Nations and Nationalism

by Ernest Gellner, Simten Coşar (Translator), Saltuk Özertürk (Translator)

This thoughtful and penetrating book, addressed to political scientists, sociologists, historians, and anthropologists, interprets nationalism in terms of its social roots, which it locates in industrial social organization. Professor Gellner asserts here that a society's affluence and economic growth depend on innovation, occupational mobility, the effectiveness of the mass media, universal literacy, and an all-embracing educational system based on a shared, standard idiom. These factors, taken together, govern the relationship between culture and the state. Political units that do not conform to the principle, "one state, one culture" feel the strain in the form of nationalistic activity.

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction, Sociology, Philosophy, International Relations, Political Science

170 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Ernest Gellner was a prominent British-Czech philosopher, social anthropologist, and writer on nationalism.

Reviews

[Murtaza · Rating 5 out of 5]

The sudden emergence of industrial society required a new type of person as well as a new organizing principle to support itself. Into this breach emerged what we call nationalism, which remains the system that the overwhelming majority of human beings live under today. As defined by Gellner, the nation is a unit large enough to reproduce itself through education, ideologically bound to a single literate culture and consisting mostly of deracinated ("gelded"), interchangeable people who can be moved with little retraining between the various occupations demanded by society. To put it simply the modern nation is characterized by homogeneity, anonymity and functional literacy. Appropriately, this is also the type of person its institutions produce.

One of the key requirements for creating a nation is control of the education system. This system is a lumbering, unconscionably expensive apparatus that can only be administered by an entity the size of a state. In practice it serves the purpose of manufacturing for the state the type of human being that fits its needs. This system is truly a hegemon. In a modern nation, any attempts to create alternate educational structures (and thus separate types of people) will inevitably dissolve into the oceanic culture produced by the state educational apparatus. “Modern society is one in which no sub-community, below the size of one capable of sustaining an independent education system, can any longer reproduce itself,” Gellner writes. He is structurally deterministic in his view of human behavior en masse and it’s difficult for me to disagree. Whoever controls the official educational system determines the shape of the citizenry.

One of the great ironies of the modern nation is that it liquidates local "low" folk cultures in the name of championing them. The basis of the nation is inevitably literate, "high" cultures that are capable of both existing and communicating outside of local contexts and homogenizing large groups of people across time and space. A prominent example of this comes from the world of Islam, where the emergence of modern states has led to the eradication of local forms of folk Islamic expression and the centralization of power by text-driven religious authorities tied to national governments. In all contexts nationalism has helped eradicate the local and traditional while giving rise to the mass man. The modern individual is effectively a Mamluk or janissary: a person removed from tribal and familial ties by education and economic factors in order to become the autonomous agent that the modern state demands. What we call corruption in developing countries – for instance nepotism and tribal patronage – is often the outcome of mixing modern state institutions into a society where people have not yet been severed from traditional ties of allegiance. The combination is often a disastrous one.

Gellner argues that the modern state ideologically justifies itself to its citizens with the promise of constant material improvement, “social bribery,” and that its greatest vulnerability is the threat that this river of wellbeing will somehow be stymied. In societies with weak social bonds this certainly seems to be true, though there are nations that seek to bind citizens to them through deeper metaphysical ties. This binding is important because economic life in modernity is deeply unstable. The nature of work is constantly changing, albeit in one general direction. Less and less people work at the “coal face” of nature. Instead they are skilled to do a variety of generalist jobs that at their core are about communication and the manipulation of signs and meanings – what we today call the "knowledge economy." The modern individual is broadly but thinly educated. With a little bit of retraining, they can be shaped and reshaped according to the occupational needs of an economic system in constant flux.

There is a certain lack of solidity to modern society: the overwhelming majority of people live in a controlled environment, distant from the natural world. It is something like an aquarium, highly artificial and requiring constant maintenance. Were this environment to somehow collapse, the type of people who have been reared in it would not be able to survive, at least not without an extremely painful period of readjustment. This is not to romanticize pre-modern agrarian societies where people worked the land and were thus closer to a natural state. These societies were functionally Malthusian in nature, with all the suffering that entails. But it does highlight the dizzying plateau that we all now stand upon.

As Gellner brilliantly articulates in this short book, despite the nostalgia poignantly expressed by Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, there is no going back to the world that came before the modern one we inhabit today. The break with the past is total. We live in a world where almost every one of us has been severed from old social ties, hierarchies and structures. Most of us would not welcome such a return to those old systems anyways, as the only hierarchies that can ever be accepted by human beings are those that are somehow hallowed by time or custom. Any attempt to revive the old by coercion can only end in tragedy, farce, or both, as several failed reactionary projects in recent years have demonstrated.

This book is highly recommended. I found myself highlighting almost every page, even if I didn't necessarily accept every one of Gellner's contentions. His work makes a good companion to Benedict Anderson’s similar inquiries into the creation of homo-nationalisticus, or modern man.

