Culture, Identity and Politics

Gellner argues that the modern nation-state has displaced traditional structures as the primary source of cultural and personal identity. The state actively constructs the nation from above, imposing a single, homogeneous culture upon its population through control of education, museums, libraries, and archives. Nationalism is thus the political expression of industrial society's structural demand for cultural standardisation. The essays apply this framework across cases ranging from Iran and Algeria to eastern Europe and the Atlantic world, exploring how modern social orders require and permit particular forms of moral and political legitimation.

Gellner develops the idea that the state actively manufactures national culture through what he calls its control of the means of education and memory. At each school year, the state imposes its own conception of culture, using state schools, museums, libraries, and archives to control not only values but the very memory of the nation. This process constructs the nation from above, creating a unified cultural identity where none previously existed. The argument extends Gellner's earlier work by specifying the institutional mechanisms through which industrial society's demand for cultural homogeneity is met.

Culture, Identity and Politics contains a chapter explicitly titled 'Recollection in Anxiety: Thought and Change Revisited,' in which Gellner returns to the themes of his 1964 book. The 1987 volume serves as both an extension and a reconsideration of the earlier work's argument about nationalism as an unintended consequence of industrialisation. Where Thought and Change had sketched the theory in a single chapter, these essays develop its implications for questions of identity, egalitarianism, and political legitimation. The book thus offers readers a view of Gellner's thinking as it evolved between his initial statement and the fuller treatment in Nations and Nationalism (1983).

Gellner devotes a chapter to 'The Social Roots of Egalitarianism,' arguing that modern egalitarian ideals are not simply moral discoveries but structural features of industrial society. Industrialism requires a workforce that can be trained and redeployed across different roles, which presupposes a degree of cultural and educational standardisation. This creates pressures toward equality of treatment and opportunity that are functional to the industrial order. Gellner's account treats egalitarianism neither as an abstract ethical principle nor as a mere ideology, but as one of the moral and political legitimation requirements of the emerging social order.

Reviews were generally respectful but noted the volume's demanding nature. A CHOICE review observed that the book's underlying concern with nationalism is not suggested by its title, and that while the thesis about the nation-state displacing traditional identity sources is not necessarily new, its cumulative impact demonstrates keen understanding of modernity's dynamics. The same reviewer warned that the book is not a primer of political sociology but a history of ideas requiring a solid grasp of the intellectual tradition Gellner critiques, frustrating introductory students but rewarding graduate readers. A Political Studies review by Alan Bairner also appeared in 1988.

Culture, Identity and Politics is a collection of eleven essays, most previously published, rather than a unified monograph. The essays range across diverse topics: a humorous pastiche of national stereotypes, the paradoxes of modern nationalism, Hannah Arendt's relationship to Enlightenment ideals, Iranian Shi'ite political leadership, and the nature of disenchantment. Reviewers noted this fragmentary structure, with one describing the introductory allegory as beguiling but misleading for readers expecting a systematic treatment. The volume is best approached as a series of provocations and refinements rather than as Gellner's definitive statement on nationalism, which remains Nations and Nationalism.