Search Results

“... The brilliant, illuminating and intellectually cohesive tradition known as social anthropology has long been dominated in Britain by the thought and research styles established by Bronislaw Malinowski. Those who were close to him and who attended his seminar at the LSE were the Companions of the Prophet. Many of them are still with us, active and productive: but they are by now, all of them, in academic retirement ...”

“... has interpreted that collapse as an episode in the global spread of civil society – defined by Ernest Gellner as ‘that set of diverse non-governmental institutions which is strong enough to counterbalance the state and, while not preventing the state from fulfilling its role of keeper of the peace and arbitrator among major interests, can ...”

“... When Ernest Gellner was teaching at the Central European University in Prague in 1995, the last year of his life, he cultivated informal social relations with the graduate students there. One student ‘confessed to unease when Gellner sat down to watch television with him – saying it was as if Max Weber had dropped by ...”

“... in the field at this level of intensity, and perhaps even for those who are, the 16 pages of Ernest Gellner’s ‘Foreword’ provide essential reading. Khazanov’s book takes for granted a general framework of Russian Marxist ideas which will be unfamiliar to most English readers. Within that framework it makes a contribution to a long-standing ...”

“... This is a small book, but one of high density, both in ideas and, at times, in expression. Gellner’s field of concern is the modern world, and though occasionally he casts a look at Mediaeval Europe and Islam, it is in the 20th century that his interest lies, as does what evidence he can muster to support his themes ...”

“... no place in it. This is not just because he fails to mention Fukuyama. Anderson, Roberto Unger, Ernest Gellner, or other significant contributors. More serious is the fact that he believes himself dispensed from doing so in virtue of a special insight bestowed by the Judaic inheritance. A Jew, he writes, naturally ‘reflects the deepest eddies of the ...”

“... If human history does, indeed, have a structure, it is, as Professor Gellner emphasises, discernible only with hindsight. The path which has led, in his words, ‘from the cosy social cocoon of early man to the expanding, cognitively powerful, and socially disconnected world of modern man’ was not merely invisible to those who were treading it: it was inconceivable ...”

“... can claim a long past, even if his theory implies that most of it was a past without nationalism. Ernest Gellner, who has written before on nationalism, and here adds a short but concentrated essay, together with related pieces, has attributed its rise to the capitalised industrial economy of the modern world. Those movements of the 19th century that ...”

“... case, like Dora’s, unresolved. ‘Freud – Freude’. Helped by a compositor’s reckless id, Ernest Gellner goes further and writes of ‘Anna Fraud (once described by her father as his only son)’. If the parapraxis is unjust, the parenthesis, like much in The Psychoanalytic Movement, is crudely apt. Betrayed by schismatic disciples, Freud settled ...”

“... reason and morality – have betrayed them. This theme is broached in a fine introductory essay by Ernest Gellner, who offers an exemplary exposition of Julien Benda’s much mentioned but little read La Trahison des Clercs of 1928. Benda called intellectuals to task for deserting old standards of truth, objectivity and morality. But as ...”

“... other hand, Paul Hyams hailed it as a blast of fresh air and the sort of book we need more of, and Ernest Gellner was equally enthusiastic about its intellectual daring. I thought it was a splendid piece of work: a small book with large implications. Moreover, in its main claims it was clearly right, and none of its critics have in the least disturbed its ...”

“... trappings; wisdom as the tyranny of disingenuousness. ‘The concept of the unconscious,’ Ernest Gellner writes, ‘devalues both the individual’s autonomy and all inner rational compulsion, and the authority of evidence.’ Once we have language, desire, dream-work in the picture – rather than, say, insight, mastery and empiricism ...”

“... century Mazower describes, into fewer, more solid patches of relative ethnic homogeneity. As Ernest Gellner observed, the picture has gone ‘from Kokoschka to Modigliani’. But Mazower’s conclusions are grim indeed for those parts of the Balkans, such as Macedonia, which still have the Kokoschka ethnic mix. And what of the Baltic states and ...”

“... attach themselves to non-kinship groups, such as revolutionary brotherhoods. Islam, as Professor Gellner points out in this collection of his writings, is unique among world religions in ‘maintaining its pre-industrial faith in the modern world’: a feature which, when it combines with political aspirations, makes a potent agent of political mobilisation ...”

“... War over and over again. The obsessive undertow of Orientalism brought Said into conflict with Ernest Gellner. Reviewing a successor-volume, Culture and Imperialism, in the Times Literary Supplement, Gellner accused him of ‘inventing a bogy called Orientalism’ and attributing to it a far too pervasive cultural ...”