NATIONS AND J O U R N A L O F T H E A S S O C I AT I O N AS

NATIONALISM
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FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY

A N D N AT I O N A L I S M EN
Nations and Nationalism 25 (1), 2019, 45–57.
DOI: 10.1111/nana.12431

Our current sense of anxiety or after

Gellner*
JOHN A. HALL
Sociology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

ABSTRACT. The paper begins by describing three elements of Gellner’s social phi-
losophy that lay behind his essentially optimistic version of liberalism. The argument
that follows suggests that all these elements – respect for the procedures of modern sci-
ence, general participation in a growing economy and ‘ironic’ nationalism – are under
attack. In consequence, we live again in an age of anxiety.

This journal bears the name of Ernest Gellner’s famous treatise on nationalism
(Gellner 1983), and readers here know him principally on its account. But his
theory is in fact part of a general social philosophy, without appreciation of
which it cannot properly be understood. One purpose of this essay – one sense
of ‘after Gellner’ – is to highlight this consideration. But the larger intent is to
claim that we now live in a world ‘after Gellner’ in a different sense, that is, in a
world in which the three central precepts of his thought no longer make sense –
although challenges to those precepts distinctly help us understand the condi-
tion of the contemporary world.
A first preliminary point to bear in mind is the slightly idiosyncratic nature
of Gellner’s liberal social philosophy. A brilliant paper by Jan-Werner Muller
has aptly characterized post-war liberalism in terms of fear and freedom
(Muller 2008). The thought of Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin
and Raymond Aron, all thinkers with Jewish backgrounds, is essentially neg-
ative – the call to avoid extremes and to privilege clarity, and most certainly
to accept pluralism in political life rather than monistic historicisms given
their record of justifying brutality. Gellner shared a Jewish background, but
he was a critic of the view in question, precisely choosing to make a monistic
case based on historicist assumptions (Gellner 1974) – and adding to it, more-
over, an insistence that ‘clarity’ was too amorphous an entity to support
much of anything (Gellner 1979). A second preliminary point concerning
the use of ‘our’ in the title is crucial, so as to avoid misunderstanding. The
world is not one, and what gives anxiety to some brings joy to others.
The anxiety referred to in the title is felt by liberals, and perhaps by many

*Occasionally, the journal publishes articles which express an author’s particular viewpoint on a
topic or theoretical issues under the heading “Viewpoint.” This is one such submission.

© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019
46 John A. Hall

others. But more may well be involved. The joy of others is often not secure –
indeed to sound a further Kiekegaardian note, it may well be based on fear
and trembling.

From contract to raft

Gellner wrote in the years after the Second World War, at a time of national
reconstruction in Europe and within a larger world convinced of the possibility
of development – a world of which he was aware due to extended periods of
research outside Britain in the South, mostly in North Africa. With an aware-
ness of the step in social evolution represented by industrialism he asserted in
Thought and Change that a modern social contract existed in which legitimacy
would be and should be given to social orders that provided wealth and in which
rule was exercised by those co-cultural with the majority of the population
(Gellner 1964: chapters 1–2). There is a thoroughly philistine quality to the first
point, a sort of humdrum materialism in the claim that we can but approve
industrial society since the removal of scarcity makes decent behaviour at least
possible. In contrast to this obvious consideration, his insistence that the nation
state was the political form of modernity was highly original. His earliest theory
was complex: one strand was functionalist, relating nationalism closely to the
need of industrialism to have a shared culture so that a political economy could
work well, but another stressed the agency resulting from the blocked mobility
of a native intelligentsia, educated in the metropole but not allowed into the
higher reaches of administration upon return to their homelands.
Thought gains power from exclusions – as in the utilitarian view that sensa-
tions alone exist. In Gellner’s case, the reluctant exclusion was liberty. Regimes
exist that provide order and material sufficiencies, and which are accordingly
held to be legitimate. More importantly, imitative and forced industrialization
was likely to place liberty at a discount (cf. Kohli 2004). But there was some
hope. A successful transition to industrial society would slowly expand the size
and salience of technical strata whose way of life favoured openness, so that
liberalization might take place in the long run. Gellner worked on this possibil-
ity for much of his life, but concentration here is on the prospects of liberalism
in the advanced world. Issues of decompression and democratization will be
left to one side.
Gellner’s thought about the advanced world did not somehow stop with this
brute assessment of the modern social contract. The contribution that needs to
be remembered and analysed concerns epistemology. This entailed sustained
engagement with the work of Popper who had admired Thought and Change
whilst characteristically disliking its historicism (Hall 2010: 158–9). Gellner
fought back over many years, prompted by what he considered to be Popper’s
increasing insistence on a quasi-Darwinian view in which the growth of
knowledge was written into the nature of human life. In contrast, Gellner
had a keen sense of the absolute difference between ideological systems within

© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019
Our current sense of anxiety, or, after Gellner 47

which people move and have their lives, both from personal experience of
classic modern ideologies such as psychoanalysis and marxism and from field-
work amongst the Berber tribesmen of the High Atlas – as well, of course,
from his disciplinary background in social anthropology. The central point
that he made again and again was that ideologies were often circular and
self-reinforcing. Differently put, closed systems of social thought were so to
speak coherent and solid. One could not escape them. But escape had taken
place, with the power of Western science being seen by Gellner as one of the
key elements of the modern age, above all, as the progenitor of wealth. There
was a difference here between Durkheim’s view that all humans are rational
and Weber’s more specific claim that only modern humans are rational in
the sense of possessing rational–legal means. Gellner spent a great deal of time
trying to rationally reconstruct how it had been possible to exit circular worlds,
stressing – in a surprisingly intellectualist manner – the important role played
by codification within the world religions (Gellner 1988: chapters 2–5).
He added to his speculations about the origins of this new world an account
of how it worked. What mattered was the establishment of a norm of judgement
that had the capacity to humble circular systems. Positivism – less Comte’s
religion of humanity than basic empiricism – has a background assumption of
atomism, a belief that experiences are separable, that allows this to take place.

[Empiricism] enjoins, above all, a sensitivity to the distinction between that which is
publicly verifiable by experiental evidence and that which is not, a sensitivity which
is low or even systematically obscured in traditional culture. It creates a distinction
where it barely existed ….Thus the really important social impact of the ghost
philosophy [i.e., empiricism] is the injunction `Be sensitive to the boundary, and impose
consistency with respect to it’; the secondary injunction, `Down with the transcendent’
(Burn the books containing it according to Hume, or Call it technical nonsense according
to Ayer) does not matter much. If the first injunction is well observed and implemented,
for all practical purposes the second is already performed and prejudged. In social
contexts in which the first is well diffused and respected, it is perfectly possible to play
down and, at a superficial level, ignore the second in the interests of courtesy, kindness,
tact or antiquarianism. It hardly matters. (Gellner 1974: 122)

In this matter, Gellner is supremely sophisticated. It may not be the case that
sensations are separable in ‘reality-in-itself’. To the contrary, it may be that the
world is made up of glutinous mass. Nonetheless, pretending that the world is
atomized – that experiences come one at a time – is a background assumption
that seems to have worked, allowing us to believe that the assumption might
then be veridical, although we cannot prove that to be the case. Differently
put, empiricism/positivism is an ethic of cognition, a normative commitment
with enormously important consequences. Positivism is a social world, but
one that seems to work – or, in Gellner’s formulation, positivism is right for
Hegelian reasons (Gellner 1985). To make this argument was of course to ar-
gue against Popper who liked to claim that he was not a positivist at all. But
the criticism so loved by Popper would not lead to the growth of knowledge,
Gellner insisted; only criticism within a world that accepted the norm of

© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019
48 John A. Hall

empiricism ensured intellectual advance. The same general point was at work
in a passage in which Gellner sought to clarify the positions of Thomas Kuhn
and Popper, especially given Popper’s confusing insistence that real science
was revolutionary but decent politics best served by piecemeal social engineer-
ing. To begin with, Gellner suggested that Kuhn was entirely correct to locate
a paradigm shift, namely that between traditional and modern thought – but
wrong to underplay the amount of change made possible by empiricism within
the latter. With that in mind, he chided Popper for failing to realize
that the revolution in science is that of the introduction of empiricism. Scien-
tific change and social development are then both essentially piecemeal within
that world (Gellner 1974: 168–84).
Gellner’s view of modern epistemology has further elements that should
be noted. Empiricism as a model of the mind was judged to be simply
pathetic: not every sensation is equal – rather we tend to learn as the result
of traumatic moments. But this did not for a moment mean that empiricism
had no value: its enormous merit was as a tool by means of which to judge
theories. Such theories depended on the attempt to locate models, structures
or mechanisms. The search for such models was the second key cognitive
ethic of modern epistemology: it might be that structures did not really exist
in ‘reality-in-itself’, but the attempt to find them once again had so in-
creased knowledge that it was not irrational believe that the world was
orderly.
Gellner’s most sustained attempt to justify his social philosophy moved away
from the initial contractual terms to specify planks making up a more or less ser-
viceable raft for us to survive in the modern world. The bases of modern science
– the two cognitive ethics that explain the extraordinary growth of knowledge in
the modern world – make up the first element in his thought. If that first precept
is philosophical in character, the remaining two are the more sociological
considerations at the heart of his earlier view of the modern social contract.
In the years following Thought and Change, Gellner had amplified time and
again the importance of economic growth. Modern liberal capitalist societies
were based on a central contradiction: social inequality was present but those
at the bottom had rights. The system worked as long as there was sufficient
money both to buy off discontent (Gellner 1979). The message of this world,
he often wryly noted, was less ‘workers of the world unite’ than ‘consumers of
the world unite’.1 Finally, Gellner began to add to his simple statement that
legitimacy depended upon the leaders of a society being co-cultural with its
members. That basic equation had to be met for sure, but what mattered as well
was the spirit in which it was held. Nationalism needed to be present, for some
greater sense of belonging was called for in the interests of daily understandings
allowing a basic sense of social solidarity. But nationalism should not be taken
too seriously; certainly it should never create a world closed unto itself. Hence,
he recommended a spirit of ‘ironic cultural nationalism’, something only made
possible by affluence – in which, he might well have added, massive ethnic
cleansing within the advanced world had already taken place.

© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019
Our current sense of anxiety, or, after Gellner 49

Critique, negative and positive

Gellner’s position can usefully be seen as Saint-Simonian. Perhaps, more obvi-

ously, it is a clear instance of modernization theory, above all in its insistence
that nation-building and economic development were not just possible but sure
to actually take place. Much could be said here about this view, so popular in
the post-war years marked by national reconstruction, but three points have
special importance.
First, Gellner’s theory is very messy. Industrialism seems to depend on
science but this was not noted as one of the key elements of the modern social
contract. Perhaps that is not an accident, for in a sense it could not be so
mentioned. For there is much to be said in favour of the view that affluence
and national belonging can be seen in every part of the world. This seems less
true of the acceptance of empiricism and mechanism, the norms of modern
science – a point taken up a greater length later in this essay. Remember
too that the idea of liberalization comes precisely from the idea that these
norms are held, even if only by technical strata whose growth and increasing
salience is nonetheless held to have the capacity to undermine great ideolog-
ical systems.
Second, Gellner lacks much sense of history and of politics. For one thing,
the revival of Western Europe would not have been possible without the rise of
Christian Democracy in Germany and Italy, that is, of a centre-right loyal
to constitutional order. For another, no analysis is offered of the role of
the United States, in promoting Christian Democracy and in providing the
security that allowed for interdependence within Europe to flourish. One must
note finally that the collapse of state socialism in Europe was not obviously
the result of the actions of liberalizing forces from within. What mattered
instead were various political struggles, above all those of Solidarity in
communist Poland.
Third, Gellner’s view was in key places simply wrong. The record of forcing
development from above is far from happy. There have been successes, though
these have often come at huge costs – costs which might not have had to be
borne, as in Russia, had such statist policies not even been tried. But there have
been many failures, some of which have set back development by decades.
Equally there are problems with his theory of nationalism, going well beyond
the flawed functionalism often at work. Legacies of imperial rule have left
competing ethnic groups struggling, through civil war, to gain control of
new states – with nothing like nation-building going on in countries as diverse
as Syria, Iraq and Burma. Further, his definition of nationalism – each state
with its nation, each nation with its state – is too restrictive. Switzerland,
and Canada, Britain and Spain do exist, albeit with the latter trio often
involved in uneasy states of co-dependency. There is something else of equal
importance. Gellner did not realize that international migration would grow
so dramatically – as is likely to remain the case, especially in Europe, given
the high fertility rates within sub-Saharan Africa.

© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019
50 John A. Hall

But against these negative criticisms need to be set two powerful and wholly
positive considerations. First, there are arguments in favour of affluence that
Gellner did not make, and which deserve to be taken seriously. The most
obvious one is that of Keynes, trying to save liberalism in the face of the power
systems of the Nazis and the Bolsheviks by reinvigorating capitalism:

There are valuable human activities which require the motive of money-making and the
environment of private wealth-ownership for their full fruition. Moreover, dangerous
human proclivities can be canalised into comparatively harmless channels by the exis-
tence of opportunities for money-making and private wealth, which, if they cannot be
satisfied in this way, may find their outlet in cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal
power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandisement. It is better that a man
should tyrannise over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens; and whilst the
former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least
it is an alternative. (Keynes 1973: 374)

This is the tradition of ‘le doux commerce’ that Keynes knew well as he col-
lected early editions of the works of authors from that world, notably those
of Malthus and Hume. Samuel Johnson summed up the view simply by saying
that ‘a man is never so innocently employed as when he is making money’, and
Albert Hirschman turned the notion into his great book on the early
arguments for capitalism (Hirschman 1977). It is worth going further by
turning to Adam Smith
In the languor of disease and the weariness of old age, the pleasures of the vain and
empty distinctions of greatness disappear … Power and riches appear then to be, what
they are, enormous and operose machines contrived to produce a few trifling conve-
niences to the body, consisting of springs the most nice and delicate, which must be kept
in order with the most anxious attention, and which in spite of all our care are ready
every moment to burst into pieces, and to crush in their ruins their unfortunate
possessor. They are immense fabrics, which it requires the labour of a life to raise, which
threaten every moment to overwhelm the person that dwells in them, and which while
they stand, though they may save him from some smaller inconveniences, can protect
him from none of the severer inclemencies of the season. They keep off the summer
shower, not the winter storm, but leave him always as much, and sometimes more
exposed than before, to anxiety, to fear, and to sorrow; to diseases, to danger, and to
death. (Smith 1982: 182-3)

It is astonishing to see someone reputed to be an economist making such a

statement. Nonetheless, he follows the quote by adding immediately that it is
‘well that nature imposes upon us in this manner …’ (Smith 1982: 183–4).
For one thing, Smith tells us that it rouses the industry of mankind. But the
deeper idea at the heart of his Theory of Moral Sentiments is the view that
what drives human beings is the desire to be admired and accepted, the politics
of recognition of the daily round. Most people live their lives as if on an esca-
lator – trying to catch those above them, imagining that riches ensure
happiness, and thereby amusing themselves to death since the escalator is mov-
ing, and total changes in position are rare.2 Smith of course is writing a social
psychology of popular behaviour, and exempts the wise – the readers of his

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Our current sense of anxiety, or, after Gellner 51

expensive books – from the positive illusion in question, assured that philoso-
phy and a decent sufficiency will be enough for them. That is certainly an
eighteenth century view. But is Smith’s description only suited to that era?
Of course not: it can be found in Pierre Bourdieu’s influential Distinction, an
account of the search for markers of status (Bourdieu 1984). This is not a noble
vision, and Bourdieu scorns a system that Smith admires. Still, this is the soci-
ology of the workings of capitalism. Gellner’s did not articulate this position as
well as Keynes or Smith, but he is part of a system that is far from nonsensical.
The amount of discussion devoted to nationalism since the break-up of
Yugoslavia and the collapse of the Soviet Union is enormous. Gellner was
very much part of this, fearing late in his life that some replay of the interwar
years was possible. He was forced into normative views seeking to contain
nationalism – not many of which were intellectually impressive. But Gellner
was surely right, secondly, to point to the nation state as the dominant polit-
ical form of modernity. Curiously we still lack an adequate theory of the rise
of nationalism. Perhaps it is at least worth saying that politicized nationalism
does not simply come from below. Rather it often results – as is so often the
case with social movements – from the way in which states treat, and indeed
sometimes create, different groups (Hall 2017). But the fact that nationalism
is present is utterly obvious. The European Union was never a transnational
affair, somehow going beyond nationalism; rather, it has always been always
international, a place where heads of state meet to make bargains. But such
bargains are now becoming hard to achieve as new nationalist sentiments –
to be discussed in a moment – have gained considerable force. Just as impor-
tantly, the nation state remains the ideal for those who do not yet possess it.
And there remains much sense of course in Gellner’s account: one can set its
functionalism to one side and then see the agency of political leaders seeking
to create nation states for economic and military reasons, as was true above
all for communism as a world historical movement. Finally, it does seem to
be the case that national homogeneity, especially when married to small size,
does help a country achieve economic and social success – albeit this fact
should not lead to policy conclusions that might seem obvious but which
are utterly dangerous (Campbell and Hall 2017).

