Ernest Gellner - Modern Quotes

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

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

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