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Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History
1. In the Beginning
The Need for Philosophic History
The Structure of History
Trinitarianisms
Production, Coercion, Cognition
Which Way Will the Stone Age Vote Swing?
The Suspect Witness
2. Community to Society
The Cognitive Evolution of Mankind
Multiple Sensitivities
Generic Types of Strand
Social and Logical Coherence
The Terminus
The Overall Plot
3. The Coming of the Other
Paths of Cognitive Transformation
The Disembodied Word
“Platonism”
The Indirect Route
The First Unification
The Authority of Concepts
Plato’s Sociological Mistakes
4. The Tension
A Divine Order
Church and State and their Separability
Protestantism, Generic and Specific
5. Codification
Reformation to Enlightenment
The Sovreignty of Knowledge
The Dethronement of the Concept
Concept-Implementing and Instrumental Cultures
The Enlightened Solution and its Problems
The Age of Progress, or Operation Bookstrap
6. The Coercive Order and Its Erosion
Patterns of Power
Conditions of the Exit
General Summary
7. Production, Value and Validity
The Economic Transformation
Production and Coercion
The Three Stages of Economy
The Ideological Transition to the Generalized Market
The Re-Entry Problem
The Circularity of Enlightened Reasoning
Objectivity or Not?
8. The New Science
The Concept of Culture and the Limits of Reason
Egalitarianism
What Next?
9. Self-Images
Economic Power (Wealth as Lever)
The New Coercive System
The Two Running-Mates
The Right-Wing Alternative
Acorn or Gate
The New Social Contract
1945 and Some Recent Clauses in the Contract
10. Prospect
The Division of Labour and Back Again
The Future of Production
The Future of Cognition
The Future of Coercion
Summary of Argument
Notes
Index
The Need for Philosophic History
The Structure of History
Trinitarianisms
Production, Coercion, Cognition
Which Way Will the Stone Age Vote Swing?
The Suspect Witness
2. Community to Society
The Cognitive Evolution of Mankind
Multiple Sensitivities
Generic Types of Strand
Social and Logical Coherence
The Terminus
The Overall Plot
3. The Coming of the Other
Paths of Cognitive Transformation
The Disembodied Word
“Platonism”
The Indirect Route
The First Unification
The Authority of Concepts
Plato’s Sociological Mistakes
4. The Tension
A Divine Order
Church and State and their Separability
Protestantism, Generic and Specific
5. Codification
Reformation to Enlightenment
The Sovreignty of Knowledge
The Dethronement of the Concept
Concept-Implementing and Instrumental Cultures
The Enlightened Solution and its Problems
The Age of Progress, or Operation Bookstrap
6. The Coercive Order and Its Erosion
Patterns of Power
Conditions of the Exit
General Summary
7. Production, Value and Validity
The Economic Transformation
Production and Coercion
The Three Stages of Economy
The Ideological Transition to the Generalized Market
The Re-Entry Problem
The Circularity of Enlightened Reasoning
Objectivity or Not?
8. The New Science
The Concept of Culture and the Limits of Reason
Egalitarianism
What Next?
9. Self-Images
Economic Power (Wealth as Lever)
The New Coercive System
The Two Running-Mates
The Right-Wing Alternative
Acorn or Gate
The New Social Contract
1945 and Some Recent Clauses in the Contract
10. Prospect
The Division of Labour and Back Again
The Future of Production
The Future of Cognition
The Future of Coercion
Summary of Argument
Notes
Index
288 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1990
22 people are currently reading
1893 people want to read
About the author
Ernest Gellner
56 books105 followersErnest Gellner was a prominent British-Czech philosopher, social anthropologist, and writer on nationalism.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 24, 2016
An ambitious mix of anthropology, history, sociology, and philosophy. At times Gellner writes in fairly barren generalization: such and such will tend to happen (or not); this may be inevitable, given the vast scope of his project.
I found the most interesting part to be his discussion of the philosophy underlying the Enlightenment. He distinguishes, on the one hand, the naively triumphalist thinkers. These would include Voltaire and the philosophes, who think that we merely need to put our trust in the glorious progress of science, to spread reason far and wide, and all will be well. Gellner contrasts that with the critical Enlightenment; he chiefly identifies this with Kant and Hume, whom he sees as more alike than not. They recognized the internal incoherence of reason, its failure to guarantee anything by itself. It's fairly common now to speak of a crisis of Enlightenment reason as one of the hallmarks of the postmodern age, but Gellner does an admirable job of showing that this crisis was present right from the start, at the birth of the modern age.
