Book SummaryImagined Communities, by Benedict Anderson

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Imagined Communities

In Imagined Communities, political scientist, historian, and scholar Benedict Anderson explores the phenomenon of nationalism. He argues that the concept of “the nation” has no basis in empirical reality, but is instead a purely political innovation that socially constructs a shared identity that binds strangers from different communities together. Thus, although a nation may consist of tens of millions of people—nearly all of whom will never personally know or even meet one another—nationalism provides the intellectual framework for each individual to think of themselves as a member of a singular community with a shared identity.

This insight has important implications for how we think of ourselves as members of a political community, how we view and relate to members of other political communities, and how we fashion our own individual identities on the basis of these memberships. Anderson’s theories have influenced decades of political thinking, and have become the basic philosophy upon which much discussion of nationhood rests.

Widely considered to be a landmark study in the field, Anderson’s work examines:

1. Why nationalism has an emotional and psychological power that other secular political ideologies lack
2. How nations are socially and politically created concepts
3. How pre-nationalist political communities were more the personal dynastic territory of the sovereigns than they were coherent political communities with clear boundaries, identities, and interests beyond the ruler
4. How the astonishing rise in literacy and the printing of books in vernacular languages fueled the rise of nationalism
5. How modern nations are a relatively recent phenomenon that arose out of particular...

Imagined Communities Summary 1. The Emotional Power of Nationalism

Anderson observes that today, the nation—a polity exercising full sovereignty over a well-defined and contiguous piece of land with clear boundaries—is the universal political model. Nearly all of the planet’s territory is claimed by one nation or another and nationality, the status of belonging to a nation, is something that nearly all persons are assumed to have.

Membership in a national community has become so central to our political thinking that some commentators have argued that nationality itself is the wellspring from which all other political, legal, and human rights flow.

Hannah Arendt observed the difficulties of millions of people who’d been displaced and rendered stateless in the aftermath of World War II and argued that citizenship (membership in a political community) was a fundamental right—in her famous words, it was “the right to have rights.” She reasoned that, in the modern world, all rights began with nationality. Without it, individuals had no protection against dispossession, exploitation, and, ultimately, extermination. Her...

Imagined Communities Summary 2. Nations Are Created Concepts

Given this deep level of emotional commitment, Anderson writes that it’s easy to assume that nations represent a natural way of organizing human beings into political communities. However, Anderson argues that this assumption is wrong—the nation in its modern form is a relatively recent political invention, going back no further than the 18th century (we’ll explore this history later in this summary).

He writes that the nation—and the ideology of nationalism that sustains it—was created by a unique combination of historical forces that came together at a particular time. Nations are not “natural” or “eternal.” Instead, nations and national communities are constructed identities. They have no “real” or “organic” basis in biological science or history.

Racial and Pseudoscientific Theories

Although nations may be politically engineered communities, this does not mean that nationalist theorists haven’t tried to define the nation in terms of some essential, biological, natural basis.

This was one of the primary goals of the pseudoscientific racial theorists of the 19th century. These figures, often heavily influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of species...

Imagined Communities Summary 3. The Pre-Nationalist Age

As we’ve mentioned, the nation as a political unit is a fairly recent innovation. For most of human history, people did not think of themselves as being part of a national community, bound by historical, cultural, geographical, and linguistic ties.

Anderson argues that the overarching identity that bound people together was religion, but beyond that, people were more likely to speak in terms of other forms of identity and community. In medieval or Early Modern Europe, for example, a person would be unlikely to say “I am French” or “I am German,” because “France” and “Germany” did not exist as coherent political communities. They would be more likely to identify themselves in more local terms, such as the village or manorial community to which they belonged, the language they spoke, or the trade they practiced.

Medieval Nationalism

There is some evidence to suggest that nationalist or proto-nationalist sentiment was actually beginning to form during the Middle Ages in some European countries. Some historians have argued that this effect was noticeably pronounced in England.

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Imagined Communities Summary 4. Language and the Rise of Nationalism

Anderson argues that one of the key factors in the rise of nationalism was the explosion of literacy in Europe beginning in the 14th and 15th centuries.

He writes that the new reading public that began to emerge in most European countries was able to absorb written ideas and communicate with one another in the languages they spoke every day. This, in turn, formed a crucial link that sparked national consciousness and forged key bonds of commonality between previously disunited political communities within European countries.

