1
Tazenbach: In years to come, you say, life on earth be mar- Defmitions
vellous, beautiful. That's true. But to take Part in that now, even
from afar, one must prepare, one must work - . yes,one
must work. Perhaps you think - this German is getting Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the
over-excited.~~t on my word of honour, I'm Russian. I cannot even political and the national unit should be congruent.
speak German. My father is Orthodox - - Nationalismas a sentiment, or as a movement, can best be defined /
in terms of this principle. Nationalist sentimentis the feelingof anger
Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters
aroused by the violationof the principle, or thefeeling of satisfaction
aroused by its fulfient. A nationalist m o v m t is one acmated by a
politikn rids byla vzak ,spire me'nt? smBlejzifomo~kultury- sentiment of this kind.
(ourpolitics however was a rather less daring form of culture.) There is a variety of ways in which the nationalist principlecan be
J. SlgdeEek, OsmajedesLit$ ('68), Index, K o ~ ~ Y1 9 8 0 ~ violated. The political boundaryof a given state can fail to includeall
(wri=en under this pen name by Petr Pithart, sub- themembersof the appropriate nation; or it can include them all but
sequentlyprime minister of the Czech lands, and alsoincludesome foreigners; or it canfail in both these ways at once,
previously circulated in samizdat in Prague). not incorporating all the nationals and yet also including some nonnationals.
Or again, a nation may live, unmixed with foreigners, in a
ournationaliry is like our relations to women: too implicated in Our multiplicity of states, SO that no single state can claim to be the
national one.
moral nature to be changed honourably, and too accidental be
But there is one particular form of the violation of the nationalist
worth changing. principle to which nationalist sentiment is quite particularly sensiGeorge
Santayana tive: if the rulers of the political unit belong to a nation other than
that of the majority of the ruled, this, for nationalists, constitutes a
quite outstandingly intolerable breech of political propriety. This
can occur either through the incorporation of the national territory
in a larger empire, or by the local domination of an alien group.
In brief, nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which
requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones,
and, in parricular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state - a
contingency already formallyexcludedby the principlein its general
formulation- should not separate the power-holdersfrom the rest.
The nationalist principle can be asserted in an ethical, 'universdistic'
spirit. There could be, and on occasion there have been,
nationalists-in-the-abstract,unbiassedinfavourofanyspecialnationality
of their own, and generously preaching the docvine for all
nationsalike: let all nations have their own politicalroofs, and let all
2 DEFINITIONS
of them also refrain from including non-nationals under it. There is
no formal contradiction in asserting such non-egoistic nationalism.
As a doctrineit can be supported by some good arguments, such as
the desirability of preserving cultural diversity, of a pluralistic international
political system, and of the diminution of internal strains
within states.
In fact, however, nationalism has often not been so sweetly
reasonable, nor so rationally symmetrical. It may be that, as
Immanuel Kant believed, partiality, the tendency to make exceptions
on one's own behalf or one's own case, is the central human
weakness from which all others flow; and that it infects national
sentiment as it does all else, engendering what the Italians under
Mussolinicalled the sacro egoismo of nationalism. It may also be that
the political effectiveness of national sentiment would be much
impaired if nationalists had as fine a sensibility to the wrongs committed
by their nation as they have to those committed against it.
But over and above these considerations there are others, tied to
the specificnature of the world we happen to live in, which militate
against any impartial, general, sweetly reasonable nationalism. To
put it in the simplest possible terms: there is a very large number of
potential nations on earth. Our planet also contains room for a
certain number of independent or autonomous political units. On
any reasonablecalculation, the former number (of potential nations)
is probably much, much larger than that of possible viable states. If
this argument or calculation is correct, not all nationalisms can be
satisfied, at any rate at the same time. The satisfactionof somespells
thefrustration of others. This argument is further and immeasurably
strengthened by the fact that very many of the potential nations of
this world live, or u n d recently havelived, not in compactterritorial
units but internnixedwith each other in complex patterns. It follows
that a territorial political unit can only become ethnically homogeneous,
in such cases, if it either kills, or expels, or assimilates all
non-nationals. Their unwillingnessto suffersuchfatesmay make the
peaceful implementation of the nationalist principle difficult.
These definitions must, of course, like most definitions, be
applied with common sense. The nationalist principle, as defined, is
not violated by the presence of small numbers of residentforeigners,
or even by the presence of the occasional foreigner in, say, a national
rulingfamily. Just how many residentforeignersor foreignmembers
of the ruling class there must be before the principle is effectively
DEFINITIONS 3
violated cannot be stated with precision. There is no sacred percentagefigure,
below which the foreigner can be benignly tolerated,
and above which he becomes offensiveand his safety and life are at
peril. No doubt the figurewill vary with circumstances. The impossibility
of providing a generally applicable and precise figure, however,
does not undermine the usefulness of the defmition.
State and nation
Our defmition of nationalism was parasiticl on two as yet undefined
terms: state and nation.
Discussion of the state may begin with Max Weber's celebrated
definition of it, as that agency within society which possesses the
monopoly of legitimate violence. The idea behind this is simple and
seductive: in- well-ordefed~societies, such as most of us live in or
aspire to live in, private or sectional violence is illegitimate. Conflict
as such is not illegitimate, but it cannot rightfully be resolved by
private or sectional violence. Violence may be applied only by the
central politicalauthority, and those to whom it delegates this right.
Among the various sanctions of the maintenance of order, the ultimateone-force-may
be applied only by one special, clearly identified,
and well centralized, disciplined agency within society. That
agency or group of agencies is the state.
