Ernest Gellner (1925-1995) died at the Prague airport on Sunday, November 5, 1995. He had just flown back from a meeting of the Central European University Senate in Budapest, and the heart attack struck him a month and four days short of his seventieth birthday. The location fit the life. Prague was the city that formed him and the city that expelled him. He spent fifty years explaining, from London and Cambridge, why the twentieth century had done what it did to cities like Prague, and then he came back to teach in one of the buildings the century had left standing. He was, at the end, a professor of nationalism dying in transit between two capitals of the old Habsburg world whose collapse had made his subject.
He was born in Paris on December 9, 1925, and raised in Prague. His father, Rudolf Gellner, practiced law. His parents were secular Jews from German-speaking backgrounds who gave their loyalty to the democratic Czechoslovak Republic founded after the First World War. The family lived in Dejvice, a modern middle-class district of wide streets and functionalist apartment blocks, away from the old Jewish quarter with its synagogues and legends. The apartment held two languages. Ernest spoke German with his parents and Czech with his sister. He went to a Czech primary school, then to the Prague English Grammar School, which added a third language and pointed him west.
Consider what a boy in that apartment learned before he learned any theory. He was Jewish by descent but not by practice. He was Czech at school and in the street. He was German at the dinner table. He was becoming English in the classroom. Around him, interwar Prague sorted itself into Czech, German, Jewish, Russian, Ukrainian, liberal, socialist, nationalist, and Zionist camps, each with its own newspapers, cafés, and grievances. A nationalist says nationality is an inheritance, old as the hills, waiting to be awakened. The boy in Dejvice could watch nationality being assembled, revised, and enforced in real time. People around him changed languages and loyalties, and paid prices for the changes. No one had to explain to him that identity was constructed. He had the construction site outside his window.
He loved the Czech material anyway. He knew some thirty Bohemian folk songs and played them on the harmonica. Decades later he recalled an old Czech friend accusing him of playing them with too much feeling, of “crying into the mouth-organ.” Gellner kept the story and repeated it, because it answered a question critics put to him all his life. How could a man write so coldly about nationalism? His answer: he was not immune. He felt the pull of the songs. He distrusted the political claims made in their name. A theory of nationalism written by a man with no national feeling would be like a theory of religion written by a man who had never felt awe. Gellner wrote from inside the spell, against the spell.
The Germans marched into Prague in March 1939. The Gellners fled across Europe, a dangerous passage, and reached Britain. Ernest finished school at St Albans County School for Boys and won an open scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, entering in 1943 to read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He stayed one year. Then the refugee put on a uniform. He joined the Czechoslovak Armoured Brigade as a private and served in the siege of Dunkirk, where the brigade spent months containing the German garrison that held the port after the Allied armies had swept past it. It was a strange assignment, a Czech brigade besieging a French city for a British-led coalition, and it suited a man whose nationality was already a committee decision.
In May 1945 the brigade rolled home. Gellner, still in uniform, began attending lectures at the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University, where Jan Patočka (1907-1977) and others taught. What he saw in liberated Prague repelled him. The Sudeten Germans, three million people, were being driven out of Bohemia with their suitcases, and few Czechs objected. The Communist Party grew, and the Soviet Union stood behind it. The soldier who had come back to help rebuild the republic of his childhood concluded that the republic was already lost. He returned to Britain. He would say later that he might have stayed had the country’s direction been different. The sequence deserves attention. Before Gellner completed his university education he had witnessed the destruction of a democracy, racial persecution, exile, war, the expulsion of a national minority, and the beginning of a communist takeover. His hostility to historicism, to organic nationalism, and to closed systems of thought came from experience first and from argument second. The arguments came at Oxford, where he took a first in PPE. He read David Hume (1711-1776), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), Max Weber (1864-1920), and Karl Popper (1902-1994). Popper’s case against historicism and for the open society marked him most, though Gellner thought Popper had said too little about the social conditions that make criticism possible. An open mind needs an open society, and open societies do not fall from the sky.
