While the preconditions were set in Europe, Dr.
The “deep horizontal comradeship” that characterizes a nation is socially constructed, he wrote, but also heartfelt and genuine it explains why people die and kill for their countries. Anderson did not mean that nations are not real indeed, he wrote, any community larger than a village in which people know one another face to face is to an extent imagined. The result were communities - that is, nations - that were limited (every nation had borders) and sovereign (the Age of Enlightenment and political revolution had eroded the idea of divinely ordained dynastic rule).īy “imagined,” Dr. And it created “languages of power,” like the King’s English or High German, which were more prestigious than other vernacular tongues. It also slowed down changes within languages, making them seem fixed and stable. Anderson put it, “the revolutionary vernacularizing thrust of capitalism.” Mechanical reproduction of printed matter helped people who might have otherwise had trouble understanding one another in person - given enormous linguistic variations - to understand themselves as part of a community. A new way to meaningfully link fraternity, power and time was needed to replace them.Įssential to this process was, as Dr. Starting in Western Europe, economic change, scientific discoveries and a revolution in communication broke down those old beliefs. “Unlike most other isms, nationalism has never produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbeses, Tocquevilles, Marxes or Webers,” he wrote.īenedict Anderson in 1991.
Anderson believed that liberal and Marxist theorists had neglected to appreciate the power of nationalism. Anderson’s best-known book, “ Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,” first published in 1983, began with three paradoxes: Nationalism is a modern phenomenon, even though many people think of their nations as ancient and eternal it is universal (everyone has a nation), even though each nation is supposedly utterly distinctive and it is powerful (so much so that people will die for their countries), even though on close inspection it is hard to define.ĭr. The cause appeared to be heart failure, Mr. The death was confirmed by his friend Tariq Ali, who had worked with him at the journal New Left Review and at the publishing house Verso Books. Benedict Anderson, a scholar of Southeast Asia who transformed the study of nationalism by positing that nations were “imagined communities” that arose from the fateful interplay of capitalism and the printing press, died on Saturday night at a hotel in Batu, Indonesia.
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