Literacy Initially Cemented a Ruling Class

Anderson argues that one of the primary bonds that had linked otherwise disparate political and religious elites together before the rise of the nation-state was their shared use of ancient sacred languages.

According to Anderson, liturgical languages like Latin, Classical Chinese, and Koranic Arabic helped to join the tiny educated elite (an infinitesimal fraction of the overall population, the overwhelming majority of which was completely illiterate) together across vast stretches of time and space. The fact that these were dead tongues—read and written, but not used in ordinary conversation—gave...

Imagined Communities Summary 5. Modern European Nationalism

Anderson writes that European nationalism in its modern form really came to the fore in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as Europeans rediscovered and promoted cultural artifacts from their own past—with a particular focus on history, literature, folklore, mythology, and music. Nineteenth-century Europeans at last began to see their own culture and history as being on par with—and even superior to—that of the Greeks and Romans.

In each country, the promoters of these emerging national identities—typically drawn from the ranks of the educated middle and professional classes—pored over ancient texts, folklore, and literature in an effort to reach back into history and find historical evidence of their “nationhood” in the distant past.

National Origin Myths in Germany

These national origin stories were important elements in the cultivation of a shared national identity—although they often had political effects far beyond what anyone at the time could have imagined. In the case of Germany, these nation-making myths proved to be an important element in the development of Nazi ideology in the 20th century.

Nineteenth-century promoters of German nationalism...

Imagined Communities Summary 6. The Challenge to the Old Dynasties

This new celebration of unique cultural identities helped to instill more nationalist and separatist political identities. This process was particularly acute among ethnic and linguistic minorities within multilingual and multiethnic empires, like the Ukrainians within the Russian Empire or the Czechs and Romanians within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Anderson argues that this created new political challenges for the dynasties—like the Romanovs, Habsburgs, and Hohenzollerns of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires, respectively—that ruled these empires.

These sovereigns were from royal families whose lineages stretched far back into the Middle Ages—they had no real “national” identity of their own. Often, they didn’t even speak the language of the dominant linguistic group over which they ruled as their primary language. For example, the Romanov dynasty of the Russian Empire primarily spoke in French and German in private.

This rise of linguistic nationalism not only created tensions within empires, but between them as well. The 19th- and early 20th-century phenomenon of Pan-Germanism—the idea that all of Europe’s German-speaking peoples should be united in...

Imagined Communities Summary 7. Nationalism in the Colonies

Anderson writes that, beginning in the late 19th century, colonized peoples from Indonesia to India to Kenya began to repurpose European-style nationalism to advance their own political ambitions—chiefly, independence from the European empires and the establishment of nations of their own.

Maintaining the East-West Divide

In Orientalism, Edward Said notes that Western scholars and imperial propagandists defined themselves explicitly in opposition to the monolithic bloc of the East. Maintaining these distinctions was key to Europeans—if these lines were to become blurred, the West might find itself without an identity of its own.

Said argues that the growth of national independence movements and organizations like the League of Nationalist Action in Lebanon and the Arab Independence Party in Mandatory Palestine (which was administered by the British) threatened to knock down the barriers between East and West and possibly even put the East on equal footing with the West with their forceful demands for self-determination. This represented a grave affront to the...

Imagined Communities Summary 8. Nationalism vs. Racism

Anderson concludes by arguing that nationalism and racism—while often viewed as related and even complementary ideologies—are actually highly divergent phenomena.

Within the nationalist framework, conflict and competition are between nations. This is the basis for history’s most famous nationalist rivalries, conflicts between largely monolithic, unified political communities—India vs. Pakistan, France vs Germany, China vs. Japan.

But, Anderson argues, racism is primarily concerned with internal racial purity. Thus, the biggest threat to the racist is not foreign aggression on the part of another nation, but instead, contamination or impurity from the enemy within. Racism tends to act as a catalyst not for foreign...

Shortform Exercise: Explore Nationalism

Think about what it means to be a member of a nation.

Would you say you come from a nation that has an ethnic or a civic model of nationalism? Explain your answer.

Shortform Exercise: Explore Your Own Nationality

Think about how you identify with your nationality.

Think about your nationality. How significant a role does it play in your personal identity?