After a short spell teaching moral philosophy at Edinburgh, Gellner joined the London School of Economics in 1949, entering a sociology department under Morris Ginsberg (1889-1970) while continuing to work in philosophy. The LSE fit him. Oxford ran on manners, tutorials, and the shared assumptions of men who had known each other since school. The LSE had been built by Fabians and stocked by émigrés, and its corridors held economists, anthropologists, and political theorists who argued across disciplinary lines and owed the British establishment nothing. Gellner later wrote about the school with affection as a place where an outsider could attack orthodoxy without first acquiring the accent.
The attack came in 1959. Words and Things assaulted the ordinary-language philosophy then ruling Oxford, the school associated with the later Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), J. L. Austin (1911-1960), and Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976). That school treated the great questions of philosophy as confusions produced by the misuse of words. The philosopher’s job was to map the rules of ordinary speech, not to build theories about mind, knowledge, or reality. Gellner replied that ordinary language is no neutral storehouse of wisdom. It is a deposit left by particular institutions, hierarchies, and habits. To make everyday speech the court of appeal is to hand inherited social arrangements a veto over criticism. He also read the movement sociologically. It was, he argued, a professional circle whose method protected its prestige, and which treated every criticism of the method as proof that the critic had not understood the method.
What followed made his name, and the scene is worth reconstructing from more than one chair. Ryle sat as editor of Mind, the discipline’s leading journal, and a review copy of the book arrived on his desk. He returned it to the publisher, Victor Gollancz Ltd, with a note declining to review it, on the ground that abusiveness disqualifies a book from treatment as a contribution to an academic subject. From Ryle’s side of the desk this was a defense of standards. The book mocked identifiable Oxford teachers. From Russell’s side it looked like a cartel protecting itself. Russell had written the foreword, agreed with the book’s case, and had spent years watching Oxford treat his own tradition of logical analysis as obsolete. He revealed Ryle’s editorial decision in a letter to The Times, and the storm of public correspondence that followed established Gellner’s reputation as a controversial figure inside and outside the academy. The Times ran a leading article, and the correspondence continued for a month. Picture the third point of view, the common reader of The Times over breakfast in November 1959, learning that the professors were fighting about whether philosophy had become a word game, and that the game’s referee had refused to let the challenger onto the field. The refusal sold the book better than any review.
The episode fixed Gellner’s style. He liked sharp distinctions, compressed models, ridicule, and open combat. He believed academic politeness often served as camouflage for guild solidarity. The style made his prose a pleasure and made him enemies, and it sometimes led him to state an opponent’s position in its least defensible form. Wittgenstein became the standing target, though Gellner’s quarrel with him grew into something larger than a philosophical disagreement, and its final form waited until the last book of his life.
The 1950s also turned him toward anthropology. Philosophy done without attention to social structure had come to seem to him like chemistry done without laboratories. At the LSE he absorbed the tradition of Bronisław Malinowski (1884-1942) and Raymond Firth (1901-2002). In 1954 he went climbing in the High Atlas of Morocco with an LSE party and became interested in the Berber communities of the mountains. Here is the scene that separates Gellner from the run of philosophers: a Balliol first, a rising LSE lecturer, spending eight field trips over the following years in stone villages above the tree line, watching shepherds, litigants, and holy men, taking notes on who mediated which feud. He completed a doctorate under Firth and Paul Stirling (1920-1998), published as Saints of the Atlas in 1969.
The book asked how order survives where no state enforces it. Gellner described a segmentary system. Clans and lineages feud at one level and combine at a higher level against outside threats, like an accordion opening and closing. Outside the ordinary rivalries stood hereditary saints, holy lineages whose religious standing let them arbitrate disputes, guarantee sanctuaries, and supply a thin but real order without a bureaucracy or an army. The method here became his method everywhere. Do not stop at what people say they believe. Ask what work the belief performs. The saint is an object of devotion and also a structural position in a political system, and the two facts explain each other. Later critics said the segmentary model tidied up a messier Moroccan history and underrated states, markets, and colonial power. The criticism has force. The book still made him a real anthropologist rather than a philosopher raiding other people’s fieldnotes.
