Platonism

Classics, social anthropology and the Enlightenment

Gellner was certainly not unknown among classicists. Keith Hopkins, at this time professor of ancient history in Cambridge and a co-fellow at King’s College, was among those thanked in the preface to Plough, Sword and Book. But his interests in historical sociology were more those of illuminating concrete and detailed cases from Roman history with the tools of sociological explanation rather than the macro-categories of philosophical history (e.g. Hopkins, 1978, 1983). The former level of generalization was in itself quite controversial enough within a discipline given, as most of the humanities, to micro-study, of single localities or single texts. It was, therefore, another aspect of Gellner’s work that would come to have a more immediate impact on students of the Greeks and Romans: social anthropology. Gellner’s field work (1969) among the Berber population of the Atlas and the living saints, mediating conflicts between neighbouring tribes was almost bound to draw the attention of a generation of scholars fascinated by everything anthropological. That came in the work of Peter Brown (1981: 10 n41; 1982: 12). About to spearhead a revolution in the study of late antiquity and turn the discipline as a whole towards cultural history, he put the emergence of ‘the holy man’ as a key figure of late Roman society firmly on the agenda (1971, 1981). As power, earthly and divine, became more absolute and distantly elevated, people needed intermediaries who could help resolve conflicts and tensions within and among communities. This was where the holy man came in. In those terms, the model seems broadly inspired by and identical with that proposed by Gellner for the role of the living saints within the tribal society of the Berbers.

In epistemology and macro-historical framework, though, there were important differences. These came to the fore in an (unannounced) clash in 1981. This was the year when Gellner published Muslim Society, a collection of studies which opened with by an attempt to combine David Hume’s philosophy of religion and Ibn Khaldun’s cyclical interpretation of tribal power in the historical Maghreb into a general analysis of Muslim civilization. It can hardly have been by coincidence that Brown, in two collections of studies from the same and the following year, included a lengthy critique of precisely what he saw as the harmful influence exercised by Hume’s philosophy on the study of (Roman) religion (1981: 12–22; 1982: 10–21). The 18th-century Scottish philosopher had with respect to religion identified ‘a kind of flux and reflux in the human mind, and that men have a natural tendency to rise from idolatry to theism, and to sink again from theism into idolatry’ (1993: 158). Gellner made this observation a corner-stone of his interpretation; it corresponded well with the tension that he had encountered in his fieldwork, between Islam as a strictly monotheist, scripturally regimented set of beliefs, a stable, standardized idiom transcending place, and the many heterodox local practices current within a largely illiterate Berber society (1981: 50–6; 1969: 5–12, 33, ch. 5).

However, the distinction between a high and a low tradition was precisely what provoked the ire of Brown: ‘This is hardly a model calculated to see the best in the springing up around the Late Antique Mediterranean world of impenitently concretized loci of the holy, drawing great crowds, in the wake of the spread of Christianity, the theistic system par excellence.’ Against the analysis of a Hume – rational, distancing, critical – an appeal was made to Spinoza and his call not to judge, but simply to understand (1982: 10, 21). Brown was, in other words, inclining more towards a Geertzian hermeneutics and its determination to treat cultures holistically, to become absorbed in their fullness through the thick description of local societies, and to find meaning. The dismissive reaction of Brown was spawned by the, in his eyes, overconfident Enlightenment stance and cultural arrogance in Hume’s text. Critical and pejorative comments, apt to call a cultural historian up in arms, certainly abound throughout the essay, for instance about the vulgarity of ‘popular religion’, or about ‘popery’ and its many saints that had made ‘whippings and fastings, cowardice and humility, abject submission and slavish obedience … the means of obtaining celestial honours among mankind’ (1993: 164).

But Gellner’s reading of Hume was cooler, less involved, more perceptive, and, not least, more attuned to discerning internal hierarchy, division and conflict in cultures. He saw Hume’s theory as based on the difference between book culture, for most of history the preserve of an elite minority, and the oral and ritually transmitted culture of the illiterate majority. These two realms could by no means be assumed to be wholly overlapping, let alone harmoniously united. In the same years, Carlo Ginzburg (1976) made his name by the study of Menocchio, the Italian miller. This character of the 16th century had, in the wake of the book printing revolution, been one of many commoners to swell the ranks of reading society, only to draw the attention of the Inquisition by his untrained, highly unconventional and unorthodox understanding of the truths contained in the books.

