Ernest Gellner Research Articles

Contingency and “National Awakening”

Scholars often describe the early stages in the development of nationalism with the metaphor of “national awakening,” which originally comes from historical actors. Several scholars, notably Ernest Gellner, criticize the metaphor for its implicit teleology and essentialism. Much recent scholarship considers non-national loyalties, such as regionalism, civic pride, monarchism, or national indifference, reflecting an understandable weariness with teleological narratives. Scholars can avoid essentialist teleology by studying failed national movements. The history of “Slovak” national awakening, for example, should address Czechoslovakism and Panslavism. Despite its difficulties, however, the metaphor of “awakening” should be retained as a term of historic periodization.

The Ernest Gellner Nationalism Lecture: The Soviet Union, self‐determination, and the creation of the postwar human rights system

AbstractThe USSR played a key role in the establishment of the post‐World War II human rights system despite its repressive and even murderous domestic record. It forged an alliance with the countries of the Global South in support of decolonization, self‐determination, and social and economic rights, policies opposed by liberal states like the United States, Great Britain, and France. These positions were deeply rooted in the socialist tradition. Moreover, when a human rights movement emerged in the mid‐1960s, its members—in its origins overwhelmingly from the intelligentsia—called not for the overthrow of the Soviet Union but for the fulfilment of Soviet law. The language of rights, proclaimed with such flourish in the 1936 constitution and its successor in 1977, served as the weapon hurled by dissidents as they called on the Soviet government to respect freedom of speech and assembly, and national rights, including the right to emigrate. In turn, the international human rights movement developed from the 1960s to the 1990s largely through support for the Soviet dissident movement, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch prime examples. The Soviet experience is critical to any global history of human rights.

THE FORMATION OF NATIONAL IDENTITY THROUGH THE THEORETICAL APPROACHES OF LINGUISTIC AND LANGUAGE IDENTITY OF UKRAINIAN DISSIDENTS

In this article, the author analyzes the ideological struggle for the Ukrainian national identity happened in a meaningful time of Khrushchev Thaw when first dissidents appeared. Additionally, we have applied the theme of ideological propaganda and agitation considered through language approach to a larger scientific extent. First, we characterize separately the creating of an ethnic identity endorsed by the SRSR, and national identity of the URSR as an integral part of a specific social identity, linguistic identification with representatives of a certain nation, its culture and traditions, which include the entire complex of emotions caused by the sense of belonging. By involving the idea of identity as a relational, socio-cultural phenomenon, we considered the concept of Bucholt and Hall, J. Mead, K. Levy-Strauss. Next, we identify the works of Anthony Smith, Herbert Blumer, Ernest Gellner, Eric Gobsbaum. Trying to conduct the concept analysis of the formation of the Ukrainian national identity through the semantic and semiotic aspects of the language identity according to the Dissidents movement we used 3 key topic notions: - Identity as a relational, socio-cultural phenomenon; - Socio-historical contextualization of showing the national identity as an environmental product of the nation; - Ideology of the Standard Language. Finally, the author comes to an outcome that the Soviet ideology allowing the formation of the so-called ethnographic identity of Ukrainians, made considerable efforts to prevent the creation of a nationwide identity that Ukrainian Dissidents were fighting for, herewith, artificially imposing the idea of the disunity of Eastern and Western Ukraine.

How Should One Write about Masters?

The aim of the paper is to answer the question: how should one write about masters? It is a question about the narrative strategies of authors writing about masters. The presented analysis is based on five examples: (1) John A. Hall’s Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography, (2) Anita Burdman Feferman and Solomon Feferman’s Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic, (3) Edmund Leach’s Lévi-Strauss, (4) Andrzej Walicki’s Idee i ludzie. Próba autobiografii [Ideas and People. An Attempt at an Autobiography], and (5) Dialogues by Roman Jakobson and Krystyna Pomorska. Each text presents different rhetorical devices, authorial relations to the master, and academic aims. The paper concludes with a critical comparison of the five examples (with the addition of some other minor cases also discussed in the paper).

