Culture, Identity, and Politics [Paperback]

Essays exploring the relationship between culture and politics in the modern world.An exploration of the relationship between culture and politics in the modern world through essays on such varied topics as the Ayatollah Khomeni, Czech dissidents, and Malinowski.An exploration of the relationship between culture and politics in the modern world through essays on such varied topics as the Ayatollah Khomeni, Czech dissidents, and Malinowski.These essays explore the relationship between culture and politics in the modern world. They range in space from Iran to Algeria, and the eastern marchlands of Europe to the Atlantic, and in time over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But they are all inspired by a cluster of linked preoccupations with the nature of the social order now emerging in the world and the kinds of moral and political legitimation it requires and permits. The essays are also linked by Ernest Gellner's distinctive, and highly arresting, intellectual temper and style. The volume will interest a wide range of readers in the social sciences and philosophy.Preface; 1. A blobologist in Vodkobuzia; 2. Nationalism and the two forms of cohesion in complex societies; 3. The roots of cohesion; 4. Zeno of Cracow; 5. From K?nigsberg to Manhattan; 6. The social roots of egalitarianism; 7. Recollection in anxiety: thought and change revisited; 8. The captive Hamlet of Europe; 9. Waiting for Imam; 10. The rubber cage: disenchantment with disenchantment; 11. Tractatus sociologico-philosophicus; Sources; Bibliography of Ernest Gellner; Index of names.