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The class name is comparative politics please no introduction or conclusion just start writing the main idea and the most important part in tthe book the theme of the section is nation and nationalism. Also focus on the argument and the evidenceNations & Nationalism Classicso Elie Kedourie. Nationalism. 4th Edition. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., [1960] 1993).https://vdocuments.mx/elie-kedourie-nationalism.html?page=23o Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).
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N ations and
N ationalism
E rnest G ellner
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE PAST
General Editor
R.I. Moore
Advisory Editors
Gerald Aylmer
loan Lewis
Patrick Wormald
Other Books by Ernest Gellner
Words and Things
Thought and Change
Saints of the Atlas
Contemporary Thought and Politics
The Devil in Modern Philosophy
Legitimation of Belief
Spectacles and Predicaments
M uslim Society
Relativism in the Social Sciences
The Psychoanalytic M ovem ent
The Concept of Kinship and Other Essays
Plough, Sword, and Book
State and Society in Social Thought
Culture, Identity, and Politics
Conditions of Liberty
Encounters with N ationalism
N ations and
N ationalism
E rn est G elln er
Cornell University Press
ITHACA, NEW YORK
© Ernest Gellner 1983
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review,
this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any
form without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage
House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 1983 by Cornell University Press
First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 1983
International Standard Book Number (paper) 0-8014-9263-7
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 83-71199
Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally
responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent
possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials
include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers
that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of
nonwood fibers. Books that bear the logo of the ESC (Forest
Stewardship Council) use paper taken from forests that have
been inspected and certified as meeting the highest standards
for environmental and social responsibility. For further
information, visit our website at
www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.
Printed in the United States of America
Paperback printing
10
9
Contents
Editor’s preface
Acknowledgements
1 Definitions
State and nation
The nation
1
3
5
2 Culture in Agrarian Society
Power and culture in the agro-literate polity
Culture
The state in agrarian society
The varieties of agrarian rulers
8
9
11
13
14
3 Industrial Society
The society of perpetual growth
Social genetics
The age of universal high culture
19
24
29
35
4 The Transition to an Age of Nationalism
A note on the weakness of nationalism
Wild and garden cultures
39
43
50
5 What is a Nation?
The course of true nationalism never did run smooth
53
58
6 Social Entropy and Equality in Industrial Society
Obstacles to entropy
Fissures and barriers
A diversity of focus
63
64
73
75
7 A Typology of Nationalisms
The varieties of nationalist experience
Diaspora nationalism
88
97
101
Contents
8 The Future of Nationalism
Industrial culture — one or many?
no
9 Nationalism and Ideology
Who is for Nuremberg?
One nation, one state
123
130
134
10 Conclusion
What is not being said
Summary
137
137
139
Select Bibliography
144
Index
114
Editor’s Preface
Ignorance has many forms, and all of them are dangerous. In the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries our chief effort has been to free
ourselves from tradition and superstition in large questions, and
from the error in small ones upon which they rest, by redefining the
fields of knowledge and evolving in each the distinctive method
appropriate for its cultivation. The achievement has been incal
culable, but not without cost. As each new subject has developed a
specialist vocabulary to permit rapid and precise reference to its own
common and rapidly growing stock of ideas and discoveries, and
come to require a greater depth of expertise from its specialists,
scholars have been cut off by their own erudition not only from
mankind at large, but from the findings of workers in other fields,
and even in other parts of their own. Isolation diminishes not only
the usefulness but the soundness of their labours when energies are
exclusively devoted to eliminating the small blemishes so embar
rassingly obvious to the fellow-professional on the next patch,
instead of avoiding others that may loom much larger from, as it
were, a more distant vantage point. Marc Bloch observed a contra
diction in the attitudes of many historians: ‘when it is a question of
ascertaining whether or not some human act has really taken place,
they cannot be too painstaking. If they proceed to the reasons for
that act, they are content with the merest appearance, ordinarily
founded upon one of those maxims of common-place psychology
which are neither more nor less true than their opposites.’ When the
historian peeps across the fence he sees his neighbours, in literature,
perhaps, or sociology, just as complacent in relying on historical
platitudes which are naive, simplistic or obsolete.
