THE STATE OF THE FIELD The inclusion of a chapter on nationalism in a Handbook of Political Socio... more THE STATE OF THE FIELD The inclusion of a chapter on nationalism in a Handbook of Political Sociology , which introduces subjects fundamental to the profession in these early years of the twenty-first century, reflects the recognition, which has grown steadily in the past twenty-five years, of the political importance of nationalism. There has been considerable academic interest in nationalism before, but this interest wavered and at times seemed to disappear altogether. This faltering interest may be held responsible for the fact that our understanding of the phenomenon did not advance as much as one could have wished from the beginning of World War II, when its violent eruption took American social scientists by surprise, and even from the beginning of the twentieth century. The work of Hans Kohn is among the most useful early efforts in attempting to come to terms with the development of nationalism in historical perspective. Kohn was particularly notable for constantly stressing that nationalism is fundamentally an idea , rather than a static, structural phenomenon, echoing the argument that the French sociologist Ernest Renan made three-quarters of a century earlier. However, Kohn (as well as Renan) can be criticized for being insufficiently rigorous in defining the idea of the nation. For him, the nation was fundamentally a sovereign community, but he failed to recognize the essentially secular quality of nationalism or the structural implications of national consciousness.
This article looks at the study of national identity, which must start with a preliminary investi... more This article looks at the study of national identity, which must start with a preliminary investigation of the question of identity. It provides definitions of national identity and nationalism before moving on to historical explanations for the rise of nationalism. It also identifies types of nationalism and their political implications.
Culture is the symbolic process through which human beings cognitively order reality and transmit... more Culture is the symbolic process through which human beings cognitively order reality and transmit their ways of life. Human beings are creatures of culture, having culture-specific orientations to reality (i.e., forms of consciousness) and culture-induced motivations that vary across history, types of societies, and individual experience: political problems — those problems related to the structure of authority relationships and distribution of power — are, therefore, necessarily cultural problems. The core phenomena in any problem of politics, indeed in any problem concerning humanity, are phenomena that have at their center human minds who animate them and who, in turn, are themselves symbolic or cultural processes occurring in the brain; thus, to understand and explain problems of politics one must understand and explain the relevant symbolic and mental processes, which is to understand and explain human actors' forms of consciousness and motivations. The problems that any social science must address are cultural problems in their various manifestations; the mentalist perspective, which the present paper represents, is the perspective which specifically focuses on them.
Questo libro vuole essere un tentativo di capire il mondo in cui viviamo. La premessa fondamental... more Questo libro vuole essere un tentativo di capire il mondo in cui viviamo. La premessa fondamentale che lo anima è che il nazionalismo sta alla base di questo mondo. Pertanto, per afferrarne appieno il significato, dobbiamo spiegare il nazionalismo. La parola "nazionalismo" viene usata qui come un concetto pigliatutto che contempla anche alcuni fenomeni correlati che ritroviamo, spesso, sotto il nome di coscienza o identità nazionale (la nazionalità) o che indicano quelle collettività che si basano su di esse -le nazioni; occasionalmente il termine verrà poi impiegato anche per riferirsi a quelle ideologie ben articolate sulle quali si fondano, a loro volta, le identità o le coscienze nazionali. Il concetto invece non si riferisce, salvo specificazioni in tal senso, a quell'ampia panoplia di comportamenti patriottici caratterizzati da attivismo politico e xenofobo; una denotazione del concetto che ritroviamo invece spesso nel linguaggio comune. Il libro si pone le seguenti domande: come e perché è emerso il nazionalismo? In che modo e perché esso si è trasformato durante il processo storico che ne ha visto la diffusione da una società all'altra? E, infine, perché e sotto quali forme le identità e le coscienze nazionali si sono traslate in pratiche istituzionali e modelli di cultura capaci di plasmare le strutture sociali e politiche di tutte quelle società che si sono definite come nazioni? [. .. l La specificità del nazionalismo, quella che distingue la nazionalità da altri tipi di identità, consiste nel fatto che il nazionalismo colloca la fonte dell'identità individuale in un "popolo" che viene visto come il depositario ultimo della sovranità statale, come l'oggetto principale verso il quale si orientano gli atteggiamenti di fedeltà e come la base fondativa dei principi di solidarietà collettiva. Il "popolo" è il segmento di una popolazione i cui limiti e la cui natura sono, certo, definiti in vario modo, ma che viene normalmente percepito • Scritto pubblicato nel 1992.