The idea enshrined in this defintion correspondsfairly well with
the moral intuitions of many, probably most, members of modern
societies. Nevertheless, it is not entirely satisfactory. There are
'states' - or, at any rate, institutions which we would normally be
inclined to call by that name - which do not monopolizelegitimate
violence within the territory which they more or less effectively
control. A feudal state does not necessarily object to private wars
between its fief-holders, provided they also M1 their obligations to
their overlord; or again, a state countingtribal populationsamongits
subjects does not necessarily object to the institution of the feud, as
long as those who indulge in it refrainfrom endangering neutrals on
the public highway or in the market. The Iraqi state, under British
tutelage after the First World War, tolerated tribal raids, provided
the raiders dudfully reported at the nearest police station beforeand
after the expedition, leaving an orderly bureaucratic record of slain
and booty. In brief, there are states which lack either the will or the
4 DEFINITIONS
means to enforce their monopoly of legitimate violence, and which
nonetheless remain, in many respects, recognizable 'states'.
Weber's underlying principle does, however, seem valid now,
however strangely ethnocentric it may be as a general defition,
with its tacit assumption of the well-centralizedWestern state. The
state constitutes one highly distinctiveand important elaboration of
the social division of labour. Where there is no division of labour,
one cannot even begin to speak of the state. But not any or every
specialism makes a state: the state is the specialization and concentration
of order maintenance. The 'state' is that institution or set
of institutions specifically concerned with the enforcement of order I
(whatever else they may also be concerned with). The state exists
where specialized order-enforcing agencies, such as policeforces and
courts, have separated out from the rest of social life. They are the
state.
Not all societies arestate-endowed. It immediatelyfollowsthat the
problem of nationalism does not arise for stateless societies. If there
is no state, one obviously cannot ask whether or not its boundaries
are congruent with the limits of nations. If there are no rulers, there
being no state, one cannot ask whether they are of the same nation as
the ruled. When neither state nor rulers exist, one cannot resent
their failure to conform to the requirements of the principle of
nationalism. One may perhaps deplore statelessness, but that is
another matter. Nationalists have generally fulminated against the
distribution of political power and the nature of politicalboundaries,
but they have seldom if ever had occasion to deplore the absence of
power and of boundaries altogether. The circumstances in which
nationalism has generally arisen have not normally been those in
which the state itself, as such, was lacking, or when its realitywasin
any serious doubt. The state was only too conspicuously present. It
was its boundaries a d o r the distribution of power, and possiblyof
other advantages, within it which were resented.
This in itself is highly significant. Not only is our defmition of
nationalism parasitic on a prior and assumed definition of the state:
it also seems to be the case that nationalism emerges only in milieux
in which the existence of the state is already very much taken for
granted. The existence of politically centralized units, and of a
moral-politicalclimate in which such centralized units are taken for
granted and are treated as normative, is a necessary though by no
means a sufficient condition of nationalism.
By way of anticipation, some general historical observations
should be made about the state. Mankind has passed through three
fundamentalstages in its history: the pre-agrarian, the agrarian, and
the industrial. Hunting and gathering bands were and are too small
to allow the kind of political division of labour which constitutes the
state; and so, for them, the question of the state, of a stable specialized
order-enforcing institution, does not really arise. By contrast,
most, but by no means all, agrarian societies have been stateendowed.
Some of these states have been strong and some weak,
some have been despoticand others law-abiding. They differ a very
great deal in their form. The agrarian phase of human history is the
periodduring which, so to speak, the very existenceof the state is an
option. Moreover, the form of the stdte is highly variable. During
the hunting-gathering stage, the option was not available.
By contrast, in the post-agrarian, industrial age there is, once
again, no option; but now the presence, not the absenceof the state is
inescapable. ParaphrasingHegel, once none had the state, then some
had it, and finally all have it. The form it takes, of course, still
remains variable. There are some traditions of social thought anarchism,
Marxism - which hold that even, or especially, in an
industrial order the state is dispensable, at least under favourable
conditions or under conditions due to be realized in the fullness of
time. There are obvious and powerful reasons for doubting this:
industrial societies are enormously large, and depend for the standard
of living to which they have become accustomed (or to which
they ardently wish to become accustomed) on an unbelievablyintricate
general division of labour and co-operation. Some of this cooperation
might under favourable conditions be spontaneous and
need no central sanctions. The idea that all of it could perpetually
work in this way, that it could exist without any enforcement and
control, puts an intolerable strain on one's credulity.
So the problem of nationalism does not arise when there is no
state. It does not follow that the problem of nationalism arises for
eachand everystate. On the contrary, it arisesonly for some states. It
remains to be seen which ones do face this problem.
1
$ The defmition of the nation presents difficulties graver than those
\ attendanton the defmitionof the state. Although modern man tends
j:
Y
fi
;
6 DEFINITIONS
to take the centralized state (and, more specifically, the centralized
national state)for granted, nevertheless he is capable, with relatively
little effort, of seeingits contingency, and of imagining a social situation
in which the state is absent. He is quite adept at visualizing the
'state of nature7
. Ananthropologistcanexplaintohimthat the tribe is
not necessarily a state writ small, and that forms of tribal organization
exist which can be describedas stateless. By contrast, the idea
of a man without a nation seems to imposea far greater strain on the
modem imagination. Chamisso, an emigre'Frenchman in Germany
during the Napoleonic period, wrote a powerful proto-Kafkaesque
novel about a man who lost his shadow: though no doubt part of the
effectiveness of this novel hinges on the intended ambiguity of the
parable, it is difficult not to suspect that, for the author, the Man
without a Shadow was the Man without a Nation. When his followers
and acquaintances detect his aberrant shadowlessness they
shun the otherwisewell-endowedPeter Schlemiehl.A man without a
nation defies the recognized categories and provokes revulsion.
