the grounds that pluralism without cohesion lapses into noise. He would tolerate curated bounds on curricular extremes where these threaten social order, and he would argue that rapid uplift and civic peace justify some paternal frictions. Gellner would accept civic framing but insist on counter-balances: ensure every civilisational claim is taught alongside rival accounts; lock independence for universities, arts schools, and examination bodies into law; finance dissenting presses and cultural institutions so that the state is never the sole patron. He would treat any attempt to make schooling the privileged relay of national ideology as the point where civil society begins to thin. Both readings converge on a warning that matters now. When education is retooled mainly for “skills pipelines” and “human capital,” the five domains slide into schools without resistance - sensing to police attendance, identity to sort, modelling to track, actuation to narrow, legibility to punish deviation. That is the path along which authoritarian stewardship meets technocratic efficiency. A democratic counter-design is not nostalgic; it uses the same capacities differently: privacy by default, contestability by design, plural content by requirement, teacher authorship by contract, humanities and arts as method across the curriculum, and visible limits on the joins between school and state. If we take Gellner seriously, sovereignty of reason in education means governing the interfaces of what can be connected, under what conditions, and who can say no. If we take Macfarlane seriously, education cannot be culturally rootless; it must transmit inheritances that bind strangers into a public. The clash is real but it is also a design brief. Build schools where inheritances are offered, not imposed; where students practice arguing with traditions as well as within them; where the arts and humanities are protected precisely because they keep reality open; and where the stack that carries learning cannot be quietly turned into a machine for obedience. In the light of this it’s sobering to reflect on the state of much education in liberal states and recognise that since the rise of the Reagan/Thatcher there has been a more or less complete dereliction of duty regarding limiting the links between state and education and this is reaching an end point in the USA under Trump. Political Correctness Political correctness, often defended as a means of resisting oppressive language and discriminatory practices, is reframed through the five domains. This lens reveals how what once appeared as a tool for liberation has paradoxically become a technology of governance allowing states, corporations, and platforms to manage populations, regulate discourse, and reproduce power. In the domain of sensing, the infrastructure of political correctness begins with the tools that capture language, sentiment, and expression. What was once the struggle to reshape public discourse around race, gender, or sexuality is now mediated by vast systems of surveillance and content moderation. Machine learning models scan text, video, and speech for “toxic” or “offensive” language. Social media companies build filters that can flag slurs or hate speech in real time. While initially conceived as protecting marginalised groups, this apparatus allows governments and corporations to track sentiment across populations. Identity is the next layer where political correctness is transformed. Identities that were once stigmatised and fought for - Black, queer, trans, disabled - are now folded into bureaucratic and digital categories. Governments and corporations adopt diversity and inclusion metrics, human resources departments construct compliance frameworks, and platforms enforce categories of “protected groups.” Yet these identity stacks, far from empowering, also regulate access to rights, services, or jobs. Someone who falls into a protected category can be granted recognition, but that same recognition becomes a surveillance vector: one’s identity is both shield and tag, marking populations for special attention, inclusion campaigns, or targeted discipline. What began as resistance to exclusion becomes a way of dividing and sorting, fragmenting solidarities and channelling politics into the terrain of recognition managed by institutions.[30] Modelling takes political correctness into the predictive register. With enough data on language use, attitudes, or group affiliations, institutions can forecast where conflicts will arise and act pre-emptively. Universities model which kinds of speech may trigger student protests; governments use sentiment analysis to predict unrest linked to racial or cultural grievances; corporations anticipate reputational risks from politically incorrect scandals. Here, political correctness is no longer about protecting dignity but about managing volatility. Prediction turns social tensions into risk profiles, allowing those in power to defuse challenges before they become disruptive. Actuation is where political correctness most clearly becomes governance. Once linguistic rules are codified into algorithms or policy, they can be used to shape behaviour directly. Universities sanction professors for inappropriate remarks; platforms ban accounts for offensive speech; governments criminalize certain forms of expression under hate speech or disinformation laws. Initially justified as protecting vulnerable groups, these mechanisms also create levers of power that can be deployed in other directions. The same infrastructure that prevents harassment can be mobilized to suppress dissent, delegitimise protest slogans, or discipline oppositional movements. What once promised emancipation now enables flexible governance: by setting the terms of acceptable discourse, institutions retain control over what may be said, by whom, and in what context. Legibility is the final layer where political correctness stabilises itself as ideology. Dashboards and reports now measure the “diversity” of workforces, the “inclusivity” of advertising campaigns, or the “safety” of online environments. These metrics present institutions as rational, fair, and progressive, while obscuring the persistence of structural inequalities. Legibility transforms political correctness into quantifiable compliance: how many minority employees, how many inclusive words, how many flags displayed during Pride month. The deeper conflicts such as exploitation of labour, dispossession, global inequality are rendered invisible behind the smooth veneer of politically correct optics. This is commodity fetishism updated for cultural struggle: relations of domination appear as neutral statistics of fairness. The genealogies of political correctness in the United States and China could hardly look more different on the surface, yet when viewed through the five domains, they converge on a strikingly similar logic: dissent becomes harder to sustain because cultural struggle is absorbed into infrastructures of governance. In the United States, political correctness emerged historically out of progressive struggles: civil rights, feminism, queer liberation and decolonial critique. Its initial aim was emancipatory, naming oppressive language and practices, reshaping culture to be more inclusive. The genealogy is liberal-inclusionary: rooted in the promise that recognition and representation would lead to greater justice. But once institutions adopted these norms, they began to operationalise them through infrastructures. Sensing systems monitor speech and behaviour; identity metrics stratify and formalise diversity; predictive modelling reframes cultural struggle as reputational risk; actuation enforces compliance through bans or HR discipline; legibility turns inclusion into public dashboards and reports. What started as a weapon against entrenched power became a system for corporations and universities to project fairness while disciplining internal dissent. The liberal genealogy produced a paradox: institutions appear ever more inclusive, while genuine confrontation with exploitation or structural inequality is displaced into the management of speech and symbols. China’s genealogy is nationalist-orthodox rather than liberal-inclusionary. What counts as politically correct is not recognition of minority identities or marginalised voices, but loyalty to Party narratives of unity, stability, and rejuvenation. This tradition emerges from Leninist statecraft fused with Confucian ideals of harmony[31]. Here too, the five domains operationalise political correctness as control. Sensing technologies like facial recognition, keyword filtering, and sentiment analysis capture dissent before it spreads. Identity is categorized into official designations - Han, Uyghur, migrant worker, citizen - that condition access to rights, but always subordinated to the demand