Should-Read: Ernest Gellner (1990): The Civil and the Sacred

Should-Read: Ernest Gellner (1990): The Civil and the Sacred: “The bourgeois fantasy lay in its doctrine that work was the very essence of man… http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/02/weekend-reading-from-ernest-gellner-1990-the-civil-and-the-sacred.html

…that productive institutions and processes were crucial… and that this domination of historic development by the productive process would in due course lead to total human fulfillment through free, spontaneous, unconstrained labor… no state to enforce order and no civil society to check the state…. [But] in a domination-prone world, economic rationality is not rational: those who work hard see themselves deprived of the fruits of their labor only by those in power. It could be brought about only by cunning and reason, as an unintended consequence of religious anguish. Those who sought wealth were not to be granted it: those who merely sought to escape despair had wealth bestowed upon them.

But Marxism credits this distinctively bourgeois trait to the human soul as such, not to some men under the impulsion of a special torment: work is, it claims, our genuine essence and our time fulfillment…. In consequence, of course, Marxists simply possess no language in which to express their central political problem: their theory precluded the very existence of the problem and eliminated any tools for handling it. As long as political circumstance constrained them to remain within Marxist language, they simply could not even discuss their main problem…