Research Paper on:
Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals by Ernest Gellner Reviewed

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
-- properly! Ernest Gellner (1925-1995) was the quintessential twentieth-century Renaissance man who could be accurately described equally well as a philosopher,  anthropologist, and sociologist (Ignatieff 128). Born in Czechoslovakia, Professor Gellner, who had once served as a professor of social anthropology at Cambridge University and served at the time of  his death as director of the Center for the Study of Nationalism at Pragues Charles University, sought to understand the human condition and the evolution of man through his social  and political institutions (Ignatieff 128). Author of the critically-acclaimed 1983 book, Nations and Nationalism, Gellner used this foundation to consider what has been generally believed to be a concept  exclusive to the West, that of a so-called "civil society" (Mabry 64). The result was an impressive 1994 book, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals, which examined  the topic from anthropological, economic, ideological, philosophical, political and sociological perspectives. I. Introduction The collapse of communism in East Germany and  the former Soviet Union in 1989 had political scientists, along with the rest of the world, collectively asking the question, "What went wrong?" Professor Gellner, who was familiar with  governmental structures on both sides of the Iron Curtain, believed that the downfall of communism was inevitable. Consider, for example, how Eastern European dissidents of the 1970s were already  contemplating another type of social and political community to replace communism. According to Gellner, they began to take serious notice of the ideal of a civil society, with origins  dating back to the Western European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century (Ignatieff 128). As they (and Gellner) discovered, the essential difference between a communist state and a civil society