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Ernest Gellner built one of the century's leading theories of nationalism, arguing it was a product of industrial modernization rather than the awakening of ancient peoples. His first book, Words and Things (1959), attacked the reigning Oxford school of linguistic philosophy so bluntly that The Times ran a month-long correspondence over it. He held the philosophy chair at the London School of Economics for 22 years and the social anthropology chair at Cambridge for eight, later founding a centre for the study of nationalism in Prague, and moved as easily through the Muslim world's intellectual life as the West's.