No. of Recommendations: 3
I'm impressed by your intellectual curiosity and the courtesy you have shown me in reading a book I recommended, and out of respect I would like to respond to some of your observations.
He takes as given - without support or interrogation - that everyone agrees that the "nation" is a modern creation. He then situates the birth of "nation" as being in the 18th century or so, without any real discussion of or support for the implicit claim that all human societies that existed before that were not "nations."The entire thesis is an argument against the idea that nations are essential identities with a transhistorical existence. Nations are not ancient communities united by a common history and culture within a specific space, but rather are the modern creation of nationalism as part of a nation state building project. The nation was invented through nationalism as part of the construction of the modern nation-state. Nationalism was a movement of state formation, and state legitimation, that seeks to displace the absolutism of monarchical states and empires.
How would you explain the origins of nations, or are they “natural” communities whose fulfillment is realized through a teleological state becoming?
“he dismisses without discussion the possibility that nations existed (whether "imagined" or not) throughout human history.”Again, he doesn’t dismiss it. His entire thesis is an argument against the teleology of nationalist ideology. The modern nation state isn’t the realization of some essential nation-being of a people but rather the culmination of a social and political project to create that nation-being.
Reading between the lines, it's pretty obvious that he wants to place "nations" in the context of the development of capitalism - and especially provide a critical analysis of the role of printing and the capitalist control of the commercial distribution of books and newspapers in the formation of the modern nation state.It’s not necessary to read between the lines, the lines are right there. Yes, he is claiming that the modern nation state, and the invention of nations, is part and parcel of the development of capitalism and the organization of national bourgeoisies against the absolutist states they seek to overthrow. It also organizes the accumulation of capital, and its state regulation, on a national basis. The important point here is that the construct of the nation, constructed through nationalist movements and the ideology of nationalism, is essential to the legitimation of the modern state and its claims to authority over a territory and its people. Yes, Anderson is arguing that this is a historical process that emerged out of the bourgeois liberalism of the 18th and 19th centuries, and that these new “nations” were not the realization of some essential transhistorical identities, but rather the creations of nationalism itself.
The existence of "nations" prior to the development of capitalism is problematic for his approach. It's hard to argue that capitalism created the very idea of a "nation" (and the concomitant willingness of men to kill or die for it) if you think too much about how Spain and Denmark and France and, I don't know the Hundred Years War and the Thirty Years War all existed long before Adam Smith was ever born.You are reading the present onto the past here. You are imposing the idea of the nation on your understanding of the absolutist states, and monarchical wars of succession and territory, of the 14-17th centuries. These were feudal wars between feudal elites in which appeals to “national” defense played no part for the organization of societies at war. Indeed, these were not even societies at war, but rather waring elites. The masses in France and England suffered mightily during these feudal wars, but not in the defense of their “nation”. These wars were not fought “for France” or “for England” but for the King of France and the King of England. They certainly became part of the lore of the nation building projects of France and England in the 18th and 19th centuries, but they are not evidence for this kind of nationalism as existing for five hundred years prior.
Anderson … doesn't really visit any of the thousand-year old nations of Europe. He would reject the idea of thousand-year old nations as an empty historical abstraction. What does the concept of nation even mean in this transhistorical context? Is there some essential identity that unifies people around culture, language, and blood and transcends the awesome differences between feudal society in the tenth century and capitalism in the twentieth century? Are these national bonds the same social glue across a thousand years of Swedish history? Actually, the idea of a homogeneous Swedish national identity is a myth (
https://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadF...). Even the Swedish nation has its origins in the Swedish nationalism of the 18th and 19th centuries. And here too the creation of the Swedish “nation” involved the repression of minority populations that would not, or could not, be assimilated.
But if this is a book trying to argue that (say) 15th Century Spain wasn't a nation, and that "nations" or "nationalism" didn't come into existence until capitalism came around to make them....I don't think he's at all backed up that thesis.As you can see, I beg to differ with you in this conclusion and would instead argue that your criticism is ahistorical. Anderson has offered a sturdy and lasting explanation of the dialectical origins of the nation and nationalism as part of the creation of the modern nation-state. It would be incumbent upon you to explain what the nation is, and how it has existed across millennium and in vastly different social conditions of existence, if it is not a historical artifact of the rise of bourgeois liberalism and its attempts to organize the state on a new basis?