You might ask what this is doing in a book that purports to tell the story of transformations affecting literally billions, the whole population of the earth. Aren't these abstruse questions of philosophy completely remote from the vast, vast majority of people as they live their lives? perhaps it's just the occupational prejudice of professors to project their little teapot tempests onto the rest of humanity? I honestly don't know. I do think all of us live by ideas to some degree, however contradictory or confused our ideas may be. Figures like Hume and Kant may represent a heroic effort to go as far as possible in articulating and untangling our vast reservoir of implicit and unexamined thoughts.
Moreover, I think there's such a thing as ideology. When Gellner describes the naive/triumphalist Enlightenment, it seems to dovetail in many ways with our own hegemonic American Way of Life (much broader than the territorial limits of America, of course), with our positivism, our priesthoods of science, health, happiness...
*
Gellner is critical of the relativist or postmodern leveling of history, while at the same time disputing any inevitable teleology of reason leading to our own society.
To what extent does the ideology of facts precede the facts themselves?
The passage above underscores a point that's often missed by boosters of atheism and scientism. The starting point, our background intellectual framework, is taken for an incontrovertible, value-neutral conclusion. If the assumptions are entrenched deeply enough, if they become part of our definition of what 'reason' is, then any alternative does indeed become absurd.
*
Oh, snap! Take that libertarians.
*
Talk of paradigms evokes Kuhn, but the problem of inncomensurability is much broader than that. In the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn seemed to want to limit the problem to the very narrow and highly specialized domain of the hard sciences. I don't think he ever endorsed generalizing it to all of human culture. But many other thinkers have taken this step. Take Foucault, for instance, in the Order of Things, or Alisdair MacIntyre in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? ... Arguably both Foucault and MacIntyre conceive the paradigm (or 'tradition' or 'episteme') as so total and without remainder that it becomes impossible to adjudicate or even have knowledge of them. Against this somewhat paranoid style of thought, I'd like to salute the salubrious influence of Gadamer. In Truth & Method he is able to offer convincing descriptions of how translation is possible. His notion of the fusion of horizons may offer a way out of the bind Gellner describes above. No longer is it a question of choosing between but rather of creating a third kind of thing.
*
Gellner, I know you were brilliant, but this passage very nearly brought my palm violently to my face. Who are these unnamed neo-romantics? I've started to notice a disappointing tendency of his to straw-man his opponents. Moreover, that term 'effective comprehension' is just screaming out for critical examination. Earlier in this very same book he's acknowledged that the enlightenment version is in crucial respects internally incoherent, that 'reason' by itself can guarantee nothing. By page 267, has he simply forgotten all that? Why does he now revert to a positivist claim for science as the only real form of understanding?
I found the most interesting part to be his discussion of the philosophy underlying the Enlightenment. He distinguishes, on the one hand, the naively triumphalist thinkers. These would include Voltaire and the philosophes, who think that we merely need to put our trust in the glorious progress of science, to spread reason far and wide, and all will be well. Gellner contrasts that with the critical Enlightenment; he chiefly identifies this with Kant and Hume, whom he sees as more alike than not. They recognized the internal incoherence of reason, its failure to guarantee anything by itself. It's fairly common now to speak of a crisis of Enlightenment reason as one of the hallmarks of the postmodern age, but Gellner does an admirable job of showing that this crisis was present right from the start, at the birth of the modern age.
You might ask what this is doing in a book that purports to tell the story of transformations affecting literally billions, the whole population of the earth. Aren't these abstruse questions of philosophy completely remote from the vast, vast majority of people as they live their lives? perhaps it's just the occupational prejudice of professors to project their little teapot tempests onto the rest of humanity? I honestly don't know. I do think all of us live by ideas to some degree, however contradictory or confused our ideas may be. Figures like Hume and Kant may represent a heroic effort to go as far as possible in articulating and untangling our vast reservoir of implicit and unexamined thoughts.
Moreover, I think there's such a thing as ideology. When Gellner describes the naive/triumphalist Enlightenment, it seems to dovetail in many ways with our own hegemonic American Way of Life (much broader than the territorial limits of America, of course), with our positivism, our priesthoods of science, health, happiness...
*
It is also notoriously a cold, morally indifferent world. Its icy indifference to values, its failure to console and reassure, its total inability either to validate norms and values or to offer any guarantee of their eventual success, is in no way a consequence of any specific findings withing it. It isn't that facts just happens to have turned out to be do deplorably unsupportive socially. It is a consequence of the overall basic and entrenched constitution of our thought, not of our accidental findings within it. - pp 64-65
Gellner is critical of the relativist or postmodern leveling of history, while at the same time disputing any inevitable teleology of reason leading to our own society.
To what extent does the ideology of facts precede the facts themselves?