His constructive theory arrived in Thought and Change (1964), the book John A. Hall (b. 1949) identifies as the seedbed of nearly everything Gellner wrote afterward. Gellner rejected the old evolutionary story in which history climbs from superstition toward reason. Most of history climbs nowhere. Civilizations rise, stall, and vanish. But the fusion of systematic science with sustained economic growth was a real break, a rare episode that changed what human life could be. He called his view neo-episodic. Modernity is not the fulfillment of a moral plan. It is an exceptional event with structural requirements, and the requirements explain modern politics. Industrial society needs constant innovation, occupational mobility, technical training, mass literacy, and communication among strangers. A man can no longer live on the inherited knowledge of his village, guild, or parish. He needs a generic education that lets him retrain and move. And governments in such a society face a new test. Dynasty, religion, and conquest no longer legitimate. Growth legitimates. Gellner later wrote that modern states serve two sovereign masters, economic growth and ethnic congruence.
Ethnic congruence brings us to the theory that made him famous. Gellner defined nationalism as the political principle that the national unit and the political unit should coincide. Every culturally defined people should have its own political roof, or every state should have one culture under its roof. Then he reversed nationalism’s story about itself. Nationalists say ancient nations awaken and demand expression. Gellner answered that nationalism engenders nations, and not the other way round. The nation is not conjured from nothing. Movements work with real languages, memories, and symbols. But the materials must be selected, standardized, and distributed, and the distributing takes dictionaries, schools, newspapers, examinations, and bureaucracies. A peasant dialect becomes a national high culture the way ore becomes steel, through industrial processing.
Why did this happen when it happened? Agrarian empires ran on cultural difference. A literate elite spoke one language at court while peasants spoke twenty dialects in the fields, and no ruler cared to make the plowman talk like the chancellor. Social position was inherited and mobility was rare. Industrial society broke the arrangement. Work now required literacy and communication with strangers and institutions. A shared standardized culture became an economic asset, and only one institution could produce it at scale. The state school system sits at the center of Gellner’s theory. Families reproduce local cultures. Only states can fund universal standardized schooling, and so the schoolteacher displaced the priest as the crucial agent of cultural reproduction. Nationalism ignites where cultural boundaries block mobility, where a man educated in the wrong language finds the good jobs closed to him.
Gellner told the story through two invented countries, Ruritania and Megalomania. Megalomania is a big empire with an established high culture in its offices and universities. Ruritanians are peasants inside the empire speaking related dialects that no one has standardized. Under agrarian conditions the difference costs little. Peasants farm, elites govern, and neither expects to share the other’s culture. Industrialization raises the stakes. Ruritanians enter a labor market where command of the official culture decides advancement, and their difference becomes disadvantage and humiliation. A young Ruritanian intelligentsia, educated enough to expect careers and marked enough to be denied them, codifies the language, collects the folklore, writes the national poetry, and reinterprets the peasantry as a nation. They demand a state that will school and govern in Ruritanian. What looks like the awakening of an ancient nation is the conversion of a rural culture into a standardized one fit for modern institutions. The model also explains why intellectuals lead these movements. They hold the grievance and the skills, and the same skills that turn dialects into languages turn resentments into programs.
The theory became one of the central modernist accounts of nationalism, alongside the work of Benedict Anderson (1936-2015) and Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012), and it drew the criticism that important theories draw. Anthony D. Smith (1939-2016), Gellner’s own former student, argued that he underrated the older ethnic cores, the myths, memories, and sacred centers that nationalists inherit rather than invent. A movement can reshape inherited material, but it cannot fabricate whatever identity it pleases, and people do not die for a labor-market convenience. Others noted that some nationalisms preceded heavy industry, that states standardized culture for war and taxation as much as for factories, and that Switzerland, Canada, Belgium, and India show industrial modernity coexisting with several languages under one roof. Gellner knew most of the exceptions. His taste for spare models made the theory look more deterministic than his full body of work was, and he admitted the taste. In a 1990 interview he conceded that he loved “neat, crisp, models,” pursued them, and grew uncomfortable without one. The theory also carries a moral shadow. If modern states press toward cultural homogeneity, minorities face a short menu: assimilate, emigrate, secede, or be destroyed. Gellner endorsed none of these outcomes. His family had lived one of them. His theory explains pressure, not destiny. Modern institutions make cultural inequality politically explosive. They do not dictate the response.
