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Gellner, Nationalism and the Liberal Compromise
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Pericles Lewis |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Ernest Gellner's theory holds that the national state is in a certain sense the natural or normal form of the state in industrial or civilized society. But what does this imply about modern, liberal political systems? In this extract from his book Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel, Pericles Lewis looks at how Gellner's theory can benefit from ideas prevalent in nineteenth-century liberal nationalism. |
 hen J. A. Hobson, in 1902, upheld the principle of nationality in opposition to imperialism, he cited the most well-known English liberal definition of nationality, that of John Stuart Mill in his Considerations on Representative Government of 1861 (Chapter 16: see Hobson, Imperialism, 1902, p. 5):
A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality, if they are united among themselves by common sympathies, which do not exist between them and any others--which make them cooperate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by themselves, or a portion of themselves, exclusively. This feeling of nationality may have been generated by various causes. Sometimes it is the effect of identity of race and descent. Community of language and community of religion contribute greatly to it. Geographical limits are one of its causes. But the strongest of all is identity of political antecedents; the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past.
Mill endorsed the case for uniting a given nationality under a single state as an extension of the theory of self-government and because he thought that multi-national states tended to encourage ethnic rivalries. He perceived national states as the natural form of representative government for nineteenth-century Europe, but held open the hope for some more universal form of government in the future. Mill's definition of nationality combines two crucial criteria that were to remain intertwined in most future discussions of the topic: the sympathies felt for one another by the members of a given group and the historical and other external causes tending to encourage those sympathies--race, descent, language, religion, geography, and especially political antecedents. |
Gellner's theory
The balance of the "causes" of the "feeling of nationality" and the "sympathies" that result from those causes in Mill's definition of the nation continues to motivate liberal theorists of the nation-state today. In Nations and Nationalism (1983), Ernest Gellner offered two provisional definitions of the nation, the cultural and the voluntarist:
1. Two men are of the same nation if and only if they share the same culture, where culture in turn means a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating.
2. Two men are of the same nation if and only if they recognize each other as belonging to the same nation ... [N]ations are the artefacts of men's convictions and loyalties and solidarities.
Gellner then goes on to develop a convincing account of the ways in which the nation-state facilitates the work of a modern, industrial society, by enabling the diffusion of a shared "high," literate culture. A high degree of literacy and numeracy is essential to the modern division of labor. Given that access to education in one's own language determines social status and rewards, it is understandable, perhaps inevitable, that groups who inhabit states where the power-holders do not speak their language would agitate for states of their own, where their own high culture is supported by state institutions, from the primary school to the university and the legal system. After developing this account of the relationship of the modern nation-state to industrial society, Gellner emphasizes the need to understand that under the social conditions which make national cultures appear "the natural repositories of political legitimacy,"
nations can indeed be defined in terms both of will and of culture, and indeed in terms of the convergence of them both with political units. In these conditions, men will to be politically united with all those, and only those, who share their culture ... The fusion of will, culture, and polity becomes the norm, and one not easily or frequently defied... These conditions do not define the human condition as such, but merely its industrial variant. (55)
Like Mill, then, but with slightly less emphasis on freedom of choice, Gellner sees the nation-state as the normal political form of industrial (Mill would have said civilized) society. This notion of a community which is at once shaped by circumstances and freely willed, a product of the evolution of "national character" and an expression of a "daily plebiscite," was the common-sense liberal attitude to the nation-state in the middle of the nineteenth century, and has become so again today. As a sociological description of the state of affairs in the liberal-democratic nation-states of the developed world, Gellner's and Mill's descriptions may seem quite accurate, and there are few--apart from radical nationalists--who would be likely to object to their basic substance. |