Le fasi del nazionalismo e il suo futuro. Ernest Gellner 1964-1997

Nationalism can be addressed as one of the main forces in modern world. Explaining the mechanisms behind its functioning had been one of the tasks of Ernest Gellner’s works. Throughout the comparison of the thesis exposed in three books: Thought and Change written in 1964, Nations and Nationalism written in 1983, and Nationalism, edited posthumous in 1997, the paper tries to reconstruct the argumentations adopted by the author to face the problem of the variety of the different species of nationalism. At the beginning of his career, Gellner elaborates a “dynamic” theory of nationalism where the main differences between its manifestations are the effect of the uneven impact of the tidal wave of industrialization that invests different territories in different times. Twenty years later, event thought the author maintains the theory of the uneven impact of the tidal wave, he tries to elaborate a typology of nationalism, that can be seen as a “static” theory valid independently from historical and geographical circumstances. But in the posthumous book Gellner abandons the typology and develops a deeper dynamic theory for explaining the nationalism in Europe. Starting from the variety and phases of the phenomenon the paper tries to presents the different ways how Gellner imagined the future of nationalism: the author elaborate, on the basis of David Hume’s theory of religion, the idea that we will assist at an ebb and flow: from the agriculture era, where culture and State do not coincide, the industrialization glorified the connection between culture/language and State, but the mature industrial society will contemplate a new balance where culture and State won’t coincide anymore.

Language, Ethno-nationalism and the South African university

This article presents a conceptual analysis of the relations between language, ethnicity, and nationalism – within the domain of the university. While an analytical distinction is commonly madbetween “ethnicity” and “nationalism,” here “ethno-nationalism” is used to highlight aspects of cultural continuity between these constructs and to draw attention to problematic “telementational” assumptions about the vehicular role of “languages” in influential modernist theories of nationalism (notably Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson). The empirical focus of the article falls on long-run institutional changes in the South African university system; and on the deployment of ideas about ethnicity, nationalism, language, and race. While assumptions about the vehicular capacity of languages have deep roots in the colonial and apartheid periods, these also feature prominently in post-apartheid debates on the transformation of the university system.

Formal and Informal Education during the Rise of Greek Nationalism: Learning To Be Greek by Theodore G. Zervas

Reviewed by: Formal and Informal Education during the Rise of Greek Nationalism: Learning To Be Greek by Theodore G. Zervas Alex R. Tipei (bio) Theodore G. Zervas, Formal and Informal Education during the Rise of Greek Nationalism: Learning To Be Greek. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2017. Pp. vii + 186. Cloth $109.99. Over the last 50 years, scholars have produced a rich and nuanced literature on the crucial role that education, particularly popular instruction, played in the construction of national identities in Europe and around the world. Theodore G. Zervas’s book, Formal and Informal Education during the Rise of Greek Nationalism: Learning To Be Greek, promises to contribute to this field by exploring how the Greek state mobilized and shaped what children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century learned not only in school, but in their homes and communities, as well. Unfortunately, Zervas’s book does not quite deliver. Zervas divides his study into five thematic chapters framed by an introduction and conclusion. He begins with a survey of family and community life (from the village to minority ethnolinguistic groups) and the place of childhood in Greek society around the turn of the twentieth century. In the following three chapters, he discusses schools and textbooks, children’s literature, and folk practices as sites of formal and informal education. The final chapter offers a series of biographical vignettes of Greek cultural figures meant to showcase how informal learning shaped them as children. From the start, Zervas struggles with the very concepts that anchor his study: nationalism and informal education. He never clearly articulates the coordinates of the Greek identity that the state promoted, nor does he directly link it to the content of either formal or informal instruction. While we get a glimpse of the contours of Greekness from allusions to the work of others, notably Michael Herzfeld (115), most of what we learn comes from vague statements. For example, Zervas writes that “Greece was hesitant in welcoming a more Western and secular society and Greek Orthodox Christianity was seen as crucial to maintaining a Greek cultural identity” (65). He leaves us to wonder to what or whom “Greece” refers here—political leaders? teachers? peasants?—as well as what these Western values were, and how they ran counter to Orthodoxy. More generally, Zervas tends to elide Orthodoxy and national identity without clarifying what sets apart the Greek case. The closest to a sketch of Greekness at the time is the claim: “[Today] it is easy . . . to define what it means to be Greek. We speak Greek, we live in Greece, we are Greek Orthodox (at least the majority of us are), and our history and culture dates back to ancient Greece” (15). This essentialized definition of contemporary [End Page 205] Greek identity points to the most troubling aspect of Zervas’s book—the reproduction of nationalist tropes. While Zervas makes it known he has read key works on nationalism (Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm), his study fails to problematize national identities, histories, and ideologies as historical-political constructions. Already in his preface, Zervas imagines his own Greek ancestry extending back as an unbroken line to 7000 BCE (vii). He contends, in contradiction to a wealth of studies, that customs and traditions—from when to lead a dance to how to serve coffee—were uniform across Greece (12) and rearticulates the figure of the timeless peasant, positing that rural life in postin-dependence Greece not only continued to resemble the entirety of the Ottoman period (1453–1821) but had often changed little “since late Byzantine times (1000–1400)” (31–32). Discussing its ethnolinguistic diversity, he calls Thessaloniki “an old relic from Greece’s Ottoman past” (40), without noting that for most of the period under consideration (1880–1930), the city was actually part of the Ottoman Empire; it only became Greek in 1913. Similarly, his brief note of educational institutions in Smyrna and other parts of Anatolia lacks any recognition of the historical or political context (70)—neglecting to nuance how Greek identity may have developed differently in the diaspora or to inform readers unfamiliar with Modern Greek history that these locales were outside the reach of the...

