Imagined communities summary. Book summary: Benedict Anderson - Imagined Communities
Very often used in modern political rhetoric. Public figures try to connect their own image and aspirations with it. But what is she really like?
Introduction of the definition: nationFirst of all, it should be noted that in the modern Russian language there is a whole complex of terms similar to the concept of nation: people, ethnic group, nationality. At the same time, the nation itself is an image that has several views on its definition. There is also some conflict here associated with translations of foreign language terms. So, for the Germans, both the people and the nation are folk. The two concepts are combined into one term. But in special English-language literature, the concepts of people and nation are distinguished. The first, by the way, is not quite the same as the people in our understanding. For a Russian-speaking person, a nation is a kind of continuation of the people, its development into a higher category. While the people are more of a legal and biological unity that has existed since ancient times, the concept of a nation expresses rather It is the awareness of a common historical fate, common heroes and tragic moments, the unity of the past and the future that turns a people into a nation. This is more than just a set of similar characteristics such as culture and language (although they are the basis). The development of a nation, according to modern researchers of the issue, at its highest point involves the creation of a state. After all, this is the most effective way to express common national interests through foreign and domestic policies.
Birth of a Nation
In modern historiography of the issue, there are several trends that view the origins of the nation in different ways. However, the most authoritative researchers still attribute the emergence of nations in their modern form to the era of modern times. Moreover, this is originally a European phenomenon. The nation is the child of development
Capitalist relations and For the peasant of the Middle Ages there was no such self-identification and there was no difference between French and German feudal lords. And for the latter, all peasants seemed like a single mass. One of the prominent researchers of our time, Benedict Anderson, created the special concept of “imagined communities.” This implies that a nation is largely a figment of human imagination. It arises only when traditional communities (for example, village communities) collapse and new, more global societies emerge. Local identification is no longer suitable, and the Munich worker, for example, as a result of these processes begins to feel a sense of community with the Dortmund clerk, although they have never met. For a nation, common symbols are extremely important - the foundation of its representatives. Often the color of a nation - poets, writers, musicians, historians - is also the creator of these symbols. They form the image of unity in the minds of the residents of a certain territory.
We bring to the attention of readers of the portal of the Center for Conservative Studies an essay by a 4th year student of the Faculty of Sociology of Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov Kosukhina Maria based on Benedict Anderson's "Imaginary Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism."
Introduction
To understand the constructivist position in Anderson’s views, first of all, one should understand the concept of “imagined community,” which is key to his entire concept.
First, let's look at the etymology of the word “community.” The Russian language, despite all its richness, does not always allow us to convey important nuances of foreign terminology, not created by us, but borrowed by us. For us, the words “communication”, “community”, “society”, “community”, “public” have one and the same root. However, Anderson uses the term as a derivative of "common" rather than of "communication", as is the case with the concept of "society". Similar to the separation of the concepts of “community” (“common”) and “society” (“communication”) or through drawing a parallel with the concepts proposed earlier by F. Tennis, “Gemeinschaft” (community) “Gesellschaft” (society), in our case etymologically “community” should be understood, first of all, as the first version of interpretation, i.e. implying the natural, and not the artificial, mechanical nature of the union, based on real common, and not on mere communication.
In contrast to the same Tönnies, Anderson views the modern nation as a community, and an imaginary community, and not a complicated community, i.e. society. “It is imaginary insofar as the members of any nation will never know the majority of their fellow nationals, while in the minds of each of them there exists an image of their community.” We get that such an addition as imagination, in the author’s interpretation, allows us to see precisely the constructed nature behind the nation. It is behind the concept of “imaginary” that there is a reference to the need for mechanisms to maintain ideas about the general in society. "Imagined Community" reflects Anderson's constructivist views on the origins of ethnicity.
Cultural roots
According to Anderson, nations and nationalism appear as “special cultural artifacts”, “the most universal values in political life”, and not as ideologies. It turns out that they have a value-based nature, which brings them closer to Durkheim’s “moral community”, held together by unified beliefs and customs.
“I am simply suggesting that in order to understand nationalism, it should be associated not with self-accepted political ideologies, but with the broad cultural systems that preceded it and from which - and at the same time and in opposition to which - it emerged. Two cultural systems are relevant to the solution of the problems facing us: the religious community and the dynastic state. Both were, in their heyday, self-evident frames of reference, much the same as nationality today.”
