The Nature of Nationalism

1939 ◽  
Vol 33 (6) ◽  
pp. 1001-1021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Kohn

Nationalism as we understand it is not older than the second half of the eighteenth century. Its first great manifestation was the French Revolution, which gave the new movement an increased dynamic force. Nationalism had, however, become manifest at the end of the eighteenth century almost simultaneously in a number of widely separated European countries. Its time in the evolution of mankind had arrived, and although the French Revolution was one of the most powerful factors in its intensification and spread, it was not its date of birth. Like all historical movements, nationalism has its roots deep in the past. The conditions which made its emergence possible had matured during centuries before they converged at its formation. These political, economic, and intellectual developments took a long time for their growth and proceeded in the various European countries at different pace. It is impossible to grade them according to their importance or to make one dependent upon the other. All are closely interconnected, each reacting upon the other; and although their growth can be traced separately, their effects and consequences cannot be separated otherwise than in the analysis of the scholar; in life, they are indissolubly intertwined.

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 425-444
Author(s):  
ANDREW JAINCHILL

Among the stunning changes in material and intellectual life that transformed eighteenth-century Europe, perhaps none excited as much contemporary consternation as the twin-headed growth of a modern commercial economy and the fiscal–military state. As economies became increasingly based on trade, money, and credit, and states both exploded in size and forged seemingly insoluble ties to the world of finance, intellectuals displayed growing anxiety about just what kind of political, economic, and social order was taking shape before their eyes. Two important new books by Michael Sonenscher and John Shovlin, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution and The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution, tackle these apprehensions and the roles they played in forging French political and economic writings in the second half of the eighteenth century. Both authors also take the further step of demonstrating the impact of the ideas they study on the origins of the French Revolution.


Author(s):  
AVNER BEN-AMOS

The Panthéon and Arc de Triomphe are two neoclassical Parisian monuments that were created in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, respectively, and which have ever since been main sites of French official memory. However, they never had the same share of the stage: when one was prominent, the other was marginal, and vice versa. This chapter delineates the parallel histories of these monuments and analyses the relationship between them, from the French Revolution to the Fifth Republic. Although they are usually ascribed to different political camps – the Pantheon to the left and the Arc de Triomphe to the right – a close reading of the context of various commemorative acts that were performed inside and around these monuments shows that their identity was more complex.


Author(s):  
Marie L. Neudorfl

Tomas Garrigue Masaryk's theories on democracy evolved primarily from an intimate knowledge of the social and political realities of his time, combined with relevant knowledge of the past both of Czech as well as other European nations. They reflected Masaryk's conviction that the ideal of modern democracy was most desirable for a majority of people,as well as his belief that since the French Revolution, the gradual realization of this ideal became possible in many European countries. At the same time, he was aware that the ideal of democracy was especially attractive to underprivileged entities, be they individuals or nations, and that the dominant forces in Central Europe had little sympathy for this ideal. While he did not discount German and Russian expansionist potentials and tendencies as negligible and insignificant for Central Europe, in the context of the Austro-Hungarian Empire his major concern was with the inequitable possibilities for the development of non-ruling nations as compared with those of the Austrian Germans and Magyars who constituted, in their respective domains, less than half of the population.


Author(s):  
Mark Philp

This expansive afterword reflects upon the whole volume’s arguments and contents. The focus is upon the concept of the miscellaneous: an eighteenth-century mode of organization and appreciation of culture, increasingly contested in the early nineteenth century. The author discusses issues of patriotism and audience reception, arguing for a more nuanced appreciation of the dynamics of political loyalism and dissent in Britain in the period following the French Revolution. Questions of identity and identification are seen as crucial, and as being formed at least in part within theatrical spaces. The author considers the difficult political interpretation of affective tropes such as humour and sentimentality, deftly relating them to the key issues of the day, while also paying attention to chronological change, and the need to recover ways of seeing and feeling that have been lost over the past two centuries.


2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 115-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce E. Moon

Prospects for democracy in Iraq should be assessed in light of the historical precedents of nations with comparable political experiences. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was an unusually extreme autocracy, which lasted an unusually long time. Since the end of the nineteenth century, only thirty nations have experienced an autocracy as extreme as Iraq's for a period exceeding two decades. The subsequent political experience of those nations offers a pessimistic forecast for Iraq and similar nations. Only seven of the thirty are now democratic, and only two of them have become established democracies; the democratic experiments in the other five are still in progress. Among the seven, the average time required to transit the path from extreme autocracy to coherent, albeit precarious, democracy has been fifty years, and only two have managed this transition in fewer than twenty-five years. Even this sober assessment is probably too optimistic, because Iraq lacks the structural conditions that theory and evidence indicate have been necessary for successful democratic transitions in the past. Thus, the odds of Iraq achieving democracy in the next quarter century are close to zero, at best about two in thirty, but probably far less.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-103
Author(s):  
Rae Greiner

