Ernest Gellner - a Jew who escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1939 after Hitler invaded - knew first-hand the catastrophic effects of excessive nationalism, and he was determined to understand the…

First published in 1959, this classic challenge to the prevailing philosophical orthodoxy of the day, remains the most devastating attack on a conventional wisdom in philosophy to this day.

These essays gather together Gellner’s thinking on the connection between philosophy and life and they approach the topic from a number of directions including a discussion of individuals including Chomsky…

These essays explore the relationship between culture and politics in the modern world. They are all inspired by a cluster of linked preoccupations with the nature of the emerging social…

When Ernest Gellner was his early thirties, he took it upon himself to challenge the prevailing philosophical orthodoxy of the day, Linguistic Philosophy. Finding a powerful ally in Bertrand Russell…

In these essays Gellner strives to understand the religions of nationalism, communism and democracy returning again and again to the basic values of the liberal: social tolerance, rational criticism, human…

How did the language of psychoanalysis become the dominant idiom in which the middle classes of the industrialized West speak about their emotions? Ernest Gellner offers a forceful and complex…