The author draws our attention to the fact that both cultural systems under consideration have signs of the absence of any clear boundaries, as well as the presence of a special small social group of people responsible for maintaining the unity of people - people who know Latin, or dynasties and their associates.
In the case of the religious community, "fundamental ideas about 'social groups' were centripetal and hierarchical rather than border-oriented and horizontal," and the existence of a trans-European scholarly world writing in Latin and a bilingual intelligentsia mediating between the spoken language and Latin contributed to bringing global communities together.
"The decline of Latin was a partial manifestation of a broader process in which sacred communities, integrated by the old sacred languages, were gradually increasingly fragmented, pluralized and territorialized."
Let us similarly trace these features in a dynastic state. “In the kingdom everything is organized around a supreme center. In the old imagination, in which states were defined by centers, boundaries were permeable and unclear, and sovereignties imperceptibly passed into one another.”
In addition to the withering away of these cultural systems, there was a gradual transformation of the understanding of time, which accompanied and at the same time contributed to the dominance of national communities.
“Time, flowing on its own, even when nothing happens, empty and endless, and therefore open to the future and bringing a new perception of the present as a set of simultaneously occurring events, was embodied in new cultural artifacts - newspapers and novels.”
“Under the influence of economic changes, “discoveries” (social and scientific) and the development of ever faster communications, drove a wedge between cosmology and history. Hence it is not surprising that there was a search for, so to speak, a new way in which brotherhood, power and time could be meaningfully linked together. And, perhaps, nothing has accelerated this search and made it as fruitful as print capitalism, which opened up for a rapidly growing number of people the opportunity to become aware of themselves and connect themselves with other people in fundamentally new ways.”
Origins of national consciousness. Creole pioneers. Old languages, new models.
Over time, the peculiarities of the religious community and then the dynastic state are gradually eradicated, and communities of the “horizontal-secular, transverse-temporal” type become simply possible, and the question arises of why a nation becomes popular.
The rise of national consciousness was particularly influenced by the creation of colonial regimes in America, Asia and Africa, the so-called community, which was based on “Creole pioneers”. Occupying a certain administrative position, “Creole pilgrim functionaries and provincial Creole printers” increasingly identified themselves with the given territory, which was to be protected from the encroachments of these regimes.
“The spread of printed languages laid the foundations of national consciousness in three different ways. First and foremost, they created unified fields of exchange and communication, located below Latin but above the local spoken languages. Secondly, print capitalism gave the language a new stability, which in the long run helped to build the image of antiquity that occupies such an important place in the subjective idea of \u200b\u200bthe nation. Thirdly, print capitalism created languages-of-power that were different in type from the previous administrative vernaculars. Now language proficiency reflected the property not of a privileged position, but of belonging to a particular territory.”
This is how the nation’s sovereignty self-asserted and their territory was limited.
The decline of the era of national liberation movements in the Americas practically coincided with the development of nationalism in Europe. Europe 1820 -1920, “national printed languages” had ideological and political significance. The “nation” becomes a conscious target, becomes an accessible subject for “piracy.”
In the second half of the 18th century. The scientific comparative study of languages began. Desacralization of the Hebrew, Ancient Greek, and Latin languages. The growth of literacy, trade, industry, communications and statehood in the 19th century gave new impetus to linguistic unification in each dynastic state. State languages acquire greater power and greater status.
Official nationalism and imperialism
From the middle of the 19th century. in Europe - the formation of “official nationalisms”. Before the advent of mass linguistic nationalisms, these nationalisms were impossible because they were fundamentally reactions of powerful groups—dynastic and aristocratic—who were threatened with exclusion or marginalization in mass imagined communities. And in most cases, official nationalism concealed the divergence between the nation and the dynastic state.
Last wave
The "last wave" of nationalisms arises in the colonial territories of Asia and Africa, and is a response to the global imperialism of a new style based on industrial capitalism. Marx - “the need for increasing sales of products drives the bourgeoisie around the globe.” Capitalism, incl. Thanks to the spread of printing, it contributed to the emergence in Europe of mass nationalisms based on native languages, which undermined the dynastic principle. Standardized school systems created new pilgrimages centered in colonial capitals. Usually these educational pilgrimages were reproduced/duplicated in the administrative sphere. The convergence of educational and administrative pilgrimages created the territorial basis for new “imagined communities” in which indigenous people could see themselves as “national.”
