Imagined Communities Themes

Benedict Anderson’s most enduring scholarly contribution remains the succinct but revolutionary definition of the nation he offers in the introduction to Imagined Communities: a nation is “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” This definition is radical because it presents a transformed understanding of the kind of thing a nation is—Anderson claims that it is an idea that binds people, not a natural political unit. At the same…

As he traces the rise of the nation-state throughout history, Anderson continually returns to language, literacy, and publishing technology as key factors that allowed people to imagine themselves as members of communities and then claim political identities and rights based on those communities. He shows how the spread of common languages allowed people to see their shared interests and, eventually, organize revolutions. And he concludes that, because dialect can stand in for identity and publishing…

Anderson emphasizes that nationalism has taken diverse forms as a result of differences in culture, historical changes in technology and markets, and perhaps most of all, the availability of historical precedent. Anderson highlights this last factor, which he calls “piracy,” because it has been relatively underemphasized in scholarly work on nationalism: after nationalism’s birth in the Americas, the rest of the world followed suit in converting monarchies and colonies to nations, but they envisioned what…