Summary
Author of Nations and Nationalism (1983), read in essay 36 of Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile and Other Essays for the account of nationalism as the imposition of a school-mediated, academy-supervised high culture on society (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.397-399).
Details
- Quoted: a high culture must “pervade the whole of society, define it, and needs to be sustained by the polity. That is the secret of nationalism” (PDF p.397).
- Nationalism is “the general imposition of a high culture on society”, producing “homogeneity, literacy, anonymity”; his account does not disagree with Benedict Anderson’s in Imagined Communities, except that Anderson sees nationalism as a phenomenon of the new rather than the old European world (PDF p.397-398).
- Quoted: “having a nation is not an inherent attribute of humanity, but it now has come to appear as such” (PDF p.398).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Matthew Arnold, Benedict Anderson