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Ernest Gellner (December 9 1925 - November 5 1995) was a philosopher and social anthropologist, one of the world's most eminent academics, who had the notable distinction of being the only philosopher whose work once prompted a leader in The Times of London.

As the Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics (LSE) for 35 years, the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge for 10, and finally as head of the new Centre for the Study of Nationalism in Prague, Gellner fought all his life, in his writing, his teaching and through his political work, against the tyranny of ideology and closed systems of thought, particularly communism, psychoanalysis, linguistic philosophy, relativism, post-modernism, and what he saw as the dictatorship of the free market. He was instrumental, in 1985, in obtaining permission from the Soviet Union for Anatoly Khazanov of the Soviet Institute of Ethnography and Anthropology to emigrate as a refusenik.

The Independent called Gellner a "one-man crusade for critical rationalism, defending enlightenment universalism against the rising tides of idealism and relativism, "(November 8, 1995). The sociologist David Glass once said that he wasn't sure whether the next revolution would come from the right or from the left; but he was quite sure that, wherever it came from, the first person to be shot would be Ernest Gellner. [1]

Background

Born in Paris to an urban intellectual Jewish family from Czechoslovakia, Gellner was brought up in Prague and attended the English grammar school there. In 1939, when he was 13 years old, the rise of Hitler in Germany persuaded his family to leave central Europe and moved to St. Albans, just north of London, England. At the age of 17, Gellner won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. He served for one year with the Czech Armored Brigade, which took part in the seige of Dunkirk, returning to Oxford in 1945 to complete his studies, where he won the John Locke prize and took first class honours in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) in 1949. He moved to the LSE, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1961 with a thesis on "Organization and the Role of a Berber Zawiya", and becoming Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method just a year later. He moved to Cambridge in 1984, becoming a fellow of King's College, and in 1993, returned to his native Prague, now free of communism, and to the new Central European University where he became head of the Center for the Study of Nationalism, a program funded by George Soros, the American billionaire philanthropist, to study the rise of nationalism in the post-communist countries of eastern and central Europe. [2] He was elected to the British Academy in 1974.

Academic life

With the publication of Words and Things, his first book, in 1959, Gellner achieved fame and, to some extent notoriety, among his fellow philosophers, as well as outside the discipline, for his fierce attack on linguistic philosophy as practised at Oxford at that time.

Nationalism

For Gellner, "nationalism is primarily a political principle that holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent". (where?) Nationalism only appeared, and, Gellner argues, became a sociological necessity, in the modern world. In previous times?? when?? ("the agro-literate" stage of history) rulers had little incentive to impose cultural homogeneity on the ruled. But in modern society, work becomes technical. One?? must operate a machine, and as such one ??? must learn. There is a need for impersonal, context-free communication and a high degree of cultural standardisation.

Furthermore, industrial society is underlined by the fact that there is perpetual growth - employment types vary and new skills must be learnt. Thus, generic employment training precedes specialised job training.

On a territorial level, there is competition for the overlapping catchment areas (e.g. Alsace-Lorraine). To maintain its grip on resources, and its survival and progress, the state and culture must for these reasons be congruent. Nationalism therefore is a necessity.

Criticisms of Gellner's theory include:

• It is too functionalist . Critics charge that Gellner explains the phenomenon with reference to the eventual historical outcome - industrial society could not 'function' without nationalism.
• It misreads the relationship between nationalism and industrialisation
• It fails to account for nationalism in non-industrial society and resurgences of nationalism in post-industrial societies
• It cannot explain the passions generated for nationalism (Why should one fight and die for one's nation?)

Philosophy of History

Gellner's Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History (1988) takes its title from the three groups he analyses through history: producers, coercers and clerisy. Their interactions emerge differently in various times and cultures, but Gellner particularly shows their typical behaviours in generic pre-agrarian, agrarian and industrial societies.