The descent of nations: social evolutionary theory, modernism and ethno‐symbolism

AbstractThis article explores the use of a revised conception of social evolutionary theory towards an understanding of nationalism. First, I review the debate between ethno‐symbolism and modernism, through the lens of the Warwick Debate between Gellner and Smith, arguing that both are partly right. Secondly, I outline what the revised conception of social evolution is looking first at its traditional conception before outlining a Darwinian view of social evolutionary theory. Finally, I examine how Darwinian social evolutionary theory can help fruitfully bring the ethno‐symbolic and modernist perspectives together. This is done by a sustained engagement primarily with the theories of Anthony Smith and Ernest Gellner pointing to how Darwinian social evolutionary theory can provide a link between the two theories that makes them mutually supportive rather than opposed.

‘Is imperialist nationalism an oxymoron?’*

AbstractAccording to Ernest Gellner's celebrated definition, nationalism is a political principle that holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent. Based on this definition, Alexander Motyl has declared that ‘nationalism and imperialism are polar types’. Even so, dozens of books and articles have used the concept of ‘imperialist nationalism’ without any qualms. Is this just a matter of terminological confusion, or does it reflect a deeper disagreement on what the phenomenon of nationalism actually is? In the lecture, I discuss the concept of ‘imperialist nationalism’ as used in the standard literature and find that numerous historical actors take pride in being both nationalists and imperialists. I distinguish between overseas colonial empires and contiguous land‐based empires and demonstrate that in both cases, ‘imperialist nationalism’ can be found. In the latter case, nationalism can take the shape of either ‘nation‐building imperialism’, in which nationalists strive for cultural homogenisation throughout the state, or ‘ethnocratic imperialism’, in which the distinction between ‘the imperial nation’ and other national groups is retained. In overseas colonial empires, I find only ethnocratic imperialism. As a case study, I analyse how Russian nationalists have related to the fact that Russia has historically been an Empire.

National Landscape with Lenin in the Background: Imagined National Communities in the Former Eastern Bloc

The paper is a critical review of two recently published monographs on the subject of the everyday and banal forms of nationalism in the post-socialist countries of Europe and Asia. The authors of the monographs, drawing on the theories of national identity and nationhood by Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Michael Billig, Michael Skey, Tim Edensor and others, showed their deep understanding of the processes of nation-building, while their ethnographic approach allowed them to gather original and non-obvious data on everyday practices and discourses by which citizens of the post-socialist countries reproduce and reconstruct their identities. However, both volumes display some shortcomings resulting from their renditions of the historical background, including the ethnic policies of the socialist states, as well as from constraints of the Western liberal perspective as applied to the social reality of the former Eastern Bloc.

Kajian atas Wacana Tasawuf dan Keutuhan Sosial Ernest Gellner

This article seeks to scrutinize the thought of Ernest Gellner particularly his idea of tasawuf and its relation to social cohesion. He has raised a number of questions concerning the relation of Islam and tasawuf with modernity, which attract the attention of other scholars in the field. By modernity he means secularism, industrialism and national-ism. Motivated by secular and orientalist ideals, Gellner seems to have no ground in the “normative” aspect of Islam. This study finds that he is equally not consistent. In the first instance, he tends to argue that Islam must be excluded from modernity because it is not in conformity with it. Then he speaks of what he calls higher Islam and lower Islam, the former being in line with modernity while the latter is not. With regard to this distinction, he urges that Muslim society undergoes what he calls a “transition” from the lower to the higher Islam if it is to join the modern society and be part of the “cohesive world”. The lower Islam should be left out because it teaches magic and encourages poverty. By bringing up this distinction, and not sticking to the consistent paradigm, Gellner’s thought on Islam and tasawuf vis-à-vis modernity is—it may be judged—dichotomous and even perplexed.