The core of the paper is an analysis of the meaning of sociology in the USSR, as defined by the p... more The core of the paper is an analysis of the meaning of sociology in the USSR, as defined by the participants and outsiders alike. The review is based on the study of progr ammatic statements , the character of ref erences in sociological writings, and available biographical information on their authors . All of these help to locate Soviet sociology within the intellectual enter prise in general and to establish whether it is actually a counterpart of what is called "sociology" in the West, or a different branch of intellectual activit y which for some reason uses its name. Most of the findings are derived from an analysis of Sot siogicheskie Issledovania (Sociological Research), the only specifically sociological journal in the USSR, published since 1974. These findings are compared with parallel observations on repres entative samples of the Amer ican J oumal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review. The conclu sion is that Soviet sociology, although it uses s...
This article discusses the co-evolution of nationalism and Protestantism in the course of the six... more This article discusses the co-evolution of nationalism and Protestantism in the course of the sixteenth century in England; the influence of the Hebrew Bible’s concept of “the people of Israel” as a community of fundamentally equal members on the emerging English national consciousness (the first national consciousness to develop, in turn influencing all subsequent nationalisms); and the reinterpretation of the core passages of the Hebrew Bible, in English translations up to the King James version, in terms of the emerging national consciousness. Completely independent at their historical sources, nationalism and Protestantism reinforced each other in the crucial English case through the translation of the Hebrew Bible. This, on the one hand, nationalized Protestantism in England and, on the other, led to the incorporation of the biblical concept of the people of God in the new, secular concept of nation.
ABSTRACT Instead of a conclusion, this special issue ends with a discussion between Liah Greenfel... more ABSTRACT Instead of a conclusion, this special issue ends with a discussion between Liah Greenfeld, on the one hand, and Uriel Abulof and Markus Kornprobst, on the other hand, about the merits of studying public justification and how best to do so. Greenfeld suggests that public justification is predicated on the autonomy of the political sphere, the importance ascribed to public views, and to the prevalence of justification. Seeing public justification as ultimately a cultural phenomenon, this caveat urges scholars to study it in only specific historical contexts, which are, for now, limited to predominantly ‘Western liberal democracies’.
It goes without saying-and precisely for this reason I'd like to stress-that I regard giving this... more It goes without saying-and precisely for this reason I'd like to stress-that I regard giving this tenth annual Gellner Lecture before what is undoubtedly the most distinguished forum in the studies of nationalism as a great honor, which gives me an opportunity to pay personal homage to the memory of a great intellectual. Like my father, Ernest Gellner was born in 1925 in Paris. Like my father, he was born into a Jewish family from an Eastern European, Slavic, country in turmoil (Russia in my father's case, Bohemia in Gellner's), and like my father, Gellner returned to grow up in that ancestral country. Both in terms of age and in terms of intellectual background I could be his daughter. Gellner's 1983 book Nations and Nationalism was a departure point for my own work in the field, but, as often happens between generations of parents and children, mine was a radical, rather than a conservative, departure: it was provoked by a profound disagreement, rather than persuasion. This was a disagreement on the most fundamental level, pertaining to the ontology of our shared subject matter. While Gellner, like all the sociological structuralists and philosophical materialists, regarded society and history essentially as a continuation of the biological evolution (though one must stress, Lamarckian rather than Darwinian), I have based my thinking on the empirical generalisation that humanity constitutes a reality sui generis, distinguished from the rest of the animal species by the symbolic, therefore not material, instead of genetic, therefore material, transmission of its ways of life across generations. This specificity, which alone makes humanity worthy of a discipline of its own, necessarily translates into the specificity of human society, because human society, in distinction to animal societies, is organised symbolically, rather than materially, and into the specificity of human history, because human history, in distinction to the development of other animal species, is subject to the regularities of cultural, rather than biological evolution. And this, in turn, necessitates that the study of human historical and social processes focus on culture, considering cultural, or symbolic, factors as both explanans and explananda. Yet, despite this fundamental disagreement, in some important way, I believe, I follow in Ernest Gellner's footsteps. I accept his division of the academe into the tribes of 'relativists', 'fundamentalists' and rationalists of
Accounts that attribute nationalism to capitalism or industrialization face the problem of nation... more Accounts that attribute nationalism to capitalism or industrialization face the problem of nationalism in late‐stage capitalist, or as some might say, post‐industrial, societies. While increasing social significance has been attributed to economic growth throughout human history, reasons for this are far from self‐evident. By looking at arguments made by Marx, List, and Smith, a new understanding of the relationship between nationalism and economics emerges—one that explains the attribution of social importance to economic development by revealing it as a function of nationalism.
