David Gellner is right to describe this exhilarating book as a synthesis of several themes that concerned Ernest Gellner all his adult life: ‘the thought of Wittgenstein, the history and theory of social anthropology, the causes of nationalism, the nature of modernity, and the social roots of rationality and irrationalism’. Exhilarating and unclassifiable: at once a synoptic interpretation of the thought of Wittgenstein and Malinowski; a comparative assessment of their world-views – of their accounts of knowledge, language and culture; a brilliant sociological sketch of the common socio-political and intellectual background which they shared; a view of their influence upon their respective disciplines; and a passionate and polemical argument with them and some of their successors, in which Gellner once more and for the last time eloquently and succinctly expresses his own world-view. He expresses it here, with all his characteristic verve, by engaging directly with what he takes to be the egregious and wholly pernicious errors of Wittgenstein, early and late, in the light of what he sees as Malinowski's liberating but only partially developed (and partially retracted) insights into the interrelated themes that have together been central to his own life's work.

It is, moreover, a genuine effort at synthesis: a bringing together of purely philosophical theories, about the nature of reality, knowledge and language; contending accounts of what he calls ‘socio-metaphysic, or philosophical anthropology’; and alternative political standpoints seen as expressing alternative responses to a common historically-given predicament. The essence of his argument can be briefly stated.