Thinking the Nation

Abstract

Abstract In “Thinking the Nation,” Max Bergholz offers a reappraisal of Benedict Anderson’s seminal 1983 book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. He does so through the telling of a set of interconnected stories. The first is the story of Anderson himself—who he was as a scholar and how the world in which he lived shaped his unique approach to nationalism. The second is the story of the reaction to his book in the immediate aftermath of its publication, and the subsequent ways in which historians derived inspiration from this work. The third and final story concerns the lasting contribution of Imagined Communities. The telling of these stories suggests that the continuing relevance of Anderson’s book seems to be not its specific historical explanation of the origin and spread of nationalism, but rather how it reorients its readers’ analytical gaze away from focusing largely on ideology, elites, and socioeconomic change, and toward cognitive processes of nationalism. In so doing, Anderson provides those seeking to tell histories of nationalism with a new conceptual vocabulary to excavate and explain human agency, and specifically the role of the imagination, in the making of nationalism into a real political force.