1. Ernest Andre Gellner was a French-born 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 crusader for critical rationalism".
Ernest Gellner is considered one of the leading theoreticians on the issue of nationalism.
Ernest Gellner was born in Paris to Anna, nee Fantl, and Rudolf, a lawyer, an urban intellectual German-speaking Austrian Jewish couple from Bohemia.
In 1939, when Ernest Gellner was 13, the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany persuaded his family to leave Czechoslovakia and move to St Albans, just north of London, where Ernest Gellner attended St Albans Boys Modern School, now Verulam School.
Ernest Gellner interrupted his studies after one year to serve with the 1st Czechoslovak Armoured Brigade, which took part in the Siege of Dunkirk, and then returned to Prague to attend university there for half a term.
Ernest Gellner returned to Balliol College in 1945 to finish his degree, winning the John Locke prize and taking first class honours in 1947.
Ernest Gellner moved to the London School of Economics in 1949, joining the sociology department under Morris Ginsberg.
Ernest Gellner simply reproduced the kind of evolutionary rationalistic vision which had already been formulated by Hobhouse and which incidentally was a kind of extrapolation of his own personal life: starting in Poland and ending up as a fairly influential professor at LSE.
Ernest Gellner evolved, he had an idea of a great chain of being where the lowest form of life was the drunk, Polish, anti-Semitic peasant and the next stage was the Polish gentry, a bit better, or the Staedtl, better still.
Ernest Gellner was elected to the British Academy in 1974.
Ernest Gellner moved to Cambridge in 1984 to head the Department of Anthropology, holding the William Wyse chair and becoming a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, which provided him with a relaxed atmosphere where he enjoyed drinking beer and playing chess with the students.
Ernest Gellner was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Ernest Gellner first encountered the strong ideological hold of linguistic philosophy while at Balliol:.
Ernest Gellner didn't put it this way, but that was what it amounted to.
Ernest Gellner developed a friendship with the Moroccan-French sociologist Paul Pascon, whose work he admired.
For Ernest Gellner, "nationalism is primarily a political principle that holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent".
Ernest Gellner argues that nationalism appeared and became a sociological necessity only in the modern world.