The passage above underscores a point that's often missed by boosters of atheism and scientism. The starting point, our background intellectual framework, is taken for an incontrovertible, value-neutral conclusion. If the assumptions are entrenched deeply enough, if they become part of our definition of what 'reason' is, then any alternative does indeed become absurd.
*
One could specify the "correct" political background by saying that the political interference should be minimal; this was the famous theory of the minimal, "nightwatchman" state. The theory has in fact been revived in our time when in fact the tremendous size of the require infrastructure renders it absurd - pp 188
Oh, snap! Take that libertarians.
*
But experience in turn, according to a very popular and persuasive theory, is meretricious and malleable, just like consent and desire. We cannot, we are told, experience anything without a prior framework, a "paradigm," which pre-moulds it and saturates it with theory, but if there is no experience without paradigms, without theory-saturation, how can one use experience to adjudicate between paradigms? Answer comes there none, and on the premisses o the argument, there simply cannot be one. - 196
Talk of paradigms evokes Kuhn, but the problem of inncomensurability is much broader than that. In the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn seemed to want to limit the problem to the very narrow and highly specialized domain of the hard sciences. I don't think he ever endorsed generalizing it to all of human culture. But many other thinkers have taken this step. Take Foucault, for instance, in the Order of Things, or Alisdair MacIntyre in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? ... Arguably both Foucault and MacIntyre conceive the paradigm (or 'tradition' or 'episteme') as so total and without remainder that it becomes impossible to adjudicate or even have knowledge of them. Against this somewhat paranoid style of thought, I'd like to salute the salubrious influence of Gadamer. In Truth & Method he is able to offer convincing descriptions of how translation is possible. His notion of the fusion of horizons may offer a way out of the bind Gellner describes above. No longer is it a question of choosing between but rather of creating a third kind of thing.
*
Whether this failure to extend the scientific revolution to the human field will be corrected, or whether it is due to fundamental causes which will protect man from effective comprehension for ever, is not something which is as yet decided. Our neo-romantis take pleasure in affirming the latter view, but their demonstrations of it fall a very long way short of cogency. - 267
Gellner, I know you were brilliant, but this passage very nearly brought my palm violently to my face. Who are these unnamed neo-romantics? I've started to notice a disappointing tendency of his to straw-man his opponents. Moreover, that term 'effective comprehension' is just screaming out for critical examination. Earlier in this very same book he's acknowledged that the enlightenment version is in crucial respects internally incoherent, that 'reason' by itself can guarantee nothing. By page 267, has he simply forgotten all that? Why does he now revert to a positivist claim for science as the only real form of understanding?
September 30, 2010
One of the rare meta-histories that is witty, wears its learning lightly, and is predictive (written in 1989) not simply an explanation of the past. On the development of the jealous god, about how ideas survive the material circumstances that made their birth possible, about how ideas shape material circumstances - unsurpassed. And as a collector of quotes I've never come across but shall pretend that I have always known them, unsurpassed. Mauriac: La place a table ne ment jamais. Ibn Khaldun's definition of government 'remains the best: it is an institution which prevents injustice other than such as it commits itself.'
September 7, 2020
Interesting, at times fascinating, but also occasionally frustrating and annoying. Gellner posits three main stages of society: hunter/gatherer, agriculture and industry. He argues that the nature of cognition, production and coercion (power) is quite different in each stage. The development of an industrial society based on industry was a singular event, since agriculture, from which it arose, is inherently conservative and stable. Very particular circumstances had to occur simultaneously for a rational, enlightened, liberal society to emerge.
Some observations and analyses are convincing, others not quite. A major issue is the pervasive lack of concrete examples. For instance, Gellner discusses at length the "many-strandedness" of cognition in hunter/gatherer and agricultural society, and contrasts it with the "single-strandedness" characteristic of rational thought. But he gives few, if any, concrete examples of what this many-strandedness consist of.
As to the writing, it is clear and reasonably straightforward, but with an annoying habit of being indirect. Instead of being explicit that some argument or observation is about, say, the French Revolution, Gellner wraps it up in indirect descriptions, assuming that the reader can figure it out for himself. Elegant, perhaps. But also intellectually arrogant.
Some observations and analyses are convincing, others not quite. A major issue is the pervasive lack of concrete examples. For instance, Gellner discusses at length the "many-strandedness" of cognition in hunter/gatherer and agricultural society, and contrasts it with the "single-strandedness" characteristic of rational thought. But he gives few, if any, concrete examples of what this many-strandedness consist of.
