Abstract
Encyclopedia entry on the British-Czech social anthropologist and social thinker Ernest Gellner. Although trained in philosophy and social anthropology, Gellner made important contributions also to political theory.
His theory of nationalism remains hugely influential, and his ideas on the emergence of modernity, civil society and the state, religion and politics in Muslim societies, and the epistemology of social sciences, as well as his sharp criticism of Marxism, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and relativism still resonate today.