Gellner, Ernest (1925—95)
Czech historian and social anthropologist. Born in Paris to a family of Bohemian Jews, Gellner grew up in Prague. In 1939 his family moved to Britain to escape persecution by the Nazis. Gellner won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied philosophy, politics, and economics. But after only a year of study, he left university to join the Czech army. He returned to Prague after the war, but disgusted by the communist takeover he left after only a few months and resumed study at Balliol. His first job in 1947 was at the University of Edinburgh in the Department of Moral Philosophy. Two years later he took a position in the Sociology Department at the London School of Economics, where he was to remain for two decades. In 1974, he moved to Cambridge as the head of the Department of Anthropology, remaining there for nearly 20 years before fulfilling a lifelong dream of returning to Prague as the head of a George Soros funded institute to study the rise of nationalism in Eastern Europe. Gellner shot to prominence in 1959 with the publication of Words and Things, which attacked the so-called ordinary language philosophers, particularly Wittgenstein, Ludwig, for the way they privilege convention and community‐established norms of meaning. Probably his most-read work, though, is Nations and Nationalism (1983), which, alongside the work of Anderson, Benedict, continues to set the agenda for debate about the subject of what constitutes nationalism. Further Reading: J. Hall The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism (1998). S. Malešević and M. Haugaard (eds.) Ernest Gellner and Contemporary Social Thought (2007).