Gellner Inflections 1

Ernest Gellner’s vision of civil society was shaped by a sharp awareness of its fragility in the face of modern industrial pressures. His warning that affluent liberal societies may degenerate into a form of permanent potlatch, where consumer competition produces waste without meaning, now seems prophetic. Gellner drew on the potlatch ceremony, a ritual practiced by Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest in which prestige was gained by giving away or destroying valuable goods. He feared that industrial modernity, severed from deeper social structures, risked becoming a vast, impersonal version of this, where status replaces solidarity, growth replaces purpose, and civic life is hollowed out in favour of display and consumption. What he could not yet fully grasp, but perhaps helped us prepare to face, is the way this erosion of meaning is now intertwined with ecological collapse, technological alienation, and a resurgent nationalism.

We are living, as Daniele Conversi writes, not simply in historical time but in geological time, where human action alters the biosphere with such speed and depth that the very ground beneath us is changing. And yet, our political structures remain trapped in the industrial age, defined by the nation-state, competitive growth, and the politics of division. As Gellner argued, nationalism was born of industrial society, and its continued grip over political life has prevented serious, collective responses to the crises of the Anthropocene. But just as nationalism is a legacy of industrialization, so too is the dismantling of civil society, which Gellner saw as the essential space between the state and the market, voluntary, plural, deliberative. It is this space that now lies in ruins in so many places, and under severe threat everywhere, and its absence is filled not by freedom or solidarity but by toxic handrails: seductive but corrosive alternatives to real civic engagement.

These toxic handrails come in many forms. In the place of local clubs, unions, and civic associations, we are offered algorithmic identity tribes online, where grievance and paranoia bind people more strongly than reason or compassion. In place of mutual aid, we are given curated brands of lifestyle solidarity, where consumption becomes the substitute for moral belonging. In place of public debate, we get public shaming, outrage, and ritualised confession. In place of religious and spiritual pluralism, we find the return of versions of fundamentalism as a totalising source of purpose. In each case, the handrail holds us up by locking us in, not by guiding us forward.

The workplace, too, has become a site of toxic substitution. Where once there may have been collective purpose, pride in craft, or forms of collegial governance, now there is KPI logic, surveillance, and individualised burnout. The trade union has given way to the wellness app. The co-operative ethic has been replaced by managerial performativity. And all the while, public language is colonised by legalism and marketing, stripping human labour of its emotional and ethical texture.

Even well-meaning politics of recognition can go astray when they become rigid, essentialist, or exclusionary. Identity politics becomes another form of branding when it is disconnected from the pluralism of civil society. It replaces solidarity with visibility, shared experience with representational gatekeeping. Its institutionalisation in algorithmic spaces, corporate HR departments, or state-led initiatives makes it both ubiquitous and shallow, encouraging competition over voice rather than connection across difference. And as the language of dignity and justice is absorbed into bureaucratic forms, real vulnerability and lived experience risk becoming administrable categories, no longer embedded in relationships of care and reciprocity.

Nationalism, meanwhile, remains the strongest and most enduring of the toxic handrails. As Conversi argues, it is not simply an ideology among others but the dominant mode of political identity in modernity. It saturates the structure of the state and the imagination of its citizens. It is therefore no surprise that climate change response has become so feeble. National governments treat environmental degradation as a problem of competitive positioning, not a shared human emergency. Borders, which should be reimagined in light of global interdependence, are instead tightened. Migrants fleeing climate disasters are cast as threats. Science is rejected, and populist leaders exploit ecological insecurity to fuel nativist fantasies. The failure of collective climate governance is not just a technical failure, it is the failure of a political imagination shaped by an increasingly toxic nationalism and consumer modernity stripped of the civic society.

What, then, is the alternative? It is not enough to call for global cooperation or technocratic reform. The real work must take place where Gellner always believed the moral and cultural strength of a society lay—in its civil institutions. The Anthropocene demands not just planetary governance but planetary civic renewal, and that begins with reweaving the fabric of local and national civil life. We need to rebuild spaces where people can meet without being monetised, represented without being marketed, challenged without being humiliated. We need libraries and unions and amateur orchestras and interfaith forums and public parks. We need new online spaces governed by the norms of deliberation, not outrage. We need political language that treats the citizen not as a consumer or identity bearer, but as a participant in a shared life. And we need forms of education and media that nourish moral imagination, not just critical suspicion.

Both left and right have a role to play. The left must resist the temptation to treat civil society as a site of guilt and fragility, always already compromised by privilege and power. The right must resist the fantasy of civil society as a return to hierarchical community or ethnic solidarity. Both must rediscover the radical, generative promise of voluntary association, shared purpose, and mutual aid. They must treat civic life not as nostalgic filler between state functions, but as the very condition of democratic renewal.

Gellner’s warning about the potlatch society was more than economic, as thinkers like Conversi continually remind us. It was moral and existential. A society that destroys its meaning-making institutions while multiplying its technologies of control and display is not sustainable. It becomes not only ecologically unstable but symbolically barren. We are approaching that edge. But the answer is not to grip the toxic handrails tighter. It is to remember what real handrails are for—to steady us as we walk together into an uncertain but shared future.