Nations and Nationalism (New Perspectives on the Past)

Gellner is very smart and his book on nations and nationalism is a fascinating read. Would recommend to people who want to read about the development and emergence of nations alongside industrialism.

Excellent version of a major set of ideas dealing with what nation states are and why it is sometimes so hard to create such political systems.

I would not suggest considering not reading this if you have an interest in International Relations and Political Science.

Nationalism is something that has interested me recently, especially as I see it as a major stumbling-block in improving the course of mankind in the world. Nations and flags are something you hold onto instead of opening up your arms and hands to the idea of a better world. That said, I have read little in the subject, the most pertinent being Hobsbawm's essays in the collection _The Invention of Tradition_. I am just opening up the hermeneutic circle in hopes of someday closing it.I do have several critiques of the book, and many of them are answered or at least brought up in the introduction to this edition. The primary critique is that the book is overly generalized. To illustrate his concept of nationalism only arising after industrialization, Gellner uses a hypothetical country to make his point. While I understand he is trying to construct a general model of nationalism, his experiences and theories naturally have to be based off of real situations to be a working model. All nations and nationalistic movements will differ in specifics from the model he creates. Does this show the strength of his model, or its weaknesses.A secondary critique is that the models he uses are entirely too Eurocentric. The book could be titled _European Nations and Nationalism_ quite easily. The post-colonial struggles for a definition of nationalistic identity all over the formerly colonized worlds are give short shrift, and I think this is because they do not fit as easily into the model he argues for in this book. The idea that the European culture imposed on the developing world is too strong to be subverted by one of the native folk cultures seems to me rather patronizing in a cultural aspect. That many of the colonial borders still exists should be reason to reexamine the model, not look for reasons why the cultures do not fit the model working in it.A final, more personal critique is Gellner's dismissal of the Marxist view of history. While the Marxist view can be open to some of the critiques I have against Gellner, I feel that the burden lies to Gellner to show more particularly how his model is superior to one that has been studied and refined through academic discourse over the past century and a half. I recognize that this book is long in print, so I am sure some Marxist historian has taken up Gellner and his glib dismissal of the Marxist system. I respect the cultural model drawn by Gellner, but I doubt the prevalence of the influence on a large scale of the socio-linguistic system he uses as the center of his theory. To me, class still seems like a larger division, even if Gellner disagrees. I still find this work interesting and illuminating, so I will not dismiss it despite my critiques. I have to read more on the subject.

"Ignorance has many forms, and all of them are dangerous. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries our chief effort has been to free ourselves from tradition and superstition in large questions, and from the error in small ones..." ( R.I. Moore, Editor's Preface to "Nations and Nationalism.")"(N)ationalism suffers from pervasive false consciousness. Its myths invert reality...Nationalism tends to treat itself as a manifest and self -evident principle, accessible as such to all men, and violated only through some perverse blindness, when in fact it owes its plausibility and compelling nature only to a very special set of circumstances, which do indeed obtain now,but which were alien to most of humanity and history....Its self image and its true nature are inversely related with an ironic neatness seldom equalled..." (Ernest Gellner, "Nations and Nationalism", pgs. 119/120.)Gellner's book was written in 1983, long before the collapse of Communism and long before the upheaval and social engineering inherent within globalisation, which, for it to succeed, entailed a mixture of forced and voluntary mass migration along with radical upheaval of myriad ethnic identities and their attendant senses of belonging. The book was written long before the savage attack on diverse ethnic groups' stability, carried out under the phony flag of `democracy', the `end of history' , and the guise of the 'war on terror'.Gellner's book was also written before `the age of the internet', which has turned many of his ideas on `high culture' and `shared and exclusive' identities on their head.Therefore, Ernest Gellner's landmark text on nationalism, is inevitably, slightly dated, but it is still essential reading, mostly for his appreciative readings, uses, subversions and disputations with Durkheim, Weber, and Marx, as well as for his exploration of the theories of Hobsbawm,Nairn,Trevor Roper and Alan Macfarlane .It is here that Gellner is at his best and most thrilling to read, theorising that in Shamanistic pre agrarian cultures, men professed to worship nature, river and mountain spirits -- but in reality, they were worshipping themselves. He theorises that in agrarian cultures, men worshipped, dreaded, bowed down to, and feared God -- but in reality, they were fearing and worshipping the austere power over life and death that the kings held. In extreme nationalism, Gellner informs us, men worship so called 'bloodlines', ancestors and 'unique genes' -- but in reality, they are fetishising and worshipping themselves.Gellner explores, at great length, the distortions, illusions and negative effects of Christian, Catholic, Protestant, rural Berber Sufi and Islamic prisms on nations, tribes and nationalism, and he investigates in some depth, the Anglo Saxon, Dutch, Scandinavian, Slavic and Islamic delusions connected to notions of the `in' group and `out' group, the `accepted and the other' as well as exploding myths about primordial 'race' and 'nation.'He covers these theses admirably, in detailed, insightful extended diatribes - but, disappointingly, he barely mentions anything whatsoever about Judaism, Jewish notions of ethnicity and nation, and he mentions nothing about Zionism, except for one or two brief lines about the Ashkenazim's 'successful RE-settlement' of the land of Israel, and the tragedy of Eastern European `diaspora', without looking at the roles that Jewish communities played within the agrarian cultures of Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania, and how these highly cultured, literate Jewish communities perceived concepts of `in' and `out' group, `accepted' and `other', `sacred' and `profane', `race' and `nation' in these geographical boundaries. It is disappointing that Gelllner so ably, admirably and accurately explodes many of the myths of other ethnic groups, but takes as axiomatic, many of the myths of Zionism. Yuri Szlezkine, Amos Elon, Illan Pappe,Shlomo Sand and Israel Shahak have so much more to tell us about those aspects of Jewish history and identity, that, prior to the 1990s, most scholars were apparently too timid to address.It is still a landmark book, which must be read if you are at all interested in the myths and delusions that surround concepts of nationalism : you just have to `fill in the spaces' for everything that has happened since the early 80s, which means of course, that the reader will have to consider the resurgence of (frequently violent) Slavic nationalism, and the continued enthusiastic rise of South Korean nationalism, which has never abated, and since the late 1800s has always been concerned with `bloodlines' and `racial purity', `racial character', `in group' and `out group', all considered as unquestionable, axiomatic truths. (For more on that, read Shin Gi Wook,Koo Hagen, and Choi Jang Jip) The reader will also have to look closely at how successfully Islam has replaced `cosmic primordial blood and soil' nationalism with the uniting principle and authority of the Umma and Ulama. Essentially, the Western reader will also have to address the intense nationalism of China, which shows no sign whatsoever of looking objectively at these ideas, taking their hitherto dormant national and `racial' superiority as a given.

Gellner might be wrong on a few points, but this is one of the most compelling and thought-provoking books I've ever read.