The author emphasizes that nationalism is not akin to political ideologies like Marxism and Fascism since the people are willing to die for the former but not for the latter. Despite the division that language, religion, and ethnicity create, there emerges a positive force of horizontal comradeship. He says, “It is an imagined political community- and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” Rise of NationalismĪlthough even in the tiniest nation, there is no way every inhabitant knows every other inhabitant, yet in the minds of everyone, there is an idea of communion that connects them and forms the imagined community. Benedict Anderson repudiates the notion that nations are something natural instead, he asserts that a nation is a socially constructed artifact based on cherished ideas and sentiments about community, solidarity, and belonging. This monumental work aims at delineating the processes by which the nation came to be imagined and once imagined, adapted, and transformed.
First published in 1983, the book is substantiated with plenty of case studies from across the globe.
Written by notable political thinker Benedict Anderson – a professor of international studies, and government and Asian studies at Cornell University – Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism aims at exploring the origin of nationalism, a very pertinent element in contemporary global politics.
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