[Kuszma · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A nacionalizmus elsősorban olyan politikai alapelv, amely a politikai és a nemzeti egység tökéletes egybeesését vallja." Magyarán: a nacionalizmus nem más, mint szándék, hogy ha a nemzetünk tagjai államunkon kívül élnek, akkor toljuk el feléjük a határokat, ha pedig az államunkban élnek olyanok, akik nem nemzetünk tagjai, akkor váljanak azzá, vagy egyéb módon szűnjenek meg ott lenni. Ha pedig nincs államunk - akkor csináljunk egyet.

Nehezen rázódtam bele a szövegbe. Így utólagosan okoskodva azért, mert Gellner igazából teljesen mellőzi, hogy a nacionalizmus milyenségéről mondjon el bármit is - nagyjából megelégszik a fenti citátummal. Ennek következtében az értelmezési mező szinte megfoghatatlanul tág lesz, nincs különbségtétel mondjuk Hitler és Mazzini között. Ami nyilván üdvös, ha azt nézzük, hogy így elkerüljük az ítélkezést. A szerző szinte megkapó magától értetődőséggel ignorálja az összes gondolkodót, aki a nacionalizmusról valaha véleményt nyilvánított - a híveket azért, mert elfogultak, és úgyis pont az ellenkezőjét mondják annak, ami van*, a kritikusokat meg jobbára azért, mert ők ezzel az "ellenkezővel" vitatkoznak, és hát annak meg mi értelme. Mindebből következik, hogy Gellner számára a nacionalizmus nem ideológia, pláne nem filozófia, hanem "csak" egy adekvát válasz a modernitás társadalmi következményeire.

Amiben Gellner újat hozott a nacionalizmuskutatásba, az egy ok-okozati sorrend megfordítása. Elődei azt vallották, hogy a nacionalizmus olyan eszme, ami homogenizálásra tör - szerinte viszont a homogenizálás hozta létre a nacionalizmust**. Az egész pedig a modernizáció következménye: az agrártársadalmak ugyanis strukturális alapokon határozták meg magukat. Ott a kultúrát egy szűk kisebbség birtokolta, a népesség java pedig kapálta a krumplit látástól vakulásig. Ebben a konstrukcióban semmi szükség nem volt közös nemzetképre (sőt: az nem is volt elképzelhető), mert mindenkinek adott helye volt a társadalomban, amit egyfajta isteni rendelésnek tekintettek, a köztük lévő átjárást pedig határozottan blokkolták. Csak hát aztán jött az iparosodás, aminek szüksége volt mobilizált, rugalmas munkaerőre - olyan emberek tömegeire, akik nincsenek odaragadva a kapájuk nyeléhez, hanem bármely ipari munkafolyamat elvégzésére betaníthatóak. Ez megszülte az igényt egyfelől az általános oktatásra, és ezen keresztül a közös kultúrára is, ami a kasztok felbomlása után is képes volt összetartani a társadalom szövedékét. Ezen a talajon pedig megszülethetett a nacionalizmus. Ebből következik, hogy a nacionalizmus logikailag levezethető az iparosodásból, ám ez nem jelenti azt, hogy szükségszerű is. Ennek illusztrálására Gellner szerkeszt is egy csecse kis modellt, amiben három változóból, a "hatalom"-ból, az "oktatás"-ból (ami ebben a kontextusban a kultúrához való hozzáféréssel egyenlő), valamint magából a "kultúrá"-ból levezet nyolcfajta társadalmi berendezkedést - és ebből csak háromban lehetséges a nacionalizmus. És biza egyáltalán nem tuti, hogy ők hárman jártak rosszul.

Invenciózus fejtegetés, annyi bizonyos. Némi hiányérzetem ugyan van - nagy érdeklődéssel olvastam volna arról, hogy ha az agrártársadalomból az ipariba való átmenet szülte a nacionalizmust, akkor az ipari társadalomból a szolgáltatóba való átmenet mit csinál majd a nacionalizmussal. Meg hát azt is meg kell férfiasan vallanom, hogy a szerző szociológiai-antropológiai megközelítése esetenként nehezen emészthető volt nekem, tán mert a történelemtudományi nyelvezethez jobban vagyok szokva. Mindenesetre nagyon régen a kívánságlistámon volt már a kötet, és most végre levehetem róla, úgyhogy örülök. És még a nap is kisütött.

* Jellemző például, hogy a nacionalista politikusok nyakra-főre az ősi gyökerekre hivatkoznak, holott (mint Gellner is világosan leszögezi) a nacionalizmus egyértelműen friss jelenség. A másik anomália, hogy állandóan az identitás védelmét hirdetik az azt felszámoló baloldali és liberális eszmékkel szemben - holott épp a nacionalizmus az, aki a számtalan egyéni identitást megpróbálja egyetlen nemzeti keretbe betuszkolni. Részben ezért is népszerű azok körében, akik túl lusták vagy túl buták saját egyéniséget kitalálni maguknak.
** Persze az, hogy maga a nacionalizmus is katalizálja a homogenizációt, ettől még tény.

