![]() ![]() Anderson contends that with the rise of “print capitalism”, innovations such as the newspaper and the novel identified (or “imagined”) and addressed new “national” communities. These prevailed (if only amongst elites) throughout the states and regions encompassed within the religious community. ![]() Once upon a time, according to Anderson, there was an age of religious imagined communities, in which meaning depended upon the “non-arbitrariness of the sign” and religious texts were consequently written in privileged and “untranslatable” languages. Yet whilst one may suspect that the most influential contributor to the analysis of nationalism will turn out to be Anderson himself, Imagined Communities is a profoundly inadequate book and there is already a whiff of rot around many of its conclusions. Anderson launches his thesis with the observation that “plausible theory” about nationalism is “conspicuously meagre,” and that no theorist of the magnitude of Marx, Freud, or Darwin has yet addressed the questions raised by the nation. ![]() ![]() Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) is often depicted as a mountain of a book which subjected nationalism to a degree of analysis which it had hitherto been denied. ![]()
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