Movements Books

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, New Edition

Benedict Anderson

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A new edition of the definitive book on nationalism—over a quarter of a million copies sold worldwide.

Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson's brilliant book on nationalism, forged a new field of study when it first appeared in 1983. Since then it has sold over a quarter of a million copies and is widely considered the most important book on the subject. In this greatly anticipated revised edition, Anderson updates and elaborates on the core question: what makes people live, die and kill in the name of nations? He shows how an originary nationalism born in the Americas was adopted by popular movements in Europe, by imperialist powers, and by the anti-imperialist resistances in Asia and Africa, and explores the way communities were created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism and printing, and the birth of vernacular languages-of-state. Anderson revisits these fundamental ideas, showing how their relevance has been tested by the events of the past two decades.

Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity

Samuel P. Huntington

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Total reviews: 57 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

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In his seminal work The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntington argued provocatively and presciently that with the end of the cold war, "civilizations" were replacing ideologies as the new fault lines in international politics.

Now in his controversial new work, Who Are We?, Huntington focuses on an identity crisis closer to home as he examines the impact other civilizations and their values are having on our own country.

America was founded by British settlers who brought with them a distinct culture, says Huntington, including the English language, Protestant values, individualism, religious commitment, and respect for law. The waves of immigrants that later came to the United States gradually accepted these values and assimilated into America's Anglo-Protestant culture. More recently, however, our national identity has been eroded by the problems of assimilating massive numbers of primarily Hispanic immigrants and challenged by issues such as bilingualism, multiculturalism, the devaluation of citizenship, and the "denationalization" of American elites.

September 11 brought a revival of American patriotism and a renewal of American identity, but already there are signs that this revival is fading. Huntington argues the need for us to reassert the core values that make us Americans. Timely and thought-provoking, Who Are We? is an important book that is certain to shape our national conversation about who we are.

Plato: The Republic (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)

Plato

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Total reviews: 90 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A classic approach.... 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This review is of ISBN-10: 0-87220-136-8, Plato * Republic, translated by G.M.A. Grube and revised by C.D.C. Reeve.

I somehow made it through high school and college learning about Plato and Socrates without reading any full-length works. That's changing this spring as I'm taking a discussion-based class on Plato's Republic. This text was recommended by our instructor, and I can see why. The translation is not cumbersome by striving for sheer literalness, but instead seeks to capture the flavor of the discussions Socrates had with others that Plato as a youth observed.

Footnotes are provided to explain the occasional word that has a different classical than contemporary meaning -- and yet you can read each of the 10 books (chapters) that comprise this volume first without attending to the footnotes, then re-reading the books along with their footnotes.

After having seen what gifted vs. pedestrian translations can do to the vigor and beauty of classic works (Beowulf, the Epic of Gilgamesh and The Odyssey come to mind), I can understand why Grube's translation is highly regarded. According to the scholar who performed the revision, no such work was called for until 20 years after publication (I am guessing to introduce more current English idiom and turn of phrase). The person who conducted the revision was encouraged to do so by the translator's family, which speaks to continuity.

Given its impact on Western philosophy and thought, the book may at first seem slender to you. Keep in mind that much of it is in the form of dialog -- presented for the most part without space-consuming "I said"s and "he said"s (clarity is kept by paragraph indents. The brief italicized introductions help ensure ready comprehension without spoonfeeding any philosophy.

The index and bibliography also are clear, well-presented and helpful. Note that the latter is toward the front of the book.

I applaud the price point; however, I think purchasers would have been better served by paying a buck more for better-quality paper stock. This is a book that cries out to be kept on one's bookshelf well past the completion of a particular class or a once-over reading. Unfortunately, the paper stock already suffers from read-through, even before being subjected to the pencil/pen jottings that many readers will be compelled to make. Those of you who use a highlighter, I'd advise to try with caution because the paper seems pretty absorbent.

Editorial Review:

This is a completely new translation of one of the great works of Western political thought. In addition to Tom Griffith's vivid, dignified and accurate rendition of Plato's text, this edition is suitable for students at all levels. It contains an introduction that assesses the cultural background to the Republic, its place within political philosophy, and its general argument; succinct notes in the text; an analytical summary of content; a full glossary of proper names; a chronology of important events; and a guide to further reading.

Utopia (Norton Critical Editions)

Thomas More

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Literary Garden of Eden 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 12 people found this review helpful.

