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@Peter_Nimitz @Irkutyanin1 @rhizostigmata @Sorel_ebooks @HistorysE @real_thomas777 @theeternalright @RoiRoiDame @RogueScholarPr @GuiDurocher A short book thread on classic text that is often misunderstood. Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities".
Benedict Anderson in his 1983 work "Imagined Communities” argues that nationalism is a cultural artifact, not a self-conscious political ideology that coalesced in the late eighteenth century through nineteenth out of a crossing of different contingent historical forces. In every
context nationalism arouses deep attachments because of the aura of naturalism it cultivates. While a nation is fundamentally imagined, it appears to its citizens as very real indeed. Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” is often either misunderstood or unfairly scrutinized by
nationalists and many on the right. Far from seeing nationalism as fake, Anderson demonstrates that nationalism's powers lies in its ability to play on real human needs for community and transcendence.
Nonetheless, it is historically contingent, not a coherent political ideology but the end result of a number historical forces coming together in late eighteenth through nineteenth centuries. Unlike Marxism or liberalism, the power of nationalism was in its ability to evoke an
aura of naturalism, to evoke ideas of family and blood, things worth dying for. However, it was imagined in the sense that many of the men with nationalist sentiments were willing to die for people they had never met. Nationalism played on preexisting sentiments of community, but
what separated this sense of community from older ones was the inherently limited sense of scope that nationalism entailed along with its unique notion of sovereignty (sovereignty came from the people/nation, inherently republican). The preceding historical forces that led to
this rise of nationalism are for Anderson threefold. First, was the decline of the religious understanding of transnational community in Europe (ie Christendom) second was the increasing irrelevance of European dynastic regimes as a source of power and sovereignty as well as
changing conceptions of time (growing importance of calendars and linear time to bourgeoisie). One of the most important historical forces for the rise of nationalism in Europe (and globally) was the rise of print capitalism. The business of book publishing and the changes in
language it brought to the world; unifying, standardizing and creating an even playing field for the major languages of Europe, inspiring a more national consciousness among those who were literate. Anderson’s fifth chapter is one of his most important, because it focuses on
what I think is the most important aspect of burgeoning national consciousness, the print capitalist revolution leading to an exploding field of literate experts on national languages producing a golden age of vernacularizing lexicographers, grammarians, philologists.
These young intellectuals studied local languages that superseded in terms of importance the aristocratic transnational languages (French, sometimes German, in certain settings Latin) reviving regional and national languages, standardizing them. Aristocrats were not particularly
interested in peasant languages, emergent bourgeoisie important patron for achieving new kind of imagined solidarity through printed language. The early nationalisms of the young nationalist philologists and academics going to the people (peasantry and such) to relearn their
regional and national traditions was largely a grassroots phenomenon. In chapter six, Anderson details the evolution of official nationalism, the official nationalisms were conservative, not to say reactionary, policies, adapted from the model of the largely spontaneous popular
nationalism that preceded them. In other words, dynastic groups threatened by exclusion from or marginalization in popular imagined communities willfully merged nation and dynastic empire in order to retain their power.
The use of language to create new academic and cultural imaginings in a nationalist vein did have some casualties some regional minority cultures had to be folded into larger nationalist projects, Slovaks were to be Magyarized, Indians Anglicized, and Koreans Japanified.
In the last chapters, Andersons turns his attention to the colonies in the third world making the argument that with nationalism becoming an important political and administrative reference point for the west, they in turn sought to impose nationalism on the third world,
creating centralized school and administrative systems to thus nationalize their imperial and colonial subjects in places like Batavia, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, Mozambique, and the Philippines.
In the last two chapters Anderson primarily tries to suggest how natural nationalism has become and how it has been so central to conceptualizing politics and international relations that there seems to be no alternative or way to conceptualize a present or past sans nationalism.
Acknowledging that nationalism as a phenomenon is not necessarily based in an ancient unbroken chain of nationhood, is not to say that nationalism is not real. The way that many European nationalisms came together and formed are obviously contingent upon history forming
these nationalism's to the political and historical realities of their time while playing on new types of technology.
I think the greatest benefit that Anderson’s text presents to those on the right is being able to understand that the impulse behind historical nationalism is not only real and popular but appeals to deeply human instincts that are timeless and primeval.
However, on that same note, the specific European nationalisms that still exist with us are not specifically timeless. It is up to the coming generations of westerners to decide whether they wish to redefine these old loyalties and reorient themselves to new realities.
This is the task that lies before us and Anderson’s classic text can help us understand this.
