Making the difference: the émigrés, relativism and Enlightenment

Abstract

This paper examines the situation and ideas of the Eastern European Jewish émigré intellectuals who came to England in the pre-war period, often escaping from persecution. It deals in particular with Ernest Gellner and Karl Popper. Contrary to an earlier influential interpretation by Perry Anderson, it argues that rather than simply being assimilated to conservative English intellectual and cultural values, these thinkers typically had a more complex relationship to English culture reflecting their commitment to Enlightenment values and the public role and responsibility of the intellectual. This argument is related to the demise of the influence of postmodernism and the view that these thinkers can be seen as an important source of inspiration for current debates because of the way in which they rejected both foundationalism and relativism in favour of a committed liberal fabilism.

Notes

1. See, for instance, Medawar & Pyke (2000), Snowman (2002) and also Edmonds & Eidinow (2001).

2. Anderson (1968), although this begs the question of just how ‘red’ the Frankfurt School actually was. Of Adorno's cultural writings Popper says, ‘I had known, and heartily disliked, this kind of writing in my days in Vienna. I used to think of it as cultural snobbery, practised by a clique which regarded itself as a cultural elite. These essays, incidentally, are characterised by their social irrelevance’ (Popper, 1994, p. 78).

3. This is especially ironic because, as Snowman (2002) argues, the émigrés typically continued to regard themselves as essentially Middle European or Germanic thinkers. It is striking, for instance, how little attention that Gellner gave to Anglo-Saxon debates or thinkers in sociology, despite the senior positions he held at the London School of Economics and Cambridge University. It is instructive to examine the bibliographies of his major works.

4. Sayer (2000, p. 47) cites both Hitler and Mussolini explicitly declaring themselves as relativists.

5. Interestingly, the False Messiah is a view of the intellectual émigrés one finds in a number of Iris Murdoch novels, e.g. Message to the Planet, although in Murdoch's personal history the False Messiah was based on Elias Canetti. Arguably this reflects a wider English suspicion of the social role of the intellectual that finds its locus classicus in Burke's attack on the philosphes whom he saw as responsible for the French Revolution.

6. Malcolm Bradbury captures this mood well in his first campus satire, Eating People is Wrong, in the character Tanya (a lecturer in Slavonic languages): ‘Tanya would be standing by, with a quiet, a knowing smile on her European face. There is such a thing as a European face, which seems to say, “I have lived where you never could have survived”; Tanya had one … she had come to England before, during, after the war—it was impossible to say—after knowing God knew what horror and savagery. What she had learned could not be effaced from her; she could look at Machiavelli or La Rouchefoucauld and find them innocent. To treat her as a person, to offer civilised manners, took on with her almost the quality of an insult: only young people and innocent countries could afford to play about like this’ (Bradbury, 1978, pp. 100–101).

7. Isaiah Berlin was famous for his BBC third programme radio lectures. Perhaps the best example of a Jewish intellectual operating in this way was Dr Jakob Bronowski for his appearances on the BBC ‘Brains Trust’ programmes and for his magnificent TV documentary series, ‘The Ascent of Man’ from the early 1970s and still frequently repeated. Others, such as Pevsner, became influential in interpreting the English to themselves (at least for its middle class).

8. Linguistic philosophy had a major impact upon sociology through the debate initiated by Peter Winch's book, The Idea of a Social Science (1958) (see Boham, 1991, ch. 2). Gellner was a major contributor—see his comments in Gellner (1998, ch. 33). There are strong parallels between the ‘rationality debate’ of that period (see Wilson, 1970) and contemporary issues relating to postmodernism.

9. It should be noted that the first version of this paper was prepared in 1965.

10. His distinction parallels Basil Bernstein's between restricted codes (restricted to those sharing a local context and, hence, able to draw upon tacit understandings in order to exchange symbolically condensed meanings) and elaborating codes (where in the absence of such tacit knowledge meanings must be expanded and articulated in detail). Bernstein was not an émigré, but he was the child of an eastern European Jewish immigrant family and what he shared, perhaps, with the émigrés was that acute sense of the ambiguity of becoming an insider from the outside – a developed sensitivity to that which is different and that which is the same. To link to Bernstein is to make the point that the difference to which Gellner refers, the fundamental asymmetry between high/low or elaborating/restricted, is essentially the Durkheimian distinction between sacred and profane (Bernstein, 2000).

11. What might be termed ‘radical break theory’ was recognised as a distinctive recurring feature of intellectual and cultural fields as long ago as 1966 by Frank Kermode in a series of essays entitled The Sense of an Ending: studies in the theory of fiction (Kermode, 1966, new edition 2000). As such, this mode of thinking might be seen as a phenomenon of intellectual fields that is in itself worthy of further study (specifically in relation to sociology see also Bernstein, 1977, ch. 7 and 2000, ch. 9).