See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/254256890

'Ernst Gellner'

Chapter · January 2007

CITATIONS READS
0 2,032

1 author:

Rodanthi Tzanelli
University of Leeds
169 PUBLICATIONS   1,026 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Thana Capitalism and the rise of death seekers View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Rodanthi Tzanelli on 01 June 2014.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

1838 Gellner, Ernst (1925–95)
Rimmerman, C. A. (2002) From Identity to Politics:
The Lesbian and Gay Movement in the United
States. Temple University Press, Philadelphia.
Rupp, L. J. & Taylor, V. (2003) Drag Queens at the
801 Cabaret. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Seidman, S. (1993) Identity Politics in a ‘‘Post-
modern’’ Gay Culture: Some Historical and Con-
ceptual Notes. In: Warner, M. (Ed.), Fear of a
Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory.
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp.
105–42.
Snow, D. A. & Benford, R. D. (1992) Master Frames
and Cycles of Protest. In: Morris, A. D. & Muel-
ler, C. M. (Eds.), Frontiers in Social Movement
Theory. Yale University Press, New Haven, pp.
133–55.
Snow, D. A., Burke Rochford, E., Jr., Worden, S. K.,
& Benford, R. D. (1986) Frame Alignment
Processes, Micro-Mobilization, and Movement
Participation. American Sociological Review 51:
464–81.
Stein, A. (1997) Sex and Sensibility: Stories of a
Lesbian Generation. University of California Press,
Berkeley.
Taylor, V. & Whittier, N. E. (1992) Collective Iden-
tity in Social Movement Communities: Lesbian
Feminist Mobilization. In: Morris, A. D. &
McClurg Mueller, C., (Eds.), Frontiers in Social
Movement Theory. Yale University Press, New
Haven, pp. 104–29.
Valocchi, S. (1999a) The Class-Inflected Nature of
Gay Identity. Social Problems 46(2): 207–24.
Valocchi, S. (1999b) Riding the Crest of the Protest
Wave? Collective Action Frames in the Gay Lib-
eration Movement, 1969–1973. Mobilization 4(1):
59–74.
Gellner, Ernst (1925–95)
Rodanthi Tzanelli
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 philoso-
phy). He was born in Paris, but was of Czech
Jewish parentage and he grew up in Czecho-
slovakia. 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 Czecho-
slovakian 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 depart-
ment of sociology at the London School of
Economics (LSE), where he completed his doc-
torate 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’Étu-
des sur les Sociétés Méditerranéens (1978–9),
member of the Social Science Research Coun-
cil (1980–6), and Chairman of the Interna-
tional 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 conser-
vative, parochial, and restrictive. His Words
and Things (1959) suggested a sociohistorical
approach to theory, which contextualizes schools
of thought and questions the ideological sub-
text of their theses. His critical approach to
intellectual production and its sociopolitical
origins, which was exemplified in his critique
of Oxford philosophical parochialism, earned
him many friends and enemies in the social
sciences. The same critical spirit guided his
pen later, when he reconsidered other hegemo-
nic systems of thought, such as Islamism, psy-
choanalysis, relativism, and hermeneutics. An
early application of this formula can be seen in
Thought and Change (1964), where Gellner sug-
gested that nationalism legitimates social order,
especially in countries in which moderniza-
tion led to social fragmentation. This Marxist
conception of nationalism as a hegemonic pro-
duct was reconsidered and modified by Gellner
himself in his later work, but was never wholly
abandoned.
Gellner’s anthropological explorations began
with The Saints of Atlas (1969), a study of
Moroccan Berbers and their system of thought.
In this study, Gellner defended the value of
Berber conceptual frameworks of the world that
contest institutional structures derived from the
centralized Moroccan state model but enable
an organization of social life based on indigen-
ous beliefs. The same themes of local knowl-
edge and hegemonic thought, particularity and

fabricated universality occupied Gellner in
Patrons and Clients (1977) and Muslim Society
(1981). Likewise, he developed an interest in
Soviet anthropology and its theoretical subtle-
ties that were depreciated by western Marxists.
His edited volume Soviet and Western Anthro-
pology (1980) marks an attempt to bring
together different ways of implementing Marx-
ism in the social sciences. His interest in Soviet
politics and society found renewed expression
in Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its
Rivals (1994), in which he offered a brilliant
reassessment of Marxism through an investiga-
tion of the conditions of modernity. Conditions
of Liberty is deemed to be one of the most
scholarly contributions in the study of civil
society and its future in a post-communist Rus-
sia overtaken by market values.
Gellner had a longstanding interest in the
phenomenon of nationalism and its different
manifestations in Western, Central, Southern
European and other, non-European, societies.
In Nations and Nationalism (1983) and Nation-
alism (1997) he examined the rise of nationalism
as an ideal that advocates the dominance of a
uniform culture. Revising or revisiting some of
the ideas he introduced in the 1950s, he argued
that nations emerge when local cultures are
replaced by the culture of the ‘‘nation,’’ which
assimilates or eradicates deviating ways of liv-
ing. Often, but not always, identifying the
nation with the nation-state, Gellner located
the emergence of national culture in the mod-
ern conditions that prevailed with the extinc-
tion of close-knit, agrarian communities and
the advance of industrialization that resulted
in social mobility and alienation. In this con-
text, citizenship became the primary loyalty of
the nation’s participants. A homogeneous edu-
cational system that promotes common tradi-
tions, beliefs, and language is sustained by the
ruling elites, so that the nation’s members,
equally educated, can move flexibly between
places and roles without compromising the
nation’s solidarity. At times Gellner replaces
the industrialization model with the advent of
Enlightenment rationality; a modernist at heart,
he located the emergence of national identity in
the post-Enlightenment era. Gellner’s theory
was criticized by Anthony Smith, one of his
students and a defender of the ethnic, historical
origins of nations (an argument encapsulated in
Gellner, Ernst (1925–95) 1839
Smith’s concept of ethnie). In October 1995 an
open debate was held at the University of War-
wick between Gellner and Smith, in which
Gellner defended the civic model of national-
ism in opposition to Smith’s ethnic model. The
Gellner–Smith dialogue was published in
Nations and Nationalism (1996), the journal of
the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and
Nationalism based at the LSE and chaired by
Smith, in 1996. Gellner was invited to continue
this debate at the LSE, but he died a few
months before the event.
For some, Gellner’s research trajectory
appears to be fragmented and lacking a coher-
ent agenda. This is partially because his inter-
ests spanned many disciplines and subject
areas. Often, Gellner changed his views on
phenomena he analyzed, or developed ideas
that initially appeared in the form of essays,
rather than extensive monographs. His work,
however, has been influential in sociology and
social anthropology, and still informs the study
of culture, nationalism, and modern identity.
SEE ALSO: Ethnicity; Marxism and Sociol-
ogy; Modernization; Nation-State; Nationalism
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED
READINGS
Gellner, E. (1959) Words and Things: A Critical
Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in
Ideology. Gollancz, London.
Gellner, E. (1964) Thought and Change. Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, London.
Gellner, E. (1969) The Saints of Atlas. University of
Chicago Press, Chicago.
Gellner, E. (1974) Contemporary Thought and Politics.
Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
Gellner, E. (Ed.) (1980) Soviet and Western Anthro-
pology. Columbia University Press, New York.
Gellner, E. (1981) Muslim Society. Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, Cambridge.
Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Black-
well, Oxford.
Gellner, E. (1994) Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society
and its Rivals. Hamish Hamilton, London.
Gellner, E. (1997) Nationalism. Weidenfeld & Nicol-
son, London.
Gellner, E. & Waterbury, J. (Eds.) (1977) Patrons and
Clients. Duckworth, London.
Lessnoff, M. (2002) Ernest Gellner and Modernity.
University of Wales Press, Cardiff.
 1840 gender, aging and
Smith, A. (1991) National Identity. Penguin, London.
The Warwick Debates (1996) The Nation: Imagined
or Real? Republished from Nations and National-
ism. Online. www.members.tripod.com.
gender, aging and
Toni Calasanti
Interest and research in gender and aging have
progressed through a variety of different phases,
each spurred by developments in both feminist
scholarship and aging studies. While each stage
has emerged from the previous, all can be found
in contemporary theory and research.
The first stage, which can be further subdi-
vided into two approaches, involved a focus
on women. Spurred by the 1970s women’s
movement, in the early 1980s some scholars of
aging began to question the lack of explicit
attention paid to aging women. This was
obvious in such topic areas as retirement, where
women were routinely excluded from research.
Even national, large-scale data sets, such as the
longitudinal retirement study undertaken by
the Social Security Administration in the
1970s, only included women as primary respon-
dents after their husbands had died. The pre-
sumed split between private and public spheres
fostered a belief that paid labor was central only
to men’s identities and that, for women, retire-
ment was either irrelevant or unimportant.
Two attempts to address the neglect of
women in aging research ensued, each repre-
senting a somewhat different approach. The
first simply added women to research. Similar
to what had occurred in other areas of sociology,
scholars began to include women in studies or
investigate them on their own. However, this
‘‘add women and stir’’ tactic simply placed
women into models and theories that derived
from men’s experiences. Conceptually, gender
remained an individual attribute, a demogra-
phic characteristic with no structural properties.
For example, noting differences between men
and women’s labor force participation histories
led to the conclusion that women’s intermittent
work histories result in lower retirement bene-
fits. Why and how women’s work histories
View publication stats
differed, or why policies such as Social Security
or defined-benefit plans rewarded stable labor
force participation were neither questioned nor
explored. Similarly, the equation of workforce
participation with adequate retirement finances
assumed a gender-neutral workplace in which
women and men reap similar rewards.
As important as this movement toward inclu-
sion was, using men as the explicit or implicit
reference group ultimately rendered women
deviant. Results and subsequent theorizing
viewed women in terms of how closely they
did or did not approximate male models, but
revealed little about women themselves. In
addition, the ways in which subsequent ‘‘differ-
ences’’ could be interpreted and used were pro-
blematic. Gibson (1996) pointed to the bias in
the ways scholars typically discuss gender dif-
ferences in old age, noting that men are used as
the implicit standard and women are described
as deviating from it. This has critical implica-
tions for future theory, research, and policies.
The realization that simply adding women
into preexisting studies and theories rendered
them as the ‘‘other’’ spawned a movement to
examine women on their own terms. Spurred
by developments in feminist scholarship, scho-
lars undertook a second response to the neglect
of women, that of centering on women’s experi-
ences from their own standpoint. More com-
mon in the 1990s, research that has centered on
women has allowed for a reformulation of meth-
ods and theories that incorporate women’s
experiences as well as men’s.
For example, in contrast to the model
intended to discern if women were more or less
satisfied with retirement than men, research
beginning with women’s experiences revealed
that, for most women, leaving the labor force
meant leaving only one job, a paid job. For
the most part, women retained their domestic
labor responsibilities. This does not necessarily
diminish their satisfaction with retirement, but
certainly shapes their experiences of this time of
life in a different way from men’s. Indeed, the
notion of being ‘‘free’’ in retirement does not
mean the cessation of work for women, but
instead a reduced work load (for which they
may well be grateful). The heightened focus
on unpaid labor that resulted from centering
on retired women also refocused attention on
the productive activities of old people, both