Ernest Gellner Born December 9, 1925 Paris, France Died November 5, 1995 (aged 69) Prague, Czech Republic

Era 20th-century philosophy Region Western Philosophy School Critical rationalism Main interests political philosophy, philosophy of science, anthropology, natio nalism Influenced by[show] Influenced[show] Part of a series on Political and legal anthropology Basic concepts[show] Case studies[show] Related articles[show] Major theorists[show] Social and cultural anthropology v t e Ernest sopher as one ne-man Andr? Gellner (9 December 1925 5 November 1995) was a British-Czech philo and social anthropologist, described by The Daily Telegraph when he died of the world's most vigorous intellectuals and by The Independent as a "o crusade for critical rationalism."[1]

His first book, Words and Things (1959) prompted a leader in The Times and a mon th-long correspondence on its letters page over his attack on linguistic philoso phy. As the Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London S chool of Economics for 22 years, the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropolo gy at the University of Cambridge for eight, and finally as head of the new Cent re for the Study of Nationalism in Prague, Gellner fought all his life in his writ ing, his teaching, and through his political activism against what he saw as close d systems of thought, particularly communism, psychoanalysis, relativism, and th e dictatorship of the free market. Among other issues in social thought, the mod ernization of society and nationalism were two of his central themes, his multic ultural perspective allowing him to work within the subject-matter of three sepa rate civilizations the Western, Islamic, and Russian. Contents 1 2 3 4 5 Background Words and Things The move to anthropology Nationalism Selected works 5.1 Books 6 Notes 7 References 8 External links Background Gellner was born in Paris[2] to Anna, n?e Fantl, and Rudolf, a lawyer, an urban intellectual German-speaking Jewish couple from Bohemia (which since 1918 was pa rt of the newly established Czechoslovakia). Julius Gellner was his uncle. He wa s brought up in Prague, attending a Czech primary school before entering the Eng

lish-language grammar school. This was Kafka's tricultural Prague, he told John Davis of Oxford University: anti-Semitic but stunningly beautiful, a city he lat er spent years longing for.[3] In 1939, when Gellner was 13 years old, the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany pers uaded his family to leave Czechoslovakia and move to St Albans, just north of Lo ndon, where Gellner attended St Albans Grammar School. At the age of 17, he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford as a result of what he called "Portugue se colonial policy," which involved "[keeping] the natives peaceful by getting a ble ones from below into Balliol."[3] "Prague is a stunningly beautiful town, and during the first period of my exile, which was during the war, I constantly used to dream about it, in the literal s ense: it was a strong longing."[3] At Balliol, he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE), specializing in philosophy. He interrupted his studies after one year to serve with the 1st Cze choslovak Armoured Brigade, which took part in the siege of Dunkirk, then return ed to Prague to attend university there for half a term. During this period, Prague lost its strong hold over him: foreseeing the communi st takeover, he decided to return to England. One of his recollections of the ci ty in 1945 was a communist poster saying: "Everyone with a clean shield into the Party", ostensibly meaning that those whose records were good during the occupa tion were welcome. In reality, Gellner said, it meant exactly the opposite: If your shield is absolutely filthy we'll scrub it for you; you are safe wit h us; we like you the better because the filthier your record the more we have a hold on you. So all the bastards, all the distinctive authoritarian personaliti es, rapidly went into the Party, and it rapidly acquired this kind of character. So what was coming was totally clear to me, and it cured me of the emotional ho ld which Prague had previously had over me. I could foresee that a Stalinoid dic tatorship was due: it came in '48. The precise date I couldn't foresee, but that it was due to come was absolutely obvious for various reasons.... I wanted no p art of it and got out as quickly as I could and forgot about it.[3] He returned to Balliol College in 1945 to finish his degree, winning the John Lo cke prize and taking first class honours in 1947. That same year, he began his a cademic career at the University of Edinburgh as an assistant to Professor John Macmurray in the Department of Moral Philosophy. He moved to the London School o f Economics in 1949, joining the sociology department under Morris Ginsberg. Gin sberg admired philosophy, and believed that philosophy and sociology were very c lose to each other. He employed me because I was a philosopher. Even though he was technically a professor of sociology, he wouldn't employ his own students, so I benefited fro m this, and he assumed that anybody in philosophy would be an evolutionary Hobho usean like himself. It took him some time to discover that I wasn't.[4] Leonard T. Hobhouse had preceded Ginsberg as Martin White Professor of Sociology at the LSE. Hobhouse's Mind in Evolution (1901) had proposed that society shoul d be regarded as an organism, a product of evolution, with the individual as its basic unit, the subtext being that society would improve over time as it evolve d, a teleological view Gellner firmly opposed. Ginsberg ... was totally unoriginal and lacked any sharpness. He simply repr oduced the kind of evolutionary rationalistic vision which had already been form ulated by Hobhouse and which incidentally was a kind of extrapolation of his own personal life: starting in Poland and ending up as a fairly influential profess or at LSE. He evolved, he had an idea of a great chain of being where the lowest form of life was the drunk, Polish, anti-Semitic peasant and the next stage was

