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Ryland Lu
History 191C
The Philosopher and the Historian: Ernest Gellner vs. Eric Hobsbawm on Nationalism

Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1983.

Hobsbawm, Eric. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

I. Background, Introduction and Questions

In comparing Eric Hobsbawm’s study on the origins and evolution of nationalism to that of Ernest
Gellner, this review offers a point of introspection on two prominent representatives of a wave of
academic writing on nationalism, as a political principle binding western nation-states, in the late
twentieth century. As Hobsbawm himself comments (H.* 4-6), the number of works dealing with nation-
states and national movements in the final three decades of the late twentieth century far exceeds that of
any earlier period, drawing the attention of an array of social scientists and historians. Writing within
seven years of Gellner, Hobsbawm directly takes note of the former, addressing and incorporating some
of the former’s key concepts. Beyond the textual intersections, the two scholars’ lives offer parallels that
are equally pertinent to an academic study of nationalism. Raised in the Central European capitals of
Prague and Berlin (respectively) in the 1930s, Hobsbawm1 and Gellner2 each experienced first-hand the
rise of the fanatic racial nationalism of Germany’s Nazi party, which forced each into permanent exile in
Britain. Hobsbawm, who joined a socialist youth organization in his last days in Berlin3, became a
lifelong member of the Communist party of the United Kingdom whereas Gellner, who witnessed the
rise of a Stalinist dictatorship upon his postwar return to Prague2, nurtured a life-long suspicion of
Marxism. Although Hobsbawm fundamentally worked within the discipline of history, Gellner started
his career as a member of the Anthropology faculty at the London School of Economics and later joined
the faculty at Cambridge as Professor of Philosophy, Logic and the Scientific Method2. My comparative
study of the works of these esteemed British academics will focus on the similarities and differences in
their approach to the origins and evolution of nationalism with an eye to the differing trajectories of
each’s life experience and academic career. This not only entails examining the broad answers and
formulas they give for the questions of how and why nationalism evolved but the methods that they use
to obtain these. I am particularly interested in the way in which Gellner’s and Hobsbawm’s different
academic disciplines, their differing attitudes towards Marxism and their common experience as central
European exiles influenced their work.
*Note: “H.” in parenthetical citations always stands for Hobsbawm, referring to Hobsbawm’s Nations and
Nationalism. (see above) “Gellner” always refers to Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism.
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II. Nationalism as a concept: definitions, location and attitude

In defining nationalism, Hobsbawm explicitly cites Gellner’s definition of a principle holding that the
“state and nation should be congruent.” Hobsbawm, like Gellner, challenges the sacrality of specific
nationalisms by noting that these are social constructions that are neither primordial (Gellner 129) nor
inherently distinguishable. (Hobsbawm 6, 10) The key question for each therefore pertains not to the
formation of the nation so much as that of “nationalism” as a political and philosophical
conceptualization. In doing so, both follow a relatively constructivist approach (though Gellner more so
than Hobsbawm). Gellner more explicitly postulates nationalism as a direct “effect of industrial social
organization” but Hobsbawm, according greater room for ideas, emphasizes the role of economic and
political changes -for instance, the need of strong democratic states to develop a sense of cohesion and
loyalty with their citizens (Hobsbawm 89)- in the process.
Historically speaking, Gellner and Hobsbawm locate the origins of nationalism within the period of
19th-century industrialization in Western Europe, the region where nationalism has achieved the fullest
fruition. Both Gellner and Hobsbawm attribute the evident lack of success of puristic nationalism in
Africa (whose state system follows colonial boundaries) to a perceived negative (“non-white” (Gellner
83)) identity of the continent’s anti-colonialist movements. (Hobsbawm 139, Gelln. 83) Gellner, with a
background in the study of Islam, delivers a rather sophisticated commentary on the capacity for the
“Protestant,” doctrinal variety of Islam (with its emphasis on individual obedience of the scripture) to
replace “secular” nationalism in the Middle East as the “high culture” of industrial political units.
(Gellner 79-80) However, neither pays attention to such clearly-marked nationalisms as those binding
nation-states in East Asia or Southeast Asia, even though the nationalisms of the former group of
countries are amongst the most vociferous in the world today. The two scholars’ lacuna of knowledge
about this region implies what Dipesh Chakrabarty describes as the “master narrative” of European
history by which historians and social scientists of Western background use Europe as their focal point
for the world4 (Gellner and Hobsbawm, as Europeans raised in an era when Europe-though declining-
still dominated much of what is now called the “third world,” would seem especially prone to this bias):
such an outlook impairs the perceived objectivity of both analyses in attempting to thoroughly cover as
universal of a phenomenon as coverage of nationalism.
In examining Europe’s nationalism, moreover, both scholars make a distinction between the 19th-
century nationalism of the Western European core (or “liberal” nationalism (H 30, Gellner 94)) and the
later-developing nationalisms of the European peripheries (“Hapsburg” or “ethno-linguistic” nationalism
(G 94, H 10)). Both express a latent preference for the former type-which resulted in the unification of
Italy and Germany-over the latter, whose arbitrary imposition requires a degree of “forceful cultural
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engineering” (Gellner 101) in the words of Gellner. Hobsbawm more discreetly describes the small-state
peripheral nationalisms-including Western separatist nationalisms such as the Basque and Fleming
movements (H 119-20)-as abandoning a “threshold principle” of economically-viable territory and
incorporating linguistic and ethnic factors into their national concept. (H 30, 33) However, the great
Western European nationalisms provide plenty of examples of chauvinism even in the “liberal” heyday
(for instance, the support for a “Great Germany” by the 1848 Frankfurt Parliament (Blackbourn 120))
and the distinctions made by the two reflect, to a degree, on their personal biases. Hobsbawm, having
become a Marxist amidst the fall of Weimar, expressed a constant commitment to the internationalist
idea of “World Revolution”1 and in its absence, he preferred limiting the spread of nationalism as a
political beyond where it was already established.5 (i.e. in the existing, stable nation-states) Gellner’s
deriding discussion of “Habsburg” nationalism more overtly reveals his disappointment with the
excesses of postwar Czech nationalism, whose proponents allied with Soviet totalitarianism while
seeking to expel the native German population, that he witnessed upon a brief postwar return to Prague
in 1946. (Hall 28)