The connection between nationalism and economic development is an important subject, and the cont... more The connection between nationalism and economic development is an important subject, and the contributors to the volume before us are to be commended for tackling it. But the significance of contributions to edited volumes in humanities and the social sciences rarely extends beyond their symbolic function—of serving as memorabilia to the rites and ceremonies in which scholarly conviviality finds its chief expression. Thus they are forgotten almost as soon as they appear in print, similarly to the elegant menus of formal dinners and wedding invitations, and for all intents and purposes are lost to the world of learning. Their only chance to escape this sad fate in most cases depends on the clarity, originality, and persuasiveness of the editors' vision, which may claim and hold the reader's attention, while creating a conceptual framework within which each individual essay acquires an added meaning. The editors of Economic Change and the National Question in Twentieth-Century...
Liah Greenfeld and Mark Simes have long worked together, integrating the perspectives of two very... more Liah Greenfeld and Mark Simes have long worked together, integrating the perspectives of two very different disciplinary traditions: cultural history/historical sociology and human neuroscience. The combination of their areas of expertise in the empirical investigation of mental disorders, which severely affect intelligence---among other things---has led them to certain conclusions that may throw a special light on the question of this symposium: Will computers outcompete us all?
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume, 1996
To answer, or even consider, the question ‘Is nationalism legitimate?', whether from the soci... more To answer, or even consider, the question ‘Is nationalism legitimate?', whether from the sociological or ethical, philosophical point of view, it is first necessary to define what nationalism is or, in other words, to understand its nature and the source of its appeal. As concerns nationalism's definition, there are several points, in regard to which there exists among the students of the phenomenon more or less general agreement, but which, nevertheless, should be emphasized at the outset:Nationalism is a modem phenomenon: for most of its recorded history humanity has not known it; it emerged quite recently and therefore cannot be seen as an automatic response to some universal need; its very historicity presupposes that it is essentially a cultural and not a psychological phenomenon, and that, as any cultural phenomenon, it can develop, take various forms within certain limits, and disappear.
In this article, several scholars of nationalism discuss the potential for the COVID‐19 pandemic ... more In this article, several scholars of nationalism discuss the potential for the COVID‐19 pandemic to impact the development of nationalism and world politics. To structure the discussion, the contributors respond to three questions: (1) how should we understand the relationship between nationalism and COVID‐19; (2) will COVID‐19 fuel ethnic and nationalist conflict; and (3) will COVID‐19 reinforce or erode the nation‐state in the long run? The contributors formulated their responses to these questions near to the outset of the pandemic, amid intense uncertainty. This made it acutely difficult, if not impossible, to make predictions. Nevertheless, it was felt that a historically and theoretically informed discussion would shed light on the types of political processes that could be triggered by the COVID‐19 pandemic. In doing so, the aim is to help orient researchers and policy‐makers as they grapple with what has rapidly become the most urgent issue of our times.