the Polish gentry, a bit better, or the Staedtl, better still. And then he came to England, first to University College under Dawes Hicks, who was quite ration al (not all that rational he still had some anti-Semitic prejudices, it seems) and finally ended up at LSE with Hobhouse, who was so rational that rationality cam e out of his ears. And so Ginsberg extrapolated this, and on his view the whole of humanity moved to ever greater rationality, from drunk Polish peasant to T.L. Hobhouse and a Hampstead garden.[4] Gellner's critique of linguistic philosophy in Words and Things (1959) focused o n J.L. Austin and the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, criticizing them for fa iling to question their own methods. The book brought Gellner critical acclaim. He obtained his Ph. D. in 1961 with a thesis on Organization and the Role of a B erber Zawiya and became Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method jus t one year later. Thought and Change was published in 1965, and in State and Soc iety in Soviet Thought (1988), he examined whether Marxist regimes could be libe ralized. He was elected to the British Academy in 1974. He moved to Cambridge in 1984 to head the Department of Anthropology, holding the William Wyse chair and becoming a fellow of King's College, which provided him with a relaxed atmosphere where he enjoyed drinking beer and playing chess with the students. Described by the O xford Dictionary of National Biography as "brilliant, forceful, irreverent, misc hievous, sometimes perverse, with a biting wit and love of irony," he was famous ly popular with his students, willing to spend many extra hours a day tutoring t hem, and was regarded as a superb public speaker and gifted teacher.[2] His Plough, Sword and Book (1988) investigated the philosophy of history, and Co nditions of Liberty (1994) sought to explain the collapse of socialism. In 1993, he returned to Prague, now free of communism, and to the new Central European U niversity, where he became head of the Center for the Study of Nationalism, a pr ogram funded by George Soros, the American billionaire philanthropist, to study the rise of nationalism in the post-communist countries of eastern and central E urope.[5] On November 5, 1995, after returning from a conference in Budapest, he suffered a heart attack and died at his flat in Prague, one month short of his 70th birthday. Gellner was not without his critics. His own daughter, Sarah Gellner, revealed t hat one of her father's favourite jokes was, "Rape, rape, rape, all summer long" , and that, "If there was one thing Dad disliked more than feminists, it was hom osexual men."[6] Words and Things Gellner first encountered the strong hold of linguistic philosophy while at Ball iol. With the publication in 1959 of Words and Things, his first book, Gellner achiev ed fame and even notoriety among his fellow philosophers, as well as outside the discipline, for his fierce attack on ordinary language philosophy (or "linguist ic philosophy", Gellner's preferred phrase). Ordinary language philosophy, in on e form or another, was the dominant approach at Oxbridge at the time (although t he philosophers themselves denied they were part of any unified school). He firs t encountered the strong ideological hold of linguistic philosophy while at Ball iol: [A]t that time the orthodoxy best described as linguistic philosophy, inspir ed by Wittgenstein, was crystallizing and seemed to me totally and utterly misgu ided. Wittgenstein's basic idea was that there is no general solution to issues other than the custom of the community. Communities are ultimate. He didn't put it this way, but that was what it amounted to. And this doesn't make sense in a world in which communities are not stable and are not clearly isolated from each other. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein managed to sell this idea, and it was enthusi

astically adopted as an unquestionable revelation. It is very hard nowadays for people to understand what the atmosphere was like then. This was the Revelation. It wasn't doubted. But it was quite obvious to me it was wrong. It was obvious to me the moment I came across it, although initially, if your entire environmen t, and all the bright people in it, hold something to be true, you assume you mu st be wrong, not understanding it properly, and they must be right. And so I exp lored it further and finally came to the conclusion that I did understand it rig ht, and it was rubbish, which indeed it is.[4] Words and Things is fiercely critical of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, Antony Flew, Peter Strawson and many others. Ryle refused to have the book reviewed in the philosophical journal Mind (which he edited), a nd Bertrand Russell (who had written an approving foreword) protested in a lette r to The Times. A response from Ryle and a lengthy correspondence ensued.[7] The move to anthropology It was in the 50s that Gellner discovered his great love of social anthropology. Chris Hann, Director, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology writes that, following the hard-nosed empiricism of Bronis?aw Malinowski, Gellner made major contributions to the subject over the next 40 years, ranging from "conceptual c ritiques in the analysis of kinship to frameworks for understanding political or der outside the state in tribal Morocco (Saints of the Atlas, 1969); from sympat hetic exposition of the works of Soviet Marxist anthropologists to elegant synth eses of the Durkheimian and Weberian traditions in western social theory; and fr om grand elaboration of 'the structure of human history' to path-breaking analys es of ethnicity and nationalism (Thought and Change, 1964; Nations and Nationali sm, 1983)".[2] Nationalism In 1983, Gellner published Nations and Nationalism. For Gellner, "nationalism is primarily a political principle that holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent".[8] Nationalism only appeared and, Gellner argues, bec ame a sociological necessity in the modern world. In previous times ("the agro-l iterate" stage of history) rulers had little incentive to impose cultural homoge neity on the ruled. But in modern society, work becomes technical. One must oper ate a machine, and as such one must learn. There is a need for impersonal, conte xt-free communication and a high degree of cultural standardisation. Furthermore, industrial society is underlined by the fact that there is perpetua l growth - employment types vary and new skills must be learned. Thus, generic e mployment training precedes specialised job training. On a territorial level, th ere is competition for the overlapping catchment areas (e.g. Alsace-Lorraine). T o maintain its grip on resources, and its survival and progress, the state and c ulture must for these reasons be congruent. Nationalism therefore is a necessity . Criticisms of Gellner's theory: It is too functionalist. Critics charge that Gellner explains the phenomenon with reference to the eventual historical outcome industrial society could not 'f unction' without nationalism. (Tambini 1996) It misreads the relationship between nationalism and industrialization. (Smi th 1998) It accounts poorly for national movements of ancient Rome, Greece, etc. clai ming an alum type argument; insisting that nationalism is tied in 'modernity' an d cannot exist without a clearly defined modern industrialization. (Smith 1995) It fails to account for nationalism in non-industrial society and resurgence s of nationalism in post-industrial societies. (Smith 1998) It cannot explain the passions generated by nationalism. Why should anyone f ight and die for his country? (Connor 1993)