His Moroccan work grew into a general account of Islam in Muslim Society (1981), built with tools borrowed from Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), Hume, Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), and Weber. Gellner distinguished the scriptural Islam of the cities, with its literacy, law, and doctrinal rigor, from the saint-centered religion of tribe and countryside, with its shrines, mediators, and local sacred practice. Reform movements rise periodically from the scriptural side and condemn the popular side as corruption. This internal tension, he argued, gave Islam a rare capacity to pass through modernization intact. In the West, modernity presented itself as an alternative to religion. In Islam, a reformer could attack the saints and the shrines as backwardness while presenting purified, literate, universal Islam as both authentic and modern. Modernization could strengthen scriptural religion rather than dissolve it. The argument anticipated the failure of simple secularization theory, and it drew its own strong critique. Sami Zubaida (b. 1937) asked whether a coherent entity called Muslim society exists at all, and charged Gellner with generalizing North African patterns across a civilization while neglecting states, classes, parties, and colonial history. Hall treats Zubaida’s question as the most serious objection to the model.
Beneath the sociology ran a philosophy of knowledge, worked out in Legitimation of Belief (1975) and defended late in Reason and Culture (1992) and Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (1992). Gellner granted the relativist’s premise. Every system of thought, including empiricism and rationalism, grows from a particular social world. He refused the relativist’s conclusion. Modern science explains, predicts, and manipulates nature as no rival system can, and its social origins cancel none of that. A socially produced method can discover truths that outrun the society that produced it. He called himself, with a grin, a humble adherent of Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalism, the joke conceding that his defense of reason could look like a militant faith while refusing to pretend neutrality between open inquiry and doctrines sealed against criticism. He held no illusions about foundations. Certainty is unavailable, and every framework rests on questionable assumptions. But the absence of certainty does not make laboratory and revelation equals. And reason, he insisted, is socially fragile. It survives only inside institutions that protect criticism, reward discovery, and keep intellectual authority separate from political and religious rank.
The same test, does the system permit its own refutation, drove The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985). Gellner argued that psychoanalysis had built defenses that no evidence could breach. If the patient accepts the interpretation, the interpretation is confirmed. If the patient resists, the resistance confirms it too. Failure gets absorbed as material. He then did something more interesting than debunking. He asked why the movement of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) had conquered the educated classes, and answered that it supplied secular societies with what churches had supplied before: an account of guilt, suffering, and desire, a rite of confession, a promise of transformation, and a priesthood with interpretive authority. Psychoanalysis was modernity attempting its own re-enchantment. He read postmodernism the same way. Yes, knowledge connects to institutions and power. No, that does not make science one narrative among others, because the airplanes fly and the vaccines work, and a theory of knowledge that cannot register the difference is an evasion. He added a political point that cuts hard today. Relativism looks tolerant from a distance, but if every tradition owns its own truth, the dissident inside a tradition has no ground to stand on. The doctrine that flatters cultures abandons individuals.
His largest historical canvas came in Plough, Sword and Book (1988), which sorted human history by three powers: production, coercion, and cognition. Hunter-gatherers accumulate little. Agrarian societies produce a surplus that feeds kings, warriors, priests, and scribes, and in them high culture belongs to clerical elites and marks them off from the peasants who feed everyone. Industrial society fuses the book to the plough. Knowledge becomes productive, education becomes an economic necessity, and high culture spreads from the clerisy to the population. The sword does not retire; the balance shifts. The book rebuilt historical materialism with Weberian parts, granting production its weight while refusing to derive coercion and belief from property relations, and refusing Marxism’s promised destination.
Inside the argument sat his darkest insight about liberal society, the doctrine of universal Danegeld. Medieval kings paid tribute to keep the Vikings off. Modern governments, Gellner argued, pay everyone, through rising consumption, services, and opportunity. Growth funds a standing social bribe that makes violent redistribution unattractive, and this, more than moral consensus, keeps the peace of wealthy societies. The corollary follows like a bill. A legitimacy purchased with growth is mortgaged to growth. Stop the cornucopia for long and governments reach for older instruments of cohesion, nationalism, conformity, coercion, and the manufacture of internal enemies. Gellner did not reduce freedom to prosperity. He counted law, pluralism, and impersonal institutions as real achievements. He said their material conditions go unmentioned in liberal theory, and he mentioned them.