[Петър Стойков · Rating 5 out of 5]

Купих си тази книга преди десетина години (издадена е в България през 1999г.). Макар че е тъничка и няма и двеста страници, почвах я няколко пъти и никога не стигах много навътре – оказа се, че не бях достатъчно умен, за да разбера какво пише в нея. Странно някак. Все пак, след известно (хехе) забавяне, успях да сдъвча невероятно концентрирания и сложен стил на писане на Ърнест Гелнър и да разбера как аджеба той вижда национализма и какво всъщност е това нация…

Не, нациите не започват с „родолюбието“. Едно време хората не са имали идея че са „народ“, че са свързани с някакви други хора, които не са виждали никога. За много от нас това е трудна за разбиране концепция, защото сме изцяло потопени в националния начин на мислене още от деца. Но това не е било винаги така – от грубо 17 в. надолу, хората смятат своя род, своето село, своя град, своята област за „техни“ и приемат другите в тях за себеподобни по някакъв начин, но в общество с минимална мобилност, бавни комуникации и ниска грамотност (като цяло много ниска свързаност), тази връзка много бързо избледнява с разширяване на географския обхват. Етървата Сийка е „наше момиче“, съселянинът е съсед, но някой от другата страна на големия баир е точно толкова далечен за теб, колкото и някой от другата страна на морето и приказва на почти неразбираем диалект.

Националистичните идеологии по света (вкл. и у нас) смятат, че националното чувство винаги го е имало у хората и то бива пробудено от т.н. „будители“, които пишат книги и припомнят на народа миналото му величие в един момент, когато той е потиснат (Звучи ли познато? Тоя мотив е удивително еднакъв в много държави и исторически периоди). Само че според Ърнест Гелнър не става така, а по-скоро наобратно – няма никакво „вродено“ национално чувство и будителите не „събуждат“ тлеещите му искри в душите на хората, а направо го създават. Малката грамотна класа в средновековното и ренесансово общество е единствената, която чувства свързаност със себеподобните си, независеща от географията и именно от нея произлизат идеите за общ произход, история и език (писменият език, който обединява местните наречия и диалекти) и по същество създава идеята за нация.

„Нации и национализъм“ е, да си го кажем право – не много забавна за четене, освен ако наистина, ама НАИСТИНА искаш да разбереш национализма. Но няма как да си кривя душата – тя обяснява точно това. Не в патетичния, „България на три планети“ стил на родните ни „родолюбци“, не в романтичния „Моята нация – права или не!“ на Стивън Декейтер, а в академичен, сух стил, като наблъскан с информация и идеи учебник, в който всяко изречение значи нещо и има нужда да го осмислиш иначе изтърваш смисъла на всичко. Силно препоръчвам!

[Andrew]

Gellner gets quite a bit right about the invention of nationalism-- especially how the practices of high culture become masked as ancient and inviolable folk tradition-- but he also gets quite a bit wrong. Perhaps he's right about the creation of a specific type of nationalism, one that is predicated on an industrial or post-industrial society and expressed most strongly in Central and Western Europe, and he's playing fast and loose with his words, but there seem to be plenty of nationalist movements that have occurred in largely pre-industrial societies, especially outside Europe. I far prefer Benedict Anderson's account, which suggests that it is the printed text and its distribution, above all else, that builds the imagined community requisite for nationalism.

But as I said Gellner is right a lot of the time, and he's thought-provoking and clear-eyed throughout. His illustration of the fictional states of "Ruritania" and "Megalomania" is honestly more entertaining than most of the fiction I've read in recent months.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Updated - scroll to "Theory of discrimination"]

What do you call it when a book on a gut level alligns with your own worldview but provides no evidence to back itself up? Homework, for me, I reckon.

Broadly, studies of nationalism adhere to one of two schools of thought. There's Benedict Anderson's constructivism that conceives of nationalism as the willed product of a community, and there's Gellner's functionalist approach that sees it as the visible edge of industrial dynamics that act through but themselves precede the nation. Neither is obviously wrong, but they focus on a different moment as to what kickstarts nationalism: Anderson focuses on the printing press and capitalism that enable communities to imagine themselves as nations, while Gellner sees industry-required homogenization that by chance is filled in as nationalism -- the first voluntarist, the second, arguably, materialist. The second dovetails with my own thinking on nationalism and discrimination (see for instance this review on Russian civil-war pogroms).

Gellner discerns two ecologies with different rules for communities.

Agricultural civilizations tend towards social stability and internal cultural differentiation. Occupation-related skills and knowledge are passed on within guilds, families and local communities. Peasant families often inherit their land for generations. Countries, even if governed over by a unitary state machine, are cobbled together from linguistically pockets because physical mobility is neither required nor encouraged and hence no universal language spread. The ruling classes (clergy, state administration) are immanently encouraged to differentiate themselves from the governed: clergies without children or families reduce the risk of nepotism and particularist attachment, as do courts of different linguistic communities than those they rule. Indeed, kings were often imported from different dynasties to govern regions they had no cultural familiarity with.