It fails to take into account the role of war and the military in fostering both cultural homogenization and nationalism, ignoring in particular the relatio nship between militarism and compulsory education. (Conversi 2007) Selected works Books Words and Things, A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology, London: Gollancz; Boston: Beacon (1959). Also see correspondence in T he Times, 10 November to 23 November 1959. Thought and Change (1964) Saints of the Atlas (1969) Contemporary Thought and Politics (1974) The Devil in Modern Philosophy (1974) Legitimation of Belief (1974) Spectacles and Predicaments (1979) Soviet and Western Anthropology (1980) (editor) Muslim Society (1981) Nations and Nationalism (1983) Relativism and the Social Sciences (1985) The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985) The Concept of Kinship and Other Essays (1986) Culture, Identity and Politics (1987) State and Society in Soviet Thought (1988) Plough, Sword and Book (1988) Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (1992) Conditions of Liberty (1994) Anthropology and Politics: Revolutions in the Sacred Grove (1995) Nationalism (1997) Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma (19 98) Notes ^ Stirling, Paul. Ernest Gellner Obituary, The Daily Telegraph, 9 November 1 995; O'Leary, Brendan. "Ernest Gellner Remembered", The Independent, 8 November 1995. ^ a b c Chris Hann, Obituary, The Independent, 8 November 1995 ^ a b c d An Interview with Gellner ^ a b c Interview with Gellner, section 2 ^ Nationalism Studies Program at the CEU ^ "Letters: Memories of Ernest Gellner". London Review of Books 33 (16). 25 August 2011. ^ T. P. Uschanov, The Strange Death of Ordinary Language Philosophy. The con troversy has been described by the writer Ved Mehta in Fly and the Fly Bottle (1 963). ^ Gellner, Nationalism, 1983, p. 1 References Obituary A Philosopher on Nationalism Ernest Gellner Died at 69 written by E ric Pace The New York Times 10 November 1995 Hall, John A. 2010. Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography. London: Verso . Connor, Walker Ethnonationalism:The Quest for Understanding, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Conversi, Daniele 2007 'Homogenisation, nationalism and war: Should we still read Ernest Gellner? , Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 13, no 3, 2007, pp. 1 24 Davies, John. Obituary in The Guardian, November 7, 1995 Lukes, Steven. "Gellner, Ernest Andr? (1925-1995)", Oxford Dictionary of Nat

ional Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, retrieved September 23, 2005 (re quires subscription) Malesevic, Sinisa and Mark Haugaard (eds). Ernest Gellner and Contemporary S ocial Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. O'Leary, Brendan. Obituary in The Independent, November 8, 1995 Smith, Anthony D, Nations and Nationalism In a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. ISBN 978-0-7456-1019-1 Smith, Anthony D, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent The ories of Nations and Nationalism. London: Routledge, 1998. ISBN 978-0-415-063418 Stirling, Paul. Obituary in the Daily Telegraph, November 9, 1995 Tambini, Damian 1996 Explaining monoculturalism: Beyond Gellner s theory of nat ionalism , Critical Review, vol. 10, no 2, pp. 251 70 "The Social and Political Relevance of Gellner's Thought Today" papers and w ebcast of conference organised by the Department of Political Science and Sociol ogy in the National University of Ireland, Galway, held on 21 22 May 2005 (10th an niversary of Gellner s death). Kyrchanoff, Maksym. Natsionalizm: politika, mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, regi onalizatsiia (Voronezh, 2007) [1] Detailed review of Gellner's works for student s. In Russian language. External links