for loyalty. Modelling predicts unrest or disaffection through social credit algorithms and predictive policing. Actuation is direct: censorship, detentions, and bans are imposed swiftly. Legibility comes through propaganda dashboards, metrics of harmony, and statistics of “poverty eradication,” which present the Party as guarantor of fairness. The nationalist genealogy, unlike the liberal one, never claimed emancipation; it claimed stability. Yet the outcome is parallel: dissent is administratively foreclosed, and populations are governed through infrastructures that transform culture into compliance. What unites these trajectories is not the content of political correctness - U.S. diversity metrics versus Chinese harmony campaigns - but the infrastructural logic of governance they both employ. In both cases, cultural resistance is metabolised into an apparatus that secures legitimacy for the system. In the U.S., the legitimacy of corporations and universities is displayed through diversity dashboards and inclusive PR campaigns; in China, the legitimacy of the Party is displayed through stability indices and unity propaganda. In both, sensing makes populations visible, modelling anticipates risk, actuation enforces discipline, and legibility projects fairness. The convergence is paradoxical. Political correctness, in its liberal genealogy, was born to expand dissent and empower the marginalised; in its nationalist genealogy, it was born to suppress dissent in the name of unity. Yet both, when integrated into infrastructures of governance, arrive at the same effect: dissent becomes less visible, less sustainable, and less transgressive. Infrastructures transform culture into administration. World Governance and the United Nations Mark Mazower’s Governing the World[32] shows us that the dream of international governance has always been bound up with imperial ambition, commercial interests, and geopolitical rivalry as much as with humanitarian idealism. What the five domains reveal is how, in the twenty-first century, world governance is less a matter of global rules and parliaments and more a matter of who owns and operates the infrastructures that span borders. This makes global order complicated, fragmented, and far from benign. Sensing technologies - satellite constellations, biometric systems, digital platforms, undersea cables - suggest a world in which everything can be observed and monitored. In theory, such infrastructures could underpin a more effective global governance system, providing the UN with the means to track compliance with treaties on climate, human rights, or arms control. But in practice, these systems are owned by states or corporations and answer to their interests. China’s surveillance architectures serve its own model of control, American sensing capabilities flow through its intelligence and platform giants, and Europe attempts to regulate but is dependent on others’ technologies. Far from creating a neutral “world eye,” sensing divides the globe into rival technical sovereignties. Identity infrastructures follow a similar path. The UN once imagined universal human rights and citizenship in a global forum. Yet today identity is mediated through biometrics, credit histories, migration databases, and platform reputation scores. These infrastructures decide who can work, travel, or receive aid. In some cases, such as refugee camps using digital ID for food distribution, they even bypass states. This fragments solidarity: rather than universal recognition, people are segmented into ever finer risk categories and statuses. Mazower reminds us that international institutions have always struggled between universalist ideals and the reality of exclusion; the new identity systems extend this paradox, dressing it in technological neutrality while entrenching hierarchy and control. Modelling has become central to legitimacy in global politics. Climate projections, epidemiological forecasts, and financial simulations offer the scientific rationale for international action. The ‘Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’ exemplifies how models substitute for binding political agreement. Yet models are also instruments of division, as seen during COVID-19 when states used projections to justify unilateral closures and vaccine hoarding. Rather than stabilising a single world government, modelling produces rival futures in the service of national or corporate interests. Here again Mazower’s insight applies: international governance has long been hostage to great power politics, and predictive models now provide the technical armoury for that struggle. Actuation shows the greatest hollowing out of world government. The UN can pass resolutions, but enforcement power lies elsewhere: in American sanctions, European data regimes, Chinese export bans, or even the terms of service of global platforms. Companies like Visa, SpaceX, or Google act in many cases as global actuators with more power to sanction than the UN Security Council. This is not a benign diffusion of authority but a troubling one, since these levers are deployed without transparency or accountability. Mazower traces how the League of Nations and the UN both sought to civilise enforcement by binding it to law. The five domains reveal instead a shift to infrastructural coercion, exercised through financial systems, logistics, and code. Legibility completes the picture. The UN still maintains indices and dashboards on poverty, development and human rights that frame how the world is seen. But it competes with a host of other legibility regimes: IMF figures, corporate ESG[33] scores, nationalist propaganda statistics. What counts as “the state of the world” is increasingly plural and politicised. Mazower shows how earlier international institutions sought to produce a common language of civilisation, progress, and development. Today, legibility is fragmented and contested, making “world governance” less a universal language and more a battlefield of competing numbers and narratives. By 2050, the United Nations (UN) would no longer appear as the central institution of “world government.” Instead, real governance is exercised through infrastructures that cross borders but are controlled by great powers and corporate giants. We may see sensing split into competing blocs of data empires, each providing surveillance, communication, and monitoring capabilities. The UN may continue to call for transparency, for example, in climate monitoring or nuclear verification but the actual capacity to sense the planet will remain in the hands of states and corporations. This makes the dream of a neutral “world eye” impossible. Identity systems today are built from biometrics (fingerprints, iris scans, facial recognition), digital identifiers, and financial reputations. India’s Aadhaar biometric ID system and its UPI (Unified Payments Interface) digital payments platform already demonstrate how billions of people can be enrolled into digital infrastructures that regulate access to welfare, payments, and mobility. In Europe, the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) tried to set a global benchmark for protecting personal data, but even it depends on national enforcement. By 2050, global identity management may become even more fragmented: blocs such as the US, China, and India may each operate its own universal ID systems, and cross-border recognition may only occur through selective treaties. The UN’s universalist ideal of citizenship and rights will struggle in this world, because identity becomes a technological infrastructure of stratification rather than a legal principle of equality. By 2050, modelling will become the dominant form of legitimacy in international politics: the bloc whose models are accepted will shape the future. For example, China may advance climate models that support its Industrial strategy, while the US may favour models aligned with its corporations. The UN will not control them. Mazower’s point that international institutions rarely escape the grip of great powers is confirmed here: predictive infrastructures are battlegrounds rather than neutral guides. Today, however, much actuation happens outside the UN. The United States imposes sanctions by cutting countries off from the global banking network (SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication). Tech companies enforce bans on users or whole countries, as when Russia was cut off from some digital services after the invasion of Ukraine. By 2050, such infrastructural actuation may dominate: corporations like Visa or satellite operators may wield more enforcement power than international institutions. The UN risks becoming largely symbolic, while real-world control is exercised through platforms, finance, and supply chains. Legibility, the final domain, refers to how societies and economies