Update: Ernest Gellner

Bloggen ska nu väckas till liv efter sommaruppehåll, även om inläggen lär komma oregelbundet den närmsta tiden.

Ernest Gellner har uppmärksammats på lite olika håll den senaste tiden. Ett skäl är förmodligen att en biografi över honom just har publicerats. Jag fick nys om denna bok i våras, och den kvalar in ganska högt på min att-läsa-lista. Bokens förord har publicerats av Wall Street Journal, och det finns ett par recensioner att läsa (WSJ, The National).

I den sistnämnda recensionen skriver Scott McLemee:

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.”

[. . .]

All of this, to repeat, should explain Gellner’s monumental prominence – except for the fact that he has no such prominence. There are Foucauldians aplenty and Rortyans by the score – and even the occasional stray Marcusean, tending the flame. But of Gellnerians, there is scarcely a trace.

Frågan om Gellners status och inflytande är mycket intressant. Apropå citatet ovan skrevs ett inlägg av Henry Farrell på Crooked Timber.

Count me as one of those barely visible Gellnerians […]. I’ve often wondered about why Gellner doesn’t get the respect he deserves. I had a genuine moment of intellectual horror last year when I realized that two articles I had co-written got more cites on Google Scholar than Plough, Sword and Book, which has to be one of the great synthetic works of scholarship of the twentieth century. Not that I don’t like my articles fine. But they are not Plough, Sword and Book. My working theory is that Gellner has less influence precisely because his work is unclassifiable.

En annan som i dagarna har uppmärksammat Gellner är den politiske teoretikern Jacob T. Levy. Han har läst Gellners Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals (Jag har velat läsa den, men den är svår att få tag på).

Like Weber, Gellner tosses out three-sentence ideas that make you (or at least me) stop and say– ”wow, if that’s right it’s hugely important, and I can see how it might be right, but figuring out whether it actually is right would take years.”

Levy bidrar även med en kommentar (#16) i diskussionen på Crooked Timber:

It happens that I’ve just been rereading The Conditions of Liberty over the past few days, for the first time since just after it came out. And that was prompting me to wonder about Gellner’s relatively low profile. I’d forgotten how much good material there is in it—and while that’s my own fault, it’s a mistake that should have been impossible to make, because it ought to get cited constantly in the literatures I’ve been reading.

I’m getting tremendously more out of the book this time, as I bring more knowledge to the table as a reader than I did a decade and a half ago. I wonder whether Gellner’s attractive prose makes it too easy to think that he’s suitable for beginners.