The Ethnic Origins of Nations (original) (raw)
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Anderson, Benedict: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
2016
This clever little book has all that it takés to become a primary source of inspiration to anyone interested in the issue of nationalism, its causes and transformations. Written with admirable clarity and a good deal of humor, its nine chapters present the reader with a refreshing way of looking at this Modern Age universal. To the student of East Central Europe this work offers the possibility of seeing his favorite subject matter placed within a comparative framework (one that goes beyond the usual West European perspective) by an author whose own 'expertise' lies with Indochina and who feels comfortable using the work of anthropology and literary theory to draw insight on political history. Nation-ness remains as legitimate a political value today as it has been for the past two centuries. It has, equally, remained an enigma to social analysis. Rather than seeing it as another ideological 'ism', Anderson prefers to treat the related phenomena of nationality, Nationalism and nation-ness as cultural artifacts, akin to kinship and religion. He defines the nation as "an imagined political Community," since it is impossible for all members to know each other 'personally'. What distinguishes it from other kinds of imagined communities is "the style by which it is imagined." (p. 15) It is imagined as limited since it rests on the notion of membership and thus exclusion. And it is sovereign; the nation connotes the sense of freedom within its protective shell (the reality of oppression notwithstanding). Anderson is certainly not the first to trace the cultural roots of nationalism to the development of mercantile capitalism, to the increased contact with non-European worlds and to the invention of the printing press, both of which gradually undermined the vast imagined dynastie and religious communities of the Middle Ages. The originality of the author's argument comes from showing how print-capitalism aecounts for the development of a new sense of co-presence, a key component in the "obscure genesis of nationalism." The vertical world of the Middle Ages was one in which the 'now' coexisted with the past and future in one simultaneity of presence given by Divine Providence. "In such a view of things, the word 'meanwhile' cannot be of real significance." (p. 30) The medieval 'simultaneity-along-time' is replaced "by an idea of 'homogeneous, empty time,' in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, crosstime, marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal eoineidence, and measured by clock and calendar." (p. 30) The novel and the newspaper provided, in different ways, the possibility of presenting an earthly simultaneity in which the reader is made present to a multiplicity of actions and actors who coexist as a 'sociolo-gicaP Community 'in time'. The newspaper draws together events related often only
2013
When asked to specify his field, Max Weber is said to have protested that he was not a donkey and did not have a field. This quip appears to be a fabrication, widely disseminated through the internet in recent years, but there is no doubting the extraordinary range of Weber's scholarship. Yet a century ago Weber worked tirelessly to institutionalise the new discipline of sociology, and it is nowadays uncontroversial to classify him as a great (historical) sociologist. Thus Weber may not have a field, but at least he has a discipline, the boundaries and content of which are more or less agreed internationally. Defining anthropology as a discipline is a little more complicated.
Introduction to Nationhood from Below: Writing the Mass into a Mass Phenomenon
in: Nationhood from Below. Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Maarten Van Ginderachter and Marnix Beyen, Basingstoke, Palgrave-Macmillan, pp. 3-22, 2012
By the end of the 1990s, it seemed that virtually everything had been said about the history of nations and nationalism. When the dust settled from the fierce disputes between modernists and primordialists an interpretive consensus seemed to emerge. On the one hand, scholars no longer contested the fundamentally constructed character of nations, yet, on the other, they acknowledged certain limits of such constructivist views. Accordingly, nineteenth-century states and nationalist movements did not invent nations at will and worked with proto-national and ethnic identities. Further, nations had histories; indeed, they underwent processes of construction earlier and in a more complex way than die-hard modernists had previously maintained. In a similar vein, the classic dichotomy between ethnic and civic varieties of nationalism turned out to be less clear-cut than formerly posited. With core conceptual debates laid to rest or mimicking older polemics, nationalism research seemed to have lost its drive. Social scientists had done their work of conceptualizing nationalism, and historians – or so some believed - could confine themselves to describing nationalisms' concrete manifestations. Yet one crucial question had hardly even been seriously asked: what did the nation mean to ordinary people? In the volume 'Nationhood from below', both renowned historians and younger scholars try to answer this question. The chapters relate to a host of present-day countries in Western, Southern, Northern and Central Europe: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Poland, Slovenia and Spain. The contributions fall into three main clusters: an introductory section, a number of historiographical survey chapters and a part with case studies.
Werner Bonefeld, Beverley Best, Chris O'Kane (eds.): The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, 3v; Chapter 38, Londo: SAGE, 2018, pp. 625-641, 2018
Critical Theory is an attempt to update the critique of political economy (K. Marx) in a new historical context: the economic crisis of the late 1920s, the crisis of the labour movement and the failure of the world revolution in 1917 / 18, and the crisis of vulgar Marxism. The relationship between history and society is analyzed as a mediation relationship between the constitution of an automatic subject (capital) and its autonomization with respect to the subjects that produce history, on the one hand, and its historical character and the possibility of overcoming it, on the other. The problems which arise from the reification of social relations and the necessary action of emancipatory subjects were extremely aggravated with the coming to power of National Socialism, the Second World War and, above all, the catastrophe of Auschwitz. The critique of Historical Materialism and of the relations of domination of nature, and a raw look at the catastrophic nature of history would lead Critical Theory to rethink the relationship between the closing of horizons of the administered world and of history, without renouncing the possibility of overcoming capitalism, which had been shelved for the moment.