are made visible and understandable through statistics, dashboards, and indicators. The UN would still publish Human Development Indices, Sustainable Development Goals dashboards, and human rights reports. But these compete with the figures of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, or corporate environmental-social-governance (ESG) ratings. By 2050, legibility will likely become even more fragmented: every bloc will produce its own indices, designed to make its own system look legitimate. China already publishes alternative poverty and growth statistics; by mid-century, we may have entirely rival “world pictures” of how development and progress are measured. Mazower shows how earlier international institutions tried to impose a single language of “civilisation” and “progress.” The five domains demonstrate that this language is fracturing into contested narratives. When put together, these developments show that “world government” is less and less about the United Nations or the dream of universal institutions. Instead, governance is becoming infrastructural, polycentric, and competitive. The five domains are controlled by great powers and corporations, not by neutral assemblies. By mid-century, the UN may survive as a stage for diplomacy and symbolism, but the real machinery of global order will run through the infrastructures that decide what can be seen, who can be recognised, which futures are forecast, which levers can be pulled, and what counts as reality. For Gellner, the vitality of democracy rests on the existence of autonomous institutions, a robust civil society, and the cultural conditions that sustain them. He argued that Industrial society requires a high culture of literacy and shared norms, which democracy can organise without collapsing into authoritarianism. Applied to the five domains, Gellner would see a danger: infrastructures are drifting out of public accountability. The platforms that collect data and predict crises are not controlled by elected parliaments or civic institutions but by corporations and technocratic elites. Legibility, once the function of public statistics accountable to citizens, becomes a battle of dashboards created by rival blocs. Gellner would warn that if democracies cannot reassert control over these infrastructures, civil society risks being hollowed out. The paradox is that democracies depend on legibility and sensing to govern, but these very domains may undermine democratic autonomy by making citizens and states dependent on opaque global systems. His emphasis on sustaining democracy thus highlights the fragility of relying on infrastructures beyond political oversight. Macfarlane, by contrast, has often emphasised China’s distinctiveness, especially its historical ability to sustain social order without relying on the same institutional pathways that shaped the West. He tends to present China’s trajectory as an alternative model of modernity, one less dependent on liberal freedoms and more on bureaucratic coherence. Seen through the five domains, Macfarlane might argue that China is unusually well positioned to make world governance infrastructural rather than liberal-institutional. Its Aadhaar-like national ID systems, digital payments platforms such as WeChat Pay, predictive modelling for everything from pandemics to traffic, and tight control over legibility through statistics and censorship all give it systemic capacity to govern at scale. Where Mazower shows the UN as a forum for Western ideals that never fully materialised, Macfarlane would suggest that China offers a real functioning alternative: a civilisational model where infrastructures replace liberal institutions. From his perspective, world governance in 2050 may not look like a failed UN but rather like an extended Chinese approach - technocratic, centralised, and infrastructural. The juxtaposition is striking. Where Gellner stresses the need for democracies to sustain themselves through autonomy, rule of law, and independent civic institutions, Macfarlane sees in China’s path a viable non-democratic alternative. The five domains provide the terrain on which this contest plays out. Democracies face the challenge of reasserting control over sensing, modelling, and legibility so that these infrastructures serve public debate rather than opaque elites. China, however, can integrate these domains seamlessly into statecraft because its political philosophy already accepts the fusion of bureaucracy, technology, and governance. The United Nations becomes marginal in both scenarios: for Gellner, because infrastructures undermine civic accountability, and for Macfarlane, because world governance has already migrated to state-led technocratic systems like China’s. By 2050, the vision of world government will therefore depend on which of these perspectives proves more prescient. If democracies can reform the governance of infrastructures, Gellner’s warning may serve as a spur to renewed civic control, ensuring that sensing and modelling remain accountable to citizens. If, however, China’s model spreads, Macfarlane’s reading suggests that infrastructural control will replace democratic deliberation as the dominant form of global order. In either case, Mazower’s historical lesson that world government was never purely benign becomes even clearer. Health and Obesity By 2050, sensing will be almost totalised. Smart fridges, wearables, sewage analysis, and supermarket sensors will track not only what people eat but also the environmental impact of those choices. Governments will be able to map the carbon footprint of diets in real time, linking obesity not just to health costs but to greenhouse gas emissions. Yet corporations will use identical sensing to deepen extraction: precision agriculture sensors will optimise production of corn syrup, palm oil, and cheap meat, making fast food even cheaper and more abundant. This will be marketed as “green efficiency” ensuring fewer inputs per calorie while in fact locking in monocultures and ecological collapse. Sensing thus produces a double edge: hyper-visibility of obesity and carbon damage for public health campaigns while making the systemic ecological destruction invisible for corporate profit. Identity will be reframed around both health and environmental citizenship. Governments may score individuals on not just obesity risk but on “green diets,” linking insurance costs and even travel privileges to carbon-efficient food choices. At the same time, corporations will use identity scoring to cultivate consumer “tribes”: green-conscious flexitarians offered plant-based fast food, working-class consumers offered cheap high-calorie animal products. Platforms like Uber Eats could sort customers into eco-loyalty bands, nudging some toward lab-grown meat while pushing others into intensified cheap fried chicken. Identity infrastructures thus stratify populations into both health and environmental classes: the “eco-lean,” healthy and privileged, and the “obese-brown,” burdened with junk food and higher environmental risk. Modelling will fuse health and climate forecasting. States will use predictive models to estimate the long-term healthcare burden of obesity alongside the ecological cost of diets linking diabetes projections to methane emissions from beef. Yet corporations will run competing models to forecast profit streams from different consumer groups. KFC may model how climate-stressed populations in low-income countries will still demand fried protein, designing supply chains accordingly. Meanwhile, PepsiCo might hedge its profits by investing simultaneously in sugary snacks and lab-grown “healthy” algae drinks. Both sides call this “resilience,” but the outcomes diverge: one aims to reduce systemic harm, the other to extract surplus from crisis. Actuation will intensify the paradox. Governments will impose sugar taxes, carbon tariffs on meat, and subsidies for lab-grown or plant-based foods. Yet corporations will actuate with equal force in the opposite direction, using real-time platforms to flood markets with greenwashed fast food. A McDonald’s in 2050 may advertise its “net zero” burger because the beef is lab-grown and cooked in solar-powered kitchens but the burger is still calorie-dense, ultra-processed, and designed for addictive consumption. Similarly, Uber Eats will offer carbon-offset options for your fried chicken delivery, while encouraging larger basket sizes that increase both calories and packaging waste. Actuation is thus both green and anti-green: the tools for climate responsibility become marketing gimmicks that entrench consumption. Legibility may be the most fraught domain. Governments will publish dashboards showing obesity rates, carbon footprints of diets, and healthcare savings from healthy eating. These will be intended to make visible the links between bodies and