Patriotism

Abstract

Patriotism is intuitively understood as love of one's forefathers' symbolic community, usually expressed as emotional and culturally legitimized attachment to a person's homeland (location, language, history, forefathers, tradition, art, culture, religion). This patriotically loved homeland can be (and often is) either a contested or an imagined community—or both. President Theodore Roosevelt called patriotism standing by one's country, as opposed to obeying an elected official, and the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert said that it should be the last of the emotional bonds that a rebelling individual must break. Patriotism has been hotly defended as a profoundly felt and noble emotional attachment to a broader community, and equally hotly attacked as an instrumental ideology of a nation‐state. Patriotism has contributed both to the emotional mobilization of individuals in the service of a broader community and to the dramatic exclusion of others from the solidarity with mankind.