JULY 3, 2012

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983)
Nationalism is a strange phenomenon. Against all commonsense to the contrary, people perceive
themselves to be in community with total strangers who just happen to be citizens of the same
nation. As soldiers, people are even willing to diefor those complete strangers. This peculiar
phenomenon is replicated the world over. Every successful revolution since World War Two has
defined itself in national terms, and the United Nations adds to its ranks every year. Why has the
nation become the de facto form of government? And why do the nations citizens feel such deep
attachments, including the willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice, to the nation and its
strangers? Neither Marxism nor liberal theory has answers to these questions.
In his classic book Imagined Communities, political theorist Benedict Anderson argues that
nationalism is a cultural artifactnot a self-conscious political ideologythat coalesced in the
late eighteenth century out of a crossing of different contingent historical forces. Once it came
into existence, it became modular. That is, it was transplanted and adapted to a wide range of
social, political, and ideological terrains. In every context, nationalism arouses deep attachments
because of the aura of naturalism it cultivates. While a nation is fundamentally imagined, it
appears to its citizens as very real indeed.
The Nation as an Imagined Community (Chapter 1)
Anderson defines the nation as such: It is an imagined political communityand imagined as
both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined 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 The nation is imagined
aslimited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings,
has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself
coterminous with mankind It is imagined assovereign because the concept was both in an age
in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained
hierarchical dynastic realm nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The
gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state. Finally, it is imagined as
a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in
each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this

fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not
so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings (5-7).
Cultural Roots (Chapter 2)
Three overlapping historical conditions enabled the emergence of this limited and sovereign
imagined community in Europe. The first change was in the decline of the unselfconscious
coherence of religious community. As a result of global exploration, religions became to be seen
as plural and territorialized in a way that foreshadowed nationalist imagination. The spread of
publishing in vernacular language and gradual demotion of Latin as a sacred language also
played a role. Religious communities were no longer integrated by their dependence on a core
Latin-writing clerisy. A second change was in the power and status of dynasties. In medieval
Europe, states were defined by centers and peripheries. Borders were porous, contested, and
always unofficial. With the rise of regicide and revolution in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, the assumed legitimacy of monarchic rule declined, along with its models of
governmental organization. Third, early moderns were subject to changing conceptions of time.
Time became to be perceived as homogenous, empty time, measured in units by clock and
calendar. This new temporal consciousness mapped on to the idea of the nation, which is also
seen as moving steadily through history. An American, for example, will never meet, or even
know the names of more than a handful of his 240,000,000-odd fellow-Americans. He has no
idea of what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady,
anonymous, simultaneous activity (26).
Print-Capitalism (Chapter 3)
If the three aforementioned changesthe decline of a coherent religious community, the decline
of dynasties, and the emergence of homogenous timecreated the conditions under which
nationalism may have emerged, the growth of print-capitalism is what cultivated the beginnings
of nationalist consciousness.
The early modern period saw an explosion of book publishing in vernacular languages. At least
20,000,000 books had already by printed in Europe by 1500, and as many as 200,000,000 had
been manufactured by 1600, in part owing to the spectacular spread of Reformation literature. An
unanticipated result of the logic of capitalism, more-or-less fixed written versions of French,
German, and English were assembled out of Europes dizzying array of spoken languages in