Chamisso's perception - if indeed this is what he intended to
convey - was valid enough, but valid only for one kind of human
condition, and not for the human condition as such anywhere at any
time. A man must have a nationality as he must have a nose and two
ears; a deficiency iuany of these particularsis not inconceivableand
does from time to time occur, but only as a result of some disaster,
and it is itself a disaster of a kind. All this seems obvious, though,
alas, it is not true. But that it should have come to seem so very
obviously true is indeed an aspect, or perhaps the very core, of the
problem of nationalism. Having a nation is not an inherent attribute
of humanity, but it has now come to appear as such.
In fact, nations, like states, are a contingency, and not a universal
necessity. Neither nations nor states exist at all times and in all
circumstances. Moreover, nations and states are not the same contingency.
Nationalism holds that they were destined for each other;
that either without the other is incomplete, and constitutes a
tragedy. But before they could become intended for each other, each
of them had to emerge, and their emergence was independent and
contingent. The state has certainly emerged without the help of the
nation. Some nations have certainly emerged without the blessings ,
of their own state. It is more debatablewhether the normativeidea of
the nation, in its modern sense, did not presuppose the prior exis-
'
tence of the state. I
What then is this contingent, but in our age seemingly universal
and normative, idea of the nation? Discussionof two very makeshift,
temporary definitions will help to pinpoint this elusive concept.
1 Two men are of the same nation if and only if they share the
same culture, where culture in turn means a system of ideas and
sfgns-andassociations and ways of behaving and communicating. +
2 Two men are of the same nation if and only if they recognize _,
each other as belonging to the same nation. In other words, nations
maketh man; nations are the artefactsof men's convictionsand loyal- '
ties and solidarities. A mere category of persons (say, occupants of a
given territory, or speakers of a given language, for example)
becomes a nation if and when the members of the category f d y
recognize certain mutual rights andlduties to each other in virtue of
their shared membershipof it. It is their recognitionof each other as
fellowsof this kind which turns them into a nation, and not the other
shared attributes, whatever they might be, which separate that
category from non-members.
Each of these provisional definitions, the cultural and the volun- .,
taristic, has some merit. Each of them singles out an element which
is of real importance in the understanding of nationalism. But
neither is adequate. Definitions of culture, presupposed by the first
defmition, in the anthropological rather than the normative sense,
are notoriously difficult and unsatisfactory. It is probably best to
approach this problem by using this term without attempting too
much in the way of formal definition, and looking at what culture
does.
Culture in Agrarian Society
CULTURE IN AGRARIAN S o c m 9
the Black, the specialists of violence and of faith, are indeed independently
operating rivals, and their territories are often not co-
extensive.
Power and culture in the agro-literate polity
These two crucial and idiosyncratic forms of the divisionof labourthe
centralizations of power and of culturdcognition - have proOne
development which takes place during the agrarian epoch of found and special implications for the typical social structure of the
human history is comparable in importance with the emergence of ago-literate polity. Their implications are best considered jointly,
the state itself: the emergenceof literacyand of a specialized clerical and they can be schematized as shown in figure 1.
class or estate, a clerisy. Not all agrarian societies attain literacy:
paraphrasingHegel once again, we may say that at first none could
read; then somecould read; and eventuallyall can read. That, at any
rate, seems to be the way in which literacy fits in with the three great
ages of man. In the middle or agrarian age literacy appertains to
some only. Some societies have it; and within the societies that do
have it, it is always some, and never all, who can actually read.
The written word seems to enter history with the accountant and
the tax collector: the earliest uses of the written sign seem often to be
occasioned by the keepingof records. Once developed, however, the
written word acquires other uses, legal, contractual, administrative.
God himself eventuallyputs hiscovenantwith humanityand his rules
for the comportmentof his creationin writing. Theology, legislation,
litigation, administration, therapy: all engender a class of literate
specialists, in alliance or more often in competition with freelance
illiterate thaumaturges. In agrarian societies literacy brings forth a
major chasm between the great and the little traditions (or cults).
The doctrines and forms of organization of the clerisy of the great
and literate cultures are highly variable, and the depth of the chasm
between the great and little traditions may vary a great deal. So does
the relationship of the clerisy to the state, and its own internal
organization: it may be centralized or it may be loose, it may be
hereditaryor on the contrary constitute an open guild, and so forth.
Literacy, the establishment of a reasonably permanent and standardizedscript,
means in effect the possibility of cultural and cognitive
storage and centralization. The cognitive centralization and
codification effected by a clerisy, and the political centralization
which is the state, need not go hand in hand. Often they are rivals;
sometimes one may capture the other; but more often, the Red and
stratified, horizontally
segregated layers of
military, administrative,
clerical and sometimes
commercial ruling class
communities of
I agricultural producers
1 Figure 1 General form of the social structure of agrarian societies.
In the characteristic agro-literate polity, the ruling class forms a
small minority of the population, rigidly separate from the great
majority of direct agricultural producers, or peasants. Generally
speaking, its ideology exaggerates rather than underplays the inequality
of classesand the degreeof separation of the rulingstratum.
This can in turn be sub-divided into a number of more specialized
layers: warriors, priests, clerics, administrators, burghers. Some of
these layers (for example, Christian clergy) may be non-hereditary
and be re-selected in each generation, though recruitment may be
closely predetermined by the other hereditary strata. The most
important point, however, is this: both for the ruling stratum as a
whole, and for the various sub-strata within it, there is great stress
on cultural differentiation rather than on homogeneity. The more
differentiated in style of all kinds the various strata are, the less friction
and ambiguity there will be between them. The whole system
favours horizontal lines of cultural cleavage, and it may invent and
reinforce them when they are absent. Genetic and cultural differences
are attributed to what were in fact merely strata differentiated
by function, so as to fortify the differentiation, and endow it with
authorityand permanence. For instance, in early nineteenth-century
Tunisia, the ruling stratum considered itself to be Turkish, though
quite unable to speak that language, and in fact of very mixed
ancestry and reinforced by recruits from below.
