The agitated relations between state, civil society and cultural identity are the main themes of this exploration of the sociocultural reality of the present. In view of the horrors that human beings have been capable of in the past two centuries, Ernest Gellner expresses in these essays his concern for the legitimacy, scope and risks of our choices and choices.
From the profound social, industrial and political changes of those centuries, new ideologies and aspirations were generated, reflected in nationalism, socialism and colonialism. However, its influence reaches our time with the rise of modern Islamism, ethnic discrimination and struggles for current cultural identity. Gellner analyzes with critical clarity these profound changes in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, accompanied by some of the most eminent theories that dealt with it.
In outstanding thinkers like Émile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski or Hannah Arendt, among others, the author elucidates the dilemmas, the tensions and temptations that challenge these illustrious spirits when they assume the risk of capturing and interpreting emerging phenomena without having even established theories.