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 ëconfessed to unease when Gellner sat down to watch television with him ñ saying it was as if Max Weber had dropped by.í It requires only a little familiarity with Weberís 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 Gellnerís complacent-seeming endorsement of post-1945 mass affluence and Weberís more agonised reflections on Europe after 1918: ëIt is difficult to imagine Weber, relaxed before a television set, greeting the festivities of the time as a new Belle Epoque.í

LRB 2 June 2011 | PDF Download