environments. Yet corporations will publish their own dashboards: glossy ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) reports claiming reductions in emissions per unit of food produced, while hiding absolute increases in production and consumption. McDonald’s will proudly show that its fries are grown with 30% less water, even as total potato farming doubles to meet global demand. Legibility becomes a battlefield: obesity and environmental damage are simultaneously made hyper-visible (in government metrics) and mystified (in corporate ESG accounting). The result is a double paradox. By 2050, the five domains will be deployed to make both people and environments healthier and sicker at the same time. Public health systems will use them to reduce obesity, curb diabetes, and cut food-related carbon emissions. Corporations will use them to intensify overconsumption, shift environmental costs onto the poor, and greenwash destructive supply chains. The same infrastructures will support both planetary health and planetary degradation. This means obesity in 2050 won’t just be a matter of bodies but of ecosystems. Fast food chains will position themselves as “climate allies,” offering lab-grown nuggets and carbon-neutral Coke while still locking consumers into addictive cycles. Governments will tighten controls, but their interventions may disproportionately burden the poor, creating an eco-health inequality gap. In this way, the five domains become not neutral tools but a terrain of struggle where obesity and ecological collapse are governed together, sometimes mitigated, sometimes exacerbated often simultaneously. Set against this terrain, Gellner and Macfarlane read the future very differently. Gellner’s priority is sustaining democratic life: the separation of power domains, the autonomy of civil society, and institutions strong enough to say “no” when technocracy or commerce overreach. He would see eco-health success or failure hinging less on clever sensors than on who owns and governs the interfaces. If sensing and modelling live in private clouds, identity rails are run by platforms, and actuation is executed through payment networks and delivery apps, then parliaments and publics become spectators to dashboards. His prescription is constitutional and infrastructural: keep the domains decoupled and contestable. Publicly governed sensing (open dietary and environmental data with strict privacy guarantees), plural identity rails (no single “health/green passport” that unlocks all services), auditable models with uncertainty budgets and adversarial testing, actuation bound by due process (no automated exclusions; taxes and subsidies designed to avoid regressive effects), and legibility that pairs outcome metrics with upstream accountability (who profits when “green” sales rise?). He would back universal measures that cut coercion and stigma - cheap healthy calories by default, safe active transport, advertising limits to children - over punitive scoring of individuals. And he would warn that “green paternalism” can quietly become class discipline unless unions, municipalities and independent regulators have real leverage over the stack. Macfarlane, more sympathetic to China’s capacity for long-horizon coordination, would emphasise what comprehensive stewardship can deliver when the five domains are integrated. A state that can align agricultural standards, retail logistics, clinical pathways and urban design can, in principle, bend both obesity and emissions curves faster than coalition democracies. He would point to the advantages of coherent sensing (farm-to-table traceability), unified identity (benefits that follow the person across provinces), national modelling (diet-climate-health planning as one exercise), decisive actuation (rapid procurement shifts into legumes, seaweed and cultured proteins; city-wide ad restrictions; default healthy options), and a legibility narrative that ties bodily well-being to civilisational renewal. His enthusiasm would still be conditional: stewardship is justified only if it delivers order and rising welfare without sliding into gangsterism or permanent “campaign mode”. He would worry about monoculture risk, both agricultural and ideological, and about how quickly a moralised food policy can trample minorities and local cuisines. But he’d still bet that a technocratic state with performance legitimacy can claim eco-health leadership if it shows quick, material gains. Read together, the two lenses clarify the trade-offs. A “Gellnerian” pathway keeps the system messy on purpose: multiple clouds and payment rails to avoid chokepoints; civic data trusts so communities co-govern sensitive health and purchase streams; open, peer-audited models for diet–climate policy; universal, non-stigmatising supports (cheap staples, safe streets, time protection for cooking and rest) ahead of social-credit-style scoring; advertising and placement rules that tame corporate actuation rather than outsourcing public health to brand campaigns. It will look slower and less “optimised,” but it preserves the friction that democratic correction needs. A “Macfarlane” pathway takes the gains of integration: whole-of-state procurement to flip food environments quickly; mandated reformulation; standardised labelling tied to reimbursement; urban codes that bake movement and fresh food access into the map; long contracts for farmers to de-risk crop shifts; coordinated school, clinic and media pushes. It will look brisk and coherent, but its guardrails against mission creep must be explicit: independent scientific review, hard limits on behavioural scoring, cultural carve-outs, rights to appeal, and sunset clauses[34] on emergency powers. Both agree on one awkward point: “green” can be anti-green if it just optimises per-unit footprints[35] while total throughput climbs. The cure for that rebound lies in the design of actuation and legibility. Taxes and standards should target absolute impacts (total sugar sold, total packaging waste, total livestock methane) rather than allowing endless growth in “low-footprint” products; corporate disclosures should report system-wide effects, not just product-level intensity; public dashboards should track cooking time, walkability and food retail mix and determinants, not just disease. And both would flag equity: if healthy/low-carbon defaults are dearer in time or money, the poor will pay twice, first in illness, then in stigma. Practical moves exist that satisfy both temperaments. Mandate open nutrition-environment APIs[36] so any retailer or app that wants public trust must expose placements, promotions and reformulation trails to independent audit. Fund municipal “healthy logistics” (cool-chain, micro-warehousing, curb rules[37]) so greengrocers and co-ops can compete with dark-kitchen delivery. Require “right to explanation” for health-linked pricing or throttling by insurers, employers or platforms, and ban the fusion of medical identity with retail or location streams without explicit, revocable consent. Shift subsidies from commodity inputs to outcomes, soil health, biodiversity, fibre and micronutrient availability per capita, so farming economics favour the same diets clinicians recommend. And change defaults rather than shaming choices: smaller standard portions, water as the first-reach drink, produce at the point of decision, protected time for school meals and workplace breaks. So instead of trying to change people’s behaviour by scolding, shaming, or morally pressuring them systems and institutions can shape behaviour more effectively by setting the desired option as the default path of least resistance. For example rather than lecturing people about being irresponsible if they don’t save, governments and employers can automatically enrol workers into pension schemes but allow them to opt out if they wish. Most people stick with the default, so savings rise. Instead of campaigns that shame people into signing up, some countries make organ donation the default assumption unless you opt out, leading to much higher participation. A cafeteria might put fruit at eye level and chips in a harder-to-reach place. No one is forbidden or shamed, but the default pathway nudges people toward fruit. A website could have data-sharing turned off by default, so users are automatically protected unless they explicitly opt in, rather than relying on scolding about “responsible online habits.” The five domains won’t choose for us; they are the battleground. Gellner would measure success by whether citizens and their institutions still own the couplings between domains. Macfarlane would measure it by whether integrated stewardship actually delivers healthier bodies and landscapes, without descending into permanent emergency or predation. A credible eco-health settlement by 2050 will borrow from both: enough integration