III. Structure and Trajectory

The similarities between the conceptualizations of nationalism by Gellner and Hobsbawm however, get
obscured by their differing methods of analysis. Hobsbawm provides a linear chronology of
nationalism’s development since the early nineteenth-century, analyzing the concept’s evolution in
response to changing events, trends and ideas. His first chapter, “the Nation as Novelty,” introduces the
political meaning of the word “nation” as a nineteenth-century invention before examining the
distinctions between the “revolutionary” (H. 20) and “classical liberal” (H. 37) varieties of nationalism
arising in the late Enlightenment and that of today. In the next two chapters, he moves back to examine
popular “proto-nationalist” sentiments based on common language, religion (e.g. Irish Catholicism) or
state unity before discussing the role of modernizing 19th-century governments in harnessing national
sentiments for voter loyalty and cohesion. With formative trends established, the final three chapters
temporally progress from the rise of modern “ethnic” and “linguistic” nationalisms (i.e. in their full-
fledged form) in the Belle Epoque, to the political foundation of a Europe of nation-states following the
Treaty of Versailles (a period when nationalism was “popularized” and “internationalized”), to the final
epoch of globalization where he concludes, based on trends of global economic integration and ethnic
plurality within states, that nationalism has lost its role as a “vector of historical development.” (H. 163)
Gellner’s work on the other hand, entails the holistic construction and analysis of a social model. After
defining the nation in the first chapter (“Definitions”) as based on culture and a sense of members’ self-
belonging, Gellner distinguishes between pre-modern “agrarian societies” (which culturally differentiate
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between select ruling or administrative castes and isolated groups of producers (Chapter 2)) and
“industrial societies” (where a mobile mass of individuals enjoying equal social status but engaged in
highly specialized and complex activities of economic production requires a standard, readily
understandable cultural “idiom” (Chapter 3)). Thus, he can describe “nationalism” (Chapter 4) as that
standard cultural idiom serving the needs of a complex industrial society whose political realization
through human will produces nations. (Chapter 5) Agrarian individuals filtering into an industrial
society can take on a widely-used, well-established cultural idiom to join the economy (“assimilate”) or-
if enough share a culture differing from that of the ruling class-can establish a “rival” nationalism, a
danger which can be heightened if the ruling class discriminates on the basis of cultural differences.
(Chapter 6) Characterizing societies on the basis of intersecting social cleavages of power, education and
culture, Gellner fits the rise of “nationalism” into a comprehensive “typology” of modern societies.
(Chapter 7) He concludes (Chapter 8), similarly to Hobsbawm, on nationalism in the present (post-
industrial) era, asserting (as if having established a law of nature) that the “economic infrastructure” of
industrial societies will continue to “require” (Gellner 120-1) the cultural standardization of a political
entity offered by nationalism into the near future.
The modular equation by which Gellner sequences his book reveals a contrast with Hobsbawm in the
method in which he expresses his theory on nationalism. Hobsbawm, for one, places facts-thinkers,
ideas, events-at the center of his work. When discussing the role of language in proto-nationalism (H.
50-3) or the causes of the xenophobic “divisive” nationalism of the late twentieth century first world (H.
164), for instance, he starts off by laying out the question or topic at hand before delving into various
case studies and only after thorough analysis does he draw multi-faceted conclusions (e.g. language
feeds into nationalism in places where it sets populations apart (H. 50-3)). Gellner, on the other hand
builds his model on the basis of broad, theoretical constructs that are assumed rather than proven. When
introducing the “Industrial Society,” he first acknowledges that “the origins are in dispute” but then,
without mention of a single validating statistic or occurrence (taking the supposed transition for granted),
moves into the realm of philosophy (Weber’s concept of “rationality” and Hume’s concept of
