#16 Gellner on the ease with which modern society maintains a coercive order
The coercive system of a modern complex society operates under conditions and constraints which are radically different from those prevailing earlier. Direct coercion is rare, and only occurs in certain exceptional circumstances. Men are relatively seldom obliged to do things by weapons held at their throats.
The generalization with which one may begin is that the maintenance of public order in complex modern societies is relatively easy. Blatantly unpopular regimes do survive; liberal regimes, with astonishingly mild and unrepressive police and judicial methods, also survive. A complex division of labour does turn out to have some at least of the consequences which Durkheim attributed to it. Society is at least cohesive enough to enable those who control the centre to stay there, without fearing anarchy and disintegration. The interdependence of society's diverse parts seems to make it susceptible to conformity. Systems of authority can survive both extreme unpopularity and great permissiveness, though not perhaps both at the same time.
In some ways, modern societies may yet become ungovernable, given the unavailability of rational legitimations and loss of faith in irrational ones. Nevertheless, the imposition of order by the central state does seem easy, and it is widely imposed without excessive difficulty. Political structures are surprisingly stable. Arguably a liberal modern state interferes in the lives of its citizens far more than a traditional pre-industrial despotism. The complexity and interdependence of society, and its dependence on an overall infrastructure, makes its members docile and habituated to obedience to bureaucratic instructions.
The professional middle class is tamed by threat of deprivation of what it holds dearest — education for its children, and meaningful work for itself. This kind of pressure can be astonishingly and depressingly effective, if no simultaneous collective, large-scale defiance crystallizes.
What general propositions can one make about the coercion system or state apparatus in modern society? First, the units over which it operates will seldom be smaller than those of a nation state, and they will in the main contain culturally homogeneous populations. The nationalist imperative, the requirement of "one state, one nation", will by and large be implemented. The cultural heterogeneity which was so characteristic of and even useful to large agrarian states leads to considerable difficulties in mobile and near-universally literate and educated populations. Cultural pluralism goes well with insulated rural communities, and with stable and hierarchical occupational systems, with profession and status transmitted from generation to generation. It goes exceedingly ill with mobile populations dependent on a state-supervised educational system for their culture.
Second, modern societies will inevitably be centralized. The importance of the shared infrastructure, its tremendous cost, and the need for its homogeneous and even maintenance over a reasonably large area, all ensure this. Given the importance and power of this centralized system, and the fact that it is at least an important (though not necessarily the only) source of the perks and prestige attaching to positions, it will continue to play a large part in the lives of men.
Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History, Chicago 1988 [pp. 232-8, 236-7]