Industrial civilizations tend towards social mobility and homogenization. Wage relations dominate and redefine working-class individuals as general interchangeable workers instead of members of an organic productive community. One day a man might work as a day labourer in a pin factory, the next as a miner, then again as a metalworker. In service of this horizontal mobility, literacy and printing is encouraged so as to easily store and convey information that before was passed on locally and orally. Education is universalized. The distance between ruled and ruler is erased, isolated ruling castes are dissolved, no longer do eunuchs or celibate priests rule society, the risk of particularist attachments are accepted and counterbalanced by the rapid turnover of political and administrative clerks. In short,

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Once society remakes itself in this industrial mold (Gellner avoids 'capital', which to him is seldom the marker of social strife -- legal and cultural inequality bears much stronger on public consciousness than degrees of capital ownership) strong homogenizing tendencies establish themselves. For the ruling class, the more people pass through the labour market and compete, the stronger the downward pressure on wages; hence every barrier to this market must be torn down. Social structures within this industrial society only survive to the degree that they can accommodate this; other (feudal, religious, caste, etc) are swept away by the forces of industrial entropy. That's not to say that these relics of bygone eras cannot survive for some time, but they cannot on their own terms, and they certainly won't spring up anew.
This homogenization is expressed as nationalism. This is not willed by a particular actor (contra Anderson) but simply the result of industrial revolutions requiring a universally interchangeable workforce.

Theory of discrimination

Especially piercing is Gellner's theory of discrimination. The commonplace liberal view of discrimination is that it's a problem of cumulative attitudes: when enough people dislike a group, they're kept out of places of power. Hence their oppression is the result of ill-will, with the decision to dislike itself the prime mover. In lefty spaces, this is sometimes explained as the result of capitalist propaganda aiming to divide-and-conquer.

Gellner's explanation is functionalist.
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In agrarian civilizations, social mobility is superfluous and castes emphasize their differences. Languages, dress, religious customs and social rituals reflect the qualitative differences between each layer of society. Discrimination is accepted and promoted, the natural product of agrarian stratification, prejudice a social compass.
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In industrial societies, social mobility is existentially necessary. Arbitrary barriers between trades (horizontal) and layers of power and privilege (vertical) are broken down. To the degree that they remain, they're holdouts against the social tide, not the natural expression of industrial society. There is legal equality of individuals. There are no hard and fast inborn characteristics that can preclude a person from occupying a specific social space. The vast majority of people will not be lifted up to the higher echelons of power (encompassing at most 15% of society), not because of specific ill-will but simply because the amount of privileged positions is limited. The will-to-discrimination only asserts itself after society has been stratified along occupational lines.
[image error]
Now imagine one social group (Gellner proposes 'blue-pigmented people') occurring predominantly on the lowest social rungs. For instance, in Belgium, the vast majority of Moroccan and Turkish immigrants arrived here to work in low-wage jobs in the booming 60s. Their families and descendants are still mostly situated there.
There is no legal barrier preventing them from climbing up. But doing so requires social capital (education, language fluency, the social networks, opportunities that grow out of graduating at prestigious institutions) which they haven't had the chance to accumulate. The fact that the majority of these groups will for some time remain where they are will prejudice people towards this group, based not on a willed but an observed inferiority. In other words, attitudinal discrimination is a contradictory consequence of the opening up of the labour market in industrial society; the 2 facts of social mobility and social inertia coexisting creates popular prejudice.
In the end, these groups must and will climb and spread out over all layers, until prejudice becomes self-evidently false.

This view has 2 advantages over the under-theorized 'racial-capitalist' explanations of discrimination:
- it is a more universally applicable framework. The American experience seems to show that recreating caste and discrimination are preconditions of capitalism. But segregation is not the norm, and looking at Portuguese, French and other imperialisms it is clear that in some civilizations social entropy breaking down legal barriers to individual social mobility won out over atavistic racial brokerage.
- it shifts the terrain of action. While liberal antiracism focuses on changing attitudes and lifting up individual voices, Gellner makes clear that attitudes don't play a (primary) causal role in discrimination, but rather are a second-order effect of it. To uplift groups from a socially subservient level, respected and well-paid occupations must be made available. This places the burden on the capitalist class unwilling to invest and create decent jobs, instead of on the amorphous mass of the people.

One aspect lacking in Gellner's book, which he himself acknowledges, is an understanding of explicitly racist or fascist civilizations that spring back from liberal democracies. This might be forgiven, as very few fascist states ever developed, while every country small or large developed nationalism.

[Cool_guy · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's comforting to think of nationalism as a ruling class Svengali, whose spell can be broken with the right party educational program and consciousness raising sloganeering. Why else would the workers of the world slaughter each other by the millions, if not for trickery?

Ernest Gellner demolishes this idea. He advances a materialist explanation of nationalism which argues that it is a consequence of industrial modernity. Nationalism isn't just an ideological project cooked up by intellectuals. It's a survival mechanism that makes daily life possible - especially for the working classes

In agrarian society, culture is not thought of vis a vis other cultures. It is simply taken for granted; a person stays in a village or town for their entire life, doing whatever role providence has assigned to them - probably farming - for their entire life.

