Power, Violence and the State: SC3038C - Essay Example

For example, the nation is “limited” because it is never imagined as terminating at the same time as mankind, and it is imagined as “sovereign” because it emerged at a time when the divine right of monarchs as the highest authority was being replaced by people as a result of the processes of the Enlightenment and the French revolution. The nation is conceived as a community because it is considered as the embodiment of a strong and equal comradeship, in spite of the inequality and exploitation that may be prevalent within (Baracco, 2005: 21).

This paper proposes to outline Benedict Anderson’s argument in his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1991). The author’s belief in the concept of “imagined communities” and his views on the origin and spread of nationalism will be evaluated; further, it will be determined whether in his creation of imagined national identities, he misses out on the role of national narratives. Anderson’s (1991: 6) definition of nation given above is forcefully supported by Gellner (1964: 168) who states that “nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness, it invents nations where they do not exist”.

The main weakness in Gellner’s statement is that in his keenness to show that nationalism functions as a false concept, he attributes fabrication and falsity to the concept, whereas Anderson’s approach towards nationalism was of invention, imagining and creation. Hence, Gellner’s implication that true communities exist which correlate with nations, differs from Anderson’s claim of all communities being created by the imagination. Possibly, the most cited recent theory of nationalism is Anderson’s view of nationalism as an imagined collective identity in his book on Imagined Communities based on Southeast Asian politics, as well as Gellner’s (1964) studies on the