“causation”) to portray the industrial social order characteristic of increased mobility and a changing
division of labor. (Gellner 18-24) Pieces of evidence appear fleetingly where they surface (e.g. a quote
by Ferhat Abbas to show the novelty of Algerian nationalism-as a reaction to French colonialism
(Gellner 73)) but allegories-to “cultivated” and “wild” gardens or to “blue people” who are genetically
entropy resistant-are rich and frequent. (Gellner 50-1, 69-70) Elsewhere, Gellner makes use of abstract
logic, applying transitive properties to (established) truth to reveal further truth: for example, he asserts
that “when general social conditions make for standardized, homogenized, centrally-sustained high
cultures...under these conditions and these conditions only can nations be defined.” (Gellner 55) The
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thought impresses but the lack of hard evidence of the statement’s magnitude leaves the latter open to
question. Gellner’s tendency to rely on hypothetical reasoning rather than hard evidence says less about
the quality of Gellner’s research than about Gellner’s training, as an undergraduate and doctoral student
at Cambridge, in philosophy. (Hall 33, 37-8) As a student, Gellner corresponded with the likes of the
rationalist philosopher Karl Popper (Hall 43-4) and his first book called Words and Things, challenged
the paradigm of the immutability of concepts on which linguistic philosophy based itself. (Hall 107-110)
Gellner’s strong interest in empirical observation (Hall 214) ultimately led him to projects focused on
human society, but in social studies by Gellner on Islam, for instance, critics have called out his
sweeping, distanced modeling as “thinking at a level of generality immune to empirical refutation” (Hall
302) -an accusation that would be highly fitting for a purist logician or philosopher.
In contrast, Hobsbawm defined the role of a “historian” against that of social scientists (though those
mostly of a more quantitative mold than Gellner’s) as one fundamentally concerned with “what actually
happened6”—demanding that models and patterns be used merely as tools to convey the essential
question of events bounded by chronological time. Hobsbawm did indeed criticize those historians (e.g.
of the German Rankeian tradition) who stuck to the plain facts and events, instead offering a vision of a
“social history”7 that could reach conclusions about broad patterns in society through drawing on
disciplines as diverse as economics and literature. More specifically, as an academic follower of Marx,
Hobsbawm took up the notion that societies could be analyzed as “system of relations” with a “base
(based on economic relations) and superstructure,8” for instance relating the growth of state
bureaucracies to the rise of linguistic nationalism. (H. 94-5) And yet, while having the confidence to
classify and categorize, at the center of Hobsbawm’s work, the hard facts always justify theory.
The great advantage to Hobsbawm’s approach is that it offers a picture of the nuances and
discontinuities in nationalism. For example, Hobsbawm describes the idea of the “nation” in the French
Revolution period as primarily an expression of the “common interest” against “privilege” (downplaying
the idea that the revolutionaries were early “nationalists”) but takes note of statements of suspicion made
against the German-speaking Alastians as evidence that Jacobin nationalists of the time concurrently
accepted the “ethno-linguistic criterion” later to be commonplace in nationalism. (H. 20-21) If Gellner’s
definition of nationalism frames the concept predominantly as a “culture” type (Gellner 47, 48-9, 50-1,
55), that is adopted for the purposes of “education” and “precise communication,” Hobsbawm can
incorporate the desire for language unity alongside the political role of nationalism in strengthening the
government-citizen relationship as part of nationalism’s heritage. (H. 87) In other cases, Gellner’s
deterministic language becomes implausibly overbearing, such as where he states that because peasants
entering into industrial society look for “large” and established “cultural pools,” “the principle of
nationalism can be predicted.” (Gellner 46-7) (In Chapter 6 Gellner notes, in contrast, “high” Islam’s
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potential to offer an alternative to nationalism as an industrial high culture (Gellner 79-81)).

