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.