Plough, Sword, and Book: the Structure of Human History
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
PLOUGH, SWORD AND BOOK The Structure of Human History ERNEST GELLNER The University of Chicago Press For David, Sarah, Deborah and Ben The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 Collins Harvill, London © 1988 by Ernest Gellner All rights reserved. Originally published 1988 University of Chicago Press edition 1989 Printed in Great Britain 98 97 96 95 94 93 92 91 90 89 5 4 3 2 1 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Gellner, Ernest. Plough, sword, and book : the structure of human history / Ernest Gellner. p. cm. Originally published : London : Collins Harvill, 1988. Includes index. ISBN 0-226-28701-7 1. History—Philosophy. 1. Title. D16.8.G413 1989 88-32452 901—dcl9 C1P Photoset in Linotron Sabon by Wyvern Typesetting Ltd Printed and bound in Great Britain by Hartnolls Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to put on record my gratitude to the Economic and Social Research Council and its Chairman Sir Douglas Hague and its Secretary Mrs Suzanne Reeve, who have given support to this purely theoretical inquiry and thus freed me from worry con- cerning the expenses connected with it. I would also like to put on record my very great debt to the secretarial and research staff of the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge: Mrs Mary McGinley, Mrs Margaret Story, Mrs Anne Farmer and Mrs Janet Hall. Without their sustained help and support the book certainly would not have been written. Valuable additional secretarial help was also received from Miss Hilary Colby. I am most grateful to people who have read drafts of the book and made useful suggestions: Mark Raymond Bonham-Carter, Graham Fawcett, David Gellner, Julian Jacobs, Declan Quigley, Emma Tristram, Harry Willets, and Anthony Raven. Janet Hall and Julian Jacobs have also been most helpful with the biblio- graphy. Mark Green has been outstandingly helpful and patient as an editor. The number of people from whom I have borrowed intellectu- ally is too large to be included in full, and no doubt there are many debts of which I am not properly aware. But for years I have run a seminar on historical sociology at the LSE jointly with John Hall and Michael Mann, and my debt to my two colleagues and to all those who have contributed papers or observations in discussion is very considerable. Over the years, I have learnt a very great deal from the writings or conversation of S. Andreski, the late R. Aron, J. Baechler, D. Bell, P. Burke, P. Crone, R. Dore, S. N. Eisenstadt, Y. Elkanna, M. Elvin, C. Geertz, R. Gombrich, J. Goody, J. Hajnal, M. Hinds, K. Hopkins, R. Horton, A. Khazanov, P. Laslett, G. Lloyd, A. Macfarlane, J. Merquior, C. J U N 8 1989 P L O U G H , S W O R D A N D B O O K Renfrew, G. Runciman, T. Shanin, E. Wolf, J. Woodburn, A. E. Wrigley, and many others. The responsibility for what is affirmed in the book is of course mine only. ERNEST GELLNER September, 1987 CONTENTS 1 IN T H E B E G I N N I N G II The Need for Philosophic History 11 The Structure of History 16 Trinitarianisms 19 Production, Coercion, Cognition 20 Which Way Will the Stone Age Vote Swing? 23 The Suspect Witness 3 5 2 C O M M U N I T Y TO SOCIETY 39 The Cognitive Evolution of Mankind 39 Multiple Sensitivities 50 Generic Types of Strand 5 3 Social and Logical Coherence 58 The Terminus 62 The Overall Plot 67 3 T H E C O M I N G O F T H E O T H E R 70 Paths of Cognitive Transformation 70 The Disembodied Word 71 "Platonism" 76 The Indirect Route 77 The First Unification 79 The Authority of Concepts 84 Plato's Sociological Mistakes 86 4 T H E T E N S I O N 91 A Divine Order 91 Church and State and their Separability 93 Protestantism, Generic and Specific 100 P L O U G H , S W O R D A N D B O O K 5 C O D I F I C A T I O N 113 Reformation to Enlightenment 113 The Sovereignty of Knowledge 116 The Dethronement of the Concept 122 Concept-Implementing and Instrumental Cultures 128 The Enlightened Solution and its Problems 133 The Age of Progress, or Operation Bootstrap 140 6 T H E C O E R C I V E O R D E R A N D ITS E R O S I O N 145 Patterns of Power 145 Conditions of the Exit 154 General Summary 170 7 P R O D U C T I O N , V A L U E A N D V A L I D I T Y 172 The Economic Transformation 172 Production and