Here is the synopsis of our sample research paper on Review of Ernest Gellner’s “Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals”. Have the paper e-mailed to you 24/7/365.
Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 22 page paper which examines the late British philosopher’s consideration of contemporary societies, both East and West. Bibliography lists 7 sources.
Page Count:
22 pages (~225 words per page)
File: TG15_TGegcond.rtf
Buy This Term Paper »
Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
-- properly! Ernest Gellner (1925-1995) was the quintessential twentieth-century Renaissance man who could be accurately described equally well as a philosopher,
anthropologist, and sociologist (Ignatieff 128). Born in Czechoslovakia, Professor Gellner, who had once served as a professor of social anthropology at Cambridge University and served at the time of
his death as director of the Center for the Study of Nationalism at Pragues Charles University, sought to understand the human condition and the evolution of man through his social
and political institutions (Ignatieff 128). Author of the critically-acclaimed 1983 book, Nations and Nationalism, Gellner used this foundation to consider what has been generally believed to be a concept
exclusive to the West, that of a so-called "civil society" (Mabry 64). The result was an impressive 1994 book, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals, which examined
the topic from anthropological, economic, ideological, philosophical, political and sociological perspectives. I. Introduction The collapse of communism in East Germany and
the former Soviet Union in 1989 had political scientists, along with the rest of the world, collectively asking the question, "What went wrong?" Professor Gellner, who was familiar with
governmental structures on both sides of the Iron Curtain, believed that the downfall of communism was inevitable. Consider, for example, how Eastern European dissidents of the 1970s were already
contemplating another type of social and political community to replace communism. According to Gellner, they began to take serious notice of the ideal of a civil society, with origins
dating back to the Western European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century (Ignatieff 128). As they (and Gellner) discovered, the essential difference between a communist state and a civil society
...