to move the needle fast, enough pluralism and transparency to keep the system corrigible, and enough humility to prioritise absolute impacts over pretty intensities. The litmus test is simple: do our loops get tighter while theirs stay noisy, and can the public still pull the plug? Aging Aging populations illustrate with particular clarity how the five domains of contemporary governance offer both genuine liberation and new forms of domination. The welfare state of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was heralded as a civilisational breakthrough. Pensions in Bismarck’s Germany, Beveridge’s postwar reforms in Britain, Roosevelt’s Social Security in America all signalled that older people need no longer depend entirely on family or charity. Yet these same systems introduced elaborate bureaucratic categories that sorted citizens into eligible and ineligible, deserving and undeserving. Surveillance, paperwork, and stratification came attached to benevolence. For Gellner, this was the unavoidable cost of modernity: once welfare was bureaucratised, plural life was narrowed but predictability increased. Macfarlane, with his emphasis on civilisational guardianship, would note that these systems simply shifted the familial duty of care into institutional form, preserving stability through a new apparatus. The five domains intensify this ambivalence. Sensing technologies are marketed as emancipatory: wearables that prevent unnoticed falls, smart homes that track hydration, telemedicine that offers continuity of care, artificial intelligence systems that predict dementia or heart disease. These interventions make independence longer and crises fewer. At the same time, they risk turning the home into a panopticon where every movement, heartbeat, and moment of rest is logged, flagged, and scrutinised by insurers, hospitals, or distant relatives. What feels like care to one person can feel like perpetual audit to another. Identity infrastructures once meant pension cards and insurance numbers but by mid-century are likely to be fully biometric, tying together medical records, entitlements, and mobility rights. This makes inclusion easier in principle but introduces rigid hierarchies in practice. Lifetime contributions, immigration status, and credit histories can become criteria for graded levels of care. Migrant elders, those who worked informally, or those without documentation may be placed on minimal packages or excluded altogether. Welfare bureaucracies always stratified, but digital identity can automate stratification with far less discretion for correction. For Macfarlane such systems, carefully managed, can harmonise provision across vast populations; for Gellner they are brittle devices, prone to entrenching inequality without lawful means of redress. Predictive modelling extends the reach of actuarial logic[38]. It allows governments to forecast dementia prevalence, social care costs, or hospital burdens decades in advance. Families may be reassured by personalised ageing curves. Yet the person becomes defined by trajectory rather than agency, and treatment decisions risk being rationed not on present need but on predicted decline. Demographic forecasting shaped the welfare state from its inception but machine learning deepens the reduction: lives become statistical futures, and once written into budgets those futures are difficult to contest. Actuation carries models into action. Where a welfare officer once visited a home or a pension cheque once arrived by post, algorithmic governance can now adjust benefits in real time, allocate care hours, or cut them, dispatch home nurses according to optimisation routines, or nudge behaviour through diet plans and exercise regimens. Some of these will genuinely improve wellbeing, others will reduce choice to what the system deems efficient. An elderly person may find their life reordered by unseen parameters, a family told that care hours are cut “because the model requires it.” Automated paternalism risks becoming incontestable. Legibility closes the circle. Governments, insurers, and platforms represent ageing in dashboards and indices, showing dependency ratios, healthy life years, or pension liabilities. These representations mobilise resources but also define the elderly as fiscal burdens, statistical problems, and actuarial categories. As with Marx’s commodity fetishism where relations between people appeared as relations between things, the complexities of ageing lives appear as numbers on charts. Legibility builds legitimacy for intervention but strips dignity from those who do not fit the metrics. The paradox is unavoidable. The same infrastructures that extend independence, distribute care fairly, and prevent neglect also reduce elders to monitored bodies, biometric categories, actuarial risks, algorithmic outputs, and budgetary burdens. The welfare state’s old contradiction, protection through control, is magnified by technologies that promise to know and anticipate everything. Macfarlane places faith in the civilisational achievement, a society that can care for millions systematically and thereby sustain stability. Gellner insists that unless plural institutions preserve ambiguity and dissent, infrastructures of care will harden into infrastructures of domination. The deeper lesson is that ageing is not only biological but political. Infrastructures make it governable, and governance cuts both ways. To universalise the five domains without firebreaks is to risk repeating the welfare paradox in more totalising form. To design with humility, pluralism, and resistance to over-integration is the only way to ensure that what is offered as care does not become coercion. Body Image and Sex The body image crisis that has gripped teenagers, and increasingly people of all ages, is best understood as a by-product of how the five domains channel attention and normalise certain aesthetic ideals. Sensing technologies from the endless scroll of TikTok to facial recognition algorithms in photo filters create a world where one’s physical appearance is constantly captured, evaluated, and compared. Identity infrastructures, in the form of follower counts, likes, and engagement metrics, transform bodies into quantifiable reputations. Modelling systems reinforce narrow ideals by predicting what content will maximise clicks and by surfacing images that conform to those predictions, creating feedback loops that privilege slimness, muscularity, or sexualised self-presentation. Actuation turns these predictions into lived pressure: recommendation algorithms push diet ads, cosmetic products, or fitness regimes at precisely the most vulnerable users. Legibility finalises the process, presenting the metrics of beauty such as calorie counts, BMI scores[39], photo-editing standards as neutral facts of life, rather than contested cultural norms. The result is a world where young people in particular find themselves less able to experience their bodies as their own, and more compelled to inhabit them as projects for optimisation. What feels like personal crisis is in fact a systemic outcome: bodies rendered visible, calculable, and governable by infrastructures designed to extract value from attention and insecurity alike. Sex, once thought of as the most intimate and personal of human practices, is now inseparable from the infrastructures of the five domains. The rise of pornography, falling birth rates, and the crisis of teenage sexuality cannot be understood without recognising how these domains configure desire, behaviour, and even personality. What looks like cultural decline or individual moral failing is in fact the systemic production of trajectories. The expansion of sensing has made sexuality continuously monitored and commodified. Every click on a porn site, every pause on a TikTok video, every GPS[40] trace near a nightclub is logged and analysed. The system does not simply record desire but creates it: personalised porn recommendations escalate into more extreme niches, fitness trackers feed advertising for testosterone boosters, dating apps time notifications to moments of loneliness. Adolescents encounter sex not through fumbling encounters or gradual social discovery but through infrastructures that capture their desires before they are even articulated. Identity becomes a function of these datasets. A teenager is not just “male” or “female,” gay or straight; he or she is profiled through ride-hail reputation scores[41], school behavioural logs, platform “trust” badges, and dating app rankings. Someone like Andrew Tate, who markets himself as an exemplar of the “toxic male,” flourishes because identity infrastructures channel young men into predictable categories: rejected by peers, marked by low desirability scores, they are primed for a narrative of victimhood and revenge. These men are not monsters in