Coercion 176 The Three Stages of Economy 180 The Ideological Transition to the Generalized Market 182 The Re-Entry Problem 189 The Circularity of Enlightened Reasoning 193 Objectivity or Not? 197 8 T H E N E W S C E N E 205 The Concept of Culture and the Limits of Reason 205 Egalitarianism 211 What Next? 213 9 S E L F - I M A G E S 224 Economic Power (Wealth as Lever) 224 The New Coercive System 232 C O N T E N T S The Two Running-Mates 238 The Right-Wing Alternative 242 Acorn or Gate 247 The New Social Contract 249 1945 and Some Recent Clauses in the Contract 257 IO P R O S P E C T 261 The Division of Labour and Back Again 261 The Future of Production 264 The Future of Cognition 265 The Future of Coercion 268 Summary of Argument 273 Notes 279 Index 284 Subjection enters the house with the plough Attributed to the Prophet Mohammed CHAPTER 1 In the Beginning The Need for Philosophic History Men and societies frequently treat the institutions and assump- tions by which they live as absolute, self-evident, and given. They may treat them as such without question, or they may endeavour to fortify them by some kind of proof. In fact, human ideas and social forms are neither static nor given. In our age, this has become very obvious to most of us; and it has been obvious for quite some time. But any attempt at understanding of our collective or individual predicaments must needs be spelt out against the backcloth of a vision of human history. If our choices are neither self-evident nor for keeps, we need to know the range of alternatives from which they are drawn, the choices that others have made or which were imposed on them. We need to know the principles or factors which generate that range of options. The identification of those principles or factors is not beyond our capacities, even if specific prediction continues to elude us. We inevitably assume a pattern of human history. There is simply no choice concerning whether we use such a pattern. We are, all of us, philosophical historians malgre nous, whether we wish it or not. The only choice we do have is whether we make our vision as explicit, coherent and compatible with available facts as we can, or whether we employ it more or less unconsciously and incoherently. If we do the latter, we risk using ideas without examination and criticism, passed off tacitly as some kind of "common sense". As Keynes observed about economics, common sense is but dead theory: .. the ideas of economists and political philosophers . are IN THE BEGINNING more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.1 This is true far beyond the sphere of economic thought. Those who spurn philosophical history are slaves of defunct thinkers and unexamined theories. The great paradox of our age is that although it is undergoing social and intellectual change of totally unprecedented speed and depth, its thought has become, in the main, unhistorical or anti- historical. "Historicism" has become a term of abuse, designat- ing those who set themselves up as self-appointed prophets, in possession of a secret plan of history and hence of the key to the future, who endeavour to browbeat humanity into the acceptance of their own values and recipes for the future, and who do this in the name of a possibly benign and allegedly inexorable historical necessity. This is not the only charge made out against historical visions, though it is the one that has been most eloquently expounded. There is also the "genetic fallacy" argument. It consists of the simple point that the origins and the validity of an idea are independent of each other: hence, it is mistakenly argued, we need not be concerned with our origins and our past, when we assess the merits of our future options. Discovering the roots of our ideas does not tell us whether or not those ideas are sound. So why bother with the roots? Our point here is that we look at those roots in order to understand our options, not so as to prejudge our choices. The joint result of our inescapable need for possessing some backcloth vision of history, and of the low esteem in which elaboration of global historical patterns is at present held, is a most paradoxical situation: the ideas of nineteenth-century philosophers of history such as Hegel, Marx, Comte, or Spencer are treated with scant respect and yet are everywhere in use.