Background
Gellner, Ernest Andre was born on December 9, 1925 in Paris. Arrived in England, 1939. Son of Rudolf and Anna (Fantl) Gellner.
(These essays explore the relationship between culture and...)
These essays explore the relationship between culture and politics in the modern world. They range in space from Iran to Algeria, and the eastern marchlands of Europe to the Atlantic, and in time over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But they are all inspired by a cluster of linked preoccupations with the nature of the social order now emerging in the world and the kinds of moral and political legitimation it requires and permits. The essays are also linked by Ernest Gellner's distinctive, and highly arresting, intellectual temper and style. The volume will interest a wide range of readers in the social sciences and philosophy.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521336678/?tag=2022091-20
( From reviews of the first edition: "Brilliant, provoca...)
From reviews of the first edition: "Brilliant, provocative . . . a great book."―New Statesman "An important book . . . It is a new starting line from which all subsequent discussions of nationalism will have to begin."―New Society "A better explanation than anyone has yet offered of why nationalism is such a prominent principle of political legitimacy today. This is a terse and forceful work . . . the product of great intellectual energy and an impressive range of knowledge."―Times Literary Supplement "Periodically, an important book emerges that makes us, through the uniqueness of its theory, perceive history as we have not seen it before. Ernest Gellner has written such a volume. Students of nationalism will have to come to grips with his interpretation of the causes for the emergence of nationalism, since he has declared that most of the previous explanations are largely mythical."―American Historical Review First published in 1983, Nations and Nationalism remains one of the most influential explanations of the emergence of nationalism ever written. This updated edition of Ernest Gellner's now-canonical work includes a new introductory essay from John Breuilly, tracing the way the field has evolved over the past two decades, and a bibliography of important work on nationalism since 1983.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801475007/?tag=2022091-20
(The Soviet Union has witnessed the first occasion in hist...)
The Soviet Union has witnessed the first occasion in history in which a sociological theory, namely Marxism, has become the official ideology of a major power and a large and complex society. But as social theory and social research continue to be practised within the Soviet Union a complex relationship inevitably develops between the use of Marxist ideas as official ideology and as part of historical, anthropological and sociological sociological research. These studies explore this tangled relationship in connection with a number of special topics, such as an account of the so called "Asiatic mode of production", the problem of whether Marxism can accommodate more than one line of historical materialism and the manner in which historical materialism can function as a satisfactory scheme of sociological explanation. The work throws considerable light on the problems currently facing Soviet society.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0631157875/?tag=2022091-20
(These essays explore the relationship between culture and...)
These essays explore the relationship between culture and politics in the modern world. They range in space from Iran to Algeria, and the eastern marchlands of Europe to the Atlantic, and in time over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But they are all inspired by a cluster of linked preoccupations with the nature of the social order now emerging in the world and the kinds of moral and political legitimation it requires and permits. The essays are also linked by Ernest Gellner's distinctive, and highly arresting, intellectual temper and style. The volume will interest a wide range of readers in the social sciences and philosophy.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521336678/?tag=2022091-20
( When Ernest Gellner was his early thirties, he took it ...)
When Ernest Gellner was his early thirties, he took it upon himself to challenge the prevailing philosophical orthodoxy of the day, Linguistic Philosophy. Finding a powerful ally in Bertrand Russell, who provided the foreword for this book, Gellner embarked on the project that was to put him on the intellectual map. The first determined attempt to state the premises and operational rules of the movement, Words and Things remains philosophy's most devastating attack on a conventional wisdom to this day.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415345480/?tag=2022091-20
(Of all the great world religions, Islam appears to have t...)
Of all the great world religions, Islam appears to have the most powerful political appeal in the twentieth century. It sustains some severely traditional and conservative regimes, but it is also capable of generating intense revolutionary ardour and of blending with extreme social radicalism. As an agent of political mobilisation, it seems to be overtaking Marxism, arid surpassing all other religions. The present book seeks the roots of this situation in the past. The traditional Muslim society of the arid zone has, in the past, displayed remarkable stability and homogeneity, despite great political fragmentation, and the absence of a centralised religious hierarchy. The book explores the mechanisms which have contributed to this result - a civilisation in which (in the main) weak states co-existed with a strong culture, which had a powerful hold over the populations under its sway. A literate Great Tradition, in the keeping of urban scholars, lived side by side with a more emotive, ecstatic folk tradition, ill tile keeping of holy lineages, religious brotherhoods and freelance saints. One tradition was sustained by the urban trading class and periodically swept the rest of the society in waves of revivalist enthusiasm; the other was based on the multiple functions it performed in rural tribal society and amongst the urban poor. The two traditions were intertwined, yet remained in latent tension which from time to time came to tile surface. The book traces the manner in which the impact of the modern world, acting through colonialism arid industrialisation upset the once stable balance, and helped the erstwhile urban Great Tradition to become the pervasive arid dominant one, culminating in the zealous arid radical Islam which is so prominent now. The argument is both formulated in the abstract and illustrated by a series of case studies and examinations of specific aspects, and critical examinations of rival interpretations.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521274079/?tag=2022091-20
Gellner, Ernest Andre was born on December 9, 1925 in Paris. Arrived in England, 1939. Son of Rudolf and Anna (Fantl) Gellner.
Bachelor, Master of Arts, University Oxford, 1947. Doctor of Philosophy, London University, 1961. Doctor of Science (honorary), Bristol University, England, 1986.
Doctor of Letters (honorary), Queen's University, Belfast, Ireland, 1989.
Teacher at London School of Economics 1949-1984, (full Professor since 1962). William Wyse Professor, of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge since 1984. Honorary Doctor of Science (University of Bristol) 1986.
Honorary Doctor of Letters [Queen's University of Belfast) 1989.
(The Soviet Union has witnessed the first occasion in hist...)
( When Ernest Gellner was his early thirties, he took it ...)
(Of all the great world religions, Islam appears to have t...)
(A discussion of the social and political organization of ...)
(These essays explore the relationship between culture and...)
(These essays explore the relationship between culture and...)
( From reviews of the first edition: "Brilliant, provoca...)
Gellner has written extensively on the social anthropology of the Islamic world. Within academic philosophy, his Words and Thing (1959) created a violent controversy by applying a sociological analysis to the style of what he called linguistic philosophy. The book contains a good deal of telling argument that might have been more appreciated in the 1990s than it was in the 1960s.
Gellner has been a vigorously polemical opponent of psychoanalysis.
His own positive philosophical writings have addressed issues of rationality, relativism and conceptual legitimation, as well as problems of mtercultural understanding in social anthropology. His Plough, Sword and Book (1988) contains a case for ‘philosophic history’ on Weberian lines. He characterizes his position as ‘Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalist’ in terms of a denial °f relativism: a commitment to the view that ‘there 's external, objective, culture-transcending knowledge’.
‘Truth is independent of the social order..’. On the other hand, his Position ‘does not allow any culture to validate a Part of itself with final authority, to decree some substantive affirmation to be privileged and exempt from scrutiny’. Gellner,s a prolific and independent-minded writer with an enormous range of reference.
Many current Philosophical fashions appear to him as the statements of problems rather than as solutions. His philosophizing about the cultural dominance of Western rationality has been more thorough than that of almost any other tecent thinker.
Served with Czech. Army in exile, 1944-1945. Fellow British Academy, Royal Anthropol. Institute, American Academy Arts and Sciences (honorary), Academia Europaea.
Married Susan Ryan, September 1954. Children: David, Sarah, Deborah, Benjamin.