For Mill, it is a short step from explaining the nature of the principle of nationality to justifying the nation-state as an appropriate form of political organization. Mill quickly goes on to make normative claims, again stressing the dual character of the national community. "[A]ny division of the human race" ought to be "free to ... determine, with which of the various collective bodies of human beings they choose to associate themselves," so people in a given territory should be free to choose a state that suits them, and people generally seem to prefer nation-states. Quite apart from this argument on the basis of free choice, however, there is "a still more vital consideration," namely that "Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities" (p. 309). Mill goes on to argue that because different nationalities lack the "united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government," which is based on a shared political culture, they are unlikely to have sympathy for one another. Resentments among national groups, particularly as they affect the army, will thus interfere with the development of free institutions, as the example of the Habsburg empire illustrates. |
Mill's attempt to defend the national form of representative democracy by an appeal both to choice or "sympathy" and to conditions, circumstances, or "causes" is significant because the question of the nation-state became a crucial problem for the limits of liberal and democratic politics. The existence of given national cultures or, as the Victorians called them, "national characters" appeared to be a forceful argument against the spread of representative institutions outside the Anglo-Saxon world (especially after the rise of Napoleon III in 1848--1851, which undermined the French claim to an equal share in the liberal tradition). By accepting the argument that nationality was largely a product of circumstance, Mill risked ceding ammunition to the opponents of liberalism, for it was not far from the acceptance of different governments for different national characters to Burkean arguments for an extremely gradual approach to constitutional reform. Mill summarizes the central position of the Burkean tradition:
[A people's] will has had no part in the matter [of its fundamental political institutions] but that of meeting the necessities of the moment by the contrivances of the moment, which contrivances, if in sufficient conformity to the national feelings and character, commonly last, and by successive aggregation constitute a polity, suited to the people who possess it, but which it would be vain to attempt to superinduce upon any people whose nature and circumstances had not spontaneously evolved it. (p. 3)
In this caricature of Burkean Whiggery, Mill falls back upon a key opposition that was to shape debates about the nature of nationality: the opposition between will and character. These two forces are to the idea of the nation what the ethical and sociological conceptions of the self are to the individual. References to the national will or the will of the people emphasize the nation's ability to constitute itself through an act of political freedom akin to the rational individual's acting, in Kant's words "under the Idea of freedom" (Immanuel Kant, "Foundations for the Metaphysics of Morals," in Selections, ed. L. White Beck, 1988, p. 448). References to national character, on the other hand, tend to emphasize the shaping of the people's will by forces beyond conscious control, the forces Mill enumerates as "causes" of the sympathy members of a given nation feel for one another, and what a Kantian would call the sources of their "heteronomy." |
Ethical and political principles
Mill's dual method of defining nationality, the emphasis on sympathies and on the circumstances that make those sympathies possible, reinforces the claims of the first chapter of the Considerations on Representative Government concerning the extent to which "Forms of Government are a Matter of Choice." Writing in a mode reminiscent of Tocqueville, Mill attempts here to strike a balance between those who claim that "forms of government ... being made by man ... man has the choice either to make them or not, and how or on what pattern they shall be made" and those who claim that "The government of a country ... is, in all substantial respects, fixed and determined beforehand by the state of the country in regard to the distribution of the elements of social power ... [and that a] nation, therefore, cannot choose its form of government" (p. 13). Mill seems to have in mind his father and Jeremy Bentham as advocates of "choice" and the Whiggish and Conservative British opponents of parliamentary reform as advocates of determinism. Mill's solution, similar to Tocqueville's, is to claim that while a government must be appropriate to the state of civilization of a given country, it should be possible "to exercise, among all forms of government practicable in the existing condition of society, a rational choice" (p. 17). Ultimately, then, Mill's own sympathies are with the proponents of choice, although he recognizes the need to understand the historical limitations of the range of choices available at any given time, an argument brought home to him by Macaulay's criticisms of his father's political writings. Mill attempts to strike a balance between these two forces, and his balance is typical of mid-nineteenth-century liberalism in that it emphasizes the need to recognize this bifurcation between character and will as an organizing tension of life in a community and as linked to the nature of existence in history, which constantly transforms people's needs. One other typically liberal aspect of his discussion of the problem is his claim that the strongest cause of national sympathies is "identity of political antecedents." By focusing on shared political history as the source of national feeling, Mill again emphasizes the importance of humans' capacity for free self-development through political institutions. By making politics, rather than language, religion, or race, central to the development of the nation, Mill can maintain his trust in the capacity of free choice, exercised through political institutions, to encourage individual virtue and social progress. As Stefan Collini has pointed out, Mill's faith in the virtues of citizenship links him to the classical tradition of political thought and separates him from many English liberals who lack his faith in politics themselves as the site of truly free human endeavor (S. Collini, D. Winch and J. Burrrow, That Noble Science of Politics, 1983, p. 159). |