New Perspectives on the Past represents not a reaction against
specialization, which would be a romantic absurdity, but an attempt
to come to terms with it. The authors, of course, are specialists, and
their thought and conclusions rest on the foundation of distinguished
professional research in different periods and fields. Here they will
viii
E ditor’s Preface
free themselves, as far as it is possible, from the restraints of subject,
region and period within which they ordinarily and necessarily
work, to discuss problems simply as problems, and not as ‘history’
or ‘politics’ or ‘economics’. They will write for specialists, because
we are all specialists now, and for laymen, because we are all laymen.
A series with such a goal could be inaugurated by no author more
apt than Ernest Gellner, and by no subject more fitting than natio
nalism, whose force in shaping and reshaping the modern world is so
obvious, and which yet remains obdurately alien and incompre
hensible to those who are not possessed by it. Gellner’s lucid
command of the intellectual resources of several fields – philosophy,
sociology, intellectual history and social anthropology are prominent
here – has produced an explanation of nationalism which could not
have been devised by an expert in any single one of them, and which
makes it, for the first time, historically and humanly intelligible.
R.I. Moore
Acknowledgements
The writing of this book has benefited enormously from the moral
and material support from my wife Susan and my secretary Gay
Woolven. The penultimate draft was valuably criticized by my son
David. The number of people from whose ideas and information I
benefited over the years, whether in agreement or disagreement, is
simply too large to be listed, though the extent of my debt, conscious
and other, must be enormous. But needless to say, only I may be
blamed for the contentions found in this book.
Ernest Gellner
Tuzenbach: In years to com e, you say, life on earth w ill be mar
vellous, beautiful. T h a t’s true. But to take part in that now , even
from afar, one m ust prepare, one m ust w ork . . .
Yes, one must work. Perhaps you think – this German is getting
over-excited. But on my word o f honour. I’m Russian. I cannot even
speak German. My father is O rthodox . . .
Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters
Politika u nds byla vsak sptse mene smelejst form ou kultury.
(Our politics however was a rather less daring form of culture.)
J. Sladecek, Osmasedesdty (’68), Index, Koln, 1980,
(written under this pen name by Petr Pithart, sub
sequently prime minister o f the Czech lands, and
previously circulated in samizdat in Prague).
Our nationality is like our relations to women: too implicated in our
moral nature to be changed honourably, and too accidental to be
worth changing.
George Santayana
Definitions
Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the
political and the national unit should be congruent.
Nationalism as a sentiment, or as a movement, can best be defined
in terms of this principle. Nationalist sentiment is the feeling of anger
aroused by the violation of the principle, or the feeling of satisfaction
aroused by its fulfilment, A nationalist movement is one actuated by a
sentiment of this kind.
There is a variety of ways in which the nationalist principle can be
violated. The political boundary of a given state can fail to include all
the members of the appropriate nation; or it can include them all but
also include some foreigners; or it can fail in both these ways at once,
not incorporating all the nationals and yet also including some non
nationals. Or again, a nation may live, unmixed with foreigners, in a
multiplicity of states, so that no single state can claim to be the
national one.
But there is one particular form of the violation of the nationalist
principle to which nationalist sentiment is quite particularly sensi
tive: if the rulers of the political unit belong to a nation other than
that of the majority of the ruled, this, for nationalists, constitutes a
quite outstandingly intolerable breech of political propriety. This
can occur either through the incorporation of the national territory
in a larger empire, or by the local domination of an alien group.
In brief, nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which
requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones,
and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state – a
contingency already formally excluded by the principle in its general
formulation – should not separate the power-holders from the rest.
The nationalist principle can be asserted in an ethical, ‘universalistic’ spirit. There could be, and on occasion there have been,
nationalists-in-the-abs tract, unbiassed in favour of any special nation
ality of their own, and generously preaching the doctrine for all
nations alike: let all nations have their own political roofs, and let all
2
D efinitions
of them also refrain from including non-nationals under it. There is
no formal contradiction in asserting such non-egoistic nationalism.
As a doctrine it can be supported by some good arguments, such as
the desirability of preserving cultural diversity, of a pluralistic inter
national political system, and of the diminution of internal strains
within states.
