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.’”
Anderson’s three paradoxes allow him to emphasize his two principal arguments about the nation. First, it is not concrete: one’s citizenship is nowhere written in one’s DNA, the world did not come with preestablished borders, and what nation a person or slice of territory belongs to is, in many ways, arbitrary. So the nation is an idea, not a thing. And secondly, it is not an intellectual idea, but an emotional one—the paradoxes show that the nation is, at heart, quite illogical. Most academics are wrong to see the first half but not the second: they see that nations are a fiction but do not understand why they are so powerful. So Anderson’s “Copernican” shift is showing that nations are cultural and emotional phenomena, not concrete or intellectual ones.
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.
Having explained his motivations for rethinking nationalism and the primary differences between his theory and others, Anderson now explicitly outlines his definition. Although his definition has four parts (imagination, community, limits, and sovereignty), his book largely focuses on the process of imagining the community—both the factors that make the community possible as a thinkable unit and the consequences of defining one’s national community in various ways. Here, he is careful to explain that he does not contrast “imagined” with “real”—rather, it would be more accurate to say he contrasts “imagined” with “natural” or “inherent.” In other words, Anderson is saying that the nation is a social and cultural product, not one inscribed in nature or biology (even if many nationalists want to make that seem like the case). So Anderson’s insight that nations are created through a process of collective imagination is not, as many of his critics think, a way of declaring them “false”—it is just a description of where they come from.
Themes
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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?”
While the ideas of limited territory and sovereign power are conventionally associated with nations—to the point that many maintain that these two characteristics alone define the nation—Anderson shows how the concept of community among citizens is intimately tied to the nation’s mode of sovereignty: in nationalism, it is supposed to be the people themselves who are sovereign over themselves, their relations, and their territory. In other words, the sovereignty of nations is not continuous with the sovereignty of kings and God: rather, its logic fundamentally relies on the very concept of the community.
Themes
