Politics & Power Quote by Ernest Gellner

Paris, in Gellner's telling, is less a city than a factory line for bafflement. The joke lands because it borrows the proud, muscular image of Detroit at its industrial peak - standardized, high-volume, relentlessly efficient - and bolts it onto a very different kind of product: obscurity. It's a sneer at a certain French intellectual style that treats difficulty not as a byproduct of wrestling with hard problems but as a prestige good, manufactured with repeatable techniques and shipped into the global marketplace of ideas.

Gellner, a philosopher with an anthropologist's impatience for mystification, is targeting the mid-century Parisian scene where theory became a cultural export. In that ecosystem, opacity could function like branding: if the prose is impenetrable, the thought must be profound. The Detroit analogy sharpens the critique by implying routinization. Obscurity isn't a rare accident of genius; it's mass-produced, almost interchangeable, rewarded by institutions that mistake complication for rigor and insider dialect for insight.

There's also a political subtext: industrial metaphors always smuggle in questions of labor and power. Detroit's assembly line created wealth and hierarchy; so does an academic assembly line that produces gatekeeping language. If you can't decode it, you're not part of the class that gets to speak. Gellner's barb is ultimately about intellectual incentives: when careers and reputations are built on being untouchable, the system will reliably produce untouchability, the way a mature industry produces cars.