Brendan Simms reviewed Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography for The Wall Street Journal over the weekend:
Gellner has been brought back to life—alongside his combative ideas and his maverick approach to intellectual combat—in a sympathetic but by no means reverential biography by his former pupil John A. Hall…
As Mr. Hall demonstrates, Gellner believed that there really was a clash between “liberty and pluralism,” on the one hand, and
“authoritarianism and oppressiveness” on the other. In a passionate riposte to Noam Chomsky, who had accused him of ignoring Western crimes, Gellner charged that his critic had “obscured” the fact that “the survival of freedom and accountable, limited government is an enormously important value even when some of its defenders are occasionally tarnished.
This was the authentic voice of Ernest Gellner: honest, cool and reasonable. Mr. Hall is to be congratulated for reminding us of how much we miss it today.
Read the full article here.
Scott McLemee has also reviewed Ernest Gellner for The National:
…offers a timely monument to an unjustly overlooked figure of 20th-century intellectual life…The cumulative effect is monumental – and a monument does seem overdue.
The same edition of The National also contains a brief review of Gideon Levy’s The Punishment of Gaza:
Little of what he reports will be news to the book’s readers – and those who would be surprised by its contents are unlikely ever to pick it up. But this shouldn’t diminish the power of its testimony: it is a worthy monument to Israel’s victims in Gaza – and to the integrity of those, like Levy, who have refused to ignore the crimes committed in their names.
Read the full article here.
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