Gellner

From Stefan Collini's LRB review of Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography (London: Verso 2010) by John Hall -

When Ernest Gellner was teaching at the Central European University in Prague in 1995, the last year of his life, he cultivated informal social relations with the graduate students there. One student “confessed to unease when Gellner sat down to watch television with him – saying it was as if Max Weber had dropped by”. It requires only a little familiarity with Weber’s vastly ambitious oeuvre and notoriously austere personality to imagine why that might be an unsettling experience, as well as an unlikely one. Curiously, Perry Anderson had, three or four years earlier, been trying to imagine Weber in front of a television set, as a way of making a comparison between Gellner’s complacent-seeming endorsement of post-1945 mass affluence and Weber’s more agonised reflections on Europe after 1918: “It is difficult to imagine Weber, relaxed before a television set, greeting the festivities of the time as a new Belle Epoque”.