Below the horizontally stratified minority at the top, there is
another world, that of the laterally separated petty communities of
the lay members of the society. Here, once again, cultural differentiationis
very marked, though the reasons are quite different. Small
peasant communities generally live inward-turned lives, tied to the
locality by economicneed if not by political prescription.Even if the
population of a given area starts from the same linguistic base-linewhich
very often is not the case - a kind of culture drift soon engenders
dialectal and other differences. No-one, or almost no-one,
hasan interestin promotingcultural homogeneityat this social level.
The state is interested in extracting taxes, maintaining the peace,
and not much else, and has no interest in promoting lateral com- ~munication between its subject communities.
The clerisy may,it is true, have a measure of interest in imposing I
certain shared cultural norms. Some clerisies are contemptuous of I
and indifferenttowardsfolk practices, while others, in theinterest of ,
monopolizingaccess to the sacred, to salvation, therapyand so forth, I
combat and actively denigrate folk culture and the freelance folk !':
shamanswho proliferatewithinit. But, within thegeneralconditions I
prevailing in agro-literate polities, they can never really be i
i
CULTURE IN AGRARIANSOCIETY 11
successful. Such societies simply do not possess the means for
making literacy near-universal and incorporating the broad masses
of the population in a high culture, thus implementing the ideals of
theclerisy. The most the clerisy can achieveis to ensurethat its ideal
is internalized as a valid but impracticable norm, to be respected or
even revered, perhaps even aspired to in periodic outbursts of enthusiasm,
but to be honoured more in the breach than in the observance
in normal times.
But perhaps the central, most important fact about agro-literate
society is this: almost everythingin it militates against the definition
of political units in terms of cultural boundaries.
In other words! had nationalismbeen invented in such a period its
prospects of general acceptance would have been slender indeed.
One might put it this way: of the two potential partners, cultureand
power, destined for each other according to nationalist theory,
neitherhas much inclinationfor the other in the conditionsprevailing
in the agrarian age. Let us take each of them in turn.
Culture
Among the higher strata of ago-literate society it is clearly advantageous
to stress, sharpenand accentuate the diacritical, differential,
and monopolizable traits of the privileged groups. The tendency of
liturgical languages to become distinct from the vernacular is very
strong: it is as if literacy alone did not create enough of a barrier
between cleric and layman, as if the chasm between them had to be
deepened, by making the language not merely recorded in an
inaccessible script, but also incomprehensible when articulated.
The establishment of horizontal cultural cleavages is not only
attractive, in that it furthers the interests of the privileged and the
power-holders; it is also feasible, and indeed easy. Thanks to the
relative stability of ago-literate societies, sharp separations of the
population into estates or castes or millets can be established and
maintained without creating intolerable frictions. On the contrary,
by externalizing, making absolute and underwritinginequalities, it
fortifiesthem and makes them palatable, by endowingthem with the
aura of inevitability, permanence and naturalness. That which is
inscribed into the nature of things and is perennial, is consequently
not personally, individually offensive, nor psychicallyintolerable.
12 CULTURE IN AGRARIANSOCIETY
By contrast, in an inherently mobile and unstable society the
maintenance of these social dams, separating unequal levels, is
intolerably difhcult. The powerful currents of mobility are ever
undermining them. Contrary to what Marxism has led people to
expect, it is pre-industrial society which is addicted to horizontal
differentiation within societies, whereas industrial society strengthens
the boundaries between nations rather than those between
classes.
The same tends to be true, in a different form, lower down on the
social scale. Even there, preoccupationwith horizontal, often subtle
but locallyimportant differentiationscan be intense. But even if the
local group is internally more or less homogeneous, it is most unlikely
to link its own idiosyncratic culture to any kind of political
principle, to thinkin terms of a politicallegitimacy defined in a way
which refers to the local culture. For a variety of obvious reasons,
such a style of thinking is, in these conditions, most unnatural, and
would indeed seem absurd to those concerned, were it explained to
them. Localcultureis almostinvisible.The self-enclosedcommunity
tends to communicatein terms whose meaning can only be identified
in context, in contrast to the relatively context-free scholasticism of
the scribes. But the village patois (or shorthand or 'restricted code')
has no normative or political pretensions; quite the reverse. The
most it can do is identify the village of origin or anyone who opens
his mouth at the local market.
In brief, cultures proliferate in this world, but its conditions do
not generally encourage what night be called cultural imperialisms,
the effons of one culture or another to dominate and expand to fill
out a political unit. Culture tends to be branded either horizontally
(by social caste), or vertically, to define very small local cornmunities.
The factors determining political boundaries are totally
distinct from those determining cultural limits. Clerisies sometimes
endeavour to extend the zone of a culture, or rather, of the faith they
codified for it; and states sometimes indulge in crusades, faithendorsed
aggression. But these are not the normal, pervasive conditions
of agrarian society.
It is important to add that culturesin such a world proliferate in a
very complex way: in many cases, it is far from clear how a given
individual is to be assigned to his 'cultural background'. A Hirnalayan
peasant, for instance, may be involved with priests and monks
and shamans of several religions in different contexts at different
CULTURE IN AGRARIAN SOCIETY 13
times of the year; his caste, clan and language may link him to
diverse units. The speakers of a given tribal language may, for
instance, not be treated as members of it, if they happen to be of the
wrong occupational caste. Life-style, occupation, language, ritual
practice, may fail to be congruent. A family's economicand political
survival may hinge, precisely, on the adroit manipulation and maintenance
of these ambiguities, on keeping options and connections
open. Its membersmay not have the slightest interest in, or tastefor,
an unambiguous, categorical self-characterization such as is nowadays
associated with a putative nation, aspiring to internal homogeneity
and external autonomy. In a traditional milieu an ideal of a
single overriding and cultural identity makes little sense. Nepalese
hill peasants often have links with a variety of religious rituals, and
think in terms of caste, clan, or village (but not of nation) according
to circumstance. It hardly matters whether homogeneityis preached
or not. It can find little resonance.
