Ernest Gellner Quotes (32 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Anthropology and Politics

Ernest Gellner

Ernest Gellner: 32 quotes 0 likes

Famous Ernest Gellner Quotes

“The model that can be drawn up, of a plural society in which the multiplicity of forces and institutions prevent any one of their number dominating the rest, and which function on the basis of a broad and non-doctrinaire consensus — this picture does not warm the blood like wine. To appreciate and savour its appeal, one needs a rather sophisticated taste, perhaps.”

Ernest Gellner

Contemporary Thought and Politics (1974)

“[I am a humble adherent of]…Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalism.”

Ernest Gellner

Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (1992)

“In brief, nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which requires the ethnic boundaries should not be cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state — a contingency already formally excluded by the principle in its general formulation — should not separate the power holders from the rest.”

Ernest Gellner

Source: Nations and Nationalism (1983), Chapter 1, Definitions, p. 1

“Dr J. O. Wisdom once observed to me that he knew people who thought there was no philosophy after Hegel, and others who thought there was none before Wittgenstein; and he saw no reason for excluding the possibility that both were right.”

Ernest Gellner

Spectacles & Predicaments (1979)

“Just as every girl should have a husband, preferably her own, so every culture must have its state, preferably its own.”

Ernest Gellner

The Coming of Nationalism and Its Interpretation: The Myths of Nation and Class in Mapping the Nation

“It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.”

Ernest Gellner

Nations and Nationalism (1983)

Ernest Gellner Quotes about the trip

“The new perspective also manifested itself in other ways: the shift of attention to sociologists such as Max Weber who were primarily concerned, not with overall 'development', but with the one specific development, that of modern society; the tendency to be concerned with those aspects of Marxism relevant to this one transition, and to ignore its Evolutionist aspects; and, recently and most characteristically, the concern with the notion of industrial society, and its antithesis, to the detriment of other classifications, oppositions and alternatives.”

Ernest Gellner

Thought and Change (1964)

“I am deeply sensitive to the spell of nationalism. I can play about thirty Bohemian folk songs… on my mouth-organ. My oldest friend, who is Czech and a patriot, cannot bear to hear me play them because he says I do it in such a schmalzy way, 'crying into the mouth organ'. I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism which I did write, were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs, which happen to be my favourite form of music.”

Ernest Gellner

"Reply to Critics" in The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner

“The way forward does not lie in amateur and comically timeless linguistic sociology which takes ‘forms of life’ for granted (and this is what philosophy has been recently), but in the systematic study of forms of life which does not take them for granted at all.”

Ernest Gellner

The crisis in the humanities and in the mainstream of philosophy (1964), reprinted in The Devil in Modern Philosophy (1974)
Context: The way forward does not lie in amateur and comically timeless linguistic sociology which takes ‘forms of life’ for granted (and this is what philosophy has been recently), but in the systematic study of forms of life which does not take them for granted at all. It hardly matters whether such an inquiry is called philosophy or sociology.

Ernest Gellner Quotes

“Knowledge which … transcends the bounds, the prejudices and prejudgements of any one society and culture is not an illusion but, on the contrary, a glorious and luminous reality. Just how it was achieved remains subject to debate.”

Ernest Gellner

Reason and Culture (1992)

Knowledge , Reality

“Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment.”

Ernest Gellner

Source: Words and Things (1959), p. 265
Context: Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment. That which one would insinuate, thereof one must speak.

“It is the Soft Porn of Irrationalism.”

Ernest Gellner

Concepts and Community, in Relativism and the Social Sciences (1985)
Context: Wittgenstein's appeal lies in the fact that he provides a strange kind of vindication of romanticism, of conceptual Gemeinschaft, of custom-based concepts rather than statute-seeking Reform, and that he does so through a very general theory of meaning, rather than from the premisses habitually used for this purpose. Because there is no unique formal notation valid for all speech, each and every culture is vindicated. One never knew that could be done — and so quickly too! It is that above all which endows his philosophy with such a capacity to attract and to repel. His mystique of consensual custom denies that anything can sit in judgment of our concepts, that some may be more rational and others less so. So all of them are in order and have nothing to fear from philosophy, as indeed he insists. This is a fairly mild form of irrationalism, invoking no fierce dark Gods, merely a consensual community. It is the Soft Porn of Irrationalism.

“When knowledge is the slave of social considerations, it defines a special class; when it serves its own ends only, it no longer does so.”

Ernest Gellner

Plough, Sword and Book (1988)
Context: When knowledge is the slave of social considerations, it defines a special class; when it serves its own ends only, it no longer does so. There is of course a profound logic in this paradox: genuine knowledge is egalitarian in that it allows no privileged source, testers, messengers of Truth. It tolerates no privileged and circumscribed data. The autonomy of knowledge is a leveller.

Knowledge

“Civil Society is a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely, rather than imposed by birth or sustained by awesome ritual.”

Ernest Gellner

Conditions of Liberty (1994)
Context: Civil Society is a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely, rather than imposed by birth or sustained by awesome ritual. You can join the Labour Party without slaughtering a sheep...

Birth , Strong

“Addicts would be subject to blackmail.”

Ernest Gellner book Anthropology and Politics

Anthropology and Politics (1995)
Context: I do not recommend any legislative action against hermeneutics. I am a liberal person opposed to all unnecessary state limitation of individual liberties. Hermeneutics between consenting adults should not, in my view, be the object of any statutory restrictions. I know, only too well, what it would entail. Hermeneutic speakeasies would spring up all over the place, smuggled Thick Descriptions would be brought in by the lorry-load from Canada by the Mafia, blood and thick meaning would clot in the gutter as rival gangs of semiotic bootleggers slugged it out in a series of bloody shoot-outs and ambushes. Addicts would be subject to blackmail. Consumption of deep meanings and its attendant psychic consequences would in no way diminsh, but the criminal world would benefit, and the whole fabric of civil society would be put under severe strain. Never!