So if Gellner’s intellectual style, compared to Brown (and Geertz), was more analytical and critical, seeking explanation rather than understanding, it was much closer to that of another prominent ancient historian, Moses Finley (1912–86). Both liked to grace their texts with engaging references to luminaries such as Hume or Fustel de Coulanges; both relished argument and debate; and both were heavily inspired by Weberian comparative, historical sociology. ¹ With Finley being one of the most influential ancient historians of the past century, the ground ought to have been prepared for a more ready reception. But precisely at this moment, the wider master-narrative to which they both subscribed was coming under renewed and intensified attack. Indeed, Finley and Gellner themselves could arguably be seen as part of this process, questioning and challenging traditional narratives of historical development, of the rise of ‘the West’ and of rationality.

There were, however, many in some respects more radical voices. Paul Veyne, the French historical sociologist of Greco-Roman antiquity, had made a Weberian start, but as the 1970s moved on he turned to Foucault, the exponent of anti-Enlightenment (Veyne, 1978). ² So did many others. In the beginning it looked as if the big narrative was dead. From now on, only small, fragmented stories were possible. This was the battle-cry of the postmodernists. Inspired by Foucault, Edward Said questioned the capacity of western scholarship to study and represent the societies of the Middle East and the Orient. Their work had served as tools of western, imperialist domination by caging people of these societies within a cultural stereotype of a stagnant and pliable Orient; it was time to shed the yoke, break down the barrier between us and them and let the people of the Middle East speak for themselves (Said, 1978, 1993). Soon Bruno Latour (1991) would add to this his observation that ‘we have never been modern’. The sharp distinctions that most theories of societal development posited between the modern and the pre-modern world could not stand up to scrutiny. The notion of a radical break or rupture was a fiction; history knew only seamless development. While offering some genuine insights, both positions are easily exaggerated and may even be disorienting. How else to characterize the economic surge that China and the Asian Tigers have been and still are going through than by words such as break or rupture (cf. Mahbubani, 2013)? Or the global population rush to the big cities that we are seeing in these years? If the views represented by Said and Latour have been influential, therefore, it has not really been in undermining macro-historical inquiry or macro-sociological frameworks. Quite the contrary, it has been by provoking a new and intensified debate about the process of modernization on a global scale.

The new discourse on world history

The stakes of this debate can be gleaned from Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000). The big question of Weber, and of the other classic theorists of modernity, had been how to explain the leap of (western) Europe into modern conditions. But the resulting theory is not so much wrong, reads the nuanced argument, as it is simply inadequate as a guide for people faced with the challenge of creating development and autonomy in countries with a very different historical experience, such as India or China. The conditions from which they have had to start are far from identical; and the European theories have to be broadened to include their experience and help them identify, or even recognize, dynamic forces in their own societies from which they can build (2000: 237–55). ³ Provincializing Europe, to put it bluntly, means not writing Europe or the West out of the global historical experience, such as some of the more politically correct occasionally give the impression, but rather to delimit the story about the rise of the West, cut it down to size, not take its truths for given and place it in a wider world historical context. In fact, Weber had already been on to this, with his enquiries into the world religions. But the answers are bound to have changed from a century ago, for two reasons. The global predominance of the West turned out to be much more precarious than it seemed to Weber’s generation in the heyday of colonialism, a temporary phenomenon rather than a civilizational accomplishment set in stone. Scholarship on China and India has also developed infinitely since the early 20th century. Plough, Sword and Book was published just before these trends would coalesce to set off a major debate among world historians about the character of the developments that led to the modern world.

The epicentre of these discussions is marked by Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence (2000). This commanding work sets up a comparison between early-modern Europe and China to argue that the economic and institutional differences between these two macro-regions in the 18th century were trifling. If western Europe, led by Britain, would go on to industrialize, it was not due to the emergence of new and more dynamic modes of organizing markets, production and society at large, but primarily a matter of chance. Easy access to the relatively scarcely populated continent of North America and rich deposits of coal on the British Isles – only these gifts of fortune enabled the United Kingdom to transform its economy from an agricultural to an industrial one. The new world provided the old with agricultural substitute resources as they transferred their own to the needs of industry. Lacking such ‘windfall’ resources, China, stuck with a growing population, was forced to remain in agricultural production. So the Middle Kingdom was inescapably pulled into stagnation and the Malthusian trap, as Europe rushed ahead during the 19th century.

