Our Way

John Gray

• Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals by Ernest Gellner
  Hamish Hamilton, 225 pp, £18.99, August 1994, ISBN 0 241 00220 6

Recent discussion of the Soviet collapse, even when not echoing the shallow triumphalism of Western conservatives and neo-liberals, has interpreted that collapse as an episode in the global spread of civil society – defined by Ernest Gellner as ‘that set of diverse non-governmental institutions which is strong enough to counterbalance the state and, while not preventing the state from fulfilling its role of keeper of the peace and arbitrator among major interests, can nevertheless prevent it from dominating and atomising the rest of society’. The debacle of Gorbachev’s reformist project has been understood, if not as proof of an ineluctable global convergence on Western institutions, then at any rate as compelling evidence of their functional indispensability to a modern industrial economy. Western opinion, shaken by the political upheavals of the past five years, which confounded all the expectations of diplomats, strategists and (not least) Sovietologists, is now gripped by the conviction that, in the long run, there simply is no alternative to the institutions of civil society: any state which wishes to enjoy prosperity and the stability that prosperity confers will have to adopt them.