In fact, however, nationalism has often not been so sweetly
reasonable, nor so rationally symmetrical. It may be that, as
Immanuel Kant believed, partiality, the tendency to make excep
tions on one’s own behalf or one’s own case, is the central human
weakness from which all others flow; and that it infects national
sentiment as it does all else, engendering what the Italians under
Mussolini called the sacro egoismo of nationalism. It may also be that
the political effectiveness of national sentiment would be much
impaired if nationalists had as fine a sensibility to the wrongs com
mitted by their nation as they have to those committed against it.
But over and above these considerations there are others, tied to
the specific nature of the world we happen to live in, which militate
against any impartial, general, sweetly reasonable nationalism. To
put it in the simplest possible terms: there is a very large number of
potential nations on earth. Our planet also contains room for a
certain number of independent or autonomous political units. On
any reasonable calculation, the former number (of potential nations)
is probably much, much larger than that of possible viable states. If
this argument or calculation is correct, not all nationalisms can be
satisfied, at any rate at the same time. The satisfaction of some spells
the frustration of others. This argument is further and immeasurably
strengthened by the fact that very many of the potential nations of
this world live, or until recently have lived, not in compact territorial
units but intermixed with each other in complex patterns. It follows
that a territorial political unit can only become ethnically homo
geneous, in such cases, if it either kills, or expels, or assimilates all
non-nationals. Their unwillingness to suffer such fates may make the
peaceful implementation of the nationalist principle difficult.
These definitions must, of course, like most definitions, be
applied with common sense. The nationalist principle, as defined, is
not violated by the presence of small numbers of resident foreigners,
or even by the presence of the occasional foreigner in, say, a national
ruling family. Just how many resident foreigners or foreign members
of the ruling class there must be before the principle is effectively
D efinitions
3
violated cannot be stated with precision. There is no sacred per
centage figure, below which the foreigner can be benignly tolerated,
and above which he becomes offensive and his safety and life are at
peril. No doubt the figure will vary with circumstances. The imposs
ibility of providing a generally applicable and precise figure, how
ever, does not undermine the usefulness of the definition.
State and nation
Our definition of nationalism was parasitic on two as yet undefined
terms: state and nation.
Discussion of the state may begin with Max Weber’s celebrated
definition of it, as that agency within society which possesses the
monopoly of legitimate violence. The idea behind this is simple and
seductive: in well-ordered societies, such as most of us live in or
aspire to live in, private or sectional violence is illegitimate. Conflict
as such is not illegitimate, but it cannot rightfully be resolved by
private or sectional violence. Violence may be applied only by the
central political authority, and those to whom it delegates this right.
Among the various sanctions of the maintenance of order, the ulti
mate one – force – may be applied only by one special, clearly identi
fied, and well centralized, disciplined agency within society. That
agency or group of agencies is the state.
The idea enshrined in this definition corresponds fairly well with
the moral intuitions of many, probably most, members of modern
societies. Nevertheless, it is not entirely satisfactory. There are
‘states’ – or, at any rate, institutions which we would normally be
inclined to call by that name – which do not monopolize legitimate
violence within the territory which they more or less effectively
control. A feudal state does not necessarily object to private wars
between its fief-holders, provided they also fulfil their obligations to
their overlord; or again, a state counting tribal populations among its
subjects does not necessarily object to the institution of the feud, as
long as those who indulge in it refrain from endangering neutrals on
the public highway or in the market. The Iraqi state, under British
tutelage after the First World War, tolerated tribal raids, provided
the raiders dutifully reported at the nearest police station before and
after the expedition, leaving an orderly bureaucratic record of slain
and booty. In brief, there are states which lack either the will or the
4
D efinitions
means to enforce their monopoly of legitimate violence, and which
nonetheless remain, in many respects, recognizable ‘states’.
Weber’s underlying principle does, however, seem valid now^
however strangely ethnocentric it may be as a general definition,
with its tacit assumption of the well-centralized Western state. The
state constitutes one highly distinctive and important elaboration of
the social division of labour. Where there is no division of labour,
one cannot even begin to speak of the state. But not any or every
specialism makes a state: the state is the specialization and con
centration of order maintenance. The ‘state’ is that institution or set
of institutions specifically concerned with the enforcement of order
(whatever else they may also be concerned with). The state exists
where specialized order-enforcing agencies, such as police forces and
courts, have separated out from the rest of social life. They are the
state.