The state in agrarian society
In these circumstances there is little incentive or opportunity for
cultures to aspire to the kind of monochrome homogeneityand political
pervasiveness and dominationfor which later, with the coming
of the age of nationalism, they eventually strive. But how does the
matter look from the viewpoint of the state, or, more generally, of
the political unit?
Political units of the agrarian age vary enormously in size and
kind. Roughly speaking, however, one can divide them into two
species, or perhaps poles: local self-governing communities, and
large empires. On the one hand, there are the city states, mbal seg-,
- ments, peasant communes and so forth, running their own affairs,
with a fairly high political participation ratio (to adapt S. Andreski's
useful phrase), and with only moderateinequality; and on the other,
largeterritories controlled by a concentrationof forceat one point. A
very characteristicpoliticalform is, of course, one which fuses these
I two principles: a central dominant authority co-exists with semiautonomous
local units.
I
The question which concerns us is whether, in our world, con-
I
taining these types of unit, there are forces making for that fusion of
t culture and polity which is the essence of nationalism. The answer
14 CULTURE IN AGRARIAN SOCIETY
must be No. The local communities depend for their functioningon
a good measure of face-to-face contact, and they cannot expand in
size radically without transformingthemselvesout of all recognition.
Hence these participatory communities seldom exhaust the culture
of which they are part; they may have their localaccent and customs,
but these tend to be but variants of a wider inter-communicating
culture containing many other similar communities. City states, for
instance, seldom have a languageof their own. No doubt the ancient
Greeks were reasonably typical in this respect. While they possessed
a vigorous awareness of their own shared culture and the contrast'
between it and that of all barbarians(with, incidentally, a rather low
degree of horizontalcultural differentiation bemeen Hellenes), this
sense of unity had little political expression, even in aspiration, let
alone in achievement. But when a pan-Hellenic polity was established
under Macedonian leadership, it very rapidly grew into an
empire transcending by far the bounds of Hellenism. In ancient
Greece, chauvinistic though the Greeks were in their own way, there
appears to have been no slogan equivalent to Ein Reich, Ein Volk,
Ein Fuehrer.
The varieties of agrarian d e r s
The agro-literatepolity is a kind of society which has been in existence
some five millennia or so and which, despite the variety of its
fonns, sharescertain basicfeatures. The great majority of its citizens
are agricultural producers, living in inward-turned communities,
and they are dominated by a minority whose chief distinguishing
attributes are the managementof violence, the maintenanceof order,
and the control of the official wisdom of the society, which is eventually
enshrined in scrip< his warrior-and-scribe ruling class can
be fitted into a rough typology, in terms of the following set of
oppositions:
1 Centralized Uncentralized
2 Gelded Stallions
3 Closed Open
4 Fused Specialized
1 Both a clerisy and a military class can be either centalized or
decentralized. The medieval Catholic Church is a splendid example
of an effectively centralized clerisy which can dominate the moral
CULTURE IN AGRARIAN SOCIETY 15
climate of a civilization. The ularna of Islam achieved as much, but
with an almost total absence of any centralized organization or
internal hierarchy, and they were theoretically an open class. The
Brahmins were both a clerisy and a closed kin group; the Chinese
bureaucracy doubled up as scribes and administrators.
2 From the viewpoint of the central state, the major danger, as
Plato recognized so long ago, is the acquisition, or retention, by its
militaryor clerical office-holders of links with particular kin groups,
whose interests are then liable to sway the officers from the stern
path of dub, and whosesupport is, at the same time, liable to endow
them on occasion with too much power.
The strategies adopted for countering this pervasive danger vary
in detail, but can be generically characterized as gelding. The idea is
to break the kin link by depriving the budding &&ior/bureaucrat/
cleric either of ancestry, or of posterity, or of both. The techniques
used included the use of eunuchs, physically incapable of possessing
posterity; of priests whose privileged position was conditional on
celibacy, thereby preventing them from avowing posterity; of
foreigners, whose kin links could be assumed to be safely distant; or
of members of otherwise disfranchised or excluded groups, who
would be helpless if separated from the employing state. Another
technique was the employment of 'slaves', men who, though in fact
privileged and powerful, nevertheless, being 'owned' by the state,
technically had no other legitimate links, and whose propem and
position could revert to thestate at any time, without even thefiction
of a right to due process, and thus without creatingany rights on the
parts of some local or kin group of the destituted official.
Literal eunuchs werefrequently employed.' Celibate priestswere,
of course, prominent in Christendom. Slave military bureaucracies
were conspicuous in Islamic polities after the decline of the Kaliphate.
Foreignerswere often prominent in palaceeliteguards and in
the fmancial secretariats of the empires.
However, gelding was not universal. The Chinese bureaucracy
was recruited from the 'genuy'; and the European feudal class
rapidly succeeded in superimposing the principle of heredity on to
that of the allocation of land for service. In contrast with gelding,
elites whose members are formally allowed to reproduce themselves
'Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves, Cambridge, 1978, ch. 4.
socially, and retain their positions for their offspring, may be called
stallions.
3 There are advantages in clerisies, bureaucracies and military
classes being open, and in their being closed. European clergy and
Chinese bureaucratswere technicallyopen (as were Muslim ulama),
though they were recruitedpredominantlyfrom a restrictedstratum.
In Hinduism, priestsand warrior-rulersare both closed and distinct,
and their mutual(theoretical)impenetrabilitymay be essentialto the
working of thesystem. Theyare both closed and non-fused, distinct.
