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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Imagined Communities, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Nation as Imagined Community
Language, Publishing, and Identity
Centralization, Technology, and Power
Piracy and the Uses of History
Summary
Analysis
Anderson begins by describing the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and China between December 1978 and March 1979, which he considers significant because they involve independent Marxist governments invading each other. China invaded Vietnam, which had just invaded Cambodia. Although they have the same goals, Marxist countries are not necessarily on the same side of conflicts because “since World War II every successful revolution has defined itself in national terms”—and, indeed, specifically nationalist ones. This tendency shows no signs of slowing: the concept of the nation is now a “universally legitimate [political] value.” But there is little agreement about what “nation, nationality, [and] nationalism” actually mean and no good theory about where they come from. Because it is “an uncomfortable anomaly for Marxist theory,” Marxists usually ignore the problem of individual nations—and yet Marx wrote that “the proletariat of each country must first settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.”
Although it might seem abrupt or out-of-context on first glance, Anderson’s opening example allows him to make a crucial point about nationalism: it is simply unlike other political ideologies. It is more powerful and seems to be omnipresent, even in Marxist nations that usually hope to collaboratively transform the international economy. For those born since this book’s publication, who never lived through the wave of post-World War II national independence movements in the Global South, it is even harder to see the nation as a contingent form than it was in Anderson’s day—in the 21st century, it is difficult to conceive of any country as anything but a nation to which citizens feel loyalty and inherent connection. So Anderson’s first move is critical for contemporary readers, who can now see that their understanding of what a country is relies on the unanalyzed assumption that the nation is a normal, natural, and inevitable form of political organization. Instead of giving in to that same assumption, Anderson wants to ask why nations have become so popular as to be the default: what made them possible, and what makes them so powerful?
Themes
Anderson’s goal in Imagined Communities is “to offer some tentative suggestions for a more satisfactory interpretation of the ‘anomaly’ of nationalism.” He thinks that the concept needs a “Copernican” rethinking, and that “nation-ness [… and] nationalism are cultural artefacts” with a specific history rooted in the late 18th century, and which are so powerful in part because of the emotions they arouse in people.
Anderson defines the purpose of his book: he wants to look at the nation as a cultural form, one that arose because of particular historical events and transformations. When he calls nationalism an “anomaly,” he is referring to its dominance, and the way most other scholars have no good explanation for why nationalism is so powerful (so they simply consider its rise “anomalous”). And Anderson references Copernicus (the astronomer who first argued that the Sun, not the Earth, was at the center of the universe) in order to show how his own thinking is similarly revolutionary (and controversial), forcing people to totally change their perspective about what kind of thing a nation actually is.
Themes
Under the heading “Concepts and Definitions,” Anderson first looks at “three paradoxes” inherent to defining the nation. First: nations are a new phenomenon to historians, but an old one according to nationalists themselves. Secondly: the nation is both a universal concept—in the sense that “everyone can, should, will ‘have’ a nationality”—and an “irremediabl[y] particular[]” one, in the sense that there is no fundamental rule for what it means to have one nationality and not another. Thirdly: nationalism is powerful as an emotional and political concept, but it is logically and philosophically absurd—because of this, it has no “grand thinkers” and most serious academics look down on it as meaningless or even insane. One of these academics’ errors is to assume that all nationalism is the same—Anderson thinks it is a diverse group of phenomena, more like “‘kinship’ and ‘religion’” than like “‘liberalism’ or ‘fascism.’”
Themes
Anderson presents his “definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” The community “is imagined because the members […] will never know most of their fellow-members,” but they still consider those invisible fellows part of their own same group. Being imagined does not make communities false—any community bigger than a village must be imagined. What matters is how people imagine their communities, whether as extensions of kin, as members of the same class, or, of course, as fellow citizens.
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Next, Anderson explains, no nation claims to encompass everyone, and so all nations are limited and recognize their borders. Moreover, nations consider themselves sovereign because, historically, they arose when political power replaced the imagined power of God. And finally, citizens imagine themselves as sharing “a deep, horizontal comradeship”—as being a fraternal community—even when nations themselves are unequal. To close his Introduction, Anderson asks the provocative question at the center of his investigation: how does nationalism, which is only 200 years old, “generate such colossal sacrifices?”
Themes
