What is the main message of Imagined Communities?

The main message of Imagined Communities is that nations are socially constructed and their existence depends on collective imagination.

How long does it take to read Imagined Communities?

The estimated reading time for Imagined Communities is several hours. The Blinkist summary can be read in just 15 minutes.

Is Imagined Communities a good book? Is it worth reading?

Imagined Communities is worth reading as it provides insight into the social and political construction of nations.

Who is the author of Imagined Communities?

The author of Imagined Communities is Benedict Anderson.

Imagined Communities Summary of Key Ideas and Review

Name: Imagined Communities
Rating: 4.6 (111 reviews)
Author: Benedict Anderson

Introduction

What’s in it for me? Navigate the history of nationalism.

For most of history, the greater part of humanity lived in empires. Unlike modern nation-states, empires didn’t have hard boundaries. Royal marriages, wars of conquest, and religious conversion were ways to expand an empire. This is how the territories now covered by modern Spain, Britain, and Italy came to be part of one empire – the Roman – and Persia, Afghanistan, and India in another – the Mughal Empire.

Then, at the end of the eighteenth century, a new idea began to emerge: nationalism. This held that Bulgarians, Czechs, and Serbs shouldn’t live in a single territory ruled by an Austro-Hungarian royal family but have their own states.

This was a new type of “imagined community.” All communities larger than villages are imagined in some way since folks will never know more than a handful of their fellow members in real life. Empires often imagined membership in religious or dynastic terms. Nations, however, were different. To belong to the same community meant belonging to the same nationality, and that had to be defined first.

So how did Spaniards become Spanish and Algerians Algerian? Well, that’s what we’ll find out in these blinks as we explore the emergence of nationality and nationalism.

Along the way, you’ll learn

why nationalism resembles religious styles of thought rather than political ideologies;
how booksellers’ search for new markets contributed to the rise of nationalism; and
why the study of languages ended up becoming such a headache for the rulers of empires.

Key idea 1 of 7

Nationalism isn’t a religion, but it’s closer to religious belief systems than to modern political ideologies.

We enter this world on terms beyond our choosing. Our genetic heritage, parents, and physical abilities are all determined by chance. The only certainty in life is death. These two facts – the contingency of existence and the inescapability of mortality – have always weighed heavily on humans. Attempts to make sense of them are at the heart of most traditional belief systems. Modern styles of thought, by contrast, remain silent on questions that can’t be settled by science, which is why neither liberals nor Marxists have much to say about immortality. Nationalists, however, do.

And that’s the key message here: Nationalism isn’t a religion, but it’s closer to religious belief systems than to modern political ideologies.

Let’s consider cenotaphs, one of the most interesting emblems of nationalism. These are monuments dedicated to nameless soldiers, and it’s this anonymity that gives these ghostly tombs their meaning. Because they commemorate “Unknown Soldiers” who lack an individual identity, they become symbols of something greater. They represent the ultimate sacrifice – dying for one’s country. Cenotaphs seem to suggest that those who give up their lives for something larger than themselves live forever.

In this, nationalism resembles religious worldviews. Faiths like Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, for example, were able to survive for millennia in dozens of different societies because they tapped into human intuition. These faiths bring hope that there must be a deeper meaning to the seemingly random ebb and flow of life. Whether they call it karma or the afterlife, religions find this meaning by linking the dead, the living, and the unborn into an eternal chain of death and regeneration.

Given this similarity between nationalism and religious thought, it’s not surprising that the former emerged just as the latter was faltering. After being taken for granted for thousands of years, religion lost its self-evident plausibility in eighteenth-century Europe. This was the age of the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that emphasized human reason rather than religious tradition. The decline of religion certainly didn’t, however, remove the suffering to which it had, in part, been a response.

In fact, this decline left a void at the heart of modern life. Without paradise, existence seemed unbearably arbitrary. Without the prospect of salvation and a life in the hereafter, the imagined community of the nation became more attractive. But before we examine nationalism itself, let’s take a closer look at the cultural systems that lead to it.

Key idea 2 of 7

Sacred languages were the glue holding large empires and religious communities together.

Picture the scene. It’s the seventeenth century, and we’re in Mecca, Islam’s holiest city, where we meet two pilgrims. One is from Maguindanao, a sultanate in the Philippines, and the other is a Berber from the mountains of Morocco. These two strangers have never met, don’t understand each other’s mother tongues, and follow different cultural norms, but they think of one another as “brothers.” Why? Well, because there’s one thing they do share – Arabic, the sacred language of the Quran and all Muslims.

The key message here? Sacred languages were the glue holding large empires and religious communities together.

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Key idea 3 of 7

Print capitalism consolidated distinctive national languages and laid the foundations for nationalism.

The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century revolutionized communication. Books had previously been painstakingly hand-copied, and libraries counted themselves lucky to own a dozen volumes. Then, books became a mass commodity. By 1500, some 20 million books had been printed. Between 1500 and 1600, around 200 million more were manufactured. As the English philosopher Francis Bacon wrote at the end of this extraordinary century, printing had changed the “appearance and state of the world.”

He was right. Soon enough, even languages had been transformed.

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Key idea 4 of 7

Vernacular newspapers cemented the idea of the people as a collective with shared interests.

Religious communities were imagined through sacred languages like Latin and Arabic. These allowed millions of believers to feel connected to one another through their shared relationship with God. As we’ve discussed, printing helped standardize national languages, and this allowed readerships to begin imagining themselves as members of a secular community.

But it wasn’t just printing in general that drove this process – it was a particular format.

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Key idea 5 of 7

A linguistic revolution boosted nineteenth-century nationalism in Europe.

For centuries, Europe regarded itself as a singular continent. As the inheritor of the cultural and moral legacy of Christianity and ancient Greece, it believed it had been divinely chosen. This meant it wasn’t just a superior civilization – it was the only civilization in the world. But, this triumphalist world view didn’t survive the European “discovery” of the Americas.

The key message here is: A linguistic revolution boosted nineteenth-century nationalism in Europe.

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Key idea 6 of 7

The rise of nationalism undermined Europe’s multinational empires because its principles were incompatible with imperial rule.

Imagine a Czech nationalist – we’ll call him Antonín – in late nineteenth-century Prague. He speaks German, the state’s official language, but prefers to use his mother tongue. He reads Czech novels and newspapers, and his favorite composers are the Czech patriots Smetana and Dvořák. What are his political goals? Chances are, he’d put being ruled by fellow Czechs at the top of his list. That makes Antonín a problem for the folks calling the shots.

Why? Well, the key message in this blink is: The rise of nationalism undermined Europe’s multinational empires because its principles were incompatible with imperial rule.

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Key idea 7 of 7

African and Asian intellectuals drew on European ideas and their experiences of colonial rule to create their own independent nations.

The First World War killed off Europe’s multinational empires. By 1922, the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires were gone. On the continent, they were replaced by newly independent nations. The League of Nations, an organization that regarded such nations as the new international norm, now took charge of diplomatic relations previously handled by imperial bureaucracies. That left the non-European world. What would happen to the European empires’ colonies in the age of nationalism?

It didn’t take long for an answer to emerge.

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