Ernest Gellner was a multilingual polymath who set the agenda in the study of nationalism and the sociology of Islam for an entire generation of academics and students. This definitive biography follows his trajectory from his early years in Prague, Paris and England to international success as a philosopher and public intellectual. Known both for his highly integrated philosophy of modernity and for combining a respect for nationalism with an appreciation for science, Gellner was passiona...

First Published in 1992. On questions of faith, Ernest Gellner believes, three ideological options are available to us today. One is the return to a genuine and firm faith in a religious tradition. The other is a form of relativism which abandons the notion of unique truth altogether and resigns itself to treating truth as relative to the society or culture in question. The third, which Gellner calls enlightenment rationalism, upholds the idea that there is a unique truth, but denies that ...

The essays in this volume gather together Gellner's thinking on the connection between philosophy and life and they approach the topic from a number of directions: philosophy of morals, history of ideas, a discussion of individuals including R. G. Collingwood, Noam Chomsky, Piaget and Eysenck and discussions on the setting of philosophy in the general culture of England and America.

This volume focuses on key conceptual issues in the social sciences, such as Winch's idea of a social science, structuralism, Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard, and the concept of kinship. In particular it deals with such problems as the relationship of nature and culture, the relevance of concepts drawn from within a given society to its understanding, and the relation of theory to time.

This edited volume examines the critical issues of the 21st century through the prism of Ernest Gellner’s work. The contributors look critically at Gellner´s legacy, questioning whether he remains an inspiration for today’s social theorists. Chapters proactively probe Gellner’s thoughts on a variety of pressing topics—modernity, postcolonialsm, nationalism, and more—without losing sight of current debates on these issues. This volume further brings these debates to life by having each chap...

In nearly two decades since Samuel P. Huntington proposed his influential and troubling 'clash of civilizations' thesis, nationalism has only continued to puzzle and frustrate commentators, policy analysts and political theorists. No consensus exists concerning its identity, genesis or future. Are we reverting to the petty nationalisms of the nineteenth century or evolving into a globalized, supranational world? Has the nation-state outlived its usefulness and exhausted its progressive and...

Ernest Gellner — a Jew who escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1939 after Hitler invaded — knew first-hand the catastrophic effects of excessive nationalism, and he was determined to understand the phenomenon that had shaped so much of 20th century history. ¶Gellner argued that the concept of ‘nation’ is not an ancient notion but rather a modern idea born out of the seismic social and cultural shifts that industrialization brought to the Western world. Nationalism, he concluded, was not the sam...

To the dismay of many commentators – who had hoped the world was evolving into a more tolerant and multicultural community of nations united under the umbrellas of supranational movements like the European Union – the nationalism that was such a potent force in the history of the 20th-century has made a comeback in recent years. Now, more than ever, it seems important to understand what it is, how it works, and why it is so attractive to so many people.A fine place to start any suc...