A Gellner Biography
by Chris Hann, Professor of Anthropology and Dean of Social Sciences,
University of Kent. This appeared in the
Independent
on November 8
th
, 1995
Ernest Gellner was an outstanding theorist
of modernity and a rare breed among late twentieth century scholars.
He made major contributions in very diverse fields, notably philosophy
and social anthropology. His excoriating attacks on the orthodoxies
of his times made it difficult for him to be fully accepted into either
of these academic communities. That suited him well enough: he seemed
to enjoy leading a one-man crusade for critical rationalism, defending
enlightenment universalism against the rising tides of idealism and
relativism.
Born in Paris on 9 December 1925, Gellner was brought up in Prague
and attended the English grammar school there. His Jewish family
decided on a move to England in 1939. At the end of the war he enlisted
with the Czech army, before continuing his education at Oxford. After
a first in PPE in 1949 he soon moved on to the London School of Economics,
becoming Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method in 1962.
During this phase of his career he achieved fame and notoriety among
philosophers, notably through his attack on Oxford linguistic idealism,
Words and Things
(1959).
Gellner always combined his passion for ideas with an equally intense
interest in the practical and material constraints of social life.
During the 1950s he discovered anthropology, and more specifically,
the hard-nosed, empirical, observational style promoted in the inter-war
decades by Bronislaw Malinowski, an earlier LSE recruit from Central
Europe. This anthropology was an immensely exciting discipline which
enabled Gellner to pursue social realities across cultural and temporal
boundaries. Through more than four decades his contributions to the
subject were enormous. They ranged from conceptual critiques in the
analysis of kinship to frameworks for understanding political order
outside the state in tribal Morocco (
Saints of the Atlas
,
1969); from sympathetic exposition of the works of Soviet marxist
anthropologists to elegant syntheses of the Durkheimian and Weberian
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).
Yet there were several paradoxes running throughout this work. Apart
form the Moroccan study, widely acknowledged as a classic of the British
school, he did not carry out local, ethnographic projects. He valued
fresh empirical data from fieldwork above all else, and advised his
many graduate students accordingly. Yet he himself often preferred
to be comparative, to theorise and to systematize. He was closer
in some ways to the anthropology of Sir James Frazer than to that
of Malinowski. There were tensions too in his political loyalties.
The hatred of communism ran deep (it was perhaps exceeded only by
his contempt for another closed system, the church of psychoanalysis
- see
The Psychoanalytic Movement
, 1985). But Gellner
could understand the security that ordinary people valued under communist
rule, and their wish to
believe
in their system, in
the same way that be could appreciate the attractions of Islamic movements.
Although some judged his thinking to be euro-centric, he both admired
and respected the other cultures he studied. On the other hand he
did not hesitate to expose the forgery of cultural identities by intellectuals,
including ethnographers, in the context of modern national movements.
He had little sympathy for the lurch to right-wing orthodoxies in
the Britain of Mrs. Thatcher. In his recent book on civil society
(
Conditions of Liberty
, 1994) her argued for an effective
state that would provide the social guarantees citizens needed to
protect them from the tyranny of the market. At various times in
his career he engaged in debate with figures on the left, among them
Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, though his general scorn for western
marxism was unswerving.
He was a superb public speaker and debater, and also a gifted teacher,
injecting occasional notes of melodrama into lectures that were delivered
slowly, without notes. I remember first hearing him in the Cambridge
anthropology department of the 1970s, when Jack Goody invited him
to do a regular series on 'rationality'. Key points about contrasting
styles of cognition were deftly summarised in a blackboard diagram
of a 'multi-periscoped submarine', an image that must be indelibly
stamped on generations of students (the argument is set out fully
in
Plough, Sword and Book
, 1988).
His influence spread far beyond social anthropology, and may indeed
have been stronger in other fields. The fierce tone of the polemics
of the 1950s against Oxford philosophers was repeated in the 1990s
in tangles in the TLS with the New York based Palestinian literary
critic Edward Said. For Gellner the issues were essentially the same:
the vital need to refute the claim that ideas lead the world. He
was planning a major conference on the subject of Orientalism at the
time of his death.
After a highly successful decade as William Wyse Professor of Social
Anthropology at Cambridge, Gellner retired in 1993 in order to head
a new Centre for the Study of Nationalism, part of the Central European
University funded by George Soros. He was thrilled to be living in
Prague once again, and for all his intense dislike of socialism he
had to concede that the former powerholders had taken good care of
the city's historic centre. One regret, he told me recently, was
that he couldn't quite manage to down the prodigious amounts of beer
necessary for effective 'participant observation' among contemporary
Bohemian villagers.
Gellner did not establish a school though, like Popper, whose influence
he always acknowledged, he did attract some able and dedicated followers.
He did not always find it easy to accept the mundane pressures of
an academic department, particularly in Cambridge where an archaic
administrative system imposed very heavy demands. Indeed Cambridge
was in some respects a disappointment: after suffering the indignity
of having to kneel before a linguistic philosopher - Bernard Williams
- in his admission ceremony, he found that the Fellowship at Kings
was too large to provide him with that elusive sense of
gemeinschaft
..
Yet he settled well in the end, enjoyed his collaboration with archaeologists,
and the essays and books continued to flow. As at the LSE, he inspired
the loyalty and affection of staff as well as students. He was not
one to suffer fools gladly, and occasionally visitors to the department
were deceived by the reserved, even taciturn welcome they received.
But Gellner hated pomposity, and the dry humour was never far away:
mischievous Bohemian spirits would emerge in the conversation over
dinner and he was quite incapable of conforming to current fads for
'political correctness'. Having distilled the key message of a visitor's
talk, he would enjoy changing the subject altogether - perhaps to
chess, or to the parlous state of the English soccer team. He was
passionate about nature, especially mountains. Long after illness
ended his climbing career, he continued to enjoy canoeing on the Cam,
and to live life to the full - too full, perhaps, in later years,
as he subjected himself to punishing international conference schedules.
But he was usually able to retreat with his family to a precious
hideaway in North Italy during summers, and it was here that much
of his extraordinarily varied writing was done. Rumour has it that
two new volumes were completed this summer.
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