Tensions or sociologies old and new

Gellner’s thought is highly original, certainly strikingly different from the cold
war liberalism noted at the start. But it rests nonetheless on post-war certain-
ties, derived from the lessons taken from the era of two world wars that seem
to have dissolved. Tensions now abound. What had seemed a better way, to
adopt the phrase of Leonard Cohen, is not the truth today. Three particular
considerations need to be borne in mind, each referring to one of the precepts
identified within Gellner’s thought.

© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019
52 John A. Hall

First, we must confront the character of late capitalist society – for it

makes little sense, given the collapse of the Soviet Model, to speak of indus-
trial society. The most striking immediate consideration is the increase in
social inequality. The richest eight Americans today own as much as half
of the nation’s households, whilst the sixty-two richest people in the world
own as much as one half of the world’s population – that is, they own more
than three and a half billion human beings (Scheidel 2017: 1. Cf. Piketty
2013). Bluntly, the rich know how to protect themselves, and are capable
in just about every historical circumstance of increasing their share of
national product. The reverse side of the picture – increasing equality – does
of course exist. A hint of what was involved comes from remembering that
the idea of democracy was the result of hoplite war of farmer-citizens in
Ancient Greece. In modern circumstances mass mobilization warfare equally
led to the ‘great convergence’ in the advanced world. But the cost in the in-
dustrial era has been enormous – perhaps seventy million dead in Europe,
and at least a hundred million dead in China and Russia as the result of
their revolutions, both made possible by war. Soldiers only fight in these
circumstances when promises are made to them – of ‘a land fit for heroes’,
as Lloyd George had it. If this is the cause of the solidarity that pushed for
equalization of life chances, perhaps the greater element at work is the sheer
destruction of the assets of the rich, at times in purely physical ways but
more often through hyper-inflation. In contrast, peaceful social reforms have
done very little to change inequality. And in fact, more than wealth was
always involved. The disasters of the middle of the twentieth century led
to an historic class compromise in the advanced West, the removal of left
and right extremes with a promise of full employment often backed by
Keynesian policies. That too looks under threat.
One needs to be a little careful here, not least as that will neatly lead into the
second consideration. Walter Scheidel’s brilliant analysis of the whole histori-
cal record is largely based on changes in GINI coefficients (Scheidel 2017).
These can mislead (Scott 2017; Offer 2017). A smaller share in a richer world
still places one near the top in terms of world inequality, and it can ensure
enough consumption to allow capitalism to function. In other words, a distinc-
tion between the austerity and negative growth consequent on the financial
crisis of 2008 and increasing inequality must at least be recognized. Yet it
may be irrelevant. The financial crisis is being overcome allowing growth to
resume, but this will not matter if its benefits continue to be so very unevenly
distributed. One consideration that follows is marxist: less money at the bot-
tom of society means underconsumption – or, in Germany’s case, the creation
of those huge surpluses that cause so much trouble within the European
Union. It is no longer the case that one’s piece of the pie, however small, will
increase year by year. A first precept of Gellner’s thought has been swept
away. Further, it may well be that the technological revolution of our time will
not produce high levels of employment, let alone employment in secure jobs –
as had been the case in previous historical periods. Perhaps still more

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Our current sense of anxiety, or, after Gellner 53