this period. (In other words, the bottom line was fatal to European linguistic diversity. Publishers
were not about to churn out translations of Luthers sermons in every variant dialect of the
French countryside; they instead translated them into the print-language French, which French
literates were then behooved to learn.) These new print-languages created unified fields of
exchange and communication in a way that offered a totally new form of imagined community.
However, print-languages themselves did not nations make. Print-language was a necessary but
not sufficient condition for nationalism.
The Rise of Nationalism in Latin America: Pilgrimage and Print (Chapter 4)
The first nations to appear on the world stage were not in Western Europe but were in Latin
America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There are two primary conditions
for consciousness of Latin American nationalism: pilgrim creole functionaries and provincial
creole printmen.
First, the role of pilgrim creole functionaries. Crucially, each of the Latin American republics had
been an administrative unit from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Drawing on the
work of anthropologist Victor Turner, Anderson argues that Latin American criollo (Americanborn Spaniard) administrative functionaries created meaning on their secular
pilgrimages within their administrative unitwithin colonial Mexico or Venezuela or Chile.
(Spanish-born peninsularviceroys and bishops, who enjoyed a much higher status than did the
creoles, had a much wider orbit, and could travel from capital to capital, including to Madrid and
back.) Creole secular pilgrims met travelling companions on their circuits from their same
territory, and developed a consciousness of connectedness that was based on an awareness
first with resentment, then with prideof the accident of their American birth (56-57). The
territorial stretches of creole secular pilgrimages prefigured Latin American nations.
These fallow territorial stretches were only imagined as nations, though, with the rise of printcapitalism, especially the newspaper, in both North and South America in the course of the
eighteenth century. In Latin America, newspapers were provincial, containing information
primarily about the administrative unit it was published insuch as lists of ships arriving ships,
marriages of the wealthy, commodity-prices, and so on. Each newspaper created an imagined
community among a specific assemblage of fellow-readers, to whom these ships, brides, bishops,
and prices belonged (62).

These territories traversed by pilgrimage and print led to series of the first national liberation
movements in history. They provided a model or blueprint of what the nation should look like.
Europe was taking notes.
The Age of Nationalism in Europe and the Philological Revolution (Chapter 5)
Nationalism developed in Europe from 1820 through 1920. There were two central reasons for
this. First, the nation became something capable of being consciously aspired to from early on
because of models in the Americas (67). Second, the expansion of print-capitalist markets along
the lines of print-languages enabled different proto-nationalistic forms of cultural imagining.
Nineteenth-century Europe was a golden age of vernacularizing lexicographers, grammarians,
philologists, and literateurs (71). There was nothing short of a philological-lexicographic
revolution (83). Grammars, dictionaries, translations of classics, and local literature by scholars
appeared in their native German, French, English, Swedish, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovene, SerboCroat, Bulgarian, Finnish, and Norwegian. These local scholars were producers for the printmarket, and they were linked, via that silent bazaar, to consuming publics (75). Their
consuming publics included not only the old nobilities and landed gentries, but also an
expanding bourgeoisie. Whereas pre-bourgeois ruling class social cohesions were the products of
kinship, client-patron relations, and personal loyalties, bourgeoisie reading publics achieved a
new kind of imagined solidarity through printed language:
An illiterate nobility could still act as a nobility. But the bourgeoisie? Here was a class which,
figuratively speaking, came in being as a class only in so many republications. Factory-owner in
Lille was connected to the factory-owner in Lyon only by reverberation. They had no necessary
reason to know of one anothers existence; they did not typically marry each others daughters or
inherit each others property. But they did come to visualize in a general way the existence of
thousands and thousands like themselves through print language. For an illiterate bourgeoisie is
scarcely imaginable. Thus in world-historical terms bourgeoisies were the first classes to achieve
solidarities on an essentially imagined basis. But in a nineteenth-century Europe in which Latin
had been defeated by vernacular print-capitalism for something like two centuries, these
solidarities had an outermost stretch limited by vernacular legibilities. To put it another way, one
can sleep with anyone, but one can only read some peoples words (77).

