Scott McLemee reviews John A. Hall's new biography of Ernest Gellner
"The cumulative effect is monumental—and a monument does seem overdue", writes Scott McLemee in his National review of John A. Hall's Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography ...
It is easy to imagine why Ernest Gellner would be one of the universally known figures in Anglophone intellectual life. A polymath whose work ranged across anthropology, history, philosophy, and sociology, his mind wrestled with an encyclopedia's worth of nagging questions about nationalism, modernity, civil society, imperialism, Islam, psychoanalysis, ethics and epistemology. "I am not a donkey," he liked to say, borrowing a line from Max Weber, "and I don't have a field."
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