Ernest Gellner

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Czech anthropologist, philosopher and sociologist (1925–1995)

title: "Ernest Gellner" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["british-sociologists", "20th-century-british-philosophers", "social-anthropologists", "anthropologists-of-religion", "jewish-scientists", "jewish-philosophers", "czech-academics", "czech-philosophers", "theories-of-history", "scholars-of-nationalism", "populism-scholars", "fellows-of-the-british-academy", "academics-of-the-london-school-of-economics", "czechoslovak-refugees", "jews-who-immigrated-to-the-united-kingdom-to-escape-nazism", "20th-century-czech-jews", "writers-from-prague", "1925-births", "1995-deaths", "academic-staff-of-central-european-university", "people-educated-at-st-albans-school,-hertfordshire", "alumni-of-balliol-college,-oxford", "academics-of-the-university-of-edinburgh", "fellows-of-king's-college,-cambridge", "fellows-of-the-royal-anthropological-institute-of-great-britain-and-ireland", "presidents-of-the-royal-anthropological-institute-of-great-britain-and-ireland", "members-of-the-american-philosophical-society", "william-wyse-professors-of-social-anthropology"] description: "Czech anthropologist, philosopher and sociologist (1925–1995)" topic_path: "history" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Gellner" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Czech anthropologist, philosopher and sociologist (1925–1995) ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox philosopher"]

FieldValue
regionWestern philosophy
era20th-century philosophy
nameErnest Gellner
imageErnest Gellner 2.jpg
birth_date
birth_placeParis, France
death_date
death_placePrague, Czech Republic
alma_materBalliol College, Oxford
institutionsUniversity of Edinburgh
London School of Economics
King's College, Cambridge
Central European University
school_traditionCritical rationalism
main_interestsPolitical philosophy, philosophy of science, anthropology, nationalism
notable_ideasGellner's theory of nationalism
Criticism of ordinary language philosophy
::

| region = Western philosophy | era = 20th-century philosophy | name = Ernest Gellner | image = Ernest Gellner 2.jpg | birth_date = | birth_place = Paris, France | death_date = | death_place = Prague, Czech Republic | alma_mater = Balliol College, Oxford | institutions = University of Edinburgh London School of Economics King's College, Cambridge Central European University | school_tradition = Critical rationalism | main_interests = Political philosophy, philosophy of science, anthropology, nationalism | notable_ideas = Gellner's theory of nationalism Criticism of ordinary language philosophy

Ernest André Gellner (9 December 1925 – 5 November 1995) was a French-born British-Czech philosopher and social anthropologist. Central themes in his social thought included modernisation theory and nationalism, the latter of which he developed into a leading theory (Gellner's theory of nationalism). His multicultural perspective allowed him to engage with the Western world, the Muslim world, and Russian civilization.

His first book, Words and Things (1959), sparked a leading article in The Times, which then published a month-long correspondence on his analytical critique of linguistic philosophy. Gellner served for 22 years as Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics, eight years as the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and later headed the new Centre for the Study of Nationalism in Prague.

Throughout his career, in writing, teaching and political activism, Gellner challenged what he saw as closed systems of thought. At his death, The Independent called him a "one-man crusader for critical rationalism", and The Daily Telegraph called him one of the world's most vigorous intellectuals.

Background

Gellner was born in Paris to Anna, née Fantl, and Rudolf, a lawyer, an urban intellectual German-speaking Austrian Jewish couple from Bohemia (which, since 1918, was part of the newly established Czechoslovakia). Julius Gellner was his uncle. He was brought up in Prague, attending a Czech language primary school before entering the English-language grammar school. This was Franz Kafka's tricultural Prague: antisemitic but "stunningly beautiful", a city he later spent years longing for.

In 1939, when Gellner was 13, the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany persuaded his family to leave Czechoslovakia and move to St Albans, just north of London, where Gellner attended St Albans Boys Modern School, now Verulam School (Hertfordshire). At the age of 17, he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, as a result of what he called "Portuguese colonial policy", which involved keeping "the natives peaceful by getting able ones from below into Balliol." ::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Prague_from_Klementinum.jpg" caption=""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 sense: it was a strong longing.""] ::

At Balliol, he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) and specialised in philosophy. He interrupted his studies after one year to serve with the 1st Czechoslovak Armoured Brigade, which took part in the Siege of Dunkirk (1944–45), and then returned to Prague to attend university there for half a term.