While Pomeranz’s views have been hotly debated, ⁴ another train of thought, a close affinity, has emerged to describe the early-modern as a global era rather than a predominantly Euro-Atlantic phenomenon (Porter, 2012). ⁵ Immediately, however, this gives rise to the question of how to demarcate such a global epoch. One recent attempt suggests expanding not just its geographical boundaries but also its chronological reach to include the 11th/12th century. But why stop there? Historians of other epochs show an equal attachment to the ‘early-modern’. Many historians of Rome claim that the economy of the ancient empire best resembles that of early-modern Europe (Pleket, 1991; Harris, 2013; Temin, 2013). More radical still is Jack Goody, the predecessor of Gellner as professor of social anthropology in Cambridge. In a number of works (best in 1996), he has presented an argument that the decisive development was the Bronze Age urban revolution. Across Eurasia societies got to share in this development and similar forms of social complexity arose which would eventually usher in modernity. Sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, never fully went through this revolution and has therefore had greater difficulties adapting to modernity.

Somehow early-modern Europe has, in this discourse, been pressed into service as the standard of choice against which most other pre-industrial societies are measured. This is a considerable paradox for a historiography that aims for a less Eurocentric vision of the course of history. Apparently the rest of the world has to be fitted to a template provided by Europe, and reduced to its well-known patterns. World history can do better than that. If, by widening our notion of the early-modern, the period can be extended almost ad infinitum, it bespeaks the difficulty of organizing most of pre-industrial history in a meaningful way along these lines. What would be early-modern in such a story? Not extending but sharpening our understanding of the early-modern: that really is what is called for. And that is precisely what the most convincing replies to the position represented by Pomeranz and other like-minded scholars have attempted. The result has been a new macro-historical narrative which is both careful not to read any kind of western ‘superiority’ too far back into history or make it a general phenomenon and to remain sensitive to dynamics in non-western societies. From this perspective, the rise of the West was a history which only gradually began to unfold as a number of quite specific developments, in state-formation, organization of markets and the production of knowledge, combined during the early-modern era and slowly gained momentum. The societies that mastered these changes were invested with a comparative advantage that during the long 19th century enabled them to achieve a form of global predominance and establish overseas colonial empires. Moreover, colonial government was not simply imposed on a set of stagnant, passive societies. Response was quick, though not always successful, and often Europeans were able to take advantage of dynamic developments in the overseas territories in laying the foundations of their colonizing projects. The modern world developed as a global process, not merely a European affair (Bayly, 2004; Darwin, 2007; Lieberman, 2009: 77–122).

From ‘early modernities’ to Platonism

So far, then, the world history discourse has focused, in various ways, on narrowing the role of Europe and reducing it to manageable proportions. But if this is so, the logical next step must be to remove the development of modernity, spearheaded by Europe, from our models as the implicit telos of most of history, its organizing principle. Only late did that story begin to dominate. For the ages before, world history was shaped by other forces, trends and dynamics, but which? In a set of illuminating and suggestive comparisons of early-modern Europe and China, Bin Wong showed how China seemed to be lacking some of the emerging modern features of European societies. But, he was at the same time careful to point out where the Europeans seemed to have ‘failed’ to develop some of the policies and goals of the Chinese. The agrarian ‘celestial empire’ had its own developmental logic; it was not a failed attempt at modernity (Bin Wong, 1997). This is where Gellner’s wider historical sociology seems, perhaps, more relevant than ever. One of the original features of Plough, Sword and Book was exactly to insist that modernity developed more by accident than design; it was an unexpected ‘miracle’, not the result of a long, linear, logical progression (1988: ch. 6; cf. Crone, 1989: ch. 8). The agrarian societies, however, which preceded this accidental breakthrough were not to be mistaken for primitive – a common fallacy. To be sure, they had a predominantly agrarian economy, but they were highly complex, often with extensive urbanization, state-formation and use of writing. These societies, thus, were not examples of agrarian stagnation, arrested in their natural progress towards modernization; they developed according to a logic of their own (1988: ch. 3). As the world historians have pointed out, in many respects that logic remained broadly comparable across Eurasia from the emergence of civilization till the dawn of modernity.

