Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Foreword
- Part I The Habsburg dilemma
- 1 Swing alone or swing together
- 2 The rivals
- 3 Genesis of the individualist vision
- 4 The metaphysics of romanticism
- 5 Romanticism and the basis of nationalism
- 6 Individualism and holism in society
- 7 Crisis in Kakania
- 8 Pariah liberalism
- 9 Recapitulation
- Part II Wittgenstein
- Part III Malinowski
- Part IV Influences
- Part V Conclusions
- General bibliography
- Bibliographies of Ernest Gellner's writings on Wittgenstein, Malinowski, and nationalism
- Index
9 - Recapitulation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Foreword
- Part I The Habsburg dilemma
- 1 Swing alone or swing together
- 2 The rivals
- 3 Genesis of the individualist vision
- 4 The metaphysics of romanticism
- 5 Romanticism and the basis of nationalism
- 6 Individualism and holism in society
- 7 Crisis in Kakania
- 8 Pariah liberalism
- 9 Recapitulation
- Part II Wittgenstein
- Part III Malinowski
- Part IV Influences
- Part V Conclusions
- General bibliography
- Bibliographies of Ernest Gellner's writings on Wittgenstein, Malinowski, and nationalism
- Index
Summary
The great ideological confrontation was between the closed, cosy Community and the open, icy, individualist Society. In certain parts of the world, notably the region which concerns us, it pervaded both politics and general sensibility.
This confrontation was in a sense unreal, a case of false consciousness. It wasn't Community and Society which really confronted each other. In reality, it was stable supra-ethnic hierarchy versus mobile culturally homogeneous units, ‘nation-states’, about to become the new political order. So the apparent confrontation mirrored, in a highly distorted and misleading manner, another and real one. The real contestants were a hierarchical, stable, absolutist but morally debilitated ancien reégime and the new nationalist order, internally mobile and anonymous, but with accentuated and well-defined cultural boundaries. This new nationalist order was not universalistic but culturally specific and bounded. Thus, partly because each nationalism was defined by a shared culture and legitimated as its protector (in fact: progenitor), partly because such nationalisms were engaged in the struggle for the conversion of culturally ambiguous peasants with neighbouring rival nationalisms, the selfimage and self-presentation of the new nation-states was in terms of the model of a closed, localised culture: idiosyncratic and glorying in its idiosyncrasy, and promising emotional and aesthetic fulfilment and satisfaction to its members.
In this struggle nationalism employed the distinctive socio-metaphysic, or philosophical anthropology, provided by romanticism. Roots are everything. Those endowed with roots are healthy and vigorous, those devoid of them are pathological and indeed pathogenicpathogenic.
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- Information
- Language and SolitudeWittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma, pp. 37 - 40Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998