During this period, Prague lost its strong hold over him: foreseeing the communist takeover, he decided to return to England. One of his recollections of the city 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 occupation were welcome. In reality, Gellner said, it meant exactly the opposite: He returned to Balliol College in 1945 to finish his degree, winning the John Locke prize and taking first class honours in 1947. The same year, he began his academic 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 of Economics in 1949, joining the sociology department under Morris Ginsberg. Ginsberg admired philosophy and believed that philosophy and sociology were very close to each other.

Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse had preceded Ginsberg as Martin White Professor of Sociology at the LSE. Hobhouse's Mind in Evolution (1901) had proposed that society should 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 evolved, a teleological view that Gellner firmly opposed.

Gellner's critique of linguistic philosophy in Words and Things (1959) focused on J. L. Austin and the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, criticising them for failing to question their own methods. The book brought Gellner critical acclaim. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1961 with a thesis on Organisation and the Role of a Berber Zawiya and became Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method just one year later. Thought and Change was published in 1965, and in State and Society in Soviet Thought (1988), he examined whether Marxist regimes could be liberalised.

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, Cambridge, which provided him with a relaxed atmosphere where he enjoyed drinking beer and playing chess with the students. Described by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as "brilliant, forceful, irreverent, mischievous, sometimes perverse, with a biting wit and love of irony", he was famously popular with his students, was willing to spend many extra hours a day tutoring them, and was regarded as a superb public speaker and gifted teacher.

His Plough, Sword and Book (1988) investigated the philosophy of history, and Conditions of Liberty (1994) sought to explain the collapse of socialism with an analogy he called "modular man". In 1993, he returned to Prague, now rid of communism, and to the new Central European University, where he became head of the Center for the Study of Nationalism, a program funded by George Soros, the American billionaire philanthropist, to study the rise of nationalism in the post-communist countries of eastern and central Europe. On 5 November 1995, after returning from a conference in Budapest, he had a heart attack and died at his flat in Prague, one month short of his 70th birthday.

Gellner was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

''Words and Things''

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/Balliol_College_Feb_2005.jpg" caption="Gellner discovered his interest in linguistic philosophy while at Balliol."] ::

With the publication in 1959 of Words and Things, his first book, Gellner achieved fame and even notoriety among his fellow philosophers, as well as outside the discipline, for his fierce attack on "linguistic philosophy", as he preferred to call ordinary language philosophy, then the dominant approach at Oxbridge (although the philosophers themselves denied that they were part of any unified school). He first encountered the predominance of linguistic philosophy while at Balliol: Words and Things is fiercely critical of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, Antony Flew, P. F. Strawson and many others. Ryle refused to have the book reviewed in the philosophical journal Mind (which he edited), and Bertrand Russell (who had written an approving foreword) protested in a letter to The Times. A response from Ryle and a lengthy correspondence ensued. Ryle explained his refusal to review the book in a letter to Gellner's publisher, he said that "Abusiveness may make a book saleable, but it disqualifies it from being treated as a contribution to an academic subject".

Social anthropology

In the 1950s, Gellner discovered his great love of social anthropology. Chris Hann, director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, writes that following the hard-nosed empiricism of Bronisław Malinowski, Gellner made major contributions to the subject over the next 40 years, ranging from "conceptual critiques in the analysis of kinship to frameworks for understanding political order outside the state in tribal Morocco (Saints of the Atlas, 1969); from sympathetic exposition of the works of Soviet Marxist anthropologists to elegant syntheses of the Durkheimian and Weberian traditions in western social theory; and from grand elaboration of 'the structure of human history' to path-breaking analyses of ethnicity and nationalism (Thought and Change, 1964; Nations and Nationalism, 1983)".

Nationalism

Main article: Gellner's theory of 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". Gellner argues that nationalism appeared and became a sociological necessity only in the modern world. In previous times ("the agro-literate" stage of history), rulers had little incentive to impose cultural homogeneity on the ruled. But in modern society, work becomes technical; one must operate a machine, and to do so, one must learn. There is a need for impersonal, context-free communication and a high degree of cultural standardisation.

Furthermore, industrial society is underlined by the fact that there is perpetual growth: employment types vary and new skills must be learned. Thus, generic employment training precedes specialised job training. On a territorial level, there is competition for the overlapping catchment areas (such as Alsace-Lorraine). To maintain its grip on resources and its survival and progress, the state and culture must for these reasons be congruent. Nationalism, therefore, is a necessity.