themselves but products of infrastructures that silo them into legible types. Modelling then predicts behaviour and escalates it. Algorithms forecast which adolescents are vulnerable to extremist influencers, which young women are likely to seek cosmetic surgery, which boys will pay for OnlyFans subscriptions. In doing so, they make futures in advance. A boy predicted to watch more misogynistic content is fed more of it; a girl modelled as likely to develop body-image issues sees a feed saturated with weight-loss programmes. The prediction becomes the script. Actuation enforces this logic. Content delivery is nudged by engagement optimisation, dating app matches rationed by hidden desirability hierarchies, porn notifications pushed at night when impulse control is weakest. These nudges rarely feel like commands but slowly recalibrate what people expect from sex and intimacy. Teenage boys who are modelled as “low desirability” are actuated into porn dependency, while teenage girls are actuated into body commodification. The system does not crush freedom with blunt bans; it steers behaviour with micro-adjustments until individuals perform the roles predicted of them. Legibility ties everything together. Sexuality becomes visible as data - youth “at risk of porn addiction,” men “flagged for misogynistic speech,” women categorised by desirability rankings, couples evaluated by fertility dashboards. Governments cite these figures to explain falling birth rates, schools use them to justify interventions, and platforms package them for advertisers. At the same time, lived experience becomes illegible. A teenager’s loneliness or confusion does not appear as complexity but as a risk category on a dashboard. The human is eclipsed by the metric. It is here that “toxic male syndrome” arises. Not as an outbreak of villainous bad actors but as the infrastructural production of predictable subjects. Someone like Andrew Tate is less an originator of misogyny than a symptom of infrastructures that reward engagement with outrage, monetise alienated young men, and amplify legible identity types. He is not an aberration but a function: the system produces him because it profits from him. The paradox is stark. The five domains can deliver sexual health benefits such as early identification of abuse, better fertility tracking, personalised health interventions. But they also create the very pathologies they claim to solve. They sustain porn addiction while offering therapy for it, encourage disaffection while monetising its expression, define teenagers by predicted decline rather than present agency. By 2050 sex is experienced less as a realm of intimacy than as a terrain of governance. Birth rates will be predicted and nudged; intimacy will be rationed by desirability scores; adolescence will be defined by battles with algorithmic nudges that anticipate desire before it is lived. The toxic male will persist, not as a choice but as a category that the system insists upon. Brexit[42] Looking back, Brexit can be re-read not just as a political rupture but as a demonstration of how the five domains of contemporary governance were mobilised and manipulated to shape democratic choice. The paradox is that the very infrastructures that delivered the referendum result were also the ones that helped ensure its negative consequences fell most heavily on the very populations who had supported it. The domain of sensing mattered first. British politics in the years leading up to the referendum was saturated with an unprecedented intensity of data harvesting. Social media platforms, canvassing apps, and commercial marketing firms all extracted clickstreams, location histories, and psychometric profiles from ordinary citizens. What was once the terrain of broadcast opinion polling became an apparatus of micro-sensing: what people read, shared, and feared was tracked in real time. This did not simply record voter opinion; it produced it. Entire neighbourhoods could be profiled as “swing” on the basis of their browsing habits or consumer purchases, then inundated with highly tailored messages. Such granular perception did not treat people as citizens deliberating about a shared future, but as consumers of anxieties whose data could be converted into political capital. Identity was then recalibrated. The referendum became framed less as a technical decision about the European Union and more as a question of who belonged to Britain, who had been forgotten, and who was to blame. Nationality, regional pride, class resentment, and racialised fears were all organised through identity infrastructures that already existed in the form of welfare systems, immigration enforcement, and labour segmentation. Campaigns made strategic use of “take back control” to invoke a shared but ill-defined identity against Brussels bureaucrats, migrants, or metropolitan elites. Online, people were sorted into echo chambers where identity markers such as patriot, leaver, remainer, migrant, globalist became as important as factual content. This fracturing of identity, powered by digital architectures, created a polarisation that outlasted the referendum itself and continues to shape British politics. Modelling played an insidious role. Sophisticated prediction systems were deployed by campaigns to simulate voting behaviour and test message resonance. Cambridge Analytica[43] is the most infamous case, but far from unique: behavioural modelling allowed strategists to forecast where turnout could be depressed, which emotional triggers would shift opinion, and how close margins might be tipped. These models did not aspire to truth; they aspired to effect. Meanwhile, mainstream economic models predicted harm from Brexit in terms of reduced GDP, trade friction, investment flight but these were discredited in the public sphere as “Project Fear.” Here the asymmetry is striking: predictive models that supported Brexit were operationalised to mobilise votes, while those that warned of damage were dismissed as elite propaganda. The electorate was governed by models either way, but selectively. Actuation was where these models bit into reality. Platform algorithms amplified messages designed to maximise outrage, fear, or resentment, regardless of truth value. Political advertising rules allowed campaigns to micro-target constituencies with contradictory promises. Coordinated bot networks[44] and brigading swelled online debates, drowning out moderation. Beyond digital space, actuation also meant deliberate policy choices: referenda rules that required only a simple majority, the framing of the vote as irreversible, and the refusal to treat turnout thresholds or regional splits as constraints. Actuation compressed the distance between modelling and decision; the feedback loop between prediction and steering was tightened until the electorate was being acted upon in real time. Legibility was the final domain. For governments, Brexit became framed in dashboards of sovereignty, border control metrics, trade deals signed, fishing quotas reclaimed, rather than in terms of lived consequences for wages, supply chains, or social care. The referendum result itself was rendered as a single, legible figure: 52 percent leave, 48 percent remain. All ambiguity, all nuance, all complexity collapsed into this binary, which was then treated as destiny. Meanwhile, the costs in terms such as lost manufacturing contracts, food inflation and labour shortages remained less visible in official discourse even as they became brutally clear in lived life. Citizens who had voted for Brexit were made legible as a triumphant bloc, even as the very infrastructures of legibility such as statistics on inflation, productivity and regional decline showed they bore disproportionate harm. In retrospect, Brexit was not a political decision but a case study in how the five domains can be turned into tools of manipulation. Citizens were sensed as data, sorted into identities, targeted through predictive models, nudged and amplified by actuation systems, and then narrated back to themselves through simplified dashboards of national destiny. The tragedy is that the functional operation of these domains allowed short-term mobilisation but produced long-term costs. Manufacturing regions lost export access, farming sectors faced bureaucratic hurdles, health services lost migrant labour, and small businesses absorbed new frictions. The very voters who felt most invisible before Brexit became more vulnerable after it. It is here that the paradox sharpens. The five domains made citizens feel newly visible and newly powerful: their anxieties sensed, their identities recognised, their voices amplified. But the very same domains, instrumentalised to deliver Brexit, ensured that material harms were obscured, deferred, or misattributed. This double-edged dynamic suggests why Ernest Gellner’s