The Nation as Propertied Community: The Emergence of Nationalism in the United States and Norway

AbstractThis article engages in the debate about the origins and nature of nationalism. The argument is a modernist one, but it qualifies this narrative by focusing on landed property rights as the basis for the emergence and development of nationalism. The argument complements Ernest Gellner's theory of nationalism by suggesting that nationalism was at first a landed agrarian phenomenon which later became ideologically functional to industrial society due to its property assumptions. A historical‐sociological comparative analysis of land rights and national development in the United States and Norway between 1770 and 1884 forms the basis of the argument. The key point is that nationalism emerged as a consequence of the emergence of the more widespread individual ownership of land, which spawned the idea of national popular sovereignty. This original connection to property rights made nationalism ideologically functional for industrial society.

Pan-Canadian nationalism since 1867: precarious nation-building revisited in light of the writings of George Grant and Eric Hobsbawm

The author here proposes a broad study of pan-Canadian nationalism that demonstrates, first, that economic forces were the dominant structuring element in the nation-building narrative, thereby reinforcing the neo-Marxist theses of Eric Hobsbawm and Ernest Gellner. Secondly, the article revisits the thesis presented in George Grant’s seminal work Lament for a Nation, and concludes that his writing on pan-Canadian nationalism was remarkably premonitory.

What future for a democratic Europe following Brexit?

According to Jean Arthuis, Brexit is a chance for Europe. It casts a cruel light on the institutional fragility of the European Union, whose functioning is hardly defensible to public opinion. Beyond the EU’s significant achievements—peace on the Continent, freedom of movement, the single market, the euro—the deficits in democracy and governance are enormous. The time has come to identify the “public goods” that EU Member States can effectively assume at the national level, on the one hand, and those that must now be collectively supported within the Union, on the other. More than ever, Europeans need “public goods”, some of which can be made available to them only by Europe. A Europe with sovereign powers (money, economy and finance, diplomacy, armed defense, digital, energy, etc.) that is governed accordingly so as to boost its economy, ensure full employment, control migratory flows, combat terrorism, ensure security, and fight against tax fraud. A Europe that speaks to Europeans. This is why Brexit gives Europe a chance to set itself the goal of becoming a world power. After all, the United States of America was born of a divorce from the English crown; let us hope that our English friends will repeat the feat and that Brexit will be the catalyst of a United States of Europe. According to Henry Farrell, for decades, the European Union has sought to increase its democratic legitimacy in the eyes of citizens, by making good policy, by enhancing the powers of the European Parliament, and by providing greater power to national parliaments. None of this has worked particularly well, and some measures have had the perverse consequence of enabling populist nationalists like Britain’s UK Independence Party. The European Union would be better served by accepting the inevitability of political disagreement, and indeed harnessing it, by providing individuals with the real opportunity to vote on which kind of “Europe” they wanted. The lessons of Ernest Gellner and other scholars are that legitimacy is an effect rather than a cause, and that structured contention provides the best means towards stability and effectiveness.

Time, Kinship, and the Nation

There remains both a great deal of confusion over the nature of kinship and an inappropriate resistance to understanding the nation as one form of kinship, specifically, territorial kinship. Although one finds the relatively early and occasional analysis of the nation in terms of kinship, for example, by Lloyd Fallers, anthropologists, including paradoxically Ernest Gellner, have avoided understanding nationality in this way. Despite Anthony Smith’s attention to ethnie, those associated with nationalism studies have also generally avoided analyzing the nation in terms of kinship, as can be seen by the ill-informed hostility to the category “primoridal”. This article rectifies this mistake by re-examining the category of kinship, along both its vertical, temporal axis and horizontal, geographical axis, with attention to nationality in general and, in particular, in antiquity.

In the Literature Lab

Abstract The most striking development in literary scholarship since the millennium is the increasing exploration of scientific models for literary research. This reflects an anxiety about the authority of humanistic research that has historical roots, some of them well described in the work of the social anthropologist Ernest Gellner. The “two cultures” debate of the early 1960s, centrally animated by C. P. Snow and F. R. Leavis, made the anxiety of the literary professoriat a matter of public debate that still inflects literary scholarship and theory. The rhetorical amplification of scientism, privileging scientific methodologies or partnership with scientific methodologies, in recent literary-critical scholarship is one result. The older formation of “humanities computing,” for example, has reemerged as the digital humanities, with claims to the status of interpretive methodology, particularly in the work of Franco Moretti. Such claims, however, are sometimes the repackaging of older methodologies.