Europe was filled with new, vernacularly imagined communities of bourgeoisie consumers
(79). And once the independence movements in the Americas reached these new vernacular
communities in Europe via print, they became blueprints of nations, available for the
pirating.
Official Nationalism and Imperialism (Chapter 6)
Just as the American nations served as models for European vernacular nations, the vernacular
nations, in turn, became models for official nationalisms of the latter half of the nineteenth
century. Such official nationalisms, according to Anderson, were conservative, not to say
reactionary, policies, adapted from the model of the largely spontaneous popular nationalism that
preceded them (110). In other words, dynastic groups threatened by exclusion from or
marginalization in popular imagined communities willfully merged nation and dynastic empire in
order to retain their power. A certain inventive legerdemain, Anderson quips, was required to
permit the empire to appear attractive in national drag (87). This was the case in Russia,
England, and Japan. Other states, such as Siam and Hungary, pursued this model not because
they desired to consolidate their power, but because they felt threatened by the spread of
nationalisms elsewhere.
Of course, this process of top-down nationalization was far from seamless. Cultures that existed
more-or-less peaceably in dynastic realms now were required to wave the flag of their foistedupon nationand they had to look the part. Slovaks were to be Magyarized, Indians Anglicized,
and Koreans Japanified.
The Last Wave (Chapter 7)
The age of high dynasticism was finally brought to an end by the First World War, and the
nation-state became the legitimate international norm. At this time, the last wave of
nationalisms crested in the colonial territories of Asia and Africa. It was in its origins a response
to the new-style global imperialism made possible by the achievements of industrial capitalism
(139). The natives of new nations leaned to imagine themselves as nationals in centralized
and standardized school systems. The schools in turn produced the required subordinate cadres
for state and corporate bureaucracies. The orbit of these new educational and administrative
pilgrimages limned the territorial base for the last wave of imagined communities, in places like
Batavia, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, Mozambique, and the Philippines. Owing to nationalisms

routinization in this period, new nations can be minted that did not have literate masses or even
linguistic uniformity. Print, once so important in facilitating imagined communities, could now
be bypassed.
The Natural Nation (Chapters 8 and 9)
In two centuries, nationalism has undergone modulation and adaptation to fit different regimes,
economies, and social and cultural structures the world over. In its extraordinary success, the
nation has taken on an aura of facticity or naturalism: I am sure that I am American, for example,
with the same certainty that I know myself to be female and white. Because nationality appears
to be a given, not a choice, it has about it a halo of disinterestedness (143). And just for that
reason, it can ask for sacrifices (144). People are willing to die for their country, Anderson
argues, because the nation is felt to be something fundamentally pure. Americanness is felt in
an Americans bones; it is not like a coat to be taken on and off at will.
Yet, like gender and race, nationalism is not lodged deep in the bones. Its an invention, and a
comparatively recent one at that. It exists in our consciousnessesin our
collective imagining. But Anderson hastens to add that just because it is imagined, does not mean
it is not real. On the contrary. It is deeply real. Anderson, a Marxist, here lobs a challenge at other
Marxist political theorists. It does no use, Anderson insists, to continue to describe nationalism as
epiphenomenal, a form of pathology, or an idealistic overlay on material realities. It is, indeed,
fundamentally imagined, but its imaginings have become viscerally materialized in print culture,
borders, revolutions, and flags. Anderson appeals to another off-center Marxist to point to what
he means: these things are the mounting pile of wreckage at the feet of Walter Benjamins Angel
of History, hurling the angel (and us, for we are part of the debris) into the future.
Implications
I am most interested in Andersons fascinating insights about the role of print culture in creating
communities of strangers. It seems like these ideas would be applicable not only to the
development of nations and nationalism, but to the development of any kind of publicsuch as
religious and secularist publics in nineteenth-century America.
Literary theorist Michael Warner, in his book Publics and Counterpublics (2005), has described a
public as a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself (67). This is a

very similar argument to Andersons comments about print capitalism in late eighteenth-century
Latin America and nineteenth-century Europe. But for Warner, the public need not be
nationalistic. Readers of the New York Times, for example, constitute a public. The Times lends
its readers a sense of self and cult: reading it implicates a certain political persuasion and an
attained level of erudition, and it bestows feelings of power stemming from the sense of being
capable of being addressed, and capable of action (69). It initiates its readers into feelings of
collective consciousness and shared values. They do not necessarily feel American when they
read it, but they do feel like they are a part of a group of literate and globally conscientious elites.
Can certain forms of print-capitalism undermine the dominance of nationalism by encouraging
different, competing communities of attachment?
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accessed on 6 March 2015