warnings about the fragility of civic institutions in the face of functional manipulations seem more prescient than Alan Macfarlane’s optimism about statecraft delivering order. The lesson is not that infrastructures of sensing, identity, modelling, actuation, and legibility are inherently malign, but that when left to operate without institutional firebreaks, they can produce outcomes that feel empowering at the ballot box but hollow out the very communities they claim to represent. Through this lens, Brexit looks less like a morality play about right wing villains and more like a case of structurally weaker actors being outgunned inside an information-and-infrastructure contest. Many who voted Leave were not naïve or malevolent; they were living in places hollowed out by deIndustrialisation, thin media ecosystems, and brittle local institutions. In that terrain, the same infrastructures that could have helped represent their interests more accurately were used to sense their fears, sort their identities, model their likely responses, actuate tailored nudges, and narrate the result back to them as a simple, cleansing choice. The harm that followed in trade frictions, labour shortages, and higher prices fell heavily on those very constituencies, which is exactly what you would expect when power can steer behaviour more quickly than it can deliver benefits. Compare this with the United States in 2016 and again in 2025. Sensing captured vast behavioural exhaust - clickstreams, likes, location traces - far beyond anything broadcast-era politics could reach. Identity tools carved the electorate into grievance-coded micro-publics: veterans in deIndustrialised counties, white evangelicals anxious about cultural loss, suburban homeowners uneasy about crime. Modelling didn’t aim for truth; it aimed for traction, constantly A/B testing[45] which messages would mobilise, which would suppress, and where the margins were soft. Actuation happened through platform ranking and ad tools that rewarded outrage, through local event choreography, through voter-contact operations tuned by prediction rather than persuasion. Legibility reduced a baroque national story to short slogans and real-time scoreboard politics. Again, the pattern is less “bad people” than “exposed people”: communities with thinner civic buffers - weak local press, eroded unions and churches, precarious work - were easier to map, nudge, and keep inside feedback loops that felt empowering on the screen and disappointing in the wallet. Catalonia’s 2017 independence push shows the pattern isn’t owned by one ideology. Pro-independence organisers used the same stack to rally crowds, route around censorship, and make their cause legible to Europe: live streams, mesh networks[46], modelled turnout drives, and a moral narrative of dignity. Madrid answered with its own actuation- court orders, platform pressure, police presence and its own legibility (constitutionalism, economic risk). The five domains don’t choose sides. They reward whoever can compose them into a faster, tighter loop. Sometimes that’s a secessionist regional government; sometimes it’s a central state; often it’s the faction with better data and fewer scruples. If we reframe the “rise of the right” in these terms, the question shifts from “who lied?” to “who was systemically easy to steer?” Structural weakness doesn’t mean lack of intelligence; it means fewer protective intermediaries. Where local journalism has collapsed, where civic associations are thin, where economic insecurity makes attention volatile, the domains have less friction to push against. People in those conditions are not the enemy; they are the most exposed. Treating them as dupes only tightens the spiral by adding stigma to injury. There are kinder, smarter responses such as practical help aligned to each domain. Sensing can be made public-interest by default. Ban covert political data brokerage[47]; give communities rights over their civic data; require “ad libraries” that show every political message, its targeting, spend, and provenance in real time. Fund local, independent newsrooms as civic infrastructure so that what gets sensed is filtered by nearby institutions that know the place. Identity needs guardrails that prevent weaponised segmentation. Prohibit political or marketing strategies that uses detailed psychological profiles of individuals to send them highly personalised messages designed to influence their behaviour in elections; cap audience granularity so messages reach genuinely public groups, not surgical slivers. Build privacy-preserving civic credentials (for voting, benefits, participation) that don’t double as marketing keys, so being visible as a citizen doesn’t make you vulnerable as a target. Modelling should be auditable. Any model used to allocate campaign resources on platforms or to throttle/boost political content should come with a published purpose, inputs, uncertainty ranges, and an independent route for challenge. Pair that with “uncertainty budgets”: when a model’s confidence is low, systems bias toward parity rather than manipulation (equal reach to competing claims in a constituency, not whoever games the model). Actuation, the levers that actually move behaviour, needs firebreaks. Outlaw last-minute microtargeted political ads; impose cooling-off periods before referendums; require equality in reach or capability for fact-checked counterclaims when a falsehood crosses a threshold of exposure. In the offline world, invest in place-based civic capacity such as libraries, union halls, youth clubs so the only actuators in town aren’t push notifications. Legibility should slow down and widen. Replace single-number narratives with plural dashboards that put local impacts alongside national headlines: trade-offs by region, sector, and household type, not just a national “win.” Support citizen assemblies and jury-style deliberations that produce public summaries in plain English before major votes, so the story people vote on isn’t only the one optimised by a campaign’s ad tech. Do some actors behave badly? Hell yes. But if you treat the rise of the right purely as a story of malign intent you miss the deeper engineering problem: in thin civic ecologies, the five domains make some publics extraordinarily steerable. Macfarlane’s optimism, that a capable state can harness these infrastructures to deliver material improvements, only holds if that state also rebuilds the buffers that keep people from being treated as targets rather than citizens. Macfarlane would argue that China has a very, very old civilisational structure that’s been doing that for over a couple of thousand years. Gellner’s worry that when domains fuse, correction becomes impossible looks, on recent evidence, more prescient. The remedies aren’t about shaming voters; they’re about thickening their protections and options so that when the next wave of sensing, sorting, predicting, steering, and storytelling arrives, people have places to stand, counter-speech to hear, and institutions that can say “not like that.” Read Brexit and Trump through this lens and a gentler conclusion follows. The people most hurt by the outcomes were already living in low-friction environments where attention and trust could be captured cheaply. The humane task is not to scold them for the choice that followed, but to change the environment so next time the choice is genuinely theirs. Conclusion Gellner’s triple lens gives the grammar for reading the new politics that grows out of today’s technological infrastructure, and it also explains why this politics arrived when it did. Rationalism in his sense is a public craft. Reasons must be produced in institutions that others can inspect, schools that form a literate population, courts and audits and elections that end arguments in written justifications that can be appealed. Citizens may revere the sacred, and public debate confines appeals to ultimate authority so that evidence carries the day. In recent decades the philosophical standing of this craft has been weakened. A fashionable scepticism about shared standards, a taste for accounts that dissolve truth into perspective, and a retreat from universal claims have eaten away at the moral warrant for procedures that bind across groups. When the academy doubts that reasons can convince strangers, the prestige of the institutions that turn conflict into reasons fades as well. The corrosion is cultural before it is legal, and it clears space for actors who prefer design to argument. Nationalism then supplies a standardised high culture that lets strangers cooperate at scale, a shared idiom taught in mass education, staffed by portable skills, and guarded by the state. That same standardisation can be captured. When public reason loses authority and when civil society is thin, the custodians of culture can claim