This was required reading for a graduate course in the Humanities. A great story and important historical work in literature. History of Utopia begins with Thomas Moore's book in 1516 he coins the phrase Utopia. Ideal societies have been around before like Garden of Eden, city on a hill. For Moore the idea of utopia was intended to be an ironic one. One of the problems you are faced with when reading his utopia is that you cannot really tell when he is serious and when he is being satirical. He writes on the border of the lyrical and satirical, you cannot really tell when he is trying to be funny or serious. The other problem is the Thomas Moore who speaks to us in the story is not the Thomas Moore who actually lived. He wrote himself into a character. He is intending it to be ironic. Utopia is Greek for "Good Place, and "no place." He is punning an ironic two-sided term he clearly intended irony when he wrote this text, which provided the foundation for a new genre for social representation. Now, according to Lewis Mumford, who wrote the book "The Story of Utopia" 1922, one of the first comprehensive studies of Utopian representation in Western Civilization, the word Utopia signifies human folly or human hope, the vain hope of perfection. The vain hope of remaking our own imperfect natures, so that we can establish the blissful harmonious communal life. On one hand, he is entirely playful and paradoxical. Thomas Moore could be bigoted (against Protestants), small minded, not a saint as portrayed. Among all the things, he was a great wit, great sense of humor. On the other hand, it seems that Utopia could be a reflection of his devout Catholicism. He has been represented as a Roman Catholic martyr. In which case you want to take him seriously, altering the model of menses a set of new aims for moral and social objectives. Of course, Moore's death is important to consider in this life he is glorified in the film, "A Man for All Seasons." He was a Renaissance man, he was a lawyer, statesman, Christian humanist a classical scholar an advocate for women's rights he was also Henry 8's Lord Chancellor.

In 1514, he was sent to Flanders to negotiate a wool treaty and while there, he meets and befriends Peter Giles who is the town clerk of Antwerp, and allegedly tells him "It is my intention to write a book about the way a country should be governed according to my principals. But, it is dangerous to write about those things in England while king Henry the 8 wrath is so easily encouraged, I could perhaps write that I met an old sailor in your house and introduce that man as a globetrotter, who had traveled all over the world and had seen places that we don't even know the existence of. What he had seen there was so unbelievable as compared to the life in Europe that the islands the countries he had visited would seem to belong to another world. Therefore, the title of my book will be "Utopia" a word that means "no where." That sailor will have traveled all over Europe and lived sometime in France Germany, and England. That is why he could compare the ideal community he got acquainted with in Utopia, to the ones he got to know in our countries, and that way I would keep myself out of the matter." After he returned to London, he wrote the fist chapter. Now, what would that tell us about the Utopian imagination, the creation the public presentation of a Utopia? Moore was beheaded in 1535; he would not recognize marriage to Ann Boleyn as lawful to the church. In 1534, Henry becomes head of the church, but Moore remains loyal to pope. In 1935, Moore is canonized. We have to take Moore's religion very seriously. Moore thought Protestants should be burned, he was greedy and proud, not a perfect man. Yet he had this wish for a Utopia.

All utopian fictional ideas of mythic proportion occupy kind of distant realm of the afterlife, myth, faith that unite all of these elements in a matter that is so rich and potentially illuminating and invaluable for scholars students that are interested in working across boundaries and in understanding and exploring the value of working across boundaries. Societies woven and inhabited by populations some of them very select, the exceptionally virtuous or blessed in some cases getting there requires a metaphysical transformation, in other cases it requires a harrowing journey that has to be understood as some ways metaphorical and some ways literal. There is always a sense that to reach Utopia requires a transformation of the human self how do we get away from our flaws, how do we get away from our seemingly inevitable and invariable nature of our being.

These places offer anecdotes to painful and tragic realities to human existence. They are historical in nature you cannot understand any utopia, whether it is represented in a sci-fi movie, or novel or feminist utopia; they must be placed in some kind of a historical context. A fascinating proposition to explore, all utopias all acts of the utopian imagination strike us as constituting in one manner or another statements, critiques or observations about the world we occupy at that given moment. Therefore, any utopia is a reflection and study of the world that we are occupying at that given moment and what we wish it were rather than what it is at that moment. Therefore, utopia is a deeply and inescapably a historical manner organizing the human imagination. I don't think any utopia works in a fixed and eternal way because for every generation and every age they have to imagine their own utopia. Of course utopian experiments were not just talking about fiction or wishing it were so, were talking about actual Soviet Revolution of 1917, were looking at movements looking to bring about radical profound social and political changes that are so deeply utopian in nature. So utopians are aesthetic, philosophical, sociological, they are imagined and fictional, but you can look a history and find attempts most of which failed to bring about these kind of communities that Emerson, Thoreau, these 19th century American egalitarian attempts to create the ideal agrarian society. 1960 hippies reawakening movement of going back to the natural and living off the land. Even today's green and ecological revolution you find in them utopian aspects that resonate so richly with the history of envisioning the ideal society, an ideal place.