Industrialization changed this. To quote Marx, it "rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life." It was a painful salvation: all the old ties were torn up and the people were thrown into the ever churning world of the city.

To survive, people need to communicate. We communicate with strangers on a daily basis. It's hard to imagine otherwise, but this wasn't the case for most of human history. With the industrial revolution, millions found themselves shoulder to shoulder with strangers, people with whom they shared no reference point, other than perhaps religion and language. Even then, regional differences such as dialect could make putative members of the same linguistic/religious group incomprehensible to one another (I once read an account of an English boat that had been blown onto shore in Kent after a storm. Local peasants thought the sailors were French when they heard them speak).

Nationalist education made communication possible in this contextless, abstract world. A standardized "high" culture, based on a distorted form of "low", folk culture, as well as mass literacy, replaced the informality of the village. This enabled the social mobility necessary for an industrial economy to function. Mass literacy was the one Enlightenment promise consistently kept by the regimes of the 20th Century. The Soviet Union had a constitution and a legal system: everyone knew that these were jokes. But by 1937, the height of the Stalinist purges, most Soviet citizens could read.

I have issues with Gellner's treatment of those intellectuals who attempted to use nationalism to jumpstart the process of industrial modernity. His is a functionalist argument: industrialization must come before nationalism. Intellectuals or not, nationalism emerges wherever there's industrialization, so nationalist politics don't matter that much. This fails to account for the success of Third World nationalist projects of the Cold War in places like Cuba and Vietnam. Did militarization stand in for industrialization in those cases? That's for another time...

The most important lesson is how nationalism perpetuates itself once it has been established as a force in the political life of country. Nationalism persists not because it is an escape valve for working class grievances, a way to blame the Other instead of the boss. Religion could just as easily fill that role. Nationalism only works when it serves a material purpose by providing a reliable means of facilitating communication in an otherwise contextless environment. If a nationalism can't do this, it remains the dream of an intellectual (or a weirdo on Twitter).

Nationalism is neither proof of our inherent barbarism as a species, nor is it a case of "false consciousness". Nationalist ideology is certainly important, but all the propaganda in the world can't make a nation. Nationalism continues to be a lynchpin of political life because it, at present, makes modern life possible.

[Bertrand · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gellner's is one of those theories of nationalism that some call 'modernist,' meaning that he believes, like Benedict Anderson, that nations are less natural or ageless historical communities, than they are phenomenons emerging alongside or in reaction to modernity;
The reader having skimmed through Imagined Communities before approaching Gellner might have been left, as I was, disatisfied with Anderson's original but relatively narrow reading of modernity, and expect to find in Gellner's work a more wide-ranging analysis informed by the author's anthropological training;
In this case he might be somewhat disappointed to discover that Gellner's analysis, although dealing with a broader focus than that of print-capitalism, retain something of a sociological biais: to him nationalism arises from the overlapping mismatch of a modern cultural and linguistic tradition and of the state and political boundaries in which it emerged. Industrialization, in his theory, requires an homogenous and educated population to service its everchanging metabolism, which in turn produces a homogenous and identity conscious culture. When the outlinr of the existing state fails to conform to those newly imagined boundaries, the tension take the form of nationalism, which will eventually give birth to nations.
If there is little doubt that nationalism result from the friction between cultural/utopian (imagined) communities and actually existing political ones, Gellner's view fail to take in consideration a number of aspect, such as the extent of the continuity between nationalist and religious communities, imagined communities in their own right (invisible church etc) from whom many elements of the nationalist liturgy has clearly been borrowed.
This surely comes from his dismissal of the nationalist doctrine as a typical case of false consciousness (but a necessary one, insofar as for him there can be no modernity without nationalism) - a point I would be inclined to agree with. Yet, if the nationalist doctrines are fictions they should not be ignored wholesale either, and in my eyes deserve an attention that might have mitigated his reductionism;
Elsewhere (Plough,Sword and Book) Gellner devellops the idea of many-stranded thought to characterize the counterfactual mode of thought of pre-aggrarian cultures: this, to him, allow for the same type of utterance or notion serve both the rational purpose to describe the real, or to express an abstract feeling of belonging to a community of believer. One can only be surprised that he could not call onto this very adroit concept rather than dismiss nationalist content under the title of false consciousness - itself a marxist concept one might have expected him to dismiss as lazy...

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting philosophical and anthropological analysis of nations and nationalism. Although this lacked the historical thinking that I find most engaging, it was interesting to look at the concept of nationalism through another lens. Gellner is structured- but I share many of the conceptual and explanatory criticisms this text has faced. This is probably a result of my historical approach.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of about the four major texts on the "modernist" theory of nationalism. And two of the other three guys work off of him. Writing a paper on nationalism for one of my classes- God you find out what a small, idol-worshipping world academia is right quick in this field.

