Ernest Gellner - Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences (Selected Philosophical Themes)

Few academics can claim double descent (as anthropologists would call it) from both Balliol and the London School of Economics. Fewer still have managed to assert their independence of each. Ernest Gellner has managed both. He read philosophy at Oxford when Oxford Philosophy was at its peak, and he studied social anthropology at the London School of Economics when functionalismthe London School of Economics type of social anthropologywas at its peak. He received his B.A. in Philosophy at Oxford in 1947, and began his attacks on it in 1951. He was, thus, among its first (and most devastating) critics; the pungency and wit of his writings did not endear him to the object of his broadsides; his compassion went unnoticed even by his friends. His attack drew the reply that philosophy at Oxford was no longer (if it ever had been) homogeneous, and consequently his main assault Words and Things (1959) was out-of-date (which we interpret to mean classical).

After he left Oxford, there was a brief period of teaching philosophy in Edinburgh from 1947 to 1949. He then moved to the London School of Economics, to the Department of Sociology, and became interested in social anthropology and in sociologyperhaps because social anthropology was reaching its peak there, among Malinowskis disciples of the first generation. In due course, he directed sympathetic critiques at social anthropology too, perhaps partly contributing to the later diversification and improvement of the subject. His anthropological fieldworkhis walkaboutwas carried out among two tribes: Oxford philosophers and the Berbers of the High Atlas of Morocco (one closed, one open).

For the latter research, the University of London School of Economics gave him the Ph.D. in Anthropology in 1961, and thus he was initiated into the tribe of social anthropologists; for the former research ( Words and Things ) he was refused a review in Mind, the nearest modern philosophy has come to ceremonial tribal expulsion.

One of the ironies of all this has been the unease about Gellners own loyalties shared by most of those whom he has attacked. Philosophers disavow him: many have been heard to declare him really an anthropologist or a publicist, or a Balliol man embittered because he didnt get an Oxford Fellowship, or a non-philosopher for any other old reason. Others have hinted that his being a philosopher at the London School of Economics forced him to be a Popper-crony even though the first of several critiques of Popper (On Being Wrong, Rationalist Annual, 1955) appeared prior to his main assault on Oxford philosophy. Anthropologists, as might be expected, like-wise disavowed him. Some of them have taken him to be a philosopher trespassing on ground where he is not quite at home (the comments of Needham and Barnes on his Ideal Language and Kinship Structure, to which The Concept of Kinship and Nature and Society in Social Anthropology are replies, bear this out), others have expected him to stick to his studies of the philosophers and leave the Berber tribe and the anthropologist tribe alone.

Perhaps the first dim recognition that Gellner was nobodys man but his own was E.R.Leachs use of the verb, Gellnerise, unexplained. Clearly, Leach assumed no explanation was required. Subsequently, when Gellner published his important work, Thought and Change, it was declared to be neither philosophy nor social science. It followed, perhaps, that, like its author, it was sui generis.