Oscar Wilde once said "A map of the world that does not include Utopia, is not even worth glancing at for it leaves out the one country at which humanity has always landed, and when humanity lands there it looks out sees a better country set sail. Progress is the realization of utopias." So when we talk about utopias we are not only talking about a desire or a wish or a longing for perfection, we are talking about an order of progress, a way in which we intend to advance, a way in which we envision or imagine improvement and progress. A progress narrative, psychoanalysis is utopian. Freud's theory of psychoanalysis is a scientific expression of the utopian imagination. The idea that where id was, the ego shall be. The idea of a talking story, the idea that we can master our neurosis that we can harness them that we can move from unconscious behavior to conscious behavior. Marxism and all the grand philosophies of the 19th and 20th centuries are grand utopian narratives. Feminism is a grand utopian narrative in and of itself.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in history, psychology, philosophy, and literature.

Nationalism (Oxford Readers)

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Achieving prevalence as an ideology in the political and social ferment of late 18th-century Europe and America, nationalism first found expression during the course of such historical upheavals as the American and French Revolutions. Its founders and early sponsors--Rousseau, Herder, Fichte, Korais, and Mazzini--looked to nationalism as the manifestation of modern humanity's most essential aspirations: autonomy, unity, identity. Born of notions regarding popular freedom and sovereignty that had been gathering momentum for generations, it conjured up images of a modernizing West at once hungry for change and yearning for a return to age-old concepts of fraternity and ancient heritage. Since that time nationalism, having taken on countless different dimensions, remains a vital and dynamic force for change--whether for good or otherwise.
Despite only recently becoming the subject of scholarly debate, nationalism has been the focus of a truly prodigious amount of writing. This important Oxford Reader makes the topic more accessible by offering a broad, authoritative treatment of the key contributions to the subject, while giving unprecedented depth to recent debates and issues. Edited by two of the field's most influential scholars, the readings are representative of the vast array of experience and scholarship that have shaped the concept of nationalism for over two centuries. From Ernest Renan's What is a Nation?, written in the 1880s, to the more current views of the 1990s, Nationalism gathers under one cover an impressive array of writing on everything from imagined communities to ethno-regional movements. In no other volume will students of politics, history, sociology, anthropology, international relations, and cultural studies have access to such a definitive appraisal of one of the modern world's most influential--and explosive--ideas.

Gandhi: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Bhikhu Parekh

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Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) was one of the few men in history to fight simultaneously on moral, religious, political, social, economic, and cultural fronts. During his time as a lawyer in South Africa he developed his strategy of non-violence: the idea of opposing unjust laws by non-violent protest. He led the Indian National Congress party in three major campaigns against British rule, each culminating in his arrest.
In Gandhi, a short introduction to Gandhi's life and thought, Bhikhu Parekh outlines both Gandhi's major philosophical insights and the limitations of his thought. Written with extensive access to Gandhi's writings in Indian languages to which most commentators have little or no access, Parekh looks at Gandhi's cosmocentric anthropology, his spiritual view of politics, and his theories of oppression, non-violent action, and active citizenship. He also considers how the success of Gandhi's principles were limited by his lack of coherent theories of evil, and of state and power. Gandhi's view of man as ascetic allows no room for expressions of the cultural, artistic, or intellectual. Furthermore, he was so hostile to modern civilization that he was unable to appreciate its complex dialectic or offer a meaningful narrative.
Nevertheless, Gandhi's life and thought had an enormous impact on the Indian nation, and he continues to be widely revered--known before and after his assassination as Mahatma, the Great Soul.

Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More: Utopia / Francis Bacon: New Atlantis / Henry Neville: The Isle of Pines (Oxford World's Classics)

Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Henry Neville

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With the publication of Utopia (1516), Thomas More provided a scathing analysis of the shortcomings of his own society, a realistic suggestion for an alternative mode of social organization, and a satire on unrealistic idealism. Enormously influential, it remains a challenging as well as a playful text. This edition reprints Ralph Robinson's 1556 translation from More's original Latin together with letters and illustrations that accompanied early editions of Utopia.
This edition also includes two other, hitherto less accessible, utopian narratives. New Atlantis (1627) offers a fictional illustration of Francis Bacon's visionary ideal of the role that science should play in the modern society. Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines (1668), a precursor of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, engages with some of the sexual, racial, and colonialist anxieties of the end of the early modern period. Bringing together these three New World texts, and situating them in a wider Renaissance context, this edition--which includes letters, maps, and alphabets that accompanied early editions--illustrates the diversity of the early modern utopian imagination, as well as the different purposes to which it could be put.

Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939

Albert Hourani

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The genesis of Arab modern thought 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

This book is an extensive version of Hisham Sharabi's Arab Intellectuals. It highlights the reaction of the Arab intellectual circles to the expanding European influence that had reached the Arab world by the early 19th century.
Hourani, however, presents a more thorough description of the life and thought of the most prominent Arab thinkers of the time including Jamaluddine Al-Afghani and Muhammad Abdo among others as opposed to Sharabi's brief account on the life and works of these people.
Despite the academic nature of this work, grasping what's in it is easy and not at all complicated. Hourani's narration is well-researched and elegant while his translation of the original texts is also remarkable. The end result is an accurate account that invites the admiration of the readers.
This book is so much needed for those who are interested to understand the evolution of Arab thought over the past two centuries and how this evolution was interrupted with the discovery of oil and the advent of imperialism.

Editorial Review:

Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age is the most comprehensive study of the modernizing trend of political and social thought in the Arab Middle East. Albert Hourani studies the way in which ideas about politics and society changed during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, in response to the expanding influence of Europe. His main attention is given to the movement of ideas in Egypt and Lebanon. He shows how two streams of thought, the one aiming to restate the social principles of Islam, and the other to justify the separation of religion from politics, flowed into each other to create the Egyptian and Arab nationalisms of the present century. The last chapter of the book surveys the main tendencies of thought in the post-war years. Since its publication in 1962, this book has been regarded as a modern classic of interpretation. It was reissued by the Cambridge University Press in 1983 and has subsequently sold over 8000 copies.

From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict

Jack L. Snyder

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A trenchant analysis of the attempts to mediate the transition from oppression to freedom, and a warning of the potentially disastrous challenges that face burgeoning democracies. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many proclaimed the triumph of liberal democracy as they watched democratization sweep through formerly authoritarian countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and East Asia. Yet the 1990s turned out to be a decade marked by chronic nationalist conflict, and the sense of democratic triumph turned to frustration. In From Voting to Violence, Jack Snyder shows how democratization can actually exacerbate nationalist fervor and ethnic conflict if the conditions permitting a successful transition are not in place. Arguing that international organizations can cause conflict rather than averting it in their rush to establish democratic governments and punish outgoing leaders, he prescribes policies that will make transitions less dangerous and allow fledgling democracies to flourish. In the light of such tragic examples as Weimar Germany and contemporary Bosnia--each drawn into a spiral of ethnic hatred and civil war by political leaders manipulating nationalist sentiments--From Voting to Violence questions the sometimes rash optimism of liberal democracy that would rush to democracy at the cost of freedom.

Nations, States, and Violence

David D. Laitin

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Nations, States, and Violence presents a revisionist view of the sources of nationalism, the relationship of the nation to culture, and the implications of nationalism and cultural heterogeneity for the future of the nation-state. It accepts the now-standard view that national identities are not inherited traits but constructed communities in order to serve political ends. But the resulting national identities do not emerge from some metaphorical plebiscite as had been suggested by some; rather they result from efforts by people to coordinate their identities with people who share at least some cultural traits with them. Coordination leads to powerful social and cultural ties that are hard to unravel, and this explains the persistence of national identities.
Understood as the result of coordination dynamics, the implications of national homogeneity and heterogeneity are explored. The book shows that national heterogeneity is not, as it is sometimes accused of being, a source of hatred and violence. Nonetheless, there are advantages to homogeneity for the production of public goods and economic growth. Whatever the positive implications of homogeneity, the book shows that in the current world, classic nation-states are defunct. Heterogeneity is proliferating not only due to migration but also because small groups in many states once thought to be homogeneous are coordinating to demand national recognition. With the prohibitive costs of eliminating cultural heterogeneity, citizens and leaders need to learn how best to manage, or even take advantage of, national diversity within their countries. Management of diversity demands that we understand the coordination aspects of national heterogeneity, a perspective that this book provides.
In addition to providing a powerful theory of coordination and cultural diversity, the book provides a host of engaging vignettes of Somalia, Spain, Estonia, and Nigeria, where the author has conducted original field research. The result is a book where theory is combined with interpretations of current issues on nationalism, economic growth, and ethnic violence.