The Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson (english version)
Rousseau, Du contrat social, Livre I, Chapitre V
Teacher in International relation and specialist in Asia area, in The Imagined Communities Anderson try to understand the origin and spread of nationalism (the sub-title of his book).
What is a nation? The problem to find a definition
Tom Nair (The Break-up of Britain, 1977, London, New Left Books) wrote: “Nationalism is the pathology of modern developpemental history, as inescapable as “neurosis” in the individual, with the same essential ambiguity attaching to it”. Contrarily to the others “-ism”, nationalism has never produced its own grand thinkers (p.5).
For the author, the researches on nationalism classify it as an ideology, put the hypostasize that “Nationalism-with-a-big-N exists.But the nationalism belonged more with ‘Kinship” and “religion”, rather than with “Liberalism” or “Fascism”.
It’s an imagined community because the members will never know most of their “fellow-members”, meet then, hear of them. All the communities larger than primordial village of face-to-face contact are imagined (p.6).
Thinking the nation as a “imagined community” don’t minimize its power, its strength:
“Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”p.7
Even the most "messianic” nationalism do not dream of the day when all the members of the human race will join their nation. That makes the first difference with the other imagined communities, like the Christian, Nation is imagined as limited (p.7).
Last point, the nation idea is linked with the concept of sovereignty and both “born” in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the Ancien Régime.
“Apprehensions of time” (pp.22-36)
If the imagined communities of nations are not a simply growing out of religious communities, it is because a fundamental change taking place in modes of apprehending the world. The new conception of time made possible to think the nation.
Bloch observes that peoples of the Middle Age thought they must be near the end of time, in the sense that Christ coming could occur at any moment. The medieval Christian mind had no concept of history as an endless chain of causes and effects or of radical separation between past and present.
The conception of time changed, from the simultaneity (the past and the present are in an instantaneous present) to meanwhile, linked to the development of secular science. The earth dating made not with the Bible chronology but with the melting of lead, the improvement of navigation with the compute of the meridians through clock, and so on… This new time is define byW. Benjamin (Illumination, 1973) as “an idea of ‘homogenous', empty time" on which simultaneity is transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar” p.24
The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) the history.
This transformation is important for the birth of the imagined community of the nation can best be seen if we consider two forms of imagining which flowered in Europe in the eighteenth century: the novel and the newspaper.
“Printing-capitalism”
One of the earlier forms of capitalist enterprise, book-publishing, felt all of capitalism’s restless search for markets. The initial market was Europe, a wide but thin stratum of Latin-readers. And since the years 1500-1550 were a period of exceptional European prosperity. In 1500, 20,000,000 books had already been printed and 200,000,000 had been printed 1600. The logic of capitalism thus meant that once the elite Latin market was saturated, the potentially huge markets represented by monoglot masses would beckon.
The coalition between Protestantism and print-capitalism, exploiting cheap popular edition, quickly created large new reading publics- not least among merchants and women- and simultaneously mobilised them for politico-religious purposes.
In this perspective, the newspaper is an ‘extreme form’, one-day best-sellers, for this reason, creates a mass ceremony, a simultaneous consumption. Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands or millions of others readers. At the same time, the newspaper readers, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbours, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life.
To have already forgotten’
“The essence of a nation is that the individuals share lot of thing and also that everyone have forgot lot of thinks… The entire French citizens obliged already to have forgotten the Saint-Berthelemy, the Midi mass murders of the XIIIe century.”
Renan, Qu’est-qu’une nation? Speech of 1882
Renan saw no reason to explain for his readers what either ‘la Saint-Barthélemy’ or ‘the midi mass murders’ meant. Renan’s readers were being told to “have already forgotten’ what Renan’s own words assumed that they naturally remembered. We become aware of a systematic historographical campaign deployed by the state mainly through the state’s school system, to ‘remind” every young Frenchwoman and Frenchman of a series of antique slaughters which now inscribed as ‘family history’. But no need to remind that most of the murdered Albigensians spoke Provençal or Catalan, and that their murderers came from many parts of Western Europe.
Interview of Benedict Anderson on ligne clic here
Reference
- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Verso; Revised edition (July 1991)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0860915468
- ISBN-13: 978-0860915461