Not all societies are state-endowed. It immediately follows that the
problem of nationalism does not arise for stateless societies. If there
is no state, one obviously cannot ask whether or not its boundaries
are congruent with the limits of nations. If there are no rulers, there
being no state, one cannot ask whether they are of the same nation as
the ruled. When neither state nor rulers exist, one cannot resent
their failure to conform to the requirements of the principle of
nationalism. One may perhaps deplore statelessness, but that is
another matter. Nationalists have generally fulminated against the
distribution of political power and the nature of political boundaries,
but they have seldom if ever had occasion to deplore the absence of
power and of boundaries altogether. The circumstances in which
nationalism has generally arisen have not normally been those in
which the state itself, as such, was lacking, or when its reality was in
any serious doubt. The state was only too conspicuously present. It
was its boundaries and/or the distribution of power, and possibly of
other advantages, within it which were resented.
This in itself is highly significant. Not only is our definition of
nationalism parasitic on a prior and assumed definition of the state:
it also seems to be the case that nationalism emerges only in milieux
in which the existence of the state is already very much taken for
granted. The existence of politically centralized units, and of a
moral-political climate in which such centralized units are taken for
granted and are treated as normative, is a necessary though by no
means a sufficient condition of nationalism.
D efinitions
5
By way of anticipation, some general historical observations
should be made about the state. Mankind has passed through three
fundamental stages in its history: the pre-agrarian, the agrarian, and
the industrial. Hunting and gathering bands were and are too small
to allow the kind of political division of labour which constitutes the
state; and so, for them, the question of the state, of a stable special
ized order-enforcing institution, does not really arise. By contrast,
most, but by no means all, agrarian societies have been stateendowed. Some of these states have been strong and some weak,
some have been despotic and others law-abiding. They differ a very
great deal in their form. The agrarian phase of human history is the
period during which, so to speak, the very existence of the state is an
option. Moreover, the form of the state is highly variable. During
the hunting-gathering stage, the option was not available.
By contrast, in the post-agrarian, industrial age there is, once
again, no option; but now the presence^ not the absence of the state is
inescapable. Paraphrasing Hegel, once none had the state, then some
had it, and finally all have it. The form it takes, of course, still
remains variable. There are some traditions of social thought anarchism, Marxism – which hold that even, or especially, in an
industrial order the state is dispensable, at least under favourable
conditions or under conditions due to be realized in the fullness of
time. There are obvious and powerful reasons for doubting this:
industrial societies are enormously large, and depend for the stan
dard of living to which they have become accustomed (or to which
they ardently wish to become accustomed) on an unbelievably intri
cate general division of labour and co-operation. Some of this co
operation might under favourable conditions be spontaneous and
need no central sanctions. The idea that all of it could perpetually
work in this way, that it could exist without any enforcement and
control, puts an intolerable strain on one’s credulity.
So the problem of nationalism does not arise when there is no
state. It does not follow that the problem of nationalism arises for
each and every state. On the contrary, it arises only for some states. It
remains to be seen which ones do face this problem.
The nation
The definition of the nation presents difficulties graver than those
attendant on the definition of the state. Although modern man tends
6
D efinitions
to take the centralized state (and, more specifically, the centralized
national state) for granted, nevertheless he is capable, with relatively
little effort, of seeing its contingency, and of imagining a social situ
ation in which the state is absent. He is quite adept at visualizing the
‘state of nature’. An anthropologist can explain to him that the tribe is
not necessarily a state writ small, and that forms of tribal organiz
ation exist which can be described as stateless. By contrast, the idea
of a man without a nation seems to impose a far greater strain on the
modern imagination. Chamisso, an emigre Frenchman in Germany
during the Napoleonic period, wrote a powerful proto-Kafkaesque
novel about a man who lost his shadow: though no doubt part of the
effectiveness of this novel hinges on the intended ambiguity of the
parable, it is difficult not to suspect that, for the author, the Man
without a Shadow was the Man without a Nation. When his fol
lowers and acquaintances detect his aberrant shadowlessness they
shun the otherwise well-endowed Peter Schlemiehl. A man without a
nation defies the recognized categories and provokes revulsion.
Chamisso’s perception – if indeed this is what he intended to
convey – was valid enough, but valid only for one kind of human
condition, and not for the human condition as such anywhere at any
time. A man must have a nationality as he must have a nose and two
ears; a deficiency in any of these particulars is not inconceivable and
does from time to time occur, but only as a result of some disaster,
and it is itself a disaster of a kind. All this seems obvious, though,
alas, it is not true. But that it should have come to seem so very
obviously true is indeed an aspect, or perhaps the very core, of the
problem of nationalism. Having a nation is not an inherent attribute
of humanity, but it has now come to appear as such.