Not only Mill's, but also more recent liberal theories of nationality, such as Gellner's or Yael Tamir's, raise certain questions about ethical and political principles that Gellner does not seem concerned to answer but that Mill recognized as unresolved problems about human nature. In particular, if the national state is in a certain sense the natural or normal form of the state in industrial or civilized society, then what does this imply about what might be called the "philosophical anthropology" of modern, liberal political systems? Liberal nationalism often suggests that the pre-political, perhaps even pre-ethical, sentiments of "friendship" and "fraternity" are in important senses prior to notions such as equality and freedom. In other words, the existence of a liberal democratic political order depends not on a generally shared characteristic of human nature (such as rationality) but on a particular set of sentiments which arises in the human being only in certain contingent circumstances, only when particular sorts of "sympathies" operate. If this is true, then the most central fact about moral subjects is not that they are created "free and equal," but that, like Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's A Portrait, they enter the world with ethical commitments and attachments that can only be prior to their commitments to humanity as a whole or to God. |
Modern liberal principles ultimately result from a situation of radical epistemological and moral uncertainty as to the ends of human action. The usual claims of liberal politics, often enshrined in the constitutions of modern nation-states, are that each person should be recognized as free and equal in respect of her rights, regardless of her attachment to a particular culture or of other attributes such as race, religious conviction, sex, and more recently sexual orientation. Political philosophers, notably John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, have often been engaged in a project of justifying these constitutional arrangements on the basis of claims concerning the universal characteristics of human beings as such, claims derived ultimately from Kantian ethics. Typical of such attempts, ever since Kant, has been the desire not to rely on too "thick" a description of human nature. In particular, neo-Kantian forms of universalistic liberalism rely on a notion of the self as "prior to its ends," that is, a self that affirms no particular values and can be conceived of as outside of any existing social relations, as a person in the abstract. One frequent objection to Kantian attempts at a universalistic liberalism, made for example by Michael Sandel and by Bernard Williams, is that they offer an inadequate philosophical anthropology, which is to say that they do not describe human nature accurately or in sufficient detail to form the basis of a meaningful political or ethical theory. Attempts to develop a more convincing philosophical anthropology often begin by rehabilitating teleological ethics, which assert that the particular ends (such as happiness) pursued by the self, and the self's location within a network of social relations, are not irrelevant to ethical thought. As Yael Tamir has suggested, liberal nationalism "rejects the view [typical of Kant] that to reason ethically, to consider things from a moral point of view, means to rely exclusively on an impartial standpoint" (Liberal Nationalism, 1995, p. 106). The theorists of the liberal nation-state I examine here differ for the most part from Kant in that they do not attempt to justify their conceptions of political justice by reference to a model of the rational self as capable of abstracting itself entirely from its prejudices and inherited values to arrive at universally applicable principles of action. To this extent, they may appear to offer alternatives to Kantian liberalism, to provide a more complete account of the motivations characteristic of human nature, and thus to provide a potential model of social relations that does not rely on the now much maligned "Archimedean point" outside of political and ethical preconceptions as a guide to moral and political questions. In fact, both Burke and Rousseau, who inspired later liberal nationalist theories, were themselves turning back to the Aristotelian tradition for a more compelling philosophical anthropology to oppose to the early social contract theories. Ultimately, however, these attempts to ground forms of liberal theory in conceptions of the central importance of social identifications to human nature led to crucial modifications of liberalism. The most fundamental problems associated with liberal nationalism arose out of the attempt to find in the organization of humanity into national states a solution to the epistemological and moral uncertainty resulting from the decline of traditional "transcendent" guarantees of the liberty and equality of all men. The discourses of national character and national will seemed to offer guarantees of a just relationship among people that would ground the claims of liberty and equality in the supposed fact of national fraternity, but in so doing they had to abandon many of the earlier transcendental claims of liberalism. The generation of the modernists was to be faced with the resulting crisis, the notion that liberal politics depended on the nation-state system and that the nation-state system could no longer guarantee the fundamental principles of liberty and equality. |
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