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Many Causes, Many Cases

Peter Hall, 28 June 1990

Confessions of a Reluctant Theorist 
by W.G. Runciman.
Harvester, 253 pp., £30, April 1990, 0 7450 0484 9
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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 ...

A la mode

Graham Hough, 18 October 1984

Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes 
by Alastair Fowler.
Oxford, 357 pp., £15, December 1982, 0 19 812812 6
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... 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 ...

Simile World

Denis Feeney: Virgil’s Progress, 4 January 2007

Virgil: Georgics 
translated by Peter Fallon, with notes by Elaine Fantham.
Oxford, 109 pp., £7.99, July 2006, 0 19 280679 3
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Virgil: The Aeneid 
translated by Robert Fagles.
Penguin, 486 pp., £25, November 2006, 0 7139 9968 3
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... 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 ...

Post-Nationalism

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 3 December 1992

English Questions 
by Perry Anderson.
Verso, 370 pp., £39.95, May 1992, 0 86091 375 9
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A Zone of Engagement 
by Perry Anderson.
Verso, 384 pp., £39.95, May 1992, 0 86091 377 5
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... 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 ...

In the Company of Confreres

Terry Eagleton: ‘Modern British Fiction’, 12 December 2002

On Modern British Fiction 
edited by Zachary Leader.
Oxford, 328 pp., £14.99, October 2002, 0 19 924932 6
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... 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 ...

Where’s the omelette?

Tom Nairn: Patrick Wright, 23 October 2008

Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War 
by Patrick Wright.
Oxford, 488 pp., £18.99, October 2007, 978 0 19 923150 8
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... 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 ...

History’s Postman

Tom Nairn: The Jewishness of Karl Marx, 26 January 2006

Karl Marx ou l’esprit du monde 
by Jacques Attali.
Fayard, 549 pp., €23, May 2005, 2 213 62491 7
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... 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 ...

Mrs Thatcher’s Spengler

Tom Nairn, 24 January 1980

An Unfinished History of the World 
by Hugh Thomas.
Hamish Hamilton, 700 pp., £12.50, November 1980, 0 241 10282 0
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... 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 ...

Wolf, Turtle, Bear

Francis Gooding: ‘Wild Thought’, 26 May 2022

Wild Thought: A New Translation of ‘La Pensée sauvage’ 
by Claude Lévi-Strauss, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman and John Leavitt.
Chicago, 357 pp., £16, January 2021, 978 0 226 41308 2
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... 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 ...

Swank and Swagger

Ferdinand Mount: Deals with the Pasha, 26 May 2022

Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East 
by Jonathan Parry.
Princeton, 453 pp., £35, April, 978 0 691 18189 9
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... 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 ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: You had better look out, 10 December 1998

... 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 ...

Demonising Nationalism

Tom Nairn, 25 February 1993

... 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 ...

From the Outer Edge

Rory Scothorne: ‘Painting Nationalism Red’, 6 December 2018

Tom Nairn: ‘Painting Nationalism Red’? 
by Neal Ascherson.
Democratic Left Scotland, 27 pp., £4, February 2018
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... 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 ...

Wanting to Be Special

Tom Nairn, 21 March 1996

The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science 
by Marek Kohn.
Cape, 311 pp., £17.99, September 1995, 9780224039581
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... 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 ...

On the Threshold

Tom Nairn, 23 March 1995

Frameworks for the Future 
Northern Ireland Office, 37 pp., February 1995Show More
Northern Ireland: The Choice 
by Kevin Boyle and Tom Hadden.
Penguin, 256 pp., £6.99, May 1994, 0 14 023541 8
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... 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 ...

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