[Siran]

I'll leave a small comment here, quoting the author himself. So tired of justifying the need and want to have rest. Seems like I have to apologize or fight for it. No way.

"Mankind moved from a hunting-gathering state when all had leisure, to an agrarian one when only some (the ruling elite) had it, to an industrial age governed by the work ethic, when none have it. Or you might say we moved from no delay in gratification to some delay and finally to eternal delay."

Gellner E. (2006 edition), page 111.

[Amir]

The book offers an excellent insight into the emergence of nationalism. I cannot recall that I've taken as many notes per page as with this book, I highly recommend it.

[Justin W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took me two weeks to read 200 pages. I'm nothing

[Matthias · Rating 4 out of 5]

In an era that is doctrinally anti-(explicit-)doctrine, people like to emphasize that grand theories, even the putatively best ones, have blinders, and that the otherwise orthodox are at their most interesting when they ramble off the plantation to make ad hoc observations. Well, they do, and sometimes they are, but the opposite is at least equally true, even in the case of the worst grand theories. Gellner is at his best and most interesting when he operates within the confines of a not even explicitly acknowledged structural functionalism (even when he raises dissent from, say, Durkheim-cum-Parsons on the degree of differentiation in modern society,) his ad hoc observations, by contrast, add little to the analysis. Like Benedict Anderson, Gellner is interested in the apparent empirical connection between mass literacy and the rise of nationalism, here understood as the demand that political boundaries correspond in some way to cultural ones; his answer is that in mass-literate societies with a complex division of labor the ancient Stands or castes or whatever that made up agricultural civilization are no longer culturally self-reproducing, but that all cultural reproduction now must proceed through the mass educational institutions overseen by the state. Within this framework he is able to provide an at least facially plausible account of the universal rise of nationality, his less systematic attempts to explain the different waves or varieties of nationalism are correspondingly less persuasive, but on the whole, his abstract and general account is not incompatible with alternative accounts (of which there are many) of this latter question.

To a great extent Gellner's proposals have already been absorbed into, and critiqued by, the subsequent literature on nationalism. However, he states them more clearly (and entertainingly!) than you are likely to find elsewhere, and this is a short book, so you have little to lose by giving it a read.

[Sumallya Mukhopadhyay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nations and Nationalism, Ernest Gellner

Nationalism, according to Ernest Gellner, is a political principle that binds the State and the nation in a tightly knit framework. However, what influences nationalism? Is it the need for a nation that engenders nationalism? Gellner argues that nationalism brings about the formation of the nation; the need for an ideology that is culturally rooted, economically sustainable and politically active generates nationalism.
Gellner affirms that it is the industrial revolution that demanded the formation of nations. An industrial society presupposes the presence of a populace that speaks and writes a common language. Most importantly, people need to possess technical abilities to sustain themselves in the industrial era. A highly centralized education system imbibes these virtues on the people; thereby resulting in the formation of a specific culture which is strengthened by the governmental apparatus.

What is problematic about Gellner’s argument is that the birth of nationalism has not always followed this pattern, especially in colonized countries or present-day Third World Countries! In the face of sharp colonial oppression, people united to demand an independent nation. It is in the idea of nationalizing the nation that nationalism took a definite pattern in these countries. Hence, those who did not fall within the national frame were considered as minorities. For instance, the Muslims who opted to stay in India after 1947 Partition.

[Malavika · Rating 2 out of 5]

My opinion of this book shouldn't downplay its value as a seminal work in the field; rather, it stems entirely from the fact that such a well-known professor didn't have an editor who told him to stop indiscriminately using commas. My biggest pet peeve about many academic books is the total lack of writing skill and style from authors that takes away from the substance of their books, and this is a prime example. Now that I'm done with my rant, I can say that Gellner's work might seem outdated -- he ignores the Soviet Union almost completely in his work -- but it has salience because it can be debated and picked apart. I'm not convinced that nationalism is a by-product of industrialism, as he claims, or that the rationality of the process necessarily explains why, for example, someone is willing to die for his country.

[Brendan McKee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though I believe his arguments on the subject are fundamentally wrong, his treatment of the topic of nationalism is nonetheless a foundational one and required reading for anyone who seeks to understand it.

[Naz Güngen · Rating 2 out of 5]

ulusçuluk alanındaki en önde gelen kitaplardan biri olduğu için eleştirmeye hakkım olmadığını düşünüyorum aslında, nihayetinde sıradan bir siyaset öğrencisiyim ben. fakat söylemeden geçemeyeceğim şeyler var;

1) kitap gereksiz uzun, yani gerçekten. belki 90-100 sayfada anlatabileceği şeyi 260 sayfaya yaymış. mevzuyla direkt bağlantısı olmayan (en azından bana göre) konulara çok fazla yer verip verip "bu başka bir konu" diyerek konuyu kapatıyor. başka bir konuysa neden ben 27 sayfa boyunca bunu anlatmanı okudum şimdi? fenalık geçirdim gereksiz uzatılmış içeriğinden ötürü.

