Spectacles and Predicaments
Essays in Social Theory

A collection of essays concerned with some key problems in the study of philosophy, politics and society.

Ernest Gellner (Author)

9780521424349, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 19 September 1991

396 pages
21.6 x 14 x 2.2 cm, 0.5 kg

'… his essays on politics in particular are vivd and thought-provoking pieces of work.' New Society

This collection of essays is concerned with philosophy, politics and society. The first group examines what philosophers such as Hegel, Wittgenstein and Chomsky have said or implied about the nature of society in general. A second group examines the cognitive predicament, questions concerning the nature of the possibility of knowledge, as handled by a thinker such as Descartes, or the Pragmatist tradition. The third group handles the political predicament and deals specifically with problems such as nationalism, the nature of the liberalisation process, the future of the welfare and consumer state and the option facing underdeveloped societies. The essays deal not only with classical theories concerning these problems but also with various recent discussions. The volume will interest many individual philosophers and social theorists and those with a more general interest in our culture and political discussions.

Editorial preface I. C. Jarvie and J. Agassi
Part I. Understanding Humanity: 1. The absolute in braces
2. Ethnomethodology: the re-enchantment industry or the Californian way of subjectivity
3. A Wittgensteinian philosophy of (or against) the Social sciences
4. Period piece
5. Chomsky
6. Notes towards a theory of ideology
Part II. The Cognitive Predicament: 7. Options of belief
8. The pure enquirer
9. An ethic of cognition
10. Beyond truth and falsehood, or no method in my madness
11. The last pragmatist, or the behaviourist Platonist
12. Pragmatism and the important of being earnest
Part III. The Political Predicament: 13. Nationalism, or the new confessions of a justified Edinburgh sinner
14. A social contract in search of an idiom: the demise of the Danegeld state
15. The withering away of the dentistry state
16. From the Revolution to liberalisation
17. Plaidoyer pur une libéralisation manquée
18. Gone and gone forever
19. The Kathmandu option
Sources
Bibliography of Gellner, 1972–78
Indexes.

Subject Areas: Anthropology [JHM]