Mode of Global Production and Islamic Culture Of Violence

Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. 41, No.4, Summer 2018 Mode of Global Production and Islamic Culture Of Violence NedZad Basic* Introduction According to one group of scholars, the economic, political and cultural changes in the late 20th century did not have a major effect on the internal relations between the political and the cultural/religious structures in the Islamic world. Ernest Gellner emphasized that the process of secularization in industrialized society did not provoke much of a response in the Islamic community. Moreover, the influence of Islam on the feelings and beliefs of his followers increased.1 Another group of prominent scholars, however, came to the conclusion that the global changes in the late 20th century had a significant impact on the creation of ideas about the necessity to change the relationship between the political and the cultural/religious structures in the Islamic world. Famous Saudi Islamologist Abubaker A. Bagader, professor at King Abdul Aziz University, in his studies of the Islamic ideal in the historical context 66 *Nedzad Basic, former Fulbright scholar, is Professor of Public International Law and International Relations and European Studies. He graduated from the Faculty of Law in Belgrade (Yugoslavia), where he earned master's degree at the Department of International Public Law and International Relations. He earned his doctorate at University of Sarajevo. Post-doctoral specialization he completed at the University of St. Thomas University in Canada. He was elected as a visiting researcher at the Faculty of Law, Columbia University in New York, in 2000-2001 academic year. At the Law Faculty in Bihac he has established the teaching courses: Legal and Political System of the EU and International Relations and Security Studies. N. Basic is author and co-author of numerous scholarly papers published in international journals the most recent are: “Secularism and Islamic Law” (Handbook), ARCult Media (2016), Koln, Germany; Specification and Redefining Global Security Paradigm, International Studies, University for Diplomacy Dag Hammarskjöld, Zagreb (2016); International Law in the Shadow of Multi-ethnic Conflict, Eötvös Lorand University, Budapest, 2016; He is also the author of several textbooks and monographs 1 Ernest Gellner, foreword to Akbar S. Ahmed and Hastings Donnan (1994), “Islam, Globalization and Post-modernity”. 67 of global structural changes, emphasized that the main problem in Islam is not the awareness that the Islamic community has to be changed. The main question is what kind of changes need to be made, and how fast and in what way they can be realized. And while some appeal to gradual and peaceful change involving the education and social activity of the masses and their active participation in political life, with respect and appreciation for the legal system and the state as a guarantor of peace and order, others are seeking faster and violent revolutionary change with the establishment of a new global revolutionary Islamic order.2 According to this view, the contemporary crisis of the territorial identity of the state has caused intensive cultural vibrations in Islamic countries, resulting in a dramatic confrontation between the state and society in the Islamic world. Global structural changes require a new space for fluctuations of capital, labor, information and the creative linking behind new knowledge and technology, which has brought about a major crisis in international relations, seeking a new global order in which the state no longer plays a central role in creating the interests and identity of social groups. Since historically the state in the Islamic world was more the agent of the interests of foreign capital rather than that of the interactions between the identity and interests in the Islamic community, this will lead to a serious identity crisis of the state in the Islamic world. As the individual and group identity in Islam is primarily associated with the identity of the global Islamic community of believers (umma), and not with the territorial-political identity of the Islamic state (Watan), whose borders were decreed by the former colonial powers, the “crisis of the territorial identity of the state” in the Islamic world will be automatically transferred into an internal conflict between the state and society in Islam.3 The remarkable complexity of this conflict...

Irish Adventures in Nation-Building by Bryan Fanning (review)