2) kitabın gerçekten çok harika tespitleri var, bunu söylemeden geçemeyeceğim tabii ki. özellikle de durkheim'ın din yorumunu ulusçuluğa şu şekilde uyarlaması çok hoşuma gitti ve bir nevi eureka anı yaşattı bana: "Durkheim’in öğretisi bize toplumun dini ibadet yolu ile kendi gizli imajına taptığını söyler. Ulusçu bir çağda ise toplumlar böyle bir kamuflajdan sıyrılarak pişkinlik ve açıklıkla kendilerine tapınırlar."
ama... ama... kitap ÇOK FAZLA tekrara düşüyor. belki kitabı çok uzun ara verip okusaydım bu tekrarlar hatırlama açısından benim için faydalı olurdu ama büyük bölümünü bir oturuşta okuduğum için yine fenalık geçirdiğim bir durum ortaya çıktı. kitabın gerekenden uzun olmasının bir diğer nedeni de bu, aynı şeyi farklı formlarda 936 kere söylemiş çünkü yazar.

3) son olarak kitap bazen bana çok karışık geldi. yani bu çeviriden kaynaklı mı yoksa kurulan cümleleri algılayacak kadar iq'ya sahip olmamamdan mı kaynaklanıyor bilmiyorum ama birkaç kez okuyup da anlamadığım çok cümle vardı. bu da doğal olarak kitaba odaklanmamı zorlaştırdı.

sonuç olarak, siyaset bilimi literatüründe inanılmaz önemli ve sayısız kez atıfta bulunulan bir kaynak olduğu kesin olmakla birlikte anlatım tarzı ve gereksiz uzun tutulmuş olmasından ötürü kitabı beğenemedim ben.

[Bohdan Pechenyak · Rating 5 out of 5]

A magnificently brief and simple, yet comprehensive and broad in its scope account of how modern nationalism has come to create and dominate the contemporary social system of nation-states. Looking at history through a tripartite prism (Hunter-gatherer, agrarian and industrial societies), Ernest Gellner cogently demonstrates how the social conditions of the industrializing and modernizing societies transformed the social structure and made nationalism as a phenomenon unavoidable. While the ideological component of “Nationalism” is contingent and not mandatory, the generic system of the political nations identified by culture and economy was inevitable after the traditional institutions (church, family, crafts and trades, estates) became deconstructed. The universalization of literacy and clerisy (a.k.a. bureaucracy) was a defining process in this context.

Identifying access to education and to power as two major factors, Gellner produces a useful typology of nationalisms - a “typical”, unificatory nationalism of Western Europe, an “atypical”, liberation nationalism of Eastern Europe (Habsburg empire and the lands east and south of it), diaspora nationalism (stateless and dispersed nation or nation-in-exile from the colonized homeland), and 5 other situations where differentials in knowledge and power might exist, but the lack of cultural difference fails to produce a nationalism. This includes the early industrial capitalism critiqued by Marx and the mature industrial system, which Marx failed to foresee. Is this latter the future of the global world? Will nationalism lose its importance? Gellner thought not, and the decades since he wrote the book in 1983 have proven him correct.

This simple and so ingenious book has added several dimensions to my understanding of the phenomena of nations and nationalism.

[Dominic Muresan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting opinion on the development of Nationalist thought and ideas. Ernest Gellner rejects the idea that nationalism is anything more than a formless force, or that it is an ideological construct - even though, it can assume such an artificial form. The point of the book is that, at its purest, nationalism is a necessity of the industrial era. A world where social differences tend to be less and less important - where the economical state dictates an egalitarian social one (not that it happens, just that there is where it tends to be). In such a world, resistant-to-change attributes, such as ethnicity, education or culture tend to come out naturally and re-establish themselves as their own. In an agricultural society, these differences were equalled with social ones, yet in the industrial world, they take a new significance. It is that homogeneity - which some anti-globalists nationalists fear the most - that drives nationalism itself.

A pretty fresh and interesting take on the subject, much better than the polemicist approach that I was somehow expecting.
9/10

[Eleanor]

DNF @ 42%. I was supposed to read this for school, but it's Zoom University time and I feel zero motivation to do anything.

I did enjoy it, though. I would probably have rated it 3-4 stars. Alas.

[J · Rating 2 out of 5]

Skip this one. There are better texts that discuss nationalism. Many of Gellner’s core claims are overly simplistic; everything meaningful here could be encapsulated in the length of a journal article. He also declined to provide the reader footnotes – I counted something like 6 in total – for the reader to pursue further research (or to fact-check him!). Hobsbawm’s 1990 text is a much better introduction to nationalism.

Gellner makes several major arguments about nationalism and nations: that the concept of nation is bound to a specific historical period, that there is no core definition of nation (although ‘culture’ is paramount), and that nationalism is an inevitable corollary of industrial society and modernity. Much of what he says has already been fleshed out by other writers; his only major contribution is the claim that nationalism was the side-product of industrial society’s division of labour that allows greater social mobility and requires state-wide basic education. This view contrasts with the other ‘modernists,’ who emphasize the mass communication and linguistic centralization of modern society. However, most of Gellner’s arguments supporting this view should have more detail, with some being so implausible. The fact that Gellner doesn’t cite is not helpful.