important is the sheer speed of technical change, the need to adapt endlessly to
new computer programs, indeed to a whole life based on the internet. It is as
well in this context to remember that interwar Vienna produced masterpieces
in social philosophy not just from Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper but from
Karl Polanyi as well. The Hungarian scholar’s The Great Transformation
should be considered the single most important text in social theory that helps
us understand our current condition (Polanyi 1944). The treatise seeks to
explain the disasters of the twentieth century by means of a single phrase.
Capitalism demands endless change, disrupting all and everything to such an
extent that sooner or later ‘society will seek to protect itself’.3
That phrase could mean the re-emergence of class politics, of the poor
against the rich. But ‘society’ is likely to be the nation state, and this points
to something much more dangerous. Class by itself has changed little: social
dynamite is caused by the interaction of class with nation – as Gellner had
insisted in Nations and Nationalism (Gellner 1983). What matters is that
nationalism, always a labile force, is changing its character once again. Where
it was once mostly an elite affair, the attempt to create a nation from above by
processes of social homogenization, it is now often a force from below, notice-
ably nativist in character. The 2000 Danish referendum on joining the euro
saw the whole political elite in favour, convinced that this was the way to
strengthen the nation; defeat came at the hands of those lacking skills to swim
inside a larger world. That was almost a benign taste of something more
general and much nastier that has followed, namely movements that insist that
some do not belong to the nation. What matters is fear – a consideration that
returns us to an initial claim, namely that the jubilation of ‘populist’ forces
hides worry and insecurity. German history was convulsed in the middle of
the twentieth century by anti-semitism, even though Jews made up only a little
more than one per cent of the population. Exactly the same is true of
Islamophobia in Quebec, with that sentiment peaking in areas which have
virtually no Muslim presence, and of Brexit, with peak sentiments coming in
the North East where there were few foreign workers. Objective reality is an
irrelevance: what is believed to be real, as the sociologist W.I. Thomas put it,
is real in its consequences. But there is a good deal of variation here. The votes
in Britain for leaving the European Union certainly had a nativist popular
element, but Brexit would not have been possible without the actions of the
ruling elite, still suffering from imperial delusions of grandeur – still failing,
as Dean Acheson cruelly but accurately had it decades ago, from losing an
empire and failing thereafter to find a new role.4 The situation in the United
States is different: a specifically American sense that a better future is almost
a constitutional right has joined together with resentments, as Arlie
Hochschild put it, that gender and – above all – race has placed a block on
the expectations of those who are anyway suffering from a difficult and less
equal social condition (Hochschild: 2016. Cf. Williams 2017; Duina 2017).
In Bavaria things seem different again, with the last wave of Russian immi-
grants showing hostility to others wanting to get in – a pattern well known

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54 John A. Hall

to sociologists. One could easily go on but the analytic point is crystal clear:
there is nothing ironic about the way in which nationalism has been embraced
in key segments of the United States and Great Britain – and to a lesser extent
in most countries of the advanced world, not least within the European Union.
Another precept of Gellner’s thought is in question. And real viciousness is
involved here. In my own Quebec, the Parti Quebecois’s playing of a xenopho-
bic card during its last period in power seems to be directly related to a rise in
hate crimes – in this part of a much more general pattern.5 Lives are being lost.
Finally, there is the horrible and notorious claim, first made by Kellyanne
Conway, the confidante of Donald Trump, that there are facts and ‘alterna-
tive’ facts. Perhaps some comfort can be found in the fact that on occasion
the claim was laughed out of court. Furthermore, it has been wonderful to
see people on the streets demonstrating for science: protests for positivism
at last! But any high level of confidence is not justified. Of course, we should
remember that there always have been different social worlds within
advanced societies. The ‘uses and gratifications’ school of media studies
demonstrated years ago the extent to which reality is differently perceived.
But such differences of perception habitually occurred within a world within
which Gellner’s norms of cognition had some ultimate hegemony. Of course,
that was not always the case: on rare occasions in the post-war world one
has felt oneself to be in Max Weber’s world, of loyalty to different Gods.
But what was unusual is now becoming normal. One absolutely crucial point
to be made here concerns changing technology. Cass Sunstein’s #republic
describes all sorts of research, from behavioural economics to standard
sociological research, that shows the increasing extent to which modern
social media cage people within intellectual silos. This can be the result of
choice, the creation of ‘a Daily Me’, but it is also something that is done
to us, both by providers such as Facebook and by political entrepreneurs,
keen to use the latest technology to cement identities. Several serious
commentators maintain that the murky actions of Cambridge Analytica
did a great deal to turn the tide against Britain remaining in the European
Union. ‘Facts’ rule less and less in this new social world, with a good deal
of the evidence showing that life in such silos does tend to harden political
attitudes. The social heterogeneity that gives us the chance to challenge
and to change our views is being lost; homogeneity rules within the bunkers
that are gaining greater and greater salience – something also pointed again
and again by research from Pew (Sunstein 2017. Cf D’Ancona 2017; The
Economist 2011). Further evidence comes out almost daily. For example,
an investigation by Valdis Krebs of readership habits that made use of Am-
azon data found that ‘recommendation’ engines were radically diminishing
books shared by ‘general’ readers (The Economist 2017). Furthermore, we
know that genuinely fake news gained salience over corrections in the 2016
presidential election by August. The campaigners for Brexit made claims
about the costs of belonging to the European Union that were proved to
be untrue. But the Brexiteers did not withdraw the claims, repeating them

