Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

from Scapegoats

A thorough attempt to understand the rise of nationalism. He attributes the primary causes to be the decline of religion and the rise of capitalism. Decline of religion caused a different conception of time, moving from a sense of divine plan to an unplanned, almost random sense of time. And nati...

from Ndkchk

Coming from the perspective of someone who'd read post-Anderson stuff before this book, I still understood why it was groundbreaking, I think, but it didn't absolutely knock my socks off. Anderson is a great treatment of nationalism and I agreed with a lot of what he had to say; sometimes he was ...

from gregdehler

Nationalism and the nation-state are fairly recent phenomena, dating to the 1500s. How did they come together and how has the idea of nationalism been perpetuated in the modern era? Anderson sees the nation as an imagined political community bound together by such diverse things as common cultura...

from DaveCullen

Extraordinary book on nationalism, and how we create these images of who we are. (I took a graduate course in Cultural Anthropology on ethnicity and nationalism, where we read a tremendous amount of the current academic thinking on related topics, and I found nearly all of it appallingly bad: in ...

from sotirfan

Although Anderson's theory is far from perfect, and on the whole I think it's been improved upon, this gets five stars for originality.