There is a major concept Gellner uses that I fundamentally disagree with. He discusses ‘culture’ as a homogeneous shared atmosphere of societies, “no longer a diversified, locality-tied” culture, something propagated by the state. To Gellner, this state-made high culture is the bedrock of nationalism.

Culture is not an opaque block of symmetric molecular composition. We can understand that there is such a thing as American culture, but that there are enormous variations within it. That doesn’t stop America from being a nation, nor do the many local cultures of Germany preclude such a thing as German nationhood. The inadequacies of Gellner’s view shows when we consider the frontiers of ‘nations’ or ‘cultures,’ such as in the mostly German-speaking Alsace-Lorraine where plebiscites repeatedly declared for France, in southern France where the local tongue was more comprehensible to a Catalan than a Parisian, or in Scotland wavering between a Scottish or British identity. The ideas of a pan-Arabic or pan-Slavic nation have presently failed, unlike the ideas of a pan-German or pan-Italian nation. The point is that culture too is constructed and inherently in tension – every individual human being conceptualizes culture and nation differently. Gellner’s view is unbelievably simplistic, and I would recommend the ethnosymbolists for a deeper understanding of culture. This text is rife with, in my opinion, minor misunderstandings here and there, but this is the biggest one and my biggest criticism.

[Mehmet · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a great book to come up with nationalism. I suppose this book has comprehensive methods to express why nations must exist for modernity process. This book gets an only holistic view about nations and nationalism on this subject. I suggest reading Gellner's theory instead of Anderson and other post-structuralist academics. Of course, they share a common core on some points, but the book differs from other books on historical analysis and the sociological imagination.


I've read many books on 'nation' concept, but only two of them are fascinating to express the concept's complexity. One is Anthony Smith and another one is Ernest Gellner. If you don't know anything about nation and nationalism, but you are curious on this subject, you should read the book to understand the nation concept. Of course, nations, like everything, are socially constructed, but it does not take account of anything anymore.

[Rixal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gellner develops a systematic theory of nationalism. The book is self-contained and relatively easy to read. Accessible even to newcomers to the topic as it starts by introducing the nationalist principle and the state. From this point onward, Gellner explores the social causes and pre-conditions to nationalism and its deep connections to culture and education. This analysis and its consequences and implications are the core of the book. I consider the book (especially chapters one to seven) as brilliant and a must-read.

In my opinion, the weakest part of the book is that, although it gives satisfactory explanations of the different phases of nationalism and nationalist action, it says little about the transition between these phases and the forces behind them. I also missed a bit of historical data to back certain claims in the book.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for Anthropolgy 391: Nation Building and Nationalism

This was a struggle to get through due to complex writing and a lot of references to historical events (I don't have a good handle on world history). But I came out the other side having learned something, and probably able to read the book again and get even more out of it.

Discussed are ideas like:
-The need for a shared experience through some form of mass media
-Folk culture as a precursor to nationalism
-The necessity of "forgetting" as an integral part of nationalist sentiment

[Cybermilitia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alman idelizmini lise felsefesi civarı öğrenmiş olan bir çoklarından biri daha. Tofflervari bir karikatür Kant ve Hegel var arkada. Ayrıntılı notlar aldım ama buraya koyamayacağım - kitabın üstünde var. Kullanılabilecek az sayıda kavramdan biri entropi düşüncesi. Yalnızca şunu söylemek gerek: Burjuva devrimlerinin varlığını unutmuş durumda. Daha doğrusu onları ulusal devrimlerle özdeşleştiriyor. Büyük hata... 3 yıldız.

[Michel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Starts off as a promising study of the consequences of Calvinist reformation and the mathematicization of the world, tying the emergence of nationalism to the needs of modern capitalism. Yet then, Gellner develops a theory in which nationalism is the glue that holds different factions together. He constantly overlooks the hidden depth beneath the ideological surface of nationalism, the latter being but a tool of the propertied to sustain the systematized exploitation.

[Dan E · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disclaimer: the 2 stars is because I was simply not interested and there were things that I found hard to follow. But, more importantly, why did I assign myself a thesis-level text? That was foolish. Mr Gellner is, I’m sure, a well respected and highly skilled academic but he could also have a second career as a sleep coach.

[Oğuzhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Milliyetçilik kuramları literatürünün baş yapıtlarından. Ufuk açıcı. Bilimsel. Ayrıca okumayı düşünenler için: http://milliyetcilikcalismalari.com/m...

[Elizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

An important book on the theory of nationalism, but it's a dry read and leaves many questions unanswered.

[Jorge Andrade · Rating 5 out of 5]

En forma breve pero precisa, Gellner muestra la evolución política de la sociedad que ha permitido la gestación del concepto de nación y nacionalidad.