THE STATE OF THE FIELD The inclusion of a chapter on nationalism in a Handbook of Political Socio... more THE STATE OF THE FIELD The inclusion of a chapter on nationalism in a Handbook of Political Sociology , which introduces subjects fundamental to the profession in these early years of the twenty-first century, reflects the recognition, which has grown steadily in the past twenty-five years, of the political importance of nationalism. There has been considerable academic interest in nationalism before, but this interest wavered and at times seemed to disappear altogether. This faltering interest may be held responsible for the fact that our understanding of the phenomenon did not advance as much as one could have wished from the beginning of World War II, when its violent eruption took American social scientists by surprise, and even from the beginning of the twentieth century. The work of Hans Kohn is among the most useful early efforts in attempting to come to terms with the development of nationalism in historical perspective. Kohn was particularly notable for constantly stressing that nationalism is fundamentally an idea , rather than a static, structural phenomenon, echoing the argument that the French sociologist Ernest Renan made three-quarters of a century earlier. However, Kohn (as well as Renan) can be criticized for being insufficiently rigorous in defining the idea of the nation. For him, the nation was fundamentally a sovereign community, but he failed to recognize the essentially secular quality of nationalism or the structural implications of national consciousness.
This article looks at the study of national identity, which must start with a preliminary investi... more This article looks at the study of national identity, which must start with a preliminary investigation of the question of identity. It provides definitions of national identity and nationalism before moving on to historical explanations for the rise of nationalism. It also identifies types of nationalism and their political implications.
Culture is the symbolic process through which human beings cognitively order reality and transmit... more Culture is the symbolic process through which human beings cognitively order reality and transmit their ways of life. Human beings are creatures of culture, having culture-specific orientations to reality (i.e., forms of consciousness) and culture-induced motivations that vary across history, types of societies, and individual experience: political problems — those problems related to the structure of authority relationships and distribution of power — are, therefore, necessarily cultural problems. The core phenomena in any problem of politics, indeed in any problem concerning humanity, are phenomena that have at their center human minds who animate them and who, in turn, are themselves symbolic or cultural processes occurring in the brain; thus, to understand and explain problems of politics one must understand and explain the relevant symbolic and mental processes, which is to understand and explain human actors' forms of consciousness and motivations. The problems that any social science must address are cultural problems in their various manifestations; the mentalist perspective, which the present paper represents, is the perspective which specifically focuses on them.
Questo libro vuole essere un tentativo di capire il mondo in cui viviamo. La premessa fondamental... more Questo libro vuole essere un tentativo di capire il mondo in cui viviamo. La premessa fondamentale che lo anima è che il nazionalismo sta alla base di questo mondo. Pertanto, per afferrarne appieno il significato, dobbiamo spiegare il nazionalismo. La parola "nazionalismo" viene usata qui come un concetto pigliatutto che contempla anche alcuni fenomeni correlati che ritroviamo, spesso, sotto il nome di coscienza o identità nazionale (la nazionalità) o che indicano quelle collettività che si basano su di esse -le nazioni; occasionalmente il termine verrà poi impiegato anche per riferirsi a quelle ideologie ben articolate sulle quali si fondano, a loro volta, le identità o le coscienze nazionali. Il concetto invece non si riferisce, salvo specificazioni in tal senso, a quell'ampia panoplia di comportamenti patriottici caratterizzati da attivismo politico e xenofobo; una denotazione del concetto che ritroviamo invece spesso nel linguaggio comune. Il libro si pone le seguenti domande: come e perché è emerso il nazionalismo? In che modo e perché esso si è trasformato durante il processo storico che ne ha visto la diffusione da una società all'altra? E, infine, perché e sotto quali forme le identità e le coscienze nazionali si sono traslate in pratiche istituzionali e modelli di cultura capaci di plasmare le strutture sociali e politiche di tutte quelle società che si sono definite come nazioni? [. .. l La specificità del nazionalismo, quella che distingue la nazionalità da altri tipi di identità, consiste nel fatto che il nazionalismo colloca la fonte dell'identità individuale in un "popolo" che viene visto come il depositario ultimo della sovranità statale, come l'oggetto principale verso il quale si orientano gli atteggiamenti di fedeltà e come la base fondativa dei principi di solidarietà collettiva. Il "popolo" è il segmento di una popolazione i cui limiti e la cui natura sono, certo, definiti in vario modo, ma che viene normalmente percepito • Scritto pubblicato nel 1992.