In Islam (excluding Mamluk and Janissary periods) neither clerisy
nor the military are gelded.
4 Finally, the ruling class may either fuse the military and
clerical (and possibly other) functions, or carefully segregate them
into specialized groups. Hinduism formally separated them. European
feudalism fused them on occasion, in the military orders.
It would be intriguing to follow in concrete historical detail the
various possible combinations resulting from choosing from among
these alternatives. For our present purpose, however, what matters
is something that all the variants tend to have in common. The
power-holdersare caught in a kind of field of.tension between local
communitieswhich are sub-national in scale, and a horizontal estate
or caste which is more than national. They are loyal to a stratum
which is much more interested in differentiating itself from those
below than in &sing its own culture to them, and which quite
often extends its own limits beyond the bounds of the local polity,
and is trans-political and in competition with the state. Only seldom '
(as in the case of the Chinese bureaucracy) is it co-extensive with a 1
state (and in that case, it did display a certain kind of nationalism). 1
I
The only stratum which can in anysense be said to have a cultural j
policy is the clerisy. Sometimes, as in the case of the Brahmins, its 1policy is in effect to create a complementarity and mutual inter- j
dependence between itself and the other orders. It seeks to strengthen
its own position by making itself indispensable, and the com- 1plementary roles it ascribes to itself and to the laity, far from requiring
its own universalization, formally preclude it. Notwithstanding
the fact that it claims monopolistic authority over ritual
propriety, it does not wish to see itself emulated. It haslittlewish for
the sincerest form of flattery, imitation, though it does provoke it.
Elsewhere, as in Islam, the clerisy from time to time takes its own
missionary duties, to be practised among the habitually relapsing
weaker brethrenwithinthefaith, with becomingseriousness. Thereis
here no rule enjoining that some must pray, some fight, and some
work, and that these estatesshould not presume to meddlewith each
other's realm. Asfar as the actual prescriptionsof thefaith go, everyone
is allowed to do all three of these things, if his aptitudes and energy
allow. (This latent egalitarianismis very important for the successful
adaptation of Islam to the modem world.) Thus there is no
formal or theological obstacle to a clerical missionary cultural policy
a outrance. In practice there is still a problem: if everyone really systernatidly
indulged in legal-theological studies, who would look
after the sheep, goatsand camels?In certain parts of the Saharathere
are entiretribes designated, by inter-tribal compact, as Peopleof the
Book. In practice, however, this only means that religious perso~el
are habitually drawn from among their number. It does not mean
that all of them actually become religious specialists. Most of them
continue to work and fight. The only communitiesin which a really
very ~ i g ~ c a n tproportion of adult males indulged in the smdy of
the Law were some Jewish ones in Eastern Europe. But that was a
special and extreme case, and in any case these communities were
themselves sub-communities in a wider and more complex society.
So for very deep, powerful and insuperable reasons, clerisies in
agro-literate societies cannot properly dominate and absorb the
entire society. Sometimestheir own rules prohibit it, and sometimes
external obstacles make it impossible; but the latter would in any
case constitute a ~ ~ c i e n tand effective impediment, even if the
rules were always favourable to this aspiration.
In the agrarian order, to try to impose on all levels of society a
universalized clerisy and a homogenized culture with centrally imposed
norms, for
tifi
ed by writing, would be an idle dream. Even if
such a programme is contained in some theological doctrines, it
cannot be, and is not, implemented. It simply cannot be done. The
resources are lacking.
But what happens if the clerisy one day is universalized, becomes
co-extensive with the entire society, not by its own efforts, not by
some heroic or miraculous internal Jihad, but by a much more
effective, deeply-rootedsocialforce, by a total transformation of the
whole nature of the division of labour and of productive and cognitive
processes? The answer to this question, and the specification
of the nature of that transformation, wiU turn out to be crucial for
the understanding of nationalism.
18 CULTURE IN AGRARIANSOCIETY
Note also that in the agrarian order only some elite strata in some
societiesweresystematically gelded, by one or anotherof the specific
techniques described above. Even when it is done, it is difficult, as
Plato foresaw, to enforce the gelding indefbitely The guardians, be
they Mamluks or Janissaries, bureaucrats or prebend-holders, become
corrupted, acquire interests and links and continuity, or are
seduced by the pursuit of honour and wealth and the lure of selfperpetuation.
Agrarianmanseemsto be madeof a corruptible'metal.
His successor, industrial man, seems to be madeof purer, though
not totally pure, metal. What happens when a social order is accidentally
brought about in which the clerisy does become, at long
last, universal, when literacy is not a specialism but a pre-condition
of all other specialisms, and when virtually all occupations cease to
be hereditary? What happens when gelding at the same time also
becomes near-universal and very effective, when every man Jack
amongst us is a Mamluk de Robe, putting the obligations to his
callingabove the claims of kinship?In an age of universalizedclerisy
and Mamluk-dom, the relationship of culture and polity changes
radically. Ahighculturepervadesthewholeof society,definesit, and
needsto besustainedby the polity. Thatis the sepretof nationalism.
3
Industrial Society
\
The originsof industrial society continueto be an object of scholarly
dispute. It seems to me very probablethat this will continueto be so
for ever. An enormously complex transformation occurred in a very
large, diversifiedand intricate society, and the event was unique: no
imitativeindustrialization can be treated as an event of thesame kind
as the original industrialization, simply in virtue of the fact that all
the others were indeed imitative, were performed in the light of the
now established knowledge that the thing could be done, and had
certain blatant and conspicuous advantages (though the emulated
ideal was, of course, interpreted in all kinds of quite diverse ways).