future. Through archival research, interviews and legal analysis, it sheds light on that web of mutually regarding personal relationships that have shaped our constitutional law. For lawyers, it provides invaluable context for the legal decisions that have influenced our constitutional system and political community. For non-lawyers, it provides an engaging and provocative introduction to the fundamentally important work of the Supreme Court. In providing this excellent account of a misunderstood but foundationally important institution, Mac Cormaic has provided a valuable service to our democracy. Dr Oran Doyle is Associate Professor of Law and Head of School, Trinity College Dublin. He has published extensively on constitutional law. Irish Adventures in Nation-Building, Bryan Fanning (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), viii+196 pages. This collection of eighteen essays covers the relationship between ideology and public policy in the cultural, political and economic development of modern Ireland. It ranges from the Famine to the boom-era inflow of immigrants and the argument over the roles of liberalism and corporatism in the economic bubble and crash of early twenty-first century Ireland. It is unusually coherent for a collection of occasional pieces, partly because the author provides an introductory essay setting out its main concerns and linking it to the analysis of such theorists of nationalism as Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner, partly because it forms part of a wider intellectual project. This comprises several related books in which Fanning interrogates the formation and adaptation of official versions of Irish identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through debates in policy journals and through attitudes to immigrants and ‘New Irish’ citizens in the twenty-first century. Some of these essays are more convincing than others. For example, the comparison between state development strategies and official culture in Ireland and Taiwan lends a new dimension to the concept of the ‘Celtic Tiger’(not least because so few Irish readers will know much about Taiwan). The surveys of the changing nature of public policy debates in Studies (incidentallycritiquingsimplisticassumptionsthatpost-independenceIreland 240 Studies • volume 106 • number 422 Summer 2017: Book Reviews was sharply divided between Catholic reactionaries and liberal modernisers) and of the extent to which The Bell, for all its perceptive criticisms of Irish society, remained a creature of its time, are likewise valuable contributions to knowledge. (More might, however, have been said about the overlap and tensions between Peadar O’Donnell’s communitarian-Marxist approach and Sean O Faolain’s enlightened liberal-bourgeois project). The analysis of the rise and fall of Irish Thomist sociology is also helpful. On the other hand, the discussion of Pádraig Pearse, centred on a 1906 article in which Pearse fantasised about a glorious Irish-speaking republic of 2006 in a world where English was only spoken by a few peasants in Somerset, is two-dimensional: it misses several hints that Pearse – who, contrary to contemporary perceptions, did have a sense of humour – was speaking tongue-in-cheek and engaging in self-conscious hyperbole, and it fails to note that Pearse’s idealisation of Cuchulain and his world resembled contemporary British public-school idealisation of mediaeval chivalry. (This was explored in Mark Girouard’s The Return to Camelot; as Girouard points out, a major progenitor of this ethos was The Broadstone of Honour by the early nineteenth-centuryAnglo-Irish convert to Catholicism, Kenelm Digby). In this context, Fanning’s contrast between Pearse’s idealised future and the current Irish vogue for the television series A Game of Thrones (which consciously reacts against the chivalric myth by emphasising the bloody and rapacious aspects of feudal knighthood) may be more appropriate than he realises. The essay format naturally lends itself to suggestion rather than comprehensiveness, and it is no disrespect to Fanning’s achievement to point out that some of the issues he raises are more complex than he presents them. For example, he accepts the ‘modernist’ theory of nationalism, and its emphasis on such matters as the way in which national identities, which present themselves as outgrowths of peasant folk cultures, in fact derive from a process of codifying and adapting premodern identities – this produces a standardised high culture capable of meeting the requirements of social and political modernity...

Taking megalomanias seriously

This article questions the traditional accounts that see nationalism and imperialism as being mutually opposed phenomena. The author engages critically with the influential theories of Ernest Gellner and Andreas Wimmer and argues that the rise of nation-states owes more to the political actions of imperial rulers and less to the behavior of nationalist movements. The essay specifies three mechanisms inside nationalizing empires that matter for nationalism: elite actions, the politicization of minorities and the feelings of those who are politically excluded. In so doing it expands the category of those considered to be nationalist actors. The general idea is that nationalism has a great deal to do with the way empires behave.

The linguistic thought of Ernest Gellner

Theoretical questions concerning language and communication figure prominently throughout the work of the Czech-British social philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner (1925–1995). The article traces the development of Gellner’s linguistic thought from his early, controversial engagements with Ordinary Language Philosophy to his responses to Chomsky’s work in linguistics and his late-career (re)assessments of Wittgenstein and particularly Malinowski whose – subsequently repudiated – view of the fundamental difference between the alleged “primitive” and “scientific” functions of language turns out to play a central explanatory role in Gellner’s renowned theory of nationalism. The key to understanding Gellner’s thinking on language is to grasp both his adherence to a “telementational” model of communication and his scientism. This leads him to embrace the view that modern national cultures are predicated upon an industrial-scientific mode of cognition which both requires and entails a radically distinctive metaphysics of communication, namely one which allows for the conveyance of culture-transcending, “context-free” conceptual content. This, I claim, is a serious error which stems in large part from a misdiagnosis of the cognitive and communicative consequences of literacy and in particular a failure to correctly apprehend what linguist Roy Harris has termed the “autoglottic space” engendered by the availability of writing.