Ernest Gellner

Thought and Change (1964)
Saints of the Atlas (1969)
Contemporary Thought and Politics (1974)
The Devil in Modern Philosophy (1974)
Legitimation of Belief (1974)
Spectacles and Predicaments (1979)
Soviet and Western Anthropology (1980) (editor)
Muslim Society (1981)
Nations and Nationalism (1983)
Relativism and the Social Sciences (1985)
The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985)
The Concept of Kinship and Other Essays (1986)
Culture Identity and Politics (1987)
State and Society in Soviet Thought (1988)
Plough Sword and Book (1988)
Postmodernism Reason and Religion (1992)
Conditions of Liberty (1994)
Anthropology and Politics: Revolutions in the Sacred Grove (1995)
Nationalism (1997)
Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma (1998)


Notes. Hobhouse's Mind in Evolution (1901) had proposed that society should be regarded as an organism a product of evolution with the individual as its basic unit the subtext being that society would improve over time as it evolved a teleological view Gellner firmly opposed. A response from Ryle and a lengthy correspondence ensued.

Ernest André Gellner (9 December 1925 – 5 November 1995) was a British-Czech philosopher and social anthropologist described by The Daily Telegraph when he died as one of the world's most vigorous intellectuals and by The Independent as a "one-man crusade for critical rationalism. Among other issues in social thought the modernization of society and nationalism were two of his central themes his multicultural perspective allowing him to work within the subject-matter of three separate civilizations—the Western Islamic and Russian. As the Professor of Philosophy Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics for 22 years the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge for eight and finally as head of the new Centre for the Study of Nationalism in Prague Gellner fought all his life—in his writing his teaching and through his political activism—against what he saw as closed systems of thought particularly communism psychoanalysis relativism and the dictatorship of the free market.