Anderson, Benedict. Imagined communities Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined communities Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition, Verso, 2006 (original was published by Verso in 1983)

First 2 chapters:

• “the ‘end of the era of nationalism,’ so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight. Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time.” 3

• “My point of departure is that nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word’s multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind.” 4

• “ It is because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” 6

• “it is imagined as a , because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.” 7

• “nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which – as well as against which – it came into being.” 12

• “Yet such classical communities linked by sacred languages had a character distinct from the imagined communities of modern nations.” 13

• “Yet if the sacred silent languages were the media through which the great global communities of the past were imagined, the reality of such apparitions depended on an idea largely foreign to the contemporary Western mind: the non-arbitrariness of the sign.” 14