So we can never repeat the original event, which was perpetrated by
men who knew not what they did, an unawareness which was of the
very essence of the event. We cannot do it, for quite a number of
cogent reasons: the sheer fact of repetition makes it different from
the original occasion; we cannot in any case reproduce all the
circumstancesof early modern Western Europe;and experimentson
such a scale, for the sake of establishing a theoretical point, are
morally hardly conceivable. In any case, to sort out the causal
threads of so complex a process, we should need not one, but very
many re-runs, and these will never be available to us.
But while we cannot reallyestablish theaetiologyof industrialism,
we can hope to makesomeprogressin puttingforward modelsof the
generic working of industrial society. In fact, the real merit and
importance of klax Weber's celebrated essay (The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism)seems to me to lie far less in his fascinating
but speculativeand inconclusive hypothesis about the genesis
of the capitalist spirit, than in his reflections about what constitute
the general distinguishing features of the new social order. In fact,
although the (entirelysalutary) shift of concern from the origins of
capitalism to that of the origins of industrialismonly occurred after
Weber, and as a consequence of the emergence of non-capitalist
industrial societies, nevertheless this reformulation of the crucial
20 INDUSTRIAL S o c i ~ n
question is already implicit in Weber's preoccupation with bureaucracy,
alongside his concern with the entrepreneurialspirit. If a centralized
bureaucracy exemplifies the new Geist just as much as does
the rational businessman, then clearly we are concerned with industrialism,
rather than with capitalism as such.
In the Weberian, and I think in any plausible accountof the new
spirit, the notion of rationaliey must be centraland important. Weber
himself was not particularly deft in giving coherent and adequate
definitions, particularlyso in this case, though it is perfectlypossible
to distilfrom the contexts of his,use of this notion of rationality what
he meant by it, and that this underlyingnotion is indeed crucial for
this topic. As it happens, this notion is explored, with unparalleled
philosophic depth, by the two greatest philosophers of the eighteenth
century, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, both of whom,
under the fond delusion that they wereanalysing the human mind as
such, an sich, anywhere, any time, werein fact giving very profound
accounts of the general logic of the new spirit whose emergence
characterized their age. What these two thinkers shared was at least
as important as what separated them.
Two elements are conspicuously present in Weber's notion of
rationality. One is coherence or consistency, the like treatment of
likecases, regularity,what might be called theverysoul or honourof
a good bureaucrat. The other is efficiency, the cool rationalselection
of the best available means to given, clearly formulatedand iso!ated
ends; in other words, the spirit of the ideal entrepreneur. Orderlinessand
efficiency may indeed by seen as the bureaucratic and the
entrepreneurial elements in an overall spirit of rationality.
I do not myself believethat these two elementsare reallyindependent
of each other. The notion of means-ends efficiencyimplies that
the agent will always choose the self-same solution to a given
problem, irrespectiveof 'irrelevant' considerations;and consequently
it carries the bureaucratic requirement of symmetry of trearmentas
an immediate corollary. The imperative of symmetry does not quite
so immediately imply the corollary of efficiency (and indeed, as an
empirical fact, bureaucrats, even or especially perfectly honest and
conscientious ones, are not always particularly efficient, as Weber
himself noted); nevertheless, any sustained and non-superficial
implementation of the requirement of orderliness will imply the use
of a general and neutral idiom for the specification both of ends and
of fact, of the environment in which the ends are to be pursued.
INDUSTRIAL SDCIETY
else.
What underlies the two elements of the rational spirit of which
Weber was clearly aware (orderliness and efficiency) is something
deeper, well explored by Hume and Kant under the blithe impression
that they were investigating the human mind in general:
namely, a common measureof fact, a universalconceptualcurrency,
so to speak, for the generalcharacterization of 'things;and the esprit
d'analyse, forcefuliy preached and characterized already by Descartes.
Each of these elements is presupposed by rationality, in the
sense in which it concerns us, as the secret of the modem spirit. By
the common or single conceptual currency I mean that all facts are
located within a single continuous logical space, that statements
reportingthem can be conjoined and generally related to each other,
and so that in principle one single language describes the world and
isinternally unitary; or on the negativeside, that thereare nospecial,
privileged, insulated facts or realms, protected from contamination
orcontradictionby others, andlivingininsulated independentlogical
spaces of their own. Just this was, of course, the most striking trait
of premodern, pre-rationalvisions: the co-existencewithin them of
multiple, not properly united, but hierarchicallyrelated sub-worlds,
and the existence of special privileged facts, sacralized and exempt
from ordinary treatment.
In a traditional social order, the languages of the hunt, of harvesting,
of various rituals, of the council room, of the kitchen or
harem, all form autonomous systems: to conjoin statements drawn
assumed that all referential uses of language ultimately refer to one
coherent world, and can be reduced to a unitary idiom; and that it is
legitimate to relate them to each other. 'Only connect' is an intelligible
and acceptable ideal. Modern philosophies of knowledge are
frequently our expfession and codification of this idea and aspiration,
which in turn is not a philosophical whim, but has profound
sodalroots.
22 INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
Equalization and homogenization of facts is incomplete unless
accompanied by what may be called the separation of all separables,
the esprit d'analyse, the breaking up of all complexes into their constituent
parts (even if it can only be donein thought), and the refusal
to countenance conceptual package deals. It is precisely by binding
things together that traditional visions perpeNate themselves and
the prejudgements contained within them; and it is by insisting on
prising things apart that we have liberated ourselves from them.
These package-deals, and the discontinuous conceptual spaces, are
the equivalents, in the sphere of ideas, of the stable social groupings
and smctwes at the level of men. Likewise, the milied and standardized,
as it were metric world of facts, as conceivedin the philosophies
of Hume or Kant, is the analogue of the anonymous and
equal collectivities of men in a mass society. In the present argument,
we are concerned with men and their groupings, rather than
with ideas; but the unif~cationof their ideas in continuous and unitary
systems is connected with their re-groupingin i n t e d y fluid,
culturally continuous communities.
