Ernest Gellner Quotes

26 Sourced 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
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
People are even more reluctant to admit that man explains nothing, than they were to admit that God explains nothing.

Ernest Gellner
In the twentieth century, the essence of man is not that he is a rational, or a political, or a sinful, or a thinking animal, but that he is an industrial animal. It is not his moral or intellectual or social or aesthetic... attributes which make man what he is. His essence resides in his capacity to contribute to, and to profit from, industrial society. The emergence of industiral society is the prime concern of sociology.

Ernest Gellner
This is indeed one of the most important general traits of a modern society: cultural homogeneity, the capacity for context-free communication, the standardization of expression and comprehension.

Ernest Gellner
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
A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.

Ernest Gellner
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.

Ernest Gellner
Capital, like capitalism, seems an overrated category.

Ernest Gellner
Roughly, science is the mode of cognition of industrial society, and industry is the ecology of science.

Ernest Gellner
America was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it.

Ernest Gellner
The idea that some of the members of the smooth, bland variety of second generation of linguistic philosophers undergo perplexity, let alone intellectual cramp, has an element of high comedy.

Ernest Gellner
Looking at the contemporary world, two things are obvious: democracy is doing rather badly, and democracy is doing very well. New states are born free, yet everywhere they are in chains. Democracy is doing very badly in that democratic institutions have fallen by the wayside in very many of the newly independent 'transitional' societies, and they are precarious elsewhere. Democracy, on the other hand, is doing extremely well in so far as it is almost (though not quite) universally accepted as a valid norm.

Ernest Gellner
It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.

Ernest Gellner
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
Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment. That which one would insinuate, thereof one must speak.

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. It hardly matters whether such an inquiry is called philosophy or sociology.

Ernest Gellner
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
Ideas, and even the detection of errors, require more than care and caution.

Ernest Gellner
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...

Ernest Gellner
It is this which explains nationalism: the principle — so strange and eccentric in the age of agrarian cultural diversity and the 'ethnic' division of labour — that homogeneity of culture is the political bond, that mastery of (and, one should add, acceptability in) a given high culture... is the precondition of political, economic and social citizenship.

Ernest Gellner
Obstruction of mobility, where it occurs, is one of the most serious and intractable problems of industrial society.

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

Ernest Gellner
[I am a humble adherent of]... Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalism.

Ernest Gellner
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
Tribalism never prospers, for when it does, everyone will respect it as a true nationalism, and no-one will dare call it tribalism.

Ernest Gellner