Patriotism and racism
The cultural products of nationalism - poetry, fiction, music, plastic arts - depict and inspire love, including love imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice. Saying the same words, songs, reading the same books promotes integration into the community.
Racism is not a consequence of nationalism. Racism has its origins in the ideologies of class rather than nation, in rulers' claims to divinity and in claims to "breed."
Census, map, museum
Three institutions of power - the census, the map and the museum - changed their form and function as the colonized zones entered the era of mechanical reproduction. These institutions influenced the way the colonial state imagined the nature of the people it ruled, the geography of its domains, and the legitimacy of its origins.
The combination of map and census imbued the topography of the map with political content, and museums and the museum imagination are deeply political.
The type of archeology that came of age during the age of mechanical reproduction involved the mass production of illustrated books detailing all the major sites reconstructed within the colony. Thanks to print capitalism, an “artistic census” of state heritage emerges, which the subjects of the state can buy.
Memory and oblivion
Unified education takes on the functions of constructing national memory and oblivion. So one of his tasks becomes, for example, “reminding” the younger generation of French about a series of ancient massacres, which are imprinted in the minds as “ancestral history.” And being forced to “already forget” those tragedies of which a person needs a constant “reminder” turns out to be a typical mechanism for constructing national genealogies.
An accumulation of documentary evidence (birth certificates, diaries, medical records, photographs, etc., which simultaneously registers apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory. From this alienation from the past is born the idea of individuality, an identity about which, because It is impossible to “remember” it; it must be told.
Summary
So, Anderson, as a constructivist, declared the artificial nature of the nation. He believed that it, as a modern cultural system, was preceded by a religious community, then a dynastic state. As the conditions of their previous functioning are lost, i.e. the sacred status of the sacred language, the absence of clear territorial boundaries, thanks to the sharp “expansion of the cultural and geographical horizon”, the development of capitalism and printing technology, printed languages are becoming increasingly widespread.
They, in turn, contribute to the reproduction of national identity. Moreover, the pioneers in establishing the mechanism for constructing a nation are the “Creole pioneers,” i.e. colonizers of America, Asia and Africa, since the need to limit their territories and consolidate their power on them was a priority in the development of these lands. Then Europe also embarked on a national track through the growing importance of the state language.
Gradually, the state printed language acquires the status of an official language. Then comes the realization of the need to transmit it to subsequent generations through the education system. Then, special importance begins to be given to the institution of the museum, census and map, as well as to the mechanism of presenting national history through the memory of significant events and their simultaneous forgetting, as alienation from the past.
Imagined Communities: The Birth of Nations in the Age of Printing and Capitalism
BenedictAnderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. - Verso Books, 1991. - 224 pages; ISBN 0-86091-546-8.
Ivan Zasursky
http:// old. russ. ru/ circle/ book/99-06-03/ zasursky. htm
TO Benedict Anderson's book "Imagined Communities" is dedicated to the phenomenon of nations - the history of their origin and, in detail, the formation of nations as the main element of the new world order, starting from the 17th and, we would add, ending with the 20th century. In fact, the very appearance of such a book can be considered the most important symptom that the time of nations is passing.
The title of the book can be translated as "Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Nature and Spread of Nationalism." Why "imaginary"? Because no one can ever become acquainted with all the people who make up a particular nation, but at the same time they feel themselves to be part of this community.
In order to realize the power of the presence of the national idea, it is difficult to find something more expressive than the tomb of the unknown soldier. At the same time, despite all the power of the national idea, which is clearly manifested in wars, in the history of the struggle against colonialists and external aggressors, and in the love for the homeland that it inspires, from the point of view of justification, the national idea looks rather helpless. In any case, the history of national states in the form in which it is taught in schools is itself the result of the implementation of the national idea, its projection into the past, the interpretations instilled in it of certain monuments of literature, the culture of ancient peoples, a product of active national construction ("The Word of Igor's Campaign" does not emphasize this fact as clearly as, for example, the choice by the descendants of the Spanish colonizers of the Aztecs and Incas as ancestors).
This does not mean that the emergence of nations did not have deep preconditions in human nature and history. Not at all - it only draws attention to the amazing fact that nations are an invention of the recent past.
The 18th century was not only the heyday of nationalism, but also the era of the decline of religions. Religion solves the problem of death by inscribing the fatality of individual life into the continuity of the sacred movement. The idea of a nation has partly taken the place of religion as the core of a community aimed at the future, presenting itself as a single whole.