As to the writing, it is clear and reasonably straightforward, but with an annoying habit of being indirect. Instead of being explicit that some argument or observation is about, say, the French Revolution, Gellner wraps it up in indirect descriptions, assuming that the reader can figure it out for himself. Elegant, perhaps. But also intellectually arrogant.
May 24, 2014
Epic in scope, clear and concise in style, original (and opinionated) in its argument. An easy read that links anthropology, sociology and history into a digestible and coherent "theory of everything". I should stress that prospective readers shouldn't be put off by the academic sounding blurb as Gellner goes to great lengths to make his prose not only accessible but even entertaining and funny, so that this book would constitute an excellent introduction to any of those three fields.
Want to read
November 14, 2024Someone on Twitter described this as "imagine Sapiens, but by someone who actually reads books"
Read
November 5, 2012A brilliant book. It has influenced my thinking for a couple of decades.
January 7, 2025
Gellner é um liberal culto e muito, muito estudado. Por mais que o livro tenha falhas inevitáveis dado o tamanho e o escopo de um projeto como esse, é uma das poucas "histórias mundiais" que não caducou integralmente.
August 21, 2023
truly a banger
March 15, 2015
Una pregunta usual es cómo surgió la sociedad y cuáles fueron los eventos y causas más importantes de su surgimiento. O, al menos, es una pregunta que usualmente me hago. Escribí una respuesta tentativa y parcial, y de paso ejercite mi inglés, aquí: http://elbigoteescritor.com/2014/03/0...
Aún reflexionando sobre el tema, compre la revista "Mente y cerebro", nro. 60/2013 y, finalmente, en mi búsqueda de respuestas me cruce con la mención de este libro de Ernest Gellner. Tuve la fortuna increíble de poder adquirirlo usado en Buenos Aires y no dude en comprarlo.
Aunque el libro recorre a grandes rasgos la historia de la humanidad enfocado en dos eventos claves: revolución neolítica y revolución agraria, el quid al que pretende responder es cómo pasamos de una sociedad agraria a una industrial. ¿Cuáles fueron los cambios que permitieron romper con el status quo de las sociedades feudales y habilitar el surgimiento de la sociedad moderna industrial?
Para ello, Gellner recurre a tres ángulos de estudio: producción (el arado), coerción (la espada) y cognición (el libro) para analizar ambas sociedades y qué cambios tuvieron que ocurrir en estas esferas para que alcanzáramos nuestro presente.
El libro no es para leer en la playa. Cada capítulo recorre varias argumentaciones conectadas pero que no carecen de digresiones que atentan contra nuestro esfuerzo por seguir el núcleo de cada capítulo. Los primeros capítulos parecen más bien un largo preludio al tema central al que le dedica la mayor parte. Su disfrute se encuentra en muchos aspectos pero uno de ellos son estas digresiones lúcidas sobre el presente del autor que no es muy lejano al nuestro aunque difiere en algo fundamental que lo hace más interesante aún: la presencia de regímenes ideocráticos (marxistas) y también las conclusiones finales con las preguntas que deja abiertas sobre el futuro de estas tres esferas en nuestra sociedad actual.
Aún reflexionando sobre el tema, compre la revista "Mente y cerebro", nro. 60/2013 y, finalmente, en mi búsqueda de respuestas me cruce con la mención de este libro de Ernest Gellner. Tuve la fortuna increíble de poder adquirirlo usado en Buenos Aires y no dude en comprarlo.
Aunque el libro recorre a grandes rasgos la historia de la humanidad enfocado en dos eventos claves: revolución neolítica y revolución agraria, el quid al que pretende responder es cómo pasamos de una sociedad agraria a una industrial. ¿Cuáles fueron los cambios que permitieron romper con el status quo de las sociedades feudales y habilitar el surgimiento de la sociedad moderna industrial?
Para ello, Gellner recurre a tres ángulos de estudio: producción (el arado), coerción (la espada) y cognición (el libro) para analizar ambas sociedades y qué cambios tuvieron que ocurrir en estas esferas para que alcanzáramos nuestro presente.
El libro no es para leer en la playa. Cada capítulo recorre varias argumentaciones conectadas pero que no carecen de digresiones que atentan contra nuestro esfuerzo por seguir el núcleo de cada capítulo. Los primeros capítulos parecen más bien un largo preludio al tema central al que le dedica la mayor parte. Su disfrute se encuentra en muchos aspectos pero uno de ellos son estas digresiones lúcidas sobre el presente del autor que no es muy lejano al nuestro aunque difiere en algo fundamental que lo hace más interesante aún: la presencia de regímenes ideocráticos (marxistas) y también las conclusiones finales con las preguntas que deja abiertas sobre el futuro de estas tres esferas en nuestra sociedad actual.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews