Ernest Gellner | |
|---|---|
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| Born | (1925-12-09)9 December 1925 Paris, France |
| Died | 5 November 1995(1995-11-05) (aged 69) Prague, Czech Republic |
| Education | |
| Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Critical rationalism |
| Institutions | University of Edinburgh London School of Economics King's College, Cambridge Central European University |
| Main interests | Political philosophy,philosophy of science,anthropology,nationalism |
| Notable ideas | Gellner's theory of nationalism Criticism ofordinary language philosophy |
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Ernest André GellnerFRAI (9 December 1925 – 5 November 1995) was a French-born British-Czechphilosopher andsocial anthropologist. Central themes in his social thought includedmodernisation theory andnationalism, the latter of which he developed into a leading theory (Gellner's theory of nationalism).[1] Hismulticultural perspective allowed him to engage with theWestern world, theMuslim world, andRussian civilization.
His first book,Words and Things (1959), sparked aleading article inThe Times, which then published a month-long correspondence on his analytical critique oflinguistic philosophy. Gellner served for 22 years as Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at theLondon School of Economics, eight years as theWilliam Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at theUniversity of Cambridge, and later headed the new Centre for the Study of Nationalism inPrague.
Throughout his career, in writing, teaching and political activism, Gellner challenged what he saw as closed systems of thought. At his death,The Independent called him a "one-man crusader forcritical rationalism", andThe Daily Telegraph called him one of the world's most vigorous intellectuals.[2]
Gellner was born inParis[3] to Anna, née Fantl, and Rudolf, a lawyer, an urbanintellectual German-speakingAustrian Jewish couple fromBohemia (which, since 1918, was part of the newly establishedCzechoslovakia).Julius Gellner was his uncle. He was brought up inPrague, attending aCzech language primary school before entering the English-language grammar school. This wasFranz Kafka's tricultural Prague:antisemitic but "stunningly beautiful", a city he later spent years longing for.[4]
In 1939, when Gellner was 13, the rise ofAdolf Hitler inGermany persuaded his family to leave Czechoslovakia and move toSt Albans, just north ofLondon, where Gellner attended St Albans Boys Modern School, nowVerulam School (Hertfordshire). At the age of 17, he won a scholarship toBalliol College, Oxford, as a result of what he called "Portuguese colonial policy", which involved keeping "the natives peaceful by getting able ones from below into Balliol."[4]
At Balliol, he studiedPhilosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) and specialised in philosophy. He interrupted his studies after one year to serve with the1st Czechoslovak Armoured Brigade, which took part in theSiege of Dunkirk (1944–45), and then returned to Prague to attend university there for half a term.
During this period, Prague lost its strong hold over him: foreseeing thecommunist takeover, he decided to return to England. One of his recollections of the city in 1945 was a communist poster saying: "Everyone with a clean shield into theParty", ostensibly meaning that those whose records were good during the occupation were welcome. In reality, Gellner said, it meant exactly the opposite:
If your shield is absolutely filthy we'll scrub it for you; you are safe with us; we like you the better because the filthier your record the more we have a hold on you. So all the bastards, all the distinctiveauthoritarian personalities, rapidly went into the Party, and it rapidly acquired this kind of character. So what was coming was totally clear to me, and it cured me of the emotional hold which Prague had previously had over me. I could foresee that aStalinoiddictatorship was due: it came in '48. The precise date I couldn't foresee, but that it was due to come was absolutely obvious for various reasons.... I wanted no part of it and got out as quickly as I could and forgot about it.[4]
He returned to Balliol College in 1945 to finish his degree, winning theJohn Locke prize and takingfirst class honours in 1947. The same year, he began his academic career at theUniversity of Edinburgh as an assistant to ProfessorJohn Macmurray in the Department of Moral Philosophy. He moved to theLondon School of Economics in 1949, joining the sociology department underMorris Ginsberg. Ginsberg admired philosophy and believed that philosophy and sociology were very close to each other.
He employed me because I was a philosopher. Even though he was technically a professor of sociology, he wouldn't employ his own students, so I benefited from this, and he assumed that anybody in philosophy would be an evolutionary Hobhousean like himself. It took him some time to discover that I wasn't.[5]
Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse had preceded Ginsberg as Martin White Professor of Sociology at the LSE. Hobhouse'sMind in Evolution (1901) had proposed that society should be regarded as an organism, a product of evolution, with the individual as its basic unit, the subtext being that society would improve over time as it evolved, ateleological view that Gellner firmly opposed.
Ginsberg... was totally unoriginal and lacked any sharpness. He simply reproduced the kind of evolutionaryrationalistic vision which had already been formulated by Hobhouse and which incidentally was a kind of extrapolation of his own personal life: starting in Poland and ending up as a fairly influential professor at LSE. He evolved, he had an idea of agreat chain of being where the lowest form of life was the drunk, Polish, anti-Semitic peasant and the next stage was the Polish gentry, a bit better, or the Staedtl, better still. And then he came to England, first toUniversity College underDawes Hicks, who was quite rational (not all that rational—he still had some anti-Semitic prejudices, it seems) and finally ended up at LSE with Hobhouse, who was so rational that rationality came out of his ears. And so Ginsberg extrapolated this, and on his view the whole of humanity moved to ever greater rationality, from drunk Polish peasant to T.L. Hobhouse and a Hampstead garden.[5]
Gellner's critique oflinguistic philosophy inWords and Things (1959) focused onJ. L. Austin and the later work ofLudwig Wittgenstein, criticising them for failing to question their own methods. The book brought Gellner critical acclaim. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1961 with a thesis onOrganisation and the Role of aBerberZawiya and became Professor ofPhilosophy,Logic andScientific Method just one year later.Thought and Change was published in 1965, and inState and Society in Soviet Thought (1988), he examined whether Marxist regimes could be liberalised.
He was elected to theBritish Academy in 1974. He moved to Cambridge in 1984 to head the Department ofAnthropology, holding theWilliam Wyse chair and becoming a fellow ofKing's College, Cambridge, which provided him with a relaxed atmosphere where he enjoyed drinking beer and playingchess with the students. Described by theOxford Dictionary of National Biography as "brilliant, forceful, irreverent, mischievous, sometimes perverse, with a biting wit and love of irony", he was famously popular with his students, was willing to spend many extra hours a day tutoring them, and was regarded as a superb public speaker and gifted teacher.[3]
HisPlough, Sword and Book (1988) investigated thephilosophy of history, andConditions of Liberty (1994) sought to explain the collapse ofsocialism with an analogy he called "modular man". In 1993, he returned to Prague, now rid of communism, and to the newCentral European University, where he became head of the Center for the Study of Nationalism, a program funded byGeorge Soros, the American billionairephilanthropist, to study the rise ofnationalism in the post-communist countries of eastern and centralEurope.[6] On 5 November 1995, after returning from a conference inBudapest, he had a heart attack and died at his flat in Prague, one month short of his 70th birthday.[citation needed]
Gellner was a member of both theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences and theAmerican Philosophical Society.[7][8]
With the publication in 1959 ofWords and Things, his first book, Gellner achieved fame and even notoriety among his fellow philosophers, as well as outside the discipline, for his fierce attack on "linguistic philosophy", as he preferred to callordinary language philosophy, then the dominant approach atOxbridge (although the philosophers themselves denied that they were part of any unified school). He first encountered the predominance of linguistic philosophy while at Balliol:
[A]t that time the orthodoxy best described as linguistic philosophy, inspired by Wittgenstein, was crystallizing and seemed to me totally and utterly misguided. Wittgenstein's basic idea was that there is no general solution to issues other than the custom of the community. Communities are ultimate. He didn't put it this way, but that was what it amounted to. And this doesn't make sense in a world in which communities are not stable and are not clearly isolated from each other. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein managed to sell this idea, and it was enthusiastically adopted as an unquestionable revelation. It is very hard nowadays for people to understand what the atmosphere was like then. This wasthe Revelation. It wasn't doubted. But it was quite obvious to me it was wrong. It was obvious to me the moment I came across it, although initially, if your entire environment, and all the bright people in it, hold something to be true, you assume you must be wrong, not understanding it properly, and they must be right. And so I explored it further and finally came to the conclusion that I did understand it right, and it was rubbish, which indeed it is.[5]
Words and Things is fiercely critical of the work ofLudwig Wittgenstein,J. L. Austin,Gilbert Ryle,Antony Flew,P. F. Strawson and many others. Ryle refused to have the book reviewed in the philosophical journalMind (which he edited), andBertrand Russell (who had written an approving foreword) protested in a letter toThe Times. A response from Ryle and a lengthy correspondence ensued.[9] Ryle explained his refusal to review the book in a letter to Gellner's publisher, he said that "Abusiveness may make a book saleable, but it disqualifies it from being treated as a contribution to an academic subject".[10]
In the 1950s, Gellner discovered his great love ofsocial anthropology. Chris Hann, director of theMax Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, writes that following the hard-nosed empiricism ofBronisław Malinowski, Gellner made major contributions to the subject over the next 40 years, ranging from "conceptual critiques in the analysis of kinship to frameworks for understanding political order outside the state in tribalMorocco (Saints of the Atlas, 1969); from sympathetic exposition of the works of Soviet Marxist anthropologists to elegant syntheses of theDurkheimian andWeberian traditions in western social theory; and from grand elaboration of 'the structure of human history' to path-breaking analyses of ethnicity and nationalism (Thought and Change, 1964;Nations and Nationalism, 1983)".[3] He also developed a friendship with the Moroccan-French sociologistPaul Pascon, whose work he admired.[11]
In 1983, Gellner publishedNations and Nationalism. For Gellner, "nationalism is primarily a political principle that holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent".[12] Gellner argues that nationalism appeared and became a sociological necessity only in the modern world. In previous times ("the agro-literate" stage of history), rulers had little incentive to impose culturalhomogeneity on the ruled. But in modern society, work becomes technical; one must operate a machine, and to do so, one must learn. There is a need for impersonal, context-free communication and a high degree of cultural standardisation.[citation needed]
Furthermore,industrial society is underlined by the fact that there is perpetual growth: employment types vary and new skills must be learned. Thus, generic employment training precedes specialised job training. On a territorial level, there is competition for the overlappingcatchment areas (such asAlsace-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.[citation needed]
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| Preceded by | William Wyse Professor of Social AnthropologyCambridge University 1984–1992 | Succeeded by |
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