Imagined Communities


Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism is a book by Benedict Anderson. It introduces a popular concept in political sciences and sociology, that of imagined communities named after it. It was first published in 1983, and reissued with additional chapters in 1991 and a further revised version in 2006.
Eric G.E. Zuelow described this book as "perhaps the most read book about nationalism".

Nationalism and imagined communities

According to Anderson's theory of imagined communities, the main causes of nationalism are the increasing importance of mass vernacular literacy, the movement to abolish the ideas of rule by divine right and hereditary monarchy ; and the emergence of printing press capitalism —all phenomena occurring with the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Nation as an imagined community

According to Anderson, nations are socially constructed. For Anderson, the idea of the "nation" is relatively new and is a product of various socio-material forces. He defined a nation as "an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign". As Anderson puts it, a nation "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". While members of the community probably will never know each of the other members face to face, they may have similar interests or identify as part of the same nation. Members hold in their minds a mental image of their affinity: for example, the nationhood felt with other members of your nation when your "imagined community" participates in a larger event such as the Olympic Games.
Nations are "limited" in that they have "finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations". They are "sovereign" since no dynastic monarchy can claim authority over them, in the modern period:
Even though we may never see anyone in our imagined community, we still know they are there through communication.
Finally, a nation is a community because,

Critique

The first major critique of Anderson's theory was Partha Chatterjee, who contends that European colonialism de facto imposed limits to nationalism: "Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized.".
The second criticism was its masculine vision of nationalism: "the very term horizontal comradeship brings with it connotations of masculine solidarity"