Communism occupied him to the end, as an intellectual error and a historical fact. State and Society in Soviet Thought (1988) examined Soviet social theory from inside and asked whether communist societies might liberalize once industrialized. He did not predict the speed of the collapse. His theory told him something better than a date: that a multinational empire administratively divided into national republics had built its own exits, and that when the center weakened, the republics and their standardized national cultures stood ready as successor states. He feared the sequel might repeat the expulsions and massacres of his youth. Yugoslavia proved the fear partly right.
Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals (1994) gave his answer to the question the collapse reopened: what social arrangements make freedom possible? Not merely the existence of groups outside the state; guilds, clans, and churches stand outside the state and can smother a man as thoroughly as any ministry. The test is whether associations remain limited. Gellner’s modular man can join a firm, a party, a congregation, and a club, cooperate with strangers, and leave any of them without losing his identity, the way modular furniture recombines without breaking. A society of such men can sustain intermediate institutions strong enough to check the state and loose enough to release their members. Pure atomized individualism leaves the citizen naked before power. Total community reproduces the tribe. Liberty lives in the narrow band between.
In 1984 he left the LSE after thirty-five years to become William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge and a fellow of King’s College. The Cambridge years poured out books: The Psychoanalytic Movement, The Concept of Kinship, State and Society in Soviet Thought, Plough, Sword and Book, Reason and Culture, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, Encounters with Nationalism, Conditions of Liberty, and Anthropology and Politics. Then came the return no one could have scripted. In 1993 he moved to Prague to direct the new Centre for the Study of Nationalism at the Central European University, funded by George Soros (b. 1930) to study nationalism in the post-communist lands. Hold the frame for a moment. A Jewish boy flees Prague in 1939 ahead of the Germans. A Czech soldier leaves Prague in 1945 ahead of the communists. An English professor comes back in 1993, past the empty synagogues and the renamed streets, to direct an institute studying the force that had emptied the city of the Germans and the Jews who once shared it with the Czechs. The Prague he returned to was homogeneous as the Prague of his childhood never was. That same year Czechoslovakia itself split in two, peacefully, and Gellner preferred the velvet divorce to coerced unity while distrusting the small-nation smugness that could follow it.
He died two years later, on November 5, 1995, after the flight from Budapest. He left his wife, Susan, and four children, David, Sarah, Deborah, and Ben. Two books followed him out: Nationalism (1997) and Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma (1998), the second closing the quarrel he had opened in 1959.
Language and Solitude reads Wittgenstein and Malinowski as two answers to one Habsburg problem. Gellner set out two visions of knowledge. The atomic, individualist, universalist vision imagines a solitary mind dissolving inherited associations, testing elements, and building truth that stands above any community. The organic, communal vision replies that men think in languages and traditions they did not make, that meaning lives inside a way of life, that culture makes the world a home. In the Habsburg Empire the choice was political before it was academic. Universalism offered the individual escape from his inherited group and threatened to dissolve every cultural world in the empire. Organic nationalism protected the cultural worlds and caged the individuals inside them, then set the cages at war. Wittgenstein, on Gellner’s reading, lived both extremes: the Tractatus as austere atomism, the later philosophy of language games and forms of life as the organic vision refined, teaching philosophers to accept the rules embedded in a form of life rather than judge them from outside. Gellner thought this licensed cultural self-validation, the sealed system again, now with a Cambridge pedigree. He did not call Wittgenstein a nationalist. He called him a symptom, the longing for a bounded meaningful world in a century that had burned the bounded worlds down. Malinowski showed the way out. Men cannot think without culture, and cultures can still be observed, compared, and explained. Knowledge is socially organized without being socially imprisoned. Gellner claimed both truths and surrendered neither, and the position joins his first book to his last.
What kind of man conducted this fifty-year campaign? An insider-outsider in every register. Attached to Czech culture, opposed to Czech nationalism. Jewish by descent, religious in nothing. A pillar of British academic life who never joined the British establishment. An anthropologist who argued like a philosopher and a philosopher who checked arguments against fieldwork. Colleagues remembered the wit, the energy, the informality, and the pleasure he took in a fight, and students remembered generosity that the polemics concealed from strangers. He built exaggerated models on purpose, believing a clear model that can be refuted teaches more than a description too qualified to fail. In politics he was a liberal social democrat with a short list of enemies: communism, romantic nationalism, religious absolutism, postmodern relativism, and the fantasy of a presocial individual. His liberalism had no sentiment in it. Freedom is not what remains when government withdraws. It is a late, expensive achievement built from economic specialization, modular identities, legal restraint, and impersonal rules, and it can be unbuilt.