In fact, nations, like states, are a contingency, and not a universal
necessity. Neither nations nor states exist at all times and in all
circumstances. Moreover, nations and states are not the same contin
gency. Nationalism holds that they were destined for each other;
that either without the other is incomplete, and constitutes a
tragedy. But before they could become intended for each other, each
of them had to emerge, and their emergence was independent and
contingent. The state has certainly emerged without the help of the
nation. Some nations have certainly emerged without the blessings
of their own state. It is more debatable whether the normative idea of
the nation, in its modern sense, did not presuppose the prior exis
tence of the state.
D efinitions
7
What then is this contingent, but in our age seemingly universal
and normative, idea of the nation? Discussion of two very makeshift,
temporary definitions will help to pinpoint this elusive concept.
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. In other words, nations
maketh man; nations are the artefacts of men’s convictions and loyal
ties and solidarities. A mere category of persons (say, occupants of a
given territory, or speakers of a given language, for example)
becomes a nation if and when the members of the category firmly
recognize certain mutual rights and duties to each other in virtue of
their shared membership of it. It is their recognition of each other as
fellows of this kind which turns them into a nation, and not the other
shared attributes, whatever they might be, which separate that
category from non-members.
Each of these provisional definitions, the cultural and the volun
taristic, has some merit. Each of them singles out an element which
is of real importance in the understanding of nationalism. But
neither is adequate. Definitions of culture, presupposed by the first
definition, in the anthropological rather than the normative sense,
are notoriously difficult and unsatisfactory. It is probably best to
approach this problem by using this term without attempting too
much in the way of formal definition, and looking at what culture
does.
Culture in Agrarian Society
One development which takes place during the agrarian epoch of
human history is comparable in importance with the emergence of
the state itself: the emergence of literacy and of a specialized clerical
class or estate, a clerisy. Not all agrarian societies attain literacy:
paraphrasing Hegel once again, we may say that at first none could
read; then some could read; and eventually all can read. That, at any
rate, seems to be the way in which literacy fits in with the three great
ages of man. In the middle or agrarian age literacy appertains to
some only. Some societies have it; and within the societies that do
have it, it is always some, and never all, who can actually read.
The written word seems to enter history with the accountant and
the tax collector: the earliest uses of the written sign seem often to be
occasioned by the keeping of records. Once developed, however, the
written word acquires other uses, legal, contractual, administrative.
God himself eventually puts his covenant with humanity and his rules
for the comportment of his creation in writing. Theology, legislation,
litigation, administration, therapy: all engender a class of literate
specialists, in alliance or more often in competition with freelance
illiterate thaumaturges. In agrarian societies literacy brings forth a
major chasm between the great and the little traditions (or cults).
The doctrines and forms of organization of the clerisy of the great
and literate cultures are highly variable, and the depth of the chasm
between the great and little traditions may vary a great deal. So does
the relationship of the clerisy to the state, and its own internal
organization: it may be centralized or it may be loose, it may be
hereditary or on the contrary constitute an open guild, and so forth.
Literacy, the establishment of a reasonably permanent and stan
dardized script, means in effect the possibility of cultural and cogni
tive storage and centralization. The cognitive centralization and
codification effected by a clerisy, and the political centralization
which is the state, need not go hand in hand. Often they are rivals;
sometimes one may capture the other; but more often, the Red and
C ulture in Agrarian S ociety
9
the Black, the specialists of violence and of faith, are indeed inde
pendently operating rivals, and their territories are often not co
extensive.
Power and culture in the agro-literate polity
These two crucial and idiosyncratic forms of the division of labour the centralizations of power and of culture/cognition – have pro
found and special implications for the typical social structure of the
agro-literate polity. Their implications are best considered jointly,
and they can be schematized as shown in figure 1.
Figure 1 General form of the social structure of agrarian societies.
In the characteristic agro-literate polity, the ruling class forms a
small minority of the population, rigidly separate from the great
majority of direct agricultural producers, or peasants. Generally
10
C ulture in Agrarian S ociety
speaking, its ideology exaggerates rather than underplays the in
equality of classes and the degree of separation of the ruling stratum.
