Ernest Gellner (192595) was one of the last great thinkers from Central Europe to be condemned by his Jewish background to experience the worst horrors of the twentieth century. He was a multilingual polymath, able to set the agenda in the study of nationalism and the sociology of Islam. His intellectual trajectory differed from that of similar thinkers both in producing a highly integrated philosophy of modernity and in combining a respect for nationalism with an appreciation of the power of modern science. In this definitive biography, particular attention is paid to his Prague roots, and to debates with Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Charles Taylor, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and many others.
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Ernest Gellner was a great twentieth-century intellectual, and John Hall s fine biography conveys a vivid sense of the man and of the extraordinary range of his ideas, while commenting with great intelligence upon them. A must read. --Michael Mann, Professor of Sociology, UCLA
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JOHN A. HALL is the James McGill Professor of Comparative Historical Sociology at McGill University in Montreal. His previous books include Powers and Liberties, Liberalism, Coercion and Consent, International Orders, and (with Charles Lindholm) Is America Breaking Apart? He taught at the Central European University in the early 1990s, when Gellner had returned to Prague, and gained an appreciation at that time of his background in Central Europe.
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Format:Hardcover
This is a painstakingly researched and highly informative survey of the life and works of one of the great social anthropologists and philosophers of the last century. Easy to read and not afraid to be critical of it's subject(just like Gellner would have wanted) it conveys a deep sense of what Gellner was actually like as a person with extracts from his own private "Notes" as well as a comprehensive explanation of his position and an even-handed critique of it. Essential reading for any social science student or anyone curious about the inner workings of the mind of one of the greatest thinkers to have come along.
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