Subject: For Phoolish Philip - Imagined Communitys
As I mentioned in our very interesting discussion of Israel and Palestine, I didn't then have time to read Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, but I promised I would when I had the chance:

https://www.shrewdm.com/MB?pid...

I've since read it. I know you didn't have the bandwidth to continue the discussion about Israel/Palestine, so I don't know if you care to talk about Anderson's analysis.

But my two cents are that while his discussion is very fascinating, I don't think it's at all relevant to the issues we were discussing. While he tries to characterize his analysis as one of "nationalism" broadly, he's only discussing the specific phenomena of the modern-nation state. He takes as given - without support or interrogation - that everyone agrees that the "nation" is a modern creation. He then situates the birth of "nation" as being in the 18th century or so, without any real discussion of or support for the implicit claim that all human societies that existed before that were not "nations."

Oh, sure, he talks about it a little bit - especially in the context of liturgical/official languages and the organized church, which seem to interest him. But he dismisses without discussion the possibility that nations existed (whether "imagined" or not) throughout human history.

Reading between the lines, it's pretty obvious that he wants to place "nations" in the context of the development of capitalism - and especially provide a critical analysis of the role of printing and the capitalist control of the commercial distribution of books and newspapers in the formation of the modern nation state. The existence of "nations" prior to the development of capitalism is problematic for his approach. It's hard to argue that capitalism created the very idea of a "nation" (and the concomitant willingness of men to kill or die for it) if you think too much about how Spain and Denmark and France and, I don't know the Hundred Years War and the Thirty Years War all existed long before Adam Smith was ever born. So Anderson just kind ignores without mention the existence of the Kingdoms of France, Spain, England, Norway-Denmark, Sweden, and the rest. Instead, he spends the first part of the book in the New World talking about how capitalism and printing created all the "first" nation-states, and doesn't really visit any of the thousand-year old nations of Europe until he's ready to talk about development of the modern nation state in the early 1800's.

Again, an interesting read. If this is a book about the modern nation-state as a political entity that is materially different from the type of nation-state of (say) 15th Century Spain, then I think he's got a lot of good observations. But if this is a book trying to argue that (say) 15th Century Spain wasn't a nation, and that "nations" or "nationalism" didn't come into existence until capitalism came around to make them....I don't think he's at all backed up that thesis. To be fair to Anderson, I don't know that he's really trying to - he wants to talk about the role of capitalism as an economic model in creating the modern nation state, and he's just taking it as a given that for his purposes that's what a "nation" is and that no one disputes that. But I don't think he's right, and he certainly doesn't support that claim.