In “Is There a Problem with Historical Fiction (or with Scott's Redgauntlet)?”—an essay, as it happens, on Sir Walter Scott's great counterfactual novel—Harry E. Shaw calls on literary critics more fully to register “the remarkable variety of things history can do in novels, by short-circuiting the assumption that the representation of history in fiction is really always doing the same sort of work, or should be.” History might be a source of imaginative energy, a sort of launching pad for a book about timeless truths, as in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (“ultimately about individual sacrifice and transcendence, not about the French Revolution in the way in which Scott's Waverley is about the Forty-Five”); or the past might function as “a pastoral,” which is to say, as a field onto which authors project the concerns of their own times, as in Romola (depicting problems “in definitively Victorian terms and then project[ing them] back on to Renaissance Italy,” where they would have been understood quite differently [176–77]). Or history, what Shaw calls “objective history,” might be a work's actual subject (180). An historical novel of this last sort tells it like it was, or tries to. But even that novel is only doing so much, only making a use of history. Georg Lukács is therefore wrong in thinking that “a sufficiently dialectical mode of representation could capture everything” (Shaw 175). No one mode can capture all of even a highly delimited history at once.


2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (5) ◽  
pp. 553-584
Author(s):  
Michał Chaberek

This paper elaborates upon the Catholic Church’s teaching on religious freedom in the period from The French Revolution to The Second Vatican Council. Based on quotations from the original documents, the author presents the evolution of the Church’s position that switched from the initial rejection to the final acceptance of the religious freedom over past two centuries. The fact of this dramatic change begs the question about the continuity of tradition and credibility of the contemporary position of the Church. Based on the document by the International Theological Commission, “Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past,” as well as the teaching of Pope Benedict XVI, the author demonstrates that – in contrast to some contemporary interpretations – the hermeneutics of continuity is possible regarding Church’s teaching on religious freedom.


2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-268
Author(s):  
Staša Babić

Modern academic disciplines of anthropology, history and archaeology are founded in the cultural, social, political context of the 18th and 19th centuries, at the times of the colonial expansion of the West European countries. Although demarcated by the objects of their study ("primitive societies", the past according to written sources, or material evidence), all these disciplines are grounded in the need to distinguish and strengthen the modern identity of the Europeans as opposed to the Others in space and time.


Reviews: The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective, on the Future of History: The Postmodernist Challenge and its Aftermath, Modernism and the Ideology of History: Literature, Politics, and the Past, Postmodernism in History: Fear or Freedom?, Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama, Early Modern Civil Discourses, ‘A moving Rhetoricke’: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England, Society and Culture in Early Modern England, the English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion and Revolution, 1630–1660, An Age of Wonders: Prodigies, Politics and Providence in England, 1657–1727, Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires, and Delectable Goods, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain, the French Revolution and the London Stage, 1789–1805, Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity in Late Victorian Culture, Modernism, Male Friendship and the First World War, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War, Manliness and the Boy's Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History, 1855–1940McCullaghC. Behan, The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective , Routledge, 2004, pp. viii + 212, £18.99 pbBreisachE., On the Future of History: The Postmodernist Challenge and its Aftermath , University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. vii + 236, $16.00 pb.WilliamsL. Blakeney, Modernism and the Ideology of History: Literature, Politics, and the Past , Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 265, £40.SouthgateBeverley, Postmodernism in History: Fear or Freedom? Routledge, 2003, pp. xi + 211, £55, £16.99 pb.BrusterDouglas, Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama , University of Nebraska Press, 2001, pp. 288, £35.50.RichardsJennifer (ed.), Early Modern Civil Discourses , Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 206, $65.00.LuckyjChristina, ‘A moving Rhetoricke‘: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England , Manchester University Press, 2002, pp. viii + 198, £40.CressyDavid, Society and Culture in Early Modern England , Variorum Collected Studies Series, Ashgate, 2003, pp. xii + 344, £57.50.McDowellNicholas, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion and Revolution, 1630–1660 , Clarendon Press, 2003, pp. x + 219, £45.BurnsWilliam E., An Age of Wonders: Prodigies, Politics and Providence in England, 1657–1727 , Manchester University Press, 2002, pp. 218, £45.BergMaxine and EgerElizabeth (eds), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires, and Delectable Goods , Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. xii + 259, 41 plates, £55.SweetRosemary, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain , Hambledon & London, 2004, pp. xxi + 473, £25.TaylorGeorge, The French Revolution and the London Stage, 1789–1805 , Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. x + 263, £45.AttridgeSteve, Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity in Late Victorian Culture , Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 229, £45.ColeSarah, Modernism, Male Friendship and the First World War , Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 297, £40FrantzenAllen J., Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War , University of Chicago Press, 2004, pp. 335, £24.50.BoydKelly, Manliness and the Boy's Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History, 1855–1940 , Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. x + 273, £60.

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-100
Author(s):  
Christopher Parker ◽  
David Watson ◽  
Alan Armstrong ◽  
Ben Lowe ◽  
Carrie Hintz ◽  
...  

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