The core of the paper is an analysis of the meaning of sociology in the USSR, as defined by the p... more The core of the paper is an analysis of the meaning of sociology in the USSR, as defined by the participants and outsiders alike. The review is based on the study of progr ammatic statements , the character of ref erences in sociological writings, and available biographical information on their authors . All of these help to locate Soviet sociology within the intellectual enter prise in general and to establish whether it is actually a counterpart of what is called "sociology" in the West, or a different branch of intellectual activit y which for some reason uses its name. Most of the findings are derived from an analysis of Sot siogicheskie Issledovania (Sociological Research), the only specifically sociological journal in the USSR, published since 1974. These findings are compared with parallel observations on repres entative samples of the Amer ican J oumal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review. The conclu sion is that Soviet sociology, although it uses s...
This article discusses the co-evolution of nationalism and Protestantism in the course of the six... more This article discusses the co-evolution of nationalism and Protestantism in the course of the sixteenth century in England; the influence of the Hebrew Bible’s concept of “the people of Israel” as a community of fundamentally equal members on the emerging English national consciousness (the first national consciousness to develop, in turn influencing all subsequent nationalisms); and the reinterpretation of the core passages of the Hebrew Bible, in English translations up to the King James version, in terms of the emerging national consciousness. Completely independent at their historical sources, nationalism and Protestantism reinforced each other in the crucial English case through the translation of the Hebrew Bible. This, on the one hand, nationalized Protestantism in England and, on the other, led to the incorporation of the biblical concept of the people of God in the new, secular concept of nation.
ABSTRACT Instead of a conclusion, this special issue ends with a discussion between Liah Greenfel... more ABSTRACT Instead of a conclusion, this special issue ends with a discussion between Liah Greenfeld, on the one hand, and Uriel Abulof and Markus Kornprobst, on the other hand, about the merits of studying public justification and how best to do so. Greenfeld suggests that public justification is predicated on the autonomy of the political sphere, the importance ascribed to public views, and to the prevalence of justification. Seeing public justification as ultimately a cultural phenomenon, this caveat urges scholars to study it in only specific historical contexts, which are, for now, limited to predominantly ‘Western liberal democracies’.
It goes without saying-and precisely for this reason I'd like to stress-that I regard giving this... more It goes without saying-and precisely for this reason I'd like to stress-that I regard giving this tenth annual Gellner Lecture before what is undoubtedly the most distinguished forum in the studies of nationalism as a great honor, which gives me an opportunity to pay personal homage to the memory of a great intellectual. Like my father, Ernest Gellner was born in 1925 in Paris. Like my father, he was born into a Jewish family from an Eastern European, Slavic, country in turmoil (Russia in my father's case, Bohemia in Gellner's), and like my father, Gellner returned to grow up in that ancestral country. Both in terms of age and in terms of intellectual background I could be his daughter. Gellner's 1983 book Nations and Nationalism was a departure point for my own work in the field, but, as often happens between generations of parents and children, mine was a radical, rather than a conservative, departure: it was provoked by a profound disagreement, rather than persuasion. This was a disagreement on the most fundamental level, pertaining to the ontology of our shared subject matter. While Gellner, like all the sociological structuralists and philosophical materialists, regarded society and history essentially as a continuation of the biological evolution (though one must stress, Lamarckian rather than Darwinian), I have based my thinking on the empirical generalisation that humanity constitutes a reality sui generis, distinguished from the rest of the animal species by the symbolic, therefore not material, instead of genetic, therefore material, transmission of its ways of life across generations. This specificity, which alone makes humanity worthy of a discipline of its own, necessarily translates into the specificity of human society, because human society, in distinction to animal societies, is organised symbolically, rather than materially, and into the specificity of human history, because human history, in distinction to the development of other animal species, is subject to the regularities of cultural, rather than biological evolution. And this, in turn, necessitates that the study of human historical and social processes focus on culture, considering cultural, or symbolic, factors as both explanans and explananda. Yet, despite this fundamental disagreement, in some important way, I believe, I follow in Ernest Gellner's footsteps. I accept his division of the academe into the tribes of 'relativists', 'fundamentalists' and rationalists of
Accounts that attribute nationalism to capitalism or industrialization face the problem of nation... more Accounts that attribute nationalism to capitalism or industrialization face the problem of nationalism in late‐stage capitalist, or as some might say, post‐industrial, societies. While increasing social significance has been attributed to economic growth throughout human history, reasons for this are far from self‐evident. By looking at arguments made by Marx, List, and Smith, a new understanding of the relationship between nationalism and economics emerges—one that explains the attribution of social importance to economic development by revealing it as a function of nationalism.