Among the prerequisites for the formation of nations, it is important to note a change in the perception of time, the emergence of so-called mechanical time instead of the church calendar, which rests on the Second Coming or the Last Judgment. Time flowing on its own, even when nothing happens, empty and endless, and therefore open to the future and bringing a new perception of the present as a totality simultaneously current events, embodied in new cultural artifacts - newspapers and novels.
In general, according to Anderson, book printing became the first and most important branch of emerging capitalism (in his study, referring to Marshall McLuhan’s “Gutenberg Galaxy,” he forms a new concept - print-capitalism; a very accurate definition of the passing era, isn’t it?). Of course, consumer products existed even before the book - but it was grain, rice, in other words, something that was sold by weight or by size, like fabric. The book was the first product from the industrial era - one copy is no different from another, the number of copies is not limited. It is printing that becomes the source of the most important aspect of national identity - the printed language, which later becomes the state language.
The influence of newspapers on the process of formation of nations was enormous due to the fact that the same newspaper was read by thousands of people, and this created a feeling of belonging to one community. As for novels, a characteristic feature of this literary form (take, for example, “Dead Souls”) is not only the description of events occurring simultaneously (which is important in itself), but also the creation of types, an underlying feeling of representativeness of the heroes and the situation in relation to to... the "nation" in general.
Literature, thus, plays a huge role in shaping the sense of the nation and becomes a catalyst for the formation of the self-awareness of the intelligentsia, which has taken on the role of preacher of the national idea where it has not been adopted by the state apparatus.
In the hands of the authorities, nationalism becomes a tool for strengthening dynastic monarchies, which begin to lose their legitimacy following the religion that granted them the status of “God’s anointed”, i.e. legitimation “from above”, regardless of the nationality of both the sovereign and the subjects, who could only be imagined as an empire, but not a nation. Nationalism at the end of the 19th century resulted in Russification and pogroms in Russia - however, with regard to “Russification,” the policy of the Russian government was not much different from the political line of other dynastic empires, from Austria-Hungary to Great Britain.
Anderson cites Count Uvarov’s famous formula “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality” in an unusual context for us - as an undertaking that was ahead of its time. The use of the Russian national idea by the Romanov house will truly begin only forty years after Uvarov determined the formula of Russian statehood - in the late eighties of the last century. Ultimately, the national policy of the monarchical empires only led to an exacerbation of contradictions. In Austria-Hungary, for example, German became the official language (although it finally replaced Latin in this capacity only at the end of the last century), which automatically led to the closure of career opportunities for non-German-speaking representatives of the Hungarian aristocracy and caused increased nationalist aspirations in other territories of the empire - just as Russification led to unrest and unrest, inscribed in the national course of history as the revolution of 1905.
The most important innovation of this research is the study of the experiences of former colonies, from America to Southeast Asia. The curious European provincialism, according to Anderson, led to the fact that Old World scholars overlooked the fact that the first nationalists were Creoles.
No matter how high the position of your parents, as soon as you were born in a colony, a career in Spain was closed to you. In turn, a position in the administrative apparatus of the colony dictated a certain geography of your business travel, which became the basis for drawing the state borders of the mainland: after a century or two as an administrative unit, the colonial elite began to identify itself with one or another territory.
Although in the collective imagination the image of a nation is always presented as a horizontal association of equal citizens, it is important to remember that the self-assertion of the sovereignty of nations occurred mainly in relation to monarchies and colonial regimes: the liberation of slaves was not part of the plans of “national liberators” like Simon Bolivar, who once said that "a slave revolt would be a thousand times worse than a Spanish victory."
Benedict Anderson completed this study in 1982 and did not make significant changes to the second edition, clarifying that the collapse of the USSR - a remnant of the times of dynastic monarchies - fits perfectly into the concept he proposed. It’s only a pity that by refusing to revise the book, the researcher isolated himself from the metamorphoses of nations in the era network society and informational capitalism, but this is perhaps the most interesting thing. But, on the other hand, the book contains enough other information for thought, and for those who are at least a little familiar with modern concepts of global transformation processes and modern information systems, it will not be difficult to take another step along the logical chain.
Let's summarize. Anderson's book is a precise, meticulous study, filled with excellent quotations and reminiscences. I highly recommend it to anyone interested. I don’t know where to buy it, but you can read it in the American center of the Library of Foreign Literature, which is located on the Yauza, overlooking the Moscow River (on the third floor to the right).