a monopoly of truth and recode the national idiom as a story of purity and grievance. Toxic nationalism in this sense is not an anomaly but an outcome that the triple lens predicts. We should expect it when the school teaches one authorised narrative rather than a common language for disagreement, when the press repeats signals rather than arguments, and when associations cannot resist the capture of symbols and funds. The very devices that make industrial cooperation possible can also make exclusion feel natural once rationalism ceases to discipline doctrine and once the residue of non state bodies is unable to answer back. Civil society in his terms is “first of all that part of society which is not the state. It is a residue,” and the residue that matters is “large, powerful, and organized.” Its associations hold resources and rights, “membership is optional or revocable,” and they can use law, budgets, publicity, and elections “to ensure that the state does its job but no more, and that it does it properly.” The new infrastructure narrows this residue without needing visible repression. Five entwined domains do the work. Sensing makes life continuously observable through phones, cameras, biometrics, and connected devices. Identity systems render people as permissioned profiles that can be adjusted in real time. Modelling anticipates behaviour and allocates attention and policing before events occur, which allows policy to pre-empt alternatives. Actuation steers conduct through ranked feeds, throttled links, programmable payments, access rules that make some paths easy and others obscure. Legibility wraps everything in dashboards and scores that narrate competence and necessity. The result is enclosure by increments. The national idiom rides on platforms that can be steered. The space for public reason contracts inside attention systems that rank and time what citizens see. The non-state residue remains busy and is less able to bind office because speech, association, fundraising, organising and even voting travel along rails that others own. A triple analysis shows what is being eroded and where remedies must bite. Start with culture. Industrial society needs a standardised high culture and it must remain shared rather than captured. That calls for plural curricula, independent credentialling, standards bodies that are not subsidiaries of any ministry or platform, and open technical protocols that keep switching costs low. Move to rationalism. Procedures must still decide. Courts need genuine unpredictability where power can lose. Emergency orders must expire unless renewed in the open. Audit and discovery must reach algorithms, training data, content labels and enforcement queues. Research access to platforms must be a right backed by law, not a grant of favour. Then civil society. The residue must be re endowed. Unions, professional bodies, congregations, watchdog organisations, universities, local media, civic data trusts and parties need legal personhood, protected endowments, and independent rails for money, speech, and identity so that citizens can enter and leave freely and yet these bodies can sue, audit, publish, assemble, and strike without permission. The same five domains can be turned outward for liberty. Sensing can be privacy preserving and accountable by default. Identity can be user held and selective, with strong pseudonymity for speech and strong real name for finance kept distinct. Modelling can be auditable, with contestable labels and due process for the ranked and the scored. Actuation can be subject to fiduciary duties[48], so platforms must act in the interests of their users and the public. Legibility can include error bars, counter metrics, and independent replication, so dashboards do not become theatre. The temptation is to read the new politics through a single window of growth rates, world class laboratories, smooth logistics, glittering infrastructures, and to infer civic health from technical prowess. Gellner’s frame warns against this. Economic capacity and scientific achievement can flourish while public reason is curated and while associations lack the power to bind office. A triple analysis is needed to get close to the truth. Ask whether the national high culture is shared rather than captured, ask whether procedures still end arguments that matter, ask whether the organised residue is large enough and free enough to keep the centre to its job and no more. Where any limb weakens, the others soon follow, because the same infrastructure that connects us also offers power new ways to enclose us. Gellner’s pessimism is not defeatism, it is a signal to rebuild all three supports at once, culture without monopoly, rationalism with standing philosophical warrant and working procedures, and civil society with real teeth, if we wish to understand the new authoritarianism and preserve room for free citizens to organise, speak, lose, return, and win by reasons that count. To hold Macfarlane and Gellner together is to refuse comforting illusions. Macfarlane’s optimism is based on the hope that stewardship and institutional craft can bend tools toward humane ends and he sees contemporary China as an example of this; Gellner’s pessimism insists that pluralism, friction, and pockets of opacity are not bugs but the very conditions of liberty that need to be re-established. The future is ambivalent because technology now carries the grammar of rule. If we keep treating these technological domains as neutral economic utilities rather than as instruments of power, we will awaken to discover that democracy has collapsed without a coup, replaced by a tidy regime of dashboards and permissions and a set of hard authoritarian regimes as dystopian as anything imagined in literature or film. The new infrastructure forces us to reconsider whether the cultural and institutional inheritances that scholars like Alan Macfarlane and Ernest Gellner placed their trust in will survive as meaningful resources. Macfarlane has long argued that China’s strength lies in its civilisational depth, a stewardship model that binds economy, culture, and governance into an order reaching back at least two millennia. Yet in a world where the five domains - sensing, identity, modelling, actuation, and legibility - become the grammar of power, it is no longer clear that such civilisational resources carry decisive weight. The infrastructures of control have their own momentum: algorithms and dashboards, predictive systems and biometric regimes, do not borrow their legitimacy from Confucian virtue or dynastic stewardship but from their apparent efficiency and inevitability. Civilisational narratives may remain as decoration, but the real authority lies in the operation of systems whose grammar is technological, not cultural. China’s stewardship could thus find itself hollowed out, its moral idioms subordinate to the logics of control embedded in the very systems it deploys. For Gellner, who insisted that modern freedom depended on rationality, the separation of coercion, economy, and culture, and the vitality of civil society, the implications are equally stark. The five domains collapse those separations. Sensing is fused to economy through platform monopolies, identity is weaponised for both political and commercial sorting, modelling blurs security and finance, actuation fuses state commands with corporate nudges, and legibility makes culture itself a dashboard for governance. Civil society, which Gellner saw as the crucial buffer between individual and state, becomes entangled in the very infrastructures it ought to resist: unions (if they survive) dependent on digital IDs, associations communicating through monitored platforms, even protest movements modelled and pre-empted by predictive policing. Rationality in the classical sense - open contestation, critical public reason - is displaced by algorithmic rationalities optimised for prediction and control. The benign nationalism Gellner defended as a foundation for democratic modernity dissolves into engineered identity scripts, administered through scores and credentials. What Macfarlane hoped would be sustained by civilisational stewardship, and what Gellner hoped would be safeguarded by civil society, may both be undone by the very infrastructural logics that now shape modernity. The technological infrastructure, in this light, is not simply another political configuration layered on top of culture and economy. It is a grammar of power that rewrites what stewardship, rationality, and social buffers can even mean. By 2050, it may not be ancient traditions or liberal institutions that anchor states, but infrastructures of control whose logic is indifferent to both. That is the warning: what once seemed the foundations of order and freedom may prove to be residual ornaments in a world governed by the five domains.