Gellner, Ernest
Gellner, Ernest (1925–95)Although Gellner was born in Czechoslovakia, his family (who had Jewish origins) left immediately after the German occupation in 1939, and he spent most of his working life in England. Between 1949 and 1984 he taught sociology then philosophy at the London School of Economics, before moving to a professorship of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. In 1993 he returned to Prague to become full-time Director of the Centre for the Study of Nationalism at the Central European University.
His writings are enormously wide-ranging. His first book was a critique of linguistic philosophy (Words and Things, 1959), which he condemned as complacent, unimaginative, and parochial. In Thought and Change (1964) he proposed the controversial thesis that social orders are seen to be legitimate only when they meet the requirements of affluence and nationalism. (Gellner's later writings attempted...
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