At the end of the last century, the British scientist Benedict Anderson outlined the original theory of nations. Anderson defines all communities as “imagined” or “constructed” except those consisting of people who know each other. The existence of an imagined community becomes possible only because people hold a mental image of it in their heads.
Nations ikli relatively recently, after the invention of the printing press, i.e. in an era when it became possible to create unified systems of education and dissemination of information that shape every society in a certain way.
From this theory, some people of liberal or leftist views have drawn an amazing conclusion - nations do not exist! All of them are just an artificial construct, which causes continuous troubles for people. Therefore, the national question can and should be ignored, and long live cosmopolitanism!
In general, if we proceed from Anderson’s logic, imaginary communities are a nation, humanity, a class... or, for example, representatives of a certain profession, say doctors. So, it turns out that humanity does not exist?
However, Anderson does not claim that imagined communities do not exist. If they are not there, the very object of his research disappears. Just because a given community is imaginary, it does not in any way follow that it does not exist. For example, the American researcher G. Derlugyan writes about this very well.
(Anderson and his followers emphasize the importance of printing, modern economics and infrastructure in the formation of nations. I think their views cannot be characterized as entirely subjective. Nations could not arise simply because someone wanted - everything is much more complicated).
Let's take a specific example. Kurds are people who, in Syria and Turkey, for a long time did not have the right to study their native language in schools, to have press and literature in their language, and were subject to discrimination when hiring. Even the very existence of the Kurds was denied: in Turkey they were called “mountain Turks.”
Let's assume that the Kurds are an imagined community. But does this make their national movement lose its meaning? Their struggle for the rights of their people is fair and justified, since any restriction on the right of people to speak their own language is a restriction on freedom and the ability to develop. Just as fair was the struggle of Jews in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century for equality, an end to discrimination and for the development of education and literature in their language - the Yiddish language.
It is important that such a struggle - a national struggle - is not necessarily nationalistic (i.e. xenophobic, separatist). Thus, the largest Jewish organization of that era, the Bund, which fought for the rights of Jews, firmly advocated a federal unification with socialist organizations of all nationalities of Russia, for unity in a common struggle - the struggle for democracy and socialism. I do not subscribe to the Bund's version of socialism, but I will note that while they were a national Jewish party, they were in no way a nationalist party.
There is one important addition here: according to the Bundists, a person had to determine his belonging to one or another national group himself. Any nation has the right to its own institutions of self-government, cultural centers, newspapers, schools, national literature, etc., but if you do not want to consider yourself a Kurd (even though you were born into a Kurdish family), this is also your sacred right. The basis of national self-determination here is the independent choice of an adult.
Anyone can consider themselves a cosmopolitan. But ignoring discrimination is wrong. If a person is beaten, put in prison, refused to be hired because of his desire to consider himself a Kurd and speak his native language, and you tell him that “in fact, there are no Kurds in nature,” you are ignoring the real abuse of a real person .
Benedict Anderson
Imagined communities
REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGINS AND SPREAD OF NATIONALISM
Imagined communities as a sociological phenomenon
The title of Benedict Anderson's famous book is on everyone's lips. The formula “imagined communities” has been mastered even by those who have never read the famous work. Not surprising. It seems to fully reveal the content, being polemically pointed against all concepts of nation and nationalism that presuppose some objective, independent of social constructs component of these phenomena. Anderson takes a constructivist point of view. And it may seem as if this formula is truly exhaustive, and then, in fact, “you don’t need to read” - and it is so clear that nationalism owes its emergence not to the awareness of a truly existing community between people, but to a construct, an imagination, something, rather everything, not genuine and erroneous. But not only that, such an attribution of Anderson’s concept to constructivism can also inspire the idea that for sociology itself there is, in principle, nothing new here, because, after all, all communities are, strictly speaking, imaginary. They exist only insofar as the people participating in them perceive themselves precisely as members of such. But what does it mean to “see yourself as a member of a community”? Why communities, and not societies or states? All these questions arise here involuntarily, and trying to understand them, apparently so innocent, we gradually begin to realize the scale of Anderson’s concept and its truly fundamental significance.