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Our current sense of anxiety, or, after Gellner 55

endlessly instead, as they still do, secure in the knowledge that those they
wished to reach would not have seen any rebuttal. The campaign of Donald
Trump exhibited the same tendency, albeit to a level hitherto unimaginable.
In consequence we now have a new language, of facts and ‘non-facts’ or
‘fake news’. This development is so severe and dramatic that it undermines
the views of Popper as well as those of Gellner. The norms of modern
science making up Gellner’s world view are being assailed every day.
Bluntly, it takes one’s breath away.

Conclusion

The anxious pessimism of this paper, derived from the feeling that, as Arnold
Toynbee had it, ‘history is on the move again’, is designed to warn. But per-
haps liberals should not despair. Trump lost the popular vote, and the margin
between Remainers and Brexiteers was not large. The rise in social inequality
in social democracies is not yet great. Further, the European Union may pull
together in the face of Brexit so as to deal with some of its looming problems
– not least as it seems as if the challenge from the right in France in 2017 was
defeated. On the other hand, Scheidel is pessimistic, as he ends his book
claiming that nothing will really change the increase in social inequality –
bar some catastrophe which his account makes him loathe to recommend
(Scheidel 2017). In contrast, Sunstein follows his analysis of the dangers posed
by divided democracy with many proposals for reform (Sunstein 2017: chapter
9) These include the creation of deliberative domains, disclosure of the political
links of producers of communications, voluntary self-regulation, subsidies to
encourage more challenging media performance, ‘must carry’ policies designed
to increase public awareness, and the use of links to draw attention to alterna-
tive sources of information. These are all excellent ideas, though the whole is a
bit of a ragbag. But his position is open to the objection that they can only
become institutionalized once one has one’s hands on power. But how does
one gain power? Protests for positivism help, of course, as does struggle more
generally. If that is a call to action, it is not designed to say that the forces
discussed can be ignored or easily defeated. There should be no sudden
move from a moment of pessimism to ungrounded optimism. Any re-
grounding of confidence in liberal democracy is likely only to come as the
result of severe setbacks. One can see that in the case of climate change.
Agreements have been made, but they are not being enforced. Only some
catastrophe – say the move of a massive amount of people consequent on
the flooding of a country such as Bangladesh – will bring action. Kant told
us that the presence of war was necessary as it reminded us of the impor-
tance of peace. Human memory is short, and the lessons of the two World
Wars are slowly being forgotten. Let us hope that we can remember for a
longer period the lessons we are about to learn.

© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019
56 John A. Hall

Notes

1 It is fun to remember that exactly this sentiment was enthusiastically endorsed at the end of the
nineteenth century in the American Journal of Sociology by Florence Kelley, a colleague of Jane
Addams, who saw it as the best route to prosperity and peace!
2 The American sociologist Charles Cooley admired Smith, and so invented ‘the looking
glass self’.
3 A necessary general point, going well beyond the limited focus of this paper, must be made at
this point. For the whole of my career I have judged countries able to develop, to grow their econ-
omies, as successful – and I still marvel at the enormous Chinese achievement in lifting so many
people out of poverty so quickly. But even a short period in Beijing or Delhi makes one feel
viscerally the presence and the costs of climate change, one of the two truly global events within
the historical record. My sense of anxiety for the longer run is even greater, given the difficulties
of redistribution on a global scale. It is very much to Gellner’s credit that he sensed the importance
of this issue in Plough, Sword and Book (1988), and indeed proposed solutions to it.
4 The general tendency licentiously to blame the people should be resisted. An earlier occasion
when the people were blamed for illiberal politics – namely the support given by an earlier rad-
ical right for McCarthyism – in fact ignored the actions of elite elements, not least in funding
the John Birch Society. Nonetheless, the post-war world has often seen elites allowing voice so
as to depoliticize oppositional movements. Elites do not now shy away from nastier actions.
Research on this change is desperately needed. One suspects that the ending of the Cold War
has played a vital role, destroying liberal unity with in Europe and even more importantly
allowing the United States, no longer needing allies, to turn from multilateralism to the basest
assertion of self-interest.
5 I rely here on research by Matthew Lange, McGill University.

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