Previous
Chapter 2
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 opens this chapter by arguing that the rise of printing supported the formation of “horizontal-secular, transverse-time” national communities because of capitalism. Hundreds of millions of books were printed in the 1500s, which brought reading to the masses and turned publishing into a huge, profitable business that hinged, of course, on selling as many books as possible. After cornering the proportionally small Latin-language market, therefore, book-sellers began publishing in the vernacular. This trend was bolstered by three factors: the academization of Latin (which grew closer to the Roman standard and further from the Catholic Church); Martin Luther and other Protestants’ use of print to fight a “religious propaganda war” and create new readers in the vernacular language; and governments’ turn to local “administrative vernaculars” that were more convenient to use than Latin. While none of these three was alone enough to “dethrone” Latin, they all made significant impacts.
Now, Anderson turns to the way that novels and newspapers’ modern representations of time and community were able to spread and influence the thinking of those they reached. The profit motive was crucial, because it incentivized those in possession of printing technology to seek out a wide audience and promote literacy to the masses. In a sense, books had to become marketable commodities before they could change the world. So Anderson sees the conjunction of print technology and capitalist market structures as crucial, which is why he and those influenced by his work often talk about “print-capitalism” as a crucial figure in the rise of nationalism. Again, however, Anderson emphasizes that change resulted from the combination of various, layered causes, rather than singular developments or actions.
Themes
Human language is inevitably diverse, and the whole world will never speak the same language. But print helped consolidate diverse dialects into common standardized versions of languages, “‘assembl[ing]’ related vernaculars” through mechanical reproduction and dissemination. These first standardized vernaculars, which lay somewhere between spoken dialects and Latin on a spectrum of formality, showed speakers that they shared a language with thousands or millions of other people. Unlike books hand-copied by scribes, printed books did not evolve over time, and this made language itself start changing less quickly throughout the centuries. And dialects closer to the printed vernacular gained prestige, while those further from it came to be seen as inferior.
Despite vernacularizing the literary world, publishers did not necessarily publish in the same dialects common people spoke—in fact, that would have made their products even less accessible to large parts of their audiences. So at the same time as print diminished the prestige of old-school sacred languages of Latin, it also put new prestige languages in their place, choosing certain potentially widely comprehensible forms of the vernacular in order to allow as many people as possible to read published works. This process of simultaneous centralization and decentralization—selecting and enforcing rigid linguistic norms in order to make language as widely accessible as possible—foreshadows and parallels the way nationalist policies often have to centralize and expand authority in order to ostensibly serve the people, controlling everything in the name of everyone.
Themes
Although the creation of prestige through print was always unintentional at first, “once ‘there,’” this process became an easy tool for governments seeking to repress minorities and impose a sense of uniform national consciousness. Now, every state has a national language, but this does not mean that each state has its own language that all of its people speak—rather, many countries share the same national languages, and many national languages are scarcely spoken or understood by their countries’ common people. The Americas saw this happen first, for they contained the first true nation-states.
Crucially, although the spread of vernacular languages might have initially seemed like an unconditional good, Anderson emphasizes that actors with opposite intentions also use it to create the appearance of unity by erasing difference. He later calls this kind of policy “official nationalism” and he frequently notes that nationalism constantly runs the risk of denying the rights and humanity of those it deems to be “outside” the nation or less-than-“ideal” citizens. So he implies that vernacularization, like so many other political and cultural tools available to the state, can be used for good or evil depending on the context.
Themes
