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“... in America had generally forsaken. The results have been prodigious. The works of Perry Anderson, Ernest Gellner, Anthony Giddens, Geoffrey Hawthorn, Steven Lukes, Michael Mann and Runciman himself, not to mention many others, take up the challenge of the classical sociologists, often on the terrain of world history. Runciman’s own response to the ...”

“... to begin with what it is not. The theory of kinds denies – I am adapting some words used by Ernest Gellner for a rather different purpose – that literature ‘reveals to us from some kind of mysterious and totally unbounded reservoir of possible experiences or impressions, this or that set of items which then also occasionally arrange ...”

“... away of the usual equation of the agricultural with the natural life. A telling quotation from Ernest Gellner illustrates how instinctive this equation can still be: ‘Agrarian man can be compared with a natural species which can survive in the natural environment. Industrial man can be compared with an artificially produced or bred species which can ...”

“... on Michael Mann, Norberto Bobbio, Roberto Unger, W.G. Runciman. Andreas Hillgruber, Max Weber, Ernest Gellner, Carlo Ginzburg, Isaiah Berlin, Fernand Braudel and Francis Fukuyama. More recently (LRB, 24 September and 22 October), he has extended himself to Michael Oakeshott and others of Oakeshott’s generation on ‘the intransigent right’, and to ...”

“... witty, self-ironising style has been the quickest route for expatriates like Wilde, Wittgenstein, Ernest Gellner, Isaiah Berlin or Tom Stoppard to become English. In doing so, they compensate for their outsider status by becoming honorary aristocrats, superior to the very middle classes who have marginalised them. In modern England, the patrician is an ...”

“... putting forward quite similar arguments about the Arab world and Muslim society.* As Ernest Gellner maintained nearly thirty years ago in Muslim Society, extreme Islamicism can be at bottom an expression of panic at internal changes, based on dread of over-hasty threats to a rigidly paternalist social structure ...”

“... sentiments nor the consequences – the background to Marxism’s genesis – were accidental, as Ernest Gellner, a later thinker from another border country, would put it in Nations and Nationalism (1983). They were not the result of history delivering the redemption message to ‘the wrong address’ – to nation instead of class. ‘Marxists ...”

“... of European empire, had it not been checked and turned back, was to transform the globe (as Ernest Gellner put it in a memorable phrase) into a series of South Africas, or even into one unified system of forced underdevelopment and apartheid. Euro-centrism is failure to perceive the limits and contradictions of an Enlightened culture that issued in ...”

“... because he felt unsure handling the philosophical content), and the philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner, who was brought in to look over the text when Wolfram and Lévi-Strauss couldn’t agree. (The title was among the sticking points: ‘Mind in the Wild’, ‘Untamed Thinking’ and ‘Natural Ideas’ were all considered and rejected.) When ...”

“... and free trade – Thatcherism avant la lettre. Urquhart’s view was mirrored 150 years later by Ernest Gellner in Plough, Sword and Book: ‘all these features seem highly congruent with an urban bourgeois lifestyle and with commercialism’; Islam was in fact ‘closer in many ways to the ideals and requirements of modernity than those of any other ...”

“... lurches incoherently from one crisis to another, reminds me of the last conversation I had with Ernest Gellner before his untimely death. I may not believe that sociology is or could ever be a predictive science, but Ernest has been proved spot on in what he said to me about Eastern Europe. The Czechs and Poles, he ...”

“... a more substantial framework of development. This failure was remedied by the important work of Ernest Gellner, Anthony Smith and others from the Sixties to the Eighties. They showed, to my mind conclusively, that nationalism was in separable from the deeper processes of industrialisation and socio-economic modernity. Far from being an irrational ...”

“... about Oxford’s fad for linguistic philosophy was shared by another of Nairn’s future mentors, Ernest Gellner, whose polemic Words and Things drew a connection between the insular preoccupations of the Oxford faculty and their cosy college life. Nairn was more interested in the Continental vigour of the ‘emperor of aesthetics’, Benedetto ...”

“... and multicultural display. I think this is what the famous row between Edward Said and the late Ernest Gellner was really about. Admittedly. Kohn’s survey also shows clearly how far social science is from being able to tell any such story. For example, one fundamental element of it will be the Human Genome Project. A 1994 document from this ...”

“... in the move towards a more global and single-system society. When an old order dismantles itself, Ernest Gellner has written of Eastern Europe, ‘nationalism emerges with all its vigour, but with few of its rivals.’ The rival forces of civil association, representative politics and local government were more severely repressed and take far more time ...”