Anderson, Benedict (2016) “Imagined communities

reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism.” Book

review by Tugay Tasci.

Benedict Anderson, in full Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson, (born

August 26, 1936, Kunming, China—died December 12/13, 2015, Batu,
Indonesia), Irish political scientist, best known for his influential work on the
origins of nationalism. Anderson graduated with high honours from the
University of Cambridge (B.A. in classics, 1957) and was awarded a Ph.D. in
government by Cornell University in 1967. His early work, including his
doctoral dissertation, focused on Indonesian politics. His critique of the
Suharto regime led him to be barred from entering the country until after the
dictator’s fall in 1998. From 1965 until his retirement in 2002, Anderson
taught in the department of government at Cornell University. In 1988 he was
appointed Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies,
Government, and Asian Studies.1

Major works: Imagined Communities Reflections On the Origin and Spread

Of Nationalism, The Age Of Globalization, The Fate Of Rural Hell, The Spectre
Of Comparisons, Under Three Flags.

Major Themes

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that the nation is a new,

modern phenomenon. The 17th and 18th century witnessed the demise of
previous forms political bodies that were shaped by a sacred language, sacred
cosmology and dynastic power, and sense of historical temporality shaped by
cosmology. Material conditions and rationalist perception of ‘homogenous
empty time’ created the structures where individuals could conceptualize
themselves as part of an ‘imagined community.’ The imagined community is
one in which members will not know most of their fellow members, is finite
with limited boundaries, sovereign power, and a community of fraternal,

1
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Benedict-Anderson <23.8.19>
horizontal comradeship.2 It is through the emergence of print-capitalism—the
technological, mass production of newspapers and the novel and the spread of
vernacular print languages—that individuals could think of themselves and
relate to others in different ways. This possibility to envision parallel and
plural realities connected individuals to other individuals to form a concept of
an ‘imagined community.’

Once upon a time, according to Anderson, there was an age of religious

imagined communities, in which meaning depended upon the “non-
arbitrariness of the sign” and religious texts were consequently written in
privileged and “untranslatable” languages. These prevailed (if only amongst
elites) throughout the states and regions encompassed within the religious
community. Anderson contends that with the rise of “print capitalism”,
innovations such as the newspaper and the novel identified (or “imagined”)
and addressed new “national” communities. These texts resorted to vernacular
languages rather than the old privileged languages; or established formal
versions of these vernacular tongues, which could be understood throughout
the regions which made up the new nation and by those who had previously
been unschooled in privileged languages.3

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) was the most influential

book in the wave of writing in the early 1980s that made nationalism an
important subject for analysis and teaching. It was provoked by the wars of
1978-79 between communist “brothers”, Vietnam, Cambodia and China, and
highlighted the failure of Marxist analyses to explain the nationalism that
repeatedly defeated socialist internationalist ideals.

Anderson’s second contribution is the historical argument regarding the

models of nations and nationalisms. Undermining the idea that the nation was
both an essentialist category and of European origins, Anderson argues that
the earliest nations and nationalist movements emerged in ‘creole

2
https://cindyanguyen.com/2016/04/03/anderson_imagined_communities/ <23.8.19>
3
https://tychy.wordpress.com/2008/09/16/book-review-imagined-communities/ <23.8.19>
communities’—descendants of white European settlers in the North and South
Americas. This model of creole communities offers one of four ‘models’ that
come to influence later nationalist movements and ideas of nations. The
second model emerges during the late 18th century among the linguistic
nationalists, philologists, and scientists who classify and reconstruct the
evolution of languages. The third model is one of offi-coal nationalism and
imperialism, seen in Russia, Japan, Thailand, England and Hungary. This
form of nationalism is a defensive, conservative response by monarchs to
popular and linguistic nationalists. The fourth model of nationalism develops
out of the colonial context and institutions of education, bureaucracy, and
movement. Anderson argues that in Asia and Africa, the administrative,
educated, bilingual intelligentsia came to identify themselves as a colonial,
national, and part of solidarity of a power and outside models of nation. It is
through the experience of travel and educational access that this intelligentsia
gained power and created an imagined community of nationals. In Anderson’s
revised later editions, he emphasizes the importance of the colonial context
and the role of the census, map, and museum to provide the ‘grammar’ of
nationalism and imaginings of dominion—the abstract quantifications of
people, symbolic demarcating of political space, and the geneaological
conceptions of pasts and heritages.

In addition to that, Anderson’s rejection of Marxist theories of nationalism was

informed by the spectacle of the 1978 Cambodian-Vietnamese war – “the first
large-scale conventional war waged by one revolutionary Marxist regime
against another” – in which “none of the belligerents has made more than the
most perfunctory attempts to justify the bloodshed in terms of a recognizable
Marxist theoretical perspective.” Anderson seems merely to keep insisting that
universalistic discourses such as Marxism should be qualified by a recognition
of the nation‘s resilience. A bourgeoisie may be systematically exterminated,
but as long as this remains, say, the British revolution, then it can be
incorporated into Anderson’s model. Imagined Communities argues firstly that
nationalism is both economically determined and that, once in being, it is too
profound a characteristic of human experience to economically determined out
of existence; and secondly that nationalism is a leading feature of modernity
and that, by comparison, the citizen’s solidarities with a specific class or race
can (or should) be only secondary. The nation, for Anderson, is the stage upon
which all of modernity is enacted.

Moreover, Anderson portrays the nation as the end of history, or even as

utopian, so that Imagined Communities at times resembles Marxism without
the happy ending. He argues that despite the tendency of “cosmopolitan
intellectuals” to equate nationalism with bigotry and racism, “it is useful to
remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-
sacrificing love.” This is perhaps in danger of elevating stupidity to a great
emotion. Anderson observes that, “for most ordinary people of whatever class
the whole point of the nation is that it is interestless… it can ask for sacrifices.”
The “aura of purity and disinterestedness” which comes from laying down
one’s life for the nation makes this act fundamentally different to that of dying
for the “proletariat” or “even Amnesty International.” This is one of the stark
raptures that occurred through the different impositions of modern
epistemology to the traditional space that eventually created a space in its own
emptiness by being too much global.

Finally, He seems to be blandly dismissive of cosmopolitanism, his position as

an anthropologist alone intimates that “cosmopolitan” virtues such as
tolerance, travelling, and an appreciation of foreign cultures are necessity, even
if they merely complement a nationalistic conception of citizenship.