His faults were the shadows of his virtues. The neat models flattened rich histories. The nationalism theory explains the pressure toward national politics better than it explains why this identity catches fire and that one dies. Muslim Society generalized a region into a civilization. His confidence in growth never confronted the environmental bill. And the polemical gift that made him readable sometimes made him unfair. But he stated his claims sharply enough to be refuted, and his critics could locate his errors because he had not hidden them in qualifications. That is a scholarly virtue rarer than accuracy.
Hall published the major study, Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography, in 2010, and a 2022 collection, Ernest Gellner’s Legacy and Social Theory Today, carried his ideas into current debates on populism, postcolonialism, and climate. The Prague center he founded remains a foundational institution of nationalism studies. His deepest subject was the price of modernity. Scientific civilization delivered knowledge, wealth, mobility, and freedom, and it also demolished settled worlds, standardized cultures, manufactured nations, and chained legitimacy to the growth chart. He defended it because the alternatives were poorer, crueler, and more closed. He never confused that defense with a promise that modernity would make men rooted, secure, or happy. He had watched what it made of Prague.
Notes
Death at Prague airport, November 5, 1995, returning from the CEU Senate meeting in Budapest, heart attack, one month short of seventy: Czech Sociological Review memorial, Wikipedia, Ernest Gellner, and the THES obituary hosted at LSE. Note a small conflict: some sources say he died at the airport, others say at his flat after returning. I used the airport version.
Dejvice apartment scene, languages by room, harmonica, thirty folk songs, “crying into the mouth-organ”: all from your source document. The Dejvice architectural details, wide streets and functionalist blocks, are self-evident characteristics of the district. The quote appears in Hall’s biography and in Gellner’s own late writing; Hall’s book is the citable source: John A. Hall, Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography (Verso, 2010).
Dunkirk siege detail, the Czech brigade containing the bypassed German garrison for months, is standard military history of the 1st Czechoslovak Armoured Brigade, 1944-45, and a reasonable extrapolation.
The 1945 return in uniform, attending Patočka‘s lectures at Charles University: Czech Sociological Review memorial. This detail is not in your source document and strengthens the Prague-return symmetry; worth keeping.
The Words and Things affair from three points of view. Ryle‘s letter to Gollancz with the “abusiveness” line: T. P. Uschanov, “The Strange Death of Ordinary Language Philosophy”, which quotes the letter in full. Russell‘s Times letter, the month of correspondence, and the Times leader: Wikipedia and Jeremy Stangroom’s account with the actual letters. The contemporary Commentary review by Marshall Cohen has period flavor, including Gellner’s crack that Ryle was “the O. Henry of English philosophy.” The breakfast-table reader is my extrapolation from the documented Times leader and correspondence.
The “neat, crisp, models” self-description from a 1990 interview: Royal Anthropological Institute obituary. The interview is John Davis, “An Interview with Ernest Gellner,” Current Anthropology 32:1 (1991), if you want the primary source.
Soros funding of the CEU nationalism center: Wikipedia and Alchetron..
The Independent‘s “one-man crusader for critical rationalism” line, Brendan O’Leary obituary, November 8, 1995, and the Daily Telegraph‘s “most vigorous intellectuals”.
Everything on the theories, Thought and Change, Ruritania, Muslim Society, Danegeld, modular man, Language and Solitude, tracks your source document, which tracks Hall. The Smith critique is in Anthony D. Smith, “The Nation: Invented, Imagined, Reconstructed?” and the Warwick Debates with Gellner (1995). Zubaida‘s critique: “Is There a Muslim Society? Ernest Gellner’s Sociology of Islam,” Economy and Society 24:2 (1995).
Extrapolations without links: the accordion image for segmentation, the ore-into-steel image for high culture, both compress Gellner’s own arguments, the construction-site image for interwar Prague identity, and the Habsburg framing of the airport death in the opening. The claim that he “would say later that he might have stayed” had Czechoslovakia’s direction differed is in Hall and in the Davis interview.
