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

[Rakesh Bhandari]

"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