Michael Mann on Power in the 21st Century; Lukes' review of Gellner biography

http://www.amazon.com/Power-21st-Century-Conversations-John/dp/product-description/0745653235/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books


http://www.amazon.com/Ernest-Gellner-Intellectual-John-Hall/dp/1844676021
http://newleftreview.org/?view=2922&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nlr71


In an interview with John Davis he remarked that ‘not having had a faith, I think I do understand . . . what Descartes and Hume and Kant were about, namely, the struggle to establish the foundations of knowledge’, and ‘[n]ever having been a member of a community but having been on the margins of a number gave me an understanding of . . . what the yearning for community is all about.’ 

When I first saw Berber villages of the central Atlas, each building clinging to the next, the style wholly homogeneous, the totality crying out that this was a Gemeinschaft, I knew at once that I wanted desperately to know, as far as an outsider ever could, what it was like inside.

It is clear that his life experience led him, as Perry Anderson observed, to a far less intense and exalted view of national allegiance than that of Max Weber, another figure who loomed large in his intellectual firmament. What Gellner favoured was the limited, liberal nationalism of Masaryk’s Czechoslovak Republic, namely,

the acceptance of ‘forms of life,’ from styles of food, handshakes and wallpapers to political rituals or personal relationships—but an acceptance which no longer endows anything with an aura of the absolute, but is ironic, tentative, optional, and above all discontinuous with serious knowledge and real conviction. In this limited sphere of ‘culture,’ relativism is indeed valid. In the sphere of serious conviction, on the other hand, relativism is not an option open to us at all.