In fact, what does it mean, say, for two people to imagine themselves and each other as members of the same social formation (small interaction, relationship, group - we will not dwell on terminological subtleties that are so important in principle, but not relevant now)? In any case, we won't talk about work right away. imagination. Because imagination still presupposes some effort, going beyond the limits of evidence. In the case of the simplest social interaction, almost no such effort is required. It is given as something self-evident, taken for granted for those who simply sees and hears each other. Perhaps the imagination comes into its own when we have to, with some effort, perceive how yours that which disperses, moves away from us in space and time, which ceases directly - in the language of another tradition - to be ours life world?
But why is imagination necessary? Why not habit, not memory, not loyalty, finally, which, as Georg Simmel once astutely noted, as some additional element accompanying the main motives, decisively contributes to the preservation of society? We ask ourselves, therefore, a more complex question: to what extent do social formations, social interactions, have a certain character of self-evidence? Or even more precisely: to what extent does self-evidence, always inherent in social formations, on the one hand, need additional motivational mechanisms for its maintenance, and on the other hand, perhaps produces that very additional tension that we call imagination? And one can easily imagine that this evidence will be more difficult to produce the more people, separated in space and time, will have to share it.
So far we have approached the matter only from one side, namely, from the side imagination. But you can also approach it from the other direction, taking a closer look at what the seemingly innocent term “community” actually means. Of course, we can say that, first of all, this is a technical term. Otherwise, Anderson himself would not have failed to devote at least a few lines to its interpretation. However, there is also something behind the technical side of the matter. We would venture to suggest that this is not a clearly defined, but absolutely undeniable idea of some close community, something that most definitely cannot be described in terms of “society” or “public.” Here we inevitably have to make a small digression. The Russian language, despite all its richness, does not always allow us to convey important nuances of foreign terminology, not created by us, but borrowed by us. For us, the words “communication”, “community”, “society”, “community”, “public” have one and the same root. We are talking about “general” in one form or another. In the European languages in which sociological terminology was created, this looks completely different. “Society” here is derived not from “common”, but from “communication”, which has predominantly the character of a (business) partnership, equal cooperation of independent individuals, and not that deep, intimate, almost organic connection that the Russian word reminds us of. community". "Community" is another matter. This is precisely a community based on commonality, and not on communication. And the “imagined community” is not an imagined possibility of communication, but an imagined commonality, something more intense than any kind of “society”, something more deeply rooted than the historically largely arbitrary boundaries of the “nation-state”, whatever meaning is put into it these borders by nationalists or their opponents.
So, Anderson's book can be immediately placed within the good, classical sociological tradition. But at the same time, it does not lose its originality and depth. To find out its meaning in more detail, let's make one more digression. We have already found out that both the problems of “imagination” and the problems of community as a “community” belong to the area of fundamental interests of sociology. Let us now look, for example, at how “nationality” was defined in Max Weber’s classic work “Economy and Society.” In view of the principled nature of Weber's reasoning, let us quote him at length: “With ‘nationality’, as with ‘people’ in the widespread ‘ethnic’ sense, is associated, at least in a normal way, with a vague idea that at the core of what is perceived as “common”, there must be a common origin, although in reality people who consider themselves members of the same nationality, not only sometimes, but very often, are much further apart in their origin than those who consider themselves to be different and nationalities hostile to each other... The real foundations of belief in the existence of a “national” community and the community action built on it are very different.” Nowadays, Weber continues, in the age of “language battles,” the “linguistic community” is of utmost importance, and in addition to this, it is possible that the basis and criterion of “national feeling” will be the result of corresponding “community action” (i.e., behavior based on on an emotionally felt sense of community, Gemeinschaft"a)- formation of a “political union”, primarily a state. We see here all the advantages and disadvantages of the classical formulation of the question. Weber, of course, sees the “nation” as an “imagined community,” with the German “Gemeinschaft” suggesting a more intense, more emotionally felt community than the English “community.” But the point here is not so much about differences in terms, but about things that are more fundamental. Weber considers the imagination of a nation as given, pointing only to the foundations, but not to the mechanism of formation of such a feeling. He is too - in our opinion today - in a hurry to transfer the matter to the plane of political power formations, primarily states, although he rightly points out the political meaning of national claims as one of the most important points. We cannot be fully satisfied with the classical formulation of the question, because a lot has happened in the twentieth century and even the most sophisticated classical schemes seem too simple and too cozy, more descriptive than explanatory, in any case, meaningfully related to socio-political realities at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.