Ernest Gellner by John A. Hall

Author:John A. Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

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1Ian Jarvie and Joseph Agassi first had the idea of collecting the essays, which they co-edited on five occasions. Jarvie helped with the remaining collections, and he continued work on the complete Gellner bibliography even after Gellner’s death. Some points of editorial etiquette can be found in Gellner’s correspondence with Jarvie. Gellner occasionally revised the essays, over whose production and selection he in fact retained complete control, not least in writing his own introductions to all but the first three volumes. Also see chapter 4, note 67 for Gellner’s explanation of the softening of his attack on Needham in a collection versus the original version of the essay. To be set against this, however, was an occasion when Jarvie suggested toning down an essay written for Philosophy of Social Sciences, which he co-edited. ‘Normally when editors ask for permission to exclude offensive remarks’, Gellner wrote, ‘I make one further offensive remark to the editor in question’ (Gellner to Jarvie, 2 May 1975).

2Ron Dore wrote Gellner a note in response to his review of Dahrendorf’s history of the LSE, discussed below, suggesting that he was too optimistic about the rationality of politics – evidenced by his surprise that the neo-liberals and Oakeshottian conservatives failed to recognize their fundamental differences. A reply came quickly with the retort that Dore was far more subject to naïve rationalism, writing letters to the newspapers and believing that intellectual ideas could change the world. The story is contained in Dore’s ‘Address’ at the King’s College Memorial Service, 24 February 1996.

3His interest in Soviet Marxism, treated in its entirety here, began in this period, but extended into his first years at Cambridge. In contrast, his thoughts on the failure of Marxism belong wholly to the Cambridge and Prague years, and so are discussed later.

4His offhand comments started at least one significant career. Bill Kissane, now of the Government Department at LSE, began his long-term comparison of Finland and Ireland as the result of Gellner noting in 1994 that, in the twentieth century, Ireland was the only partitioned state in Western Europe, Finland the only non-partitioned state in Central Europe (B. Kissane, ‘Nineteenth-century Nationalism in Finland and Ireland: A Comparative Analysis’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, vol. 6, 2000).

5Dore, ‘Address’.

6Glass admired Gellner, his wife Ruth still more so, but he seems to have found Gellner somewhat difficult to deal with, not least because of his utter independence of mind – remarking on one occasion that he did not know if the next revolution would come from the right or the left, but that Gellner would be the first to be shot in either case (J. Davis, ‘An Interview with Ernest Gellner’, Current Anthropology, vol. 32, 1991, p. 68).

7Several potential moves will be noted in the next paragraphs. Some were for limited terms, and were very much an expression of his desire to see further societies within the developing world. But others were for permanent positions. Interest was almost certainly evidence of his unhappiness at LSE.

8The Gellner Archive contains several letters from Birnbaum written at this time.

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