Paul Mattick, Jr. on Ernest Gellner - "Blaming Wittgenstein" (NYT Book Review)

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Sun Jan 17 20:10:10 PST 1999


"Where Wittgenstein insisted that one can understand culture only from within, Malinowski studied it from without, regarding it, Gellner suggests, from the viewpoint of the colonial administrator, whose own culture claimed the transcendent status of science. The political consequence Malinowski drew from his anthropology was the need for a supranational authority that would limit national sovereignty while respecting freedom of cultural expression. Gellner concedes that this idea may not be realistic, but it is, he insists, ''our only hope.'' Gellner, surprisingly, does not consider the possible source of Malinowski's politics in the empire of his origin as well as the British one in which he spent most of his life."

So if it took someone (Malinowski) steeped in the tradition of colonial administration to achieve the proper scientific impartiality to subject the cultural givens of "savages" to critical reconstruction by way of the use of "alien" analytical categories, doesn't that imply that there must be a Leninist vanguard composed of philosophers dedicated to the principles of scientific socialism for there to be a critical investigation of "bourgeois" thought and society? Is that what why Gellner did not subject his own society to "anthropological" scrutiny-- he would have been forced to become a member of the Leninist vanguard. He would have had to become a Bolshevik sociologist just like Pierre Bourdieu.

best, rakesh



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