To Anderson, the most common mistake about nationalism is to perceive it as ideologies like fascism or communism. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.” Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. He explains “the nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.
It is imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. As a modernist theorist, Benedict Anderson defines the nation as an “imagined political community”.
The concepts of nations and nationalism emerged in the late 18th century. He explains his arguments with the decreasing importance of religious communities and dynasties, the developments following the printing revolution (print-capitalism, as he named it), standardization of the language, lexicographical revolution and so on.īenedict Anderson and Imagined Communities Anderson sees the nation as an “imagined political community”. He brought a new definition to the concepts of nations and nationalism by emphasizing cultural veins that appeared in the late 18th century. In 1983, Benedict Anderson published his most influential book, Imagined Communities.
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