Paper short abstract:

Gellner was originally a refugee in Britain and he had no illusions about the nature of totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union and „people´s democracies“.

Paper long abstract:

But as an anthropologist and philosopher he was intrigued by the changes behind the Iron Curtain, especially in social sciences that were officially under the spell of the dogmas of Marxism-Leninism. We do not know whether he wanted to find some openings in the ‚granite unity‘ of scholarship in the Eastern Bloc or just wondered what kind of brains work in the institutes and departments there. The paper will look at Gellner’s reading of knowledge products of Soviet and East European social science as well as Gellner’s overal views about them.