Gellner relied on Plato and his philosophy to identify the basic characteristics of these so-called ‘agro-literate’ societies. At first, this may come as a surprise. In his discussion of Muslim civilization, Ibn Khaldun had functioned as the preferred guide. But for a wider sociology of complex agrarian societies, the experience of Khaldun was too limited, based as it was on the unstable power relations of tribal societies. The stability of the Ottoman Empire, for instance, defied the Khaldunian prediction of government consisting of a quick succession of tribal dynasties. The Ottomans represented an alternative form of power, namely that of government over large, sedentarized peasant populations (Gellner, 1981: 73–7). Among world historians, in whose works the tribal nomad conquerors of Central Asia often play a key role, some have for the same reasons begun to talk of a transition to post-nomadic, stable imperial rule (Wink, 2011; Gommans, 2007). The mechanism of the latter has perhaps most strikingly been captured in the formula of Tacitus, the Roman historian: ‘No peace can be had among the peoples without arms, nor arms without pay to the soldiers and no pay without taxes.’ ⁶ In the Ottoman Empire, as Gellner liked to point out, the same ‘social contract’ came to expression in the theory of the circle of equity (1988: 156). ⁷ For Gellner, however, the choice of Plato as the overarching theorist seems natural, both in the light of the prominent role the Greek philosopher had been given in Popper’s work on the open society but, perhaps, just as much because of the role Greek philosophy had come to play within the Islamic tradition. Its philosophers of the 10th to 12th centuries had analysed the Muslim umma in the terms of Plato’s politics, as an expression of his ideal city (state) (Crone, 2004: ch. 14). If Platonism had once before proven its worth in a sort of cross-civilizational analysis, it ought to be a powerful pointer for someone seeking a ‘generic blue-print’ of agro-literate societies. The strong dialogue with Gellner’s ideas on the pre-industrial world which has unfolded in the work of the Islamic scholar Patricia Crone offers ample confirmation of this expectation (Crone, 1989).

In the Politeia, commonly referred to as The Republic, Plato famously makes Socrates discuss the constitution of a just society. Justice, he established, requires that everyone gets to do what they are best at (II, 370a–376c). This meant that society should be based on a normative division of labour where the noblest spirits would rule and those less elevated would belong to the producing classes, the majority of whom were peasants. The rulers again would be divided between those that served to guard society from outside military threats and the wisest who would cultivate philosophy and decide over government. The well-worn medieval metaphor of plough, sword and book, used in the title, is easily discernible here. But, of course, Gellner used the Platonic version to anything but trivial effect. Plato’s philosophy provided him with an elaborate and sophisticated discussion of the challenges and character of literary culture, of the formation of political elites and of urban communities in a world based on the extraction of rent from peasant producers. In his work on nationalism, Gellner summarized this in an illustration of agro-literate society where locally bounded peasant communities were ruled by a narrow band of elites participating in translocal, universalizing networks (see figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

General form of the social structure of agrarian societies (Gellner, 1983:9).

To the student of Greco-Roman society Gellner’s take on Platonism is an unexpected turn, a thought-provoking challenge. Finley, for instance, never tired of reminding classicists not to mistake Plato’s moralizing writings for the views typical of the ancient city-state (1985: 37–8) – and Plato would have agreed. Perfection belonged to the realm of ideas; in the world of mundane existence, these ideas were present only as pale reflections, mere shadows (The Republic VII, 514a–520a). Reality always fell short of the stable, eternal order eulogized in his and the writings of other lettered people across pre-industrial society. Corruption, we would say change, was everywhere. The most significant deviation from sociological Platonism or even obstacle, Finley would have further pointed out, was the widespread inclusion of the peasantry in political life (1983: 15; further Hansen, 2006). Much to the dismay of Plato and his ilk, in many a classical city-state the peasantry had managed to gain the vote and was capable of influencing politics, most famously, of course, in the Athenian democracy and in the Roman Republic. Could it be, by some ironic twist, that Plato is a better guide to the Muslim caliphate than his own world?

