Narodniks

From RW Johnson's letter in the LRB regarding Ernest Gellner -

The feelings he had about the 'Narodniks of North Oxford' he had in only slightly milder form about many social scientists too. That is, you could watch them go to work, do their sociology or economics or anthropology or comparative history and then come back home; and that, of course, was where the things that mattered were: wife, children, mortgage, car, social status and lifestyle. It is very easy for any academic after a while to feel that his subject is a set of intellectual games, gambits and petty politics that he plays before getting back to the real world. Gellner suspected this was how the comfortable gentlemen of Oxford philosophy lived, but he had the same suspicion about many others. He generated, to a degree unequalled by any other social scientist I have met, a feeling of "look, what we are doing is trying to figure out how the modern world works and this is a deadly serious task, in fact it is the most serious thing there is." He was never really off duty.