The connection between nationalism and economic development is an important subject, and the cont... more The connection between nationalism and economic development is an important subject, and the contributors to the volume before us are to be commended for tackling it. But the significance of contributions to edited volumes in humanities and the social sciences rarely extends beyond their symbolic function—of serving as memorabilia to the rites and ceremonies in which scholarly conviviality finds its chief expression. Thus they are forgotten almost as soon as they appear in print, similarly to the elegant menus of formal dinners and wedding invitations, and for all intents and purposes are lost to the world of learning. Their only chance to escape this sad fate in most cases depends on the clarity, originality, and persuasiveness of the editors' vision, which may claim and hold the reader's attention, while creating a conceptual framework within which each individual essay acquires an added meaning. The editors of Economic Change and the National Question in Twentieth-Century...
Liah Greenfeld and Mark Simes have long worked together, integrating the perspectives of two very... more Liah Greenfeld and Mark Simes have long worked together, integrating the perspectives of two very different disciplinary traditions: cultural history/historical sociology and human neuroscience. The combination of their areas of expertise in the empirical investigation of mental disorders, which severely affect intelligence---among other things---has led them to certain conclusions that may throw a special light on the question of this symposium: Will computers outcompete us all?
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume, 1996
To answer, or even consider, the question ‘Is nationalism legitimate?', whether from the soci... more To answer, or even consider, the question ‘Is nationalism legitimate?', whether from the sociological or ethical, philosophical point of view, it is first necessary to define what nationalism is or, in other words, to understand its nature and the source of its appeal. As concerns nationalism's definition, there are several points, in regard to which there exists among the students of the phenomenon more or less general agreement, but which, nevertheless, should be emphasized at the outset:Nationalism is a modem phenomenon: for most of its recorded history humanity has not known it; it emerged quite recently and therefore cannot be seen as an automatic response to some universal need; its very historicity presupposes that it is essentially a cultural and not a psychological phenomenon, and that, as any cultural phenomenon, it can develop, take various forms within certain limits, and disappear.
In this article, several scholars of nationalism discuss the potential for the COVID‐19 pandemic ... more In this article, several scholars of nationalism discuss the potential for the COVID‐19 pandemic to impact the development of nationalism and world politics. To structure the discussion, the contributors respond to three questions: (1) how should we understand the relationship between nationalism and COVID‐19; (2) will COVID‐19 fuel ethnic and nationalist conflict; and (3) will COVID‐19 reinforce or erode the nation‐state in the long run? The contributors formulated their responses to these questions near to the outset of the pandemic, amid intense uncertainty. This made it acutely difficult, if not impossible, to make predictions. Nevertheless, it was felt that a historically and theoretically informed discussion would shed light on the types of political processes that could be triggered by the COVID‐19 pandemic. In doing so, the aim is to help orient researchers and policy‐makers as they grapple with what has rapidly become the most urgent issue of our times.
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