The
book "Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism" by notable political thinker Benedict Anderson is regarded as one of the most important works written about the sources of modern
nationalism.
Key
to Anderson's understanding of nationalism is the notion of "imagined community", the fact of nationalism being not something material or
natural (as often thought) but rather something that exists in the connection
between culture and psychology. The national community is defined by Anderson
as "imagined" since its members do not personally know each other but
yet they bear in their mind the thought of mutual connection. Anderson holds
that any community larger than the traditional village is essentially an
imagined community.
At
the beginning of "Imagined Communities" Anderson argues that in order
to understand nationalism we must look at the manner in which national
identities have formed over time which can account for why they are so
meaningful today. According to Anderson's thesis the development of printing
press alongside the Protestant revolution in Europe brought about a large
popular readership of non religious, non Latin texts. This had a key role in
the development of languages that were mutual to large populations, languages
that over through Latin is the dominant language of power.
These
new languages, according to Anderson, enabled mutual unified forms of
communication that were soon adopted by regimes, thus setting the ground for
the appearance of a new form of imagined communities - nationalism. Since someone
in the north of modern day France and someone in its south could converse
easily, read the same books, same newspaper, abide by the same law, answer to
the same courts and eventually serve in the same army against people whose
language they cannot understand, they began to imagine themselves as brethren,
being part of the same community which was and still is, imagined.
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