Gellner, Ernst (1925-1995)

Perhaps one of the most prolific scholars of the twentieth century, Ernst Gellner remains a highly influential figure across many disciplines (sociology, history, anthropology, and philosophy). He was born in Paris, but was of Czech Jewish parentage and he grew up in Czechoslovakia. In 1939, with the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Central Europe, he moved to England, where he spent most of his life. During World War II he served in the Czechoslovakian Armored Brigade (1944–5), and later he returned to Oxford, where he received a degree in politics, philosophy, and economics. From 1949 until 1984 he was in the department of sociology at the London School of Economics (LSE), where he completed his doctorate in social anthropology (1961) and became professor of philosophy (1962–84). He was, among other things, Visiting Fellow at Harvard (1952–3), the University of California, Berkeley (1968), and the Centre de Recherches et d'Etudes sur les Socits Mediterranens (1978–9), member of the Social Science Research Council (1980–6), and Chairman of the International Activities Committee (1982–4). Between 1993 and 1995 he was Director of the Centre for the Study of Nationalism at the Central European University in Prague, where he died in 1995. Gellner's initial philosophical inquiry involved a critique of linguistic philosophy as conservative, parochial, and restrictive. His Words and Things ...