Selected works

  • Words and Things: A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology, London: Gollancz; Boston: Beacon (1959). Also see correspondence in The Times, 10 November to 23 November 1959.
  • Thought and Change (1964)
  • Populism: Its Meaning and Characteristics (1969). With . New York: Macmillan.
  • 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)
  • Reason and Culture (1992)
  • Conditions of Liberty (1994)
  • Encounters with nationalism (1994)
  • Anthropology and Politics: Revolutions in the Sacred Grove (1995)
  • Liberalism in Modern Times: Essays in Honour of José G. Merquior (1996)
  • Nationalism (1997)
  • Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski, and the Habsburg Dilemma (1998)
  • Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences (2003)

Notes

References

  • Obituary A Philosopher on Nationalism Ernest Gellner Died at 69 written by Eric Pace The New York Times 10 November 1995
  • Davies, John. Obituary in The Guardian, 7 November 1995
  • Dimonye, Simeon. A Comparative Study of Historicism in Karl Marx and Ernest Gellner (Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2012)
  • Hall, John A. Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography (London: Verso, 2010)
  • Hall, John A. and Ian Jarvie (eds). The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner (Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 1996)
  • Hall, John A. (ed.) The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
  • Lessnoff, Michael. Ernest Gellner and Modernity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002)
  • Lukes, Steven. "Gellner, Ernest André (1925–1995)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, retrieved 23 September 2005 (requires subscription)
  • Malesevic, Sinisa and Mark Haugaard (eds). Ernest Gellner and Contemporary Social Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
  • O'Leary, Brendan. Obituary in The Independent, 8 November 1995
  • Stirling, Paul. Obituary in The Daily Telegraph, 9 November 1995
  • "The Social and Political Relevance of Gellner's Thought Today" papers and webcast of conference organised by the Department of Political Science and Sociology in the National University of Ireland, Galway, held on 21–22 May 2005 (10th anniversary of Gellner's death).
  • Kyrchanoff, Maksym. Natsionalizm: politika, mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, regionalizatsiia (Voronezh, 2007) http://ejournals.pp.net.ua/_ld/0/87_nat_p1.pdf Detailed review of Gellner's works for students. In Russian language.

References

  1. (January 2007). "Nationalism and the Internet". Nations and Nationalism.
  2. (9 November 1995). "Ernest Gellner Obituary". The Daily Telegraph.
  3. Chris Hann, [http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/gellner/Bio.html Obituary] {{webarchive. link. (13 February 2006 , ''The Independent'', 8 November 1995)
  4. "Gellner Interview".
  5. "Interview section 2".
  6. [http://nationalism.ceu.edu/ Nationalism Studies Program] at the CEU
  7. "Ernest Andre Gellner".
  8. "APS Member History".
  9. T. P. Uschanov, [http://www.helsinki.fi/~tuschano/writings/strange/ The Strange Death of Ordinary Language Philosophy]. The controversy has been described by the writer [[Ved Mehta]] in ''Fly and the Fly Bottle'' (1963).
  10. (2020). "Analytic Philosophy and the Later Wittgensteinian Tradition". Palgrave Macmillan UK.
  11. (1985). "Obituary: Paul Pascon". [[Anthropology Today]].
  12. Gellner, ''Nationalism'', 1983, p. 1

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british-sociologists20th-century-british-philosopherssocial-anthropologistsanthropologists-of-religionjewish-scientistsjewish-philosophersczech-academicsczech-philosopherstheories-of-historyscholars-of-nationalismpopulism-scholarsfellows-of-the-british-academyacademics-of-the-london-school-of-economicsczechoslovak-refugeesjews-who-immigrated-to-the-united-kingdom-to-escape-nazism20th-century-czech-jewswriters-from-prague1925-births1995-deathsacademic-staff-of-central-european-universitypeople-educated-at-st-albans-school,-hertfordshirealumni-of-balliol-college,-oxfordacademics-of-the-university-of-edinburghfellows-of-king's-college,-cambridgefellows-of-the-royal-anthropological-institute-of-great-britain-and-irelandpresidents-of-the-royal-anthropological-institute-of-great-britain-and-irelandmembers-of-the-american-philosophical-societywilliam-wyse-professors-of-social-anthropology