As world history has moved higher on the agenda, Gellner’s historical sociology is now beginning to find a reception among Greco-Roman historians, particularly with an interest in state formation and cross-cultural comparison (Bang, 2014; Scheidel, 2013). Among those, Ian Morris (2009, 2013) has taken up the challenge to discuss how the Athenian democracy, the seeming crux, can be illuminated by Gellner’s agrarian sociology. Athens, and its democracy, came out of the Persian wars of the early 5th century as the leading Hellenic power. Through the Delian League, it organized the defence of the city-states around the Aegean against the mighty Achaemenid Empire. In some respects, by including the commoners in politics, Athens seems to deviate from the Platonic pattern and begins to resemble a modern state, characterized in Gellner’s scheme precisely by the full integration of the people. But there were some important constraints.

The other side of the story of the successful liberation of the peasantry is the prominent position of chattel slavery. It was the extensive availability of slave labour to the aristocracy that made it possible for them to make do without manning their estates with the free population. Consequently, the latter were available for military service on the basis of which they could demand political rights. As the 5th century wore on, Athens began to transform its leadership of the Delian League into imperial domination or, as Morris prefers, an Aegean multi-city state. But to do so effectively, it would have been necessary to co-opt the political elites across the membership poleis. Rome, for instance, pursued a policy of extending citizenship to newly incorporated populations with great success. In practice, however, it was difficult for the democracy to extend rights to such groups because this might reduce the ability of the city population to keep the benefits of the empire to themselves and guard the value of their political rights. Instead the Athenian democratic citizenry was turning into a narrow ruling clique over their former allies, now increasingly tax-paying subjects. But this invited resistance, both from Athens’ rivals and from its ‘new’ subjects. Eventually the Athenian attempt to create a state or mini-empire was cut short on the battlefield with the defeat in the Peloponnesian War of 404 BC. Had it won, on the other hand, it was clear that the larger Aegean state would have resembled the pattern described by Gellner for pre-industrial society much more closely – with the Athenian citizenry acting as the limited ruling class ‘lording it’ over locally segregated communities. High integration, as Gellner would say, was only possible on a fairly local scale in the agrarian world. The ideal polis could not expand too much without losing cohesion – this was clear to Plato too. Aristotle, in his discussion of the polis, expanded the argument with a long rejection of empire – only moderately-sized states could achieve ‘well-ordered government’. ⁸

It is worth mentioning that city-states were often able to reach very high military participation ratios. The citizenry was essentially the adult male population available for army service. From that perspective, the polis enjoyed some of the same advantages found among nomadic tribes. Both types of political community were, at times, capable of very intensive military mobilization (Gellner, 1981: 20; Finley, 1983: 16–23). ⁹ Normally, however, this did not have more than local effect. As with most tribes, the vast majority of city-states were very small communities and hence of limited total strength. But given the right circumstances, a particularly large city-state might transform itself into a mighty conquering force (Scheidel, forthcoming; Hopkins, 1978: ch. 1). That force finally emerged when Rome managed to build a large military coalition of Italian communities (Rosenstein, 2009: 29–34; cf. Momigliano, 1971: 41–6) with effects not unlike those of some of the huge tribal coalitions known from world history, but of greater stability. In the long run, much as the Greeks had celebrated their victories over the mighty Achaemenids in both poetry and prose, extensive empire seems to have enjoyed a comparative advantage over the polis. What vast empires lacked in intensive capacity they made up for by sheer size. But as the conquering armies vastly expanded the possessions of Rome, the most prominent victim of successful and sustained imperialism was the Republican city-state constitution at home (Woolf, 2012: chs. 7 & 9) – just as the Athenian case would lead us to expect. To consolidate imperial power, the open political participation of the (vastly expanded) Roman citizenry in politics had to give way to an absolutist monarchy (Bang, 2013).

The intensive mobilization of the Italian peasantry was gradually phased out as the emperors relied on a standing professional army, mostly stationed in the provinces, and ruled in alliance with aristocratic groups across their extensive territorial dominions. This was the recipe for stable imperial rule; it was also a sign, as Walter Scheidel has remarked, that the Roman city-state empire was beginning to look more like other monarchical empires, such as the Chinese, which had been forming more or less contemporaneously at the eastern extremity of Eurasia. With empire, Rome was becoming normalized (Scheidel, 2009: 17–18). One could also simply state that the logic of agrarian empire drove the Romans to converge towards the norm of Gellner’s sociological Platonism: rule by extensive, transregional elite networks over organizationally segregated and localised peasant communities (Bang, 2010).

Elite formation: The Platonic solution and the Aristotelean

One of the particular attractions of Plato’s philosophy to Gellner was the discussion in The Politics of the constitution of the political elite, the class of philosophical guardians, how to safeguard its cohesion and integrity. Plato’s answer had been given with uncompromising philosophical rigour, which deserves to be quoted at length:

But we further agreed that this unity is the greatest blessing for a state, and we compared a well-governed state to the human body in its relation to the pleasure and pain of its parts. ‘And we were right in so agreeing.’ ‘Then, in turn, the cause of the greatest blessing for a state has been shown to us to be the community of women and children among the helpers.’ ‘Quite so,’ he said. ‘And this is consistent with what we said before. For we said, I believe, that these helpers must not possess houses of their own or land or any other property, but that they should receive from the other citizens for their support the wage of their guardianship and all spend it in common. That was the condition of their being true guardians.’ ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Is it not true, then, as I am trying to say, that those former and these present prescriptions tend to make them still more truly guardians and prevent them from distracting the city by referring “mine” not to the same but to different things, one man dragging off to his own house anything he is able to acquire apart from the rest and another doing the same to his own separate house, and having women and children apart, thus introducing into the state the pleasures and pains of individuals? They should all rather, we said, share one conviction about their own, tend to one goal, and so far as practicable have one experience of pleasure and pain.’ ¹⁰

Celibate clerics, slave soldiers, eunuchs – such creatures could, more than other office-holders, be made to belong to their institution since their capacity to form families and households of their own had been curtailed. The central role of the Janissary corps, the trained servants of the sultan’s household, in the Ottoman Empire constituted, perhaps, the favourite example of such ‘Platonic’ elite formation in Gellner’s ‘book’ (1981: 23). But, the Janissaries also exemplify how difficult it was to uphold this institution in pure form. Soon these people began to find ways of acquiring family, property and privileges of their own. ¹¹ Household slaves, eunuchs and the like, therefore, rarely became the norm. They formed part of the repertoire of state-power in many pre-industrial societies. Court eunuchs were an important instrument for the Chinese emperor, and the same goes for the slaves and freedmen of the Roman emperors (Dettenhofer, 2009). But as a general solution, it was too extreme, as Aristotle remarked in his modifying discussion of Plato. One should allow to the political leaders both property and family, but then expect them to put these resources at the service of state and community. A noble education was to ensure that the ruling class would behave as a proper aristocracy (Politics II, i–ii, 10). One way or another, it was such an Aristotelian arrangement that was normally predominant. The Chinese gentry, combining access to land with Confucian learning, would be a case in point; or the many landowners that governed local communities across the Roman Empire while cultivating a measure of Greek and Latin literature (Bang and Turner, 2015). ¹²

In the real world, however, this did leave one problem: how to maintain the stability of a select ruling group within a city-state, how to prevent it from degenerating. Even more than Plato, Aristotle was keenly aware of the imperfections and instability of politics. Aristocrats or oligarchs constantly risked being toppled by the majority population or by a rival faction in the many small urban communes making up his world (Politics V, v–vi 8; Finley, 1983: 105–6). But here the coming of empire turned out to be an unrecognized boon (cf. Hansen, 2006: 124–5). Philosophy was, in the end, saved by the historical phenomena. The local aristocrats, preferred as the collaborators of Roman government, became part of a much wider imperial network. This propped up their position within their communities; help could often be relied upon from the web of imperial power if things threatened to get out of hand. The Roman army served as the ultimate guarantor of the aristocratic order. From a Gellnerian perspective, this is just as we would expect with the noble and privileged classes benefitting from their ability to tap into wider networks of power in order to maintain rule over more locally bounded communities of peasants. In the best tradition of Aristotle and Plato, these landowning elites may have gone on to cherish a notion of freedom and independence in ritual and writing, but under Roman rule the cities thrived as never before. Aristocrats invested heavily in urban infrastructure to spruce up the monumental layout and cultural amenities to bask in the splendour of their polis and life-form (Bang, 2013: 438–40).