(Roughly) Daily

The estimable Henry Farrell unpacks Ernest Gellner‘s understanding of the conditions of liberty– and the centraliity of civil society– and how they are threatened today…

There are many possible stories about why American political conservatism is such an intellectual trainwreck. Here’s one. Conservatives used at least nominally to argue that it was important to protect civil society from the depredations of government, and many genuinely believed it. Some still do, but now, the dominant figures in political conservatism want to use government to weaponize and suborn civil society.

Like all simplified fables, this gets a fair amount wrong, both in its understanding of what happened and in what it leaves out. Still, it isn’t a bad way to start understanding some of what is taking place. Yet it begs an important question. What is civil society?

When I wrote about how civil society could beat Trumpism a couple of weeks ago, I felt a mild sensation of intellectual guilt – I knew I was invoking a complicated set of ideas without properly explaining them. So here’s my attempt to make up for that, and to explain why we ought want to protect civil society too, leaning on the account in Ernest Gellner’s book, Conditions of Liberty.

I suspect that few people younger than 50 have read this book – it’s been out of print for thirty years or so. [Though it is avaiable at the Internet Archive, in other lbraries, and used.] Gellner wrote it back in the 1990s, when civil society seemed to promise a path forward for the newly freed democracies of Eastern Europe. Now people are rediscovering the idea, not because of future hopes, but because they want to explain what is going wrong as the state escapes its restraints and threatens to crush the people’s liberties.

Gellner’s understanding of civil society is both relevant and a possible bridge between certain parts of the left and right. While he identified loosely with the left, Gellner was profoundly influenced by the kinds of classical liberalism articulated by Adam Ferguson and David Hume. They, in turn, wrote in the aftermath of the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution of the previous century, when Scottish and English society had been torn apart by vicious religious controversies.

Gellner’s account of civil society, like those of his intellectual forebears, begins from the fact of profound disagreement and asks how best to manage it. From Gellner’s perspective, civil society is a marvelous accident, an unanticipated by-product of the seventeenth century stalemate between Calvinist enthusiasts (here and below, the term ‘enthusiast’ refers to Protestants who believe that God lives inside them, and are accordingly uncomfortable with certain kinds of hierarchy) and the English state. Yet this accident has shaped the world that we live in, creating a realm of autonomy in which people are free to live their lives in many different ways, within broad structures that support a reasonable degree of peace and shared order.

The dominant strain in American political conservatism has abandoned any commitments that it once had to this vision of pluralism. Some conservatives favor a shared notion of the common good, which ought be imposed as necessary on society. Others are more straightforwardly interested in domination and plunder. Neither faction has any interest in preserving the autonomy of civil society. Instead of a pluralistic realm to be protected or left alone, they see a “cathedral” of left ideology and argue that universities, non-profits, even multinational corporations are redoubts of the enemy that must be taken by storm. This is dingbat Gramscianism, strained through the turd-encrusted sieve of Curtis Yarvin Thought…

[Farrell unpack’s Gellner’s thinking and puts it into context. He concludes…]

… There is plenty that is missing from the classical liberal account of civil society that Gellner lays out. It doesn’t capture many of the power dynamics that actually existing civil society entails. Civil society’s actual degree of pluralism varies, and is the subject both of legitimate debate and actual political struggle (something that both intelligent left- and right-Gramscian approaches capture better than classical liberal accounts).

Still, it does an excellent job in explaining why it is a problem when the government tries to capture civil society. If we lived in a world where the winning faction of conservatives recognized the value of civil society, we would be a lot better off than we are. There is also excellent reason to think that the left should be more appreciative of civil society too, and less prone to fantasies that everyone would change their politics if only this or that intellectual institution was controlled by the right people with the right way of thinking.

Liberal accounts of civil society push us to recognize the benefits of genuine pluralism, however painful and messy it may be, and however difficult to maintain in practice. Gellner’s particular version also has the particular benefit of emphasizing how contingent the development of civil society was, and how chancy its survival may be without relentless hard work.

Other societies may develop the economic benefits that helped civil society take off. [Quoting Gellner…]

Whether we like it or not, the deadly angel who spells death to economic inefficiency is not always at the service of liberty. He had once rendered liberty some service, but does not seem permanently at her command. This may sadden those of us who are liberals and were pleased at being given such a potent ally – but facts had better be faced.

There will always be tensions in the relationship between nationalism and liberalism, which endanger the pluralism of civil society. Strong forms of national identity and strongman government based on fostering us-them divisions go hand-in-hand with each other. If economic growth stutters or fails, then social mobility is likely to become more problematic, and abusive hierarchy – the default condition of human society – may return.

That, then, is what civil society is (under one useful definition) and why we ought care about it…

Eminently worth reading in full: “What is civil society, and why should we care?” from @himself.bsky.social. For more from Farrell on the importance of civil society an what drives it: “Liberalism transforms plurality from weakness to strength.”

Lest we need a more “commercial” form of convincing (that, among its other defects, inequality doesn’t pay): Noah Smith on “Our Age of Kings” and why “the ‘cure’ is worse than the disease.” One example:

See also: “Equality and Development: A Comparative & Historical Perspective 1800-2025,” and “The Rise and Fall of the Project State: Rethinking the Twentieth Century.”

As Kant said, “The greatest problem for the human species, the solution of which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a civil society which can administer justice universally.” Further to which, as Abbie Hoffman observed, “Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it’s something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles.”

* Ernest Gellner (a la George Orwell’s distinction between the defensive patriot and the offensive nationalist: the former naturally prefers his particular customs, whereas the latter cannot be satisfied without demonstrating their superiority over others — by conflict if necessary).

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As we push for plurality, we might spare a thought for “the only man to enter Parliament with honest intentions”– it’s Guy Fawkes Day.

On the eve of a general parliamentary session scheduled for November 5, 1605, Sir Thomas Knyvet, a justice of the peace, found Guy Fawkes lurking in a cellar of the Parliament building, and ordered the premises thoroughly searched.  Nearly two tons of gunpowder were found hidden within the cellar.  The authorities determine that the suspect was a participant in an English Catholic conspiracy, largely organized by Robert Catesby, to annihilate England’s entire Protestant government including King James I.  Over the next few months, English authorities killed or captured all of the conspirators in the “Gunpowder Plot,” and also arrested, tortured, or killed dozens of innocent English Catholics.  Fawkes himself was executed on January 31, 1606.

The day after Fawkes arrest, November 5, 1605 Londoners were encouraged to celebrate the King’s escape from assassination by lighting bonfires, “always provided that ‘this testemonye of joy be carefull done without any danger or disorder'”; an Act of Parliament later that year designated November 5th as an official day of thanksgiving for “the joyful day of deliverance”, and remained in force until 1859.

But as historian Lewis Call has observed, Fawkes is now “a major icon in modern political culture.”  The image of Fawkes’s face has become “a potentially powerful instrument for the articulation of postmodern anarchism” during the late 20th century, exemplified by the mask worn by V in the comic book series V for Vendetta, who fights against a fictional fascist English state, and by activists who were part of the Occupy Movement.

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