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The Politics of Transition: on the Work of Ernest Gellner*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

J. G. Merquior
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Type
Review Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , 01 April 1981 , pp. 230 - 243
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1981

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References

1 I shall mainly refer to the following books: Thought and Change, London, 1964 (hereafter TC); Contemporary Thought and Politics, London, 1974 (CTP); Legitimation of Belief, Cambridge, 1974 (LB); and Spectacles and Predicaments, Cambridge, 1979 (SP). CTP and SP are collections of essays assembled by I. C. Jarvie and J. Agassi.

2 LB, p. 35.

3 CTP, p. 128.

4 TC, p. 68.

5 Id., p. 40.

6 CTP, p. 115 (parenthesis added).

7 TC, p. 3.

8 TC, pp. 4–8; CTP, p. 127.

9 TC, p. 13; SP, p. 21.

10 LB, pp. 200–02.

11 CTP, pp. 129–30.

12 TC, p. 45.

13 LB, Ibid.

14 Id., p. 24.

15 Id., p. 25.

16 CTP, pp. 22–5.

17 For an elaboration of this point, see Merquior, J. G., Rousseau and Weber: Two Studies in the Theory of Legitimacy, London, 1980.Google Scholar

18 TC, p. 33.

19 Id., pp. 147–51.

20 Id., pp. 168, 174.

21 This point is cogently argued by Percy Cohen, S. in Modern Social Theory, London, 1968, pp. 224–27.Google Scholar

22 TC, pp. 153–58.

23 SP, p. 272.

24 TC, p. 166.

25 SP, p. 271, 273.

26 Id., p. 274.

27 Id. Ibid.

28 Cf. Smith, Anthony D., Theories of Nationalism, London, 1971, pp. 118–21.Google Scholar

29 On the overrating of ethnicity in Latin America and its mythical role, see the refreshing criticisms of Rangel, Carlos, Del Buen Salvaje al Buen Revolucionario, Caracas, 1977.Google Scholar

30 TC, p. 172.

31 Id., p. 130.

32 Eldridge, J. E. T., Sociology and Industrial Life, (Sunbury‐on‐Thames, 1971, p. 146 Google Scholar. The recent critique of Marxism in the works of Leszek Kolakowski and Lucio Colletti laid bare the essential link between the concept of alienation and dialectics as ‘historiosophy’. See Kolakowski, , Main Currents of Marxism, Oxford, 1978, vol. I, esp.Google Scholar chs. IX and XVI, and Colletti, Tra Marxismo e No, Bari, 1979, esp. chs. 1 and 2.

33 TC, p. 93.

34 Kolakowski, Main Currents…, cit., vol. III, p. 415.

35 SP, p. 39.

36 Gellner, ‘The Soviet and the Savage’ (a survey of Soviet anthropology), Times Literary Supplement, 18 October 1974, p. 1166.

37 TC, pp. 11, 47.

38 Id., p. 137, 133.

39 Id., p. 138.

40 Id., p. 135.

41 Id., p. 67.

42 CTP, ch. 3.

43 Id., pp. 39–40.

44 SP, p. 298.

45 Id., pp. 296–90, 302.

46 Id., p. 317.

47 Id., pp. 297–98.

48 CTP, p. 40; for a converging reasoning, see TC. 119.

49 CTP, pp. VIII–IX.

50 See Gellner, Ernest, ‘The Pluralist Anti‐Levellers of Prague’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 20–37, now CTP, ch. 12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51 See Gellner, Ernest, ‘From the Revolution to Liberalization’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 257–72, now SP, ch. 16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52 I am thinking of books such as Bendix’s, Reinhard Embattled Reason, New York, 1970, part III,Google Scholar and Eisenstadt’s, S. N. Tradition, Change and Modernity, New York, 1973.Google Scholar Incidentally, Eisenstadt (op. cit., p. 105) praises Gellner’s warnings (in Thought and Change, ch. 6) against confusing the traits of the first transition, those of European transition, those of any transition and the characteristics of a completed transition.

53 TC, p. 143.

54 Id., pp. 115–119.

55 cf. Plamenatz, John, Democracy and Illusion ‐an examination of certain aspects of modern democratic theory, London, 1973, pp. 200–02.Google Scholar