A good instance of the strength of Hobsbawm’s technique vis a vis Gellner can be seen in comparing
Hobsbawm and Gellner’s approaches to Marxism and nationalism. Hobsbawm cites Welsh coal miners-
whose eager rush to the battlefield in 1914 was followed by a general strike the following year-as an
example of how class loyalty and loyalty to “nationality” need not be “mutually exclusive.” (H. 123)
Clearly wrestling with an ideology he holds dear, Hobsbawm proceeds to discuss the “anti-fascist
nationalism” of the British working-class during World War II (the joining of national and social
demands which resulted in a Labor party victory in 1945 (H. 147-8)), the postwar Marxist support for
Third World anti-imperialist movements (H. 150), and the debates on nationalism within the Second
International. (H. 44) Gellner, on the other hand, assured in his model of nationalism as the solution for
industrial alienation, constructs the dogmatic Marx, who claims “class conflict is camouflaged as ethnic
conflict (Gellner 93-4),” as a strawman and then turns it on its head: it is not “capital, ownership and
wealth” that fuel struggle in the early industrial era so much as “education, culture and access to power.”
(Gellner 96) Whereas Hobsbawm, the Humanist Marxist historian, reveals the nuances of socialism’s
relationship to nationalism (though with a clear bias against Marxism’s mid-century alliance with anti-
imperialist nationalism), Gellner, the anti-Marxist philosopher, uses the rigid Marxist doctrinal model of
industrial society (in which class interests trump those of cultural nations) as a prop against which to
juxtapose his own (of an industrial society that requires cultural-based “nationalism” for the sake of
broad-based communication and access to human capital).
In his Social Theory and Social Transformation, William Sewell argues that social scientists-in their
craze for structure-lose sight of the unique event, based on the vagaries of human will, that only
historians can properly analyze.9 Though Sewell’s critique aims more directly at quantitative social
scientists, who seek to deduce the world through mathematical formulas, it can just as easily apply to a
philosopher like Gellner, whose attempt to construct a model of “society” through abstract reason
ignores the empirical realities that constitute the latter’s core.

IV. Conclusion
This comparative analysis began by attempting to discern the differences in theory and technique used
in Eric Hobsbawm’s and Ernest Gellner’s analyses of nationalism and ended up finding the distinction to
be most pronounced in their techniques. Hobsbawm and Gellner both root the origins of nationalism in
the Europe of the industrial revolution, when changes in society encouraged citizens to develop new
forms of political identification. Both maintain Eurocentric biases in the scope of their examination.
However, whereas Hobsbawm proceeds to lay out how nationalism developed based on a chronological
series of occurrences, Gellner constructs a model of why nationalism develops based on a model of the
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transition to industrial society. The more convincing nature of Hobsbawm’s text for the reader attests to
the insight that socially-focused historians (like Hobsbawm) can provide not only for the social sciences
but for humanities disciplines like Philosophy, through the historian’s portrayal of the unique facts and
events at the core of the long-term operation of human society.

Footnotes
1. Kocka, Jürgen. “Eric J. Hobsbawm (1917–2012).” International Review of Social History 58, no. 01 (2013): 1–8.
doi:10.1017/S0020859013000011
2. Hann, C. (n.d.). OBITUARY: Professor Ernest Gellner. The Independent. Retrieved March 19, 2014, from
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-professor-ernest-gellner-1580929.html
3. Kettle, Martin, and Dorothy Wedderburn. “Eric Hobsbawm Obituary.” The Guardian, October 1, 2012, sec. Books.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/01/eric-hobsbawm.
4. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
5. Hobsbawm, “New Left Review - Some Reflections on ‘The Break-up of Britain.’” Hobsbawm argues against fellow
Marxist Tom Nairn’s support of national-separatist movements in Great Britain, stating “The real danger for
Marxists is the temptation to welcome nationalism as ideology and programme rather than realistically to accept it
as a fact, a condition of their struggle as socialists.”
6. Hobsbawm, E.J. “From Social History to a History of Society.” Daedalus, Vol. 100, No. 1,Historical Studies Today
(Winter 1971), pg. 29.
7. “From Social History to a History of Society.” pg. 25
8. Hobsbawm, E.J. “What do Historians Owe Karl Marx?” In On History. New York: The New Press, 1987.
9. Kocka, J. (March 4, 2014) “After the Cultural Turn.”

Additional Source

Hall, John A. Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography. Verso: New York, 2010. \