Ernest Gellner Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Ernest A. Gellner (1925–1995) was an influential philosopher, historian, and social anthropologist who made major contributions to the study of Islam, nationalism, and modernity. He was a stalwart champion of critical rationalism and open systems of thought, defending them from, among others, Marxists, relativists, psychoanalysts, and dogmatic advocates of the free market.

Gellner was born in Paris but grew up in Prague. His Jewish family decided to move to Great Britain in 1939. At the end of World War II (1939–1945) he enlisted in the Czech Army, but after the war, foreseeing the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, he returned to Britain to finish his studies, first at Oxford and then at London School of Economics (LSE), from which he received a PhD in 1961. A year later, thanks in large measure to the critical acclaim of his first book, Words and Things (1959), which attacked linguistic idealism and contained a foreword by Bertrand Russell, he became professor of philosophy, logic, and scientific method at LSE.

Gellner would maintain his post at LSE until 1984, when he left to become professor of social anthropology at Cambridge. In 1993, he returned to Prague as the research director for the Center for the Study of Nationalism at Central European University, where he would work until his death.

Throughout his career, Gellner published path-breaking books, earning a reputation as one of the most original and versatile scholars in the world and having command of numerous languages. Thought and Change (1964) was a penetrating analysis of modernity and theories of social change. Saints of the Atlas (1969) was an ethnographic study of Moroccan tribal people. Muslim Society (1981) was an influential tract in Islamic studies. Nations and Nationalism (1983) became a classic work in the burgeoning field of nationalism and ethnic studies and is perhaps his more enduring study. In it, Gellner argues that nationalism arises as a product of modernity. Nations, in Gellner’s terms, ‘“have navels,” meaning they are born; they are not something eternal, as many nationalist partisans might argue. His Plough, Sword, and Book (1988) similarly emphasized the unique features of modern life, and, although his stages of history have similarities with those of Marxism, he steadfastly rejected many Marxist assumptions and stood against communism. Last, after the end of the cold war brought the possibility of democracy to Eastern Europe, he became a scholar and advocate for civil society, publishing Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals (1994), which tried to explain the collapse of communism while also arguing against putting all one’s faith in free-market ideology.

Gellner is hard to classify on ideological grounds, as he engaged in heated intellectual debates with those on the right and on the left. He made many enemies in the academy, at times seeing himself as the head of a one-man crusade against critics of rationalism and liberalism. One colleague, David Glass, remarked “that he wasn’t sure whether the next revolution would come from the right or from the left; but he was quite sure that, wherever it came from, the first person to be shot would be Ernest Gellner” (Davis 1995).

Bibliography:

Davis, John. “In Memoriam.” The Guardian, November 7, 1995.
Gellner, Ernest. Words and Things, A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology. Boston: Beacon, 1959.
Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.
Hall, John A. The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
London School of Economics. Ernest Gellner Resource Site. www lse.ac.uk/collections/gellner.
Malesevic, Sinisa, and Mark Haugaard. Ernest Gellner and Contemporary Social Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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