This can in turn be sub-divided into a number of more specialized
layers: warriors, priests, clerics, administrators, burghers. Some of
these layers (for example, Christian clergy) may be non-hereditary
and be re-selected in each generation, though recruitment may be
closely predetermined by the other hereditary strata. The most
important point, however, is this: both for the ruling stratum as a
whole, and for the various sub-strata within it, there is great stress
on cultural differentiation rather than on homogeneity. The more
differentiated in style of all kinds the various strata are, the less fric
tion and ambiguity there will be between them. The whole system
favours horizontal lines of cultural cleavage, and it may invent and
reinforce them when they are absent. Genetic and cultural differ
ences are attributed to what were in fact merely strata differentiated
by function, so as to fortify the differentiation, and endow it with
authority and permanence. For instance, in early nineteenth-century
Tunisia, the ruling stratum considered itself to be Turkish, though
quite unable to speak that language, and in fact of very mixed
ancestry and reinforced by recruits from below.
Below the horizontally stratified minority at the top, there is
another world, that of the laterally separated petty communities of
the lay members of the society. Here, once again, cultural differen
tiation is very marked, though the reasons are quite different. Small
peasant communities generally live inward-turned lives, tied to the
locality by economic need if not by political prescription. Even if the
population of a given area starts from the same linguistic base-line which very often is not the case – a kind of culture drift soon en
genders dialectal and other differences. No-one, or almost no-one,
has an interest in promoting cultural homogeneity at this social level.
The state is interested in extracting taxes, maintaining the peace,
and not much else, and has no interest in promoting lateral com
munication between its subject communities.
The clerisy may, it is true, have a measure of interest in imposing
certain shared cultural norms. Some clerisies are contemptuous of
and indifferent towards folk practices, while others, in the interest of
monopohzing access to the sacred, to salvation, therapy and so forth,
combat and actively denigrate folk culture and the freelance folk
shamans who proliferate within it. But, within the general conditions
prevailing in agro-literate polities, they can never really be
C ulture in Agrarian S ociety
11
successful. Such societies simply do not possess the means for
making literacy near-universal and incorporating the broad masses
of the population in a high culture, thus implementing the ideals of
the clerisy. The most the clerisy can achieve is to ensure that its ideal
is internalized as a valid but impracticable norm, to be respected or
even revered, perhaps even aspired to in periodic outbursts of en
thusiasm, but to be honoured more in the breach than in the obser
vance in normal times.
But perhaps the central, most important fact about agro-literate
society is this: almost everything in it militates against the definition
of political units in terms of cultural boundaries.
In other words, had nationalism been invented in such a period its
prospects of general acceptance would have been slender indeed.
One might put it this way: of the two potential partners, culture and
power, destined for each other according to nationalist theory,
neither has much inclination for the other in the conditions prevailing
in the agrarian age. Let us take each of them in turn.
Culture
Among the higher strata of agro-literate society it is clearly advan
tageous to stress, sharpen and accentuate the diacritical, differential,
and monopolizable traits of the privileged groups. The tendency of
liturgical languages to become distinct from the vernacular is very
strong: it is as if literacy alone did not create enough of a barrier
between cleric and layman, as if the chasm between them had to be
deepened, by making the language not merely recorded in an
inaccessible script, but also incomprehensible when articulated.
The establishment of horizontal cultural cleavages is not only
attractive, in that it furthers the interests of the privileged and the
power-holders; it is also feasible, and indeed easy. Thanks to the
relative stability of agro-literate societies, sharp separations of the
population into estates or castes or millets can be established and
maintained without creating intolerable frictions. On the contrary,
by externalizing, making absolute and underwriting inequalities, it
fortifies them and makes them palatable, by endowing them with the
aura of inevitability, permanence and naturalness. That which is
inscribed into the nature of things and is perennial, is consequently
not personally, individually offensive, nor psychically intolerable.
12
C ulture in Agrarian Society
By contrast, in an inherently mobile and unstable society the
maintenance of these social dams, separating unequal levels, is
intolerably difficult. The powerful currents of mobility are ever
undermining them. Contrary to what Marxism has led people to
expect, it is pre-industrial society which is addicted to horizontal
differentiation within societies, whereas industrial