Industrial society is the only society ever to live by and rely on
sustained and perpetual growth, on an expected and continuous
improvement. Not surprisingly, it was the fnst society to invent the
concept and ideal of progress, of continuous impfovement. Its
favoured mode of social control is universal Danegeld, buyihg off
socialaggressionwith materialenhancement; its greatestweaknessis
its inability to survive any temporary reduction of the social bribery
fund, and to weather the loss of legitimacy which befalls it if the
cornucopiabecomes temporarily jammedand the flow falters. Many
societies in the past have on occasion discovered innovations and
improved their lot, and sometimes it may even have been m e that
improvements came not as single spies but in battalions. But the
improvementwas never perpetual, nor expected to be so. Something
special must have happened to have engendered so unusual and
remarkable an expectation.
And indeed, something unusual, something unique, had happened.
The conception of the world as homogeneous, subject to
systematic, indiscriminate laws, and as open to interminable
exploration, offered endless possibilities of new combinations of
means with no f m prior expectations and limits: no possibilities
would be barred, and in the end nothing but evidence would decide
how things were, and how they could be combinedto secure desired
I m u s m SOCIETY 23
effects. This was a totally new vision. The old worlds were, on the
one hand, each of them, a cosmos: purposive, hierarchial, 'meaningful';
and on the other hand, not quite unified, consisting of subworlds
each with its own idiom and logic, not subsumable under a
single overall orderliness. The new world was on the one hand
morally inert, and onthe other, unitary.
Hume's philosophy is one of the most important codifications of
this vision. Its best-known part is his treatment of causation, which
: indeed follows from the overall vision and its central insights. What
1 it amounts to in the end is this: in the very nature of things, nothing
is inherently connected with anything else. The actual connections
of this world can only be established by first separating in thought
everything that can be thought separately-so that wecanisolatethe
pure elements, so to speak - and then seeing what, as a matter of
experience, happens to be actually conjoined to what.
Is the world like that? Ours is. This is the pre-condition, the price
of a world of endless discovery. Inquiry must not be bound by the
natural affmitiesand liaisons of things, built into this or that vision
and style of life. And, of course, Hume's account of causation is not
1 merely an admirable summary of the background picture facing the
!
i
untramrnelled, eternal inquirer; it is also an account of the com-
1 pomnent of his economic counterpart, the modem entrepreneur.
Not for the merchant or manufacturer of the age of reason thefusion
i of labour, technique, material and mould, prescribed by custom,
i
tied to a social order and rhythm; his progressand the advancement
/ of the economy of which he is a part hinges, once again, on his unI
trammelledselection of whatever means, in the light of the evidence
j and of nothing else, serves some clear aim such as the maximization
i
of profit. (His predecessor or indeed his surviving feudal contemporary
would have been hard put to it to single out a solitary,
isolablecriterion of success. Profitfor them would have been merged
in a number of inseparable other considerations, such as the maintenaqceof
their positions in the community. Adam Smith saw only
tw dearly the difference between a Glasgow burgher and, say,
Cameron of Lochiel. Hume's theory of causation ratifies the perceptions~ofthe
former.)
This vision of a society which has become dependent on both
cognitive and economic growth (the two being, of course, linked to
each other) con- us here, becausewe are piimady interested in
the consequences of an ever-growing, ever-progressing society. But
24 INDUSTRIALSOCIETY
the consequences of such perpetual growth have striking parallels
with the vision which was its condition.
The society of pmpetual growth
If cognitive growth presupposes that no element is indissolubly
linked a priori to any other, and that everything is open to re- ,
thinking, then economicand productive growth requires exactty the
same of human activities and hence of human roles. Roles become
optionaland instrumental. The old stability of the social role srmcm
e is simply incompatiblewith growth and innovation. Innovation
means doing new things, the boundarks of which cannot be the
same as those of the activities they replace. No doubt most societies ;
can cope wiih an occasional re-drawing of job-specifications and 1
guild boundaries, just as a football team can experimentally switch 1
from one formation to another, and yet maintain continuity. One 1
change does not make progress. But what happens when such
changes themselves are constant and continuous, when the per- t1'
sistence of occupational change itself becomes the one permanent
feature of a social order?
When this question is answered, the mab part of the problem of
nationalismis thereby solved. Nationalism is rooted in a cerrainkind
of division of labour, one which is complex and persistently, cumulatively
changing.
High productivity, as Adam Smith insisted so much, requires a
complex and refmed division of labour. Perpetually growing productivity
requires that this division be not merely complex, but also
perpetually, and often rapidly, changing. This rapid and continuous
change both of the economic role system itself and of the occupancy
of places within it, has certain immediate and profoundlyimportant
consequences. Men located within it cannot generally rest in the
same niches all their lives; and they can only seldom rest in them, so
to speak, over generations. Positions are seldom (for this and other
reasons) transmitted from father to son. Adam Smith noted the
precariousness of bourgeois fortunes, though he erroneously amibuted
stabiity of social station to pastoralists, mistaking theii
genealogical myths for reality.
The immediate consequence of this new kind of mobility is a
certain kind of egalitarianism. Modern society is not mobile because
INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY 25
it is egalitarian; it is egalitarianbecauseit is mobile. Moreover, it has
to be mobile whether it wishes to be so or not, because this is required
by the satisfaction of its terrible and overwhelming thirst for
economic growth.
A society which is destined to a permanentgameof musicalchairs
cannot erect deep barriers of rank, of caste or estate, between the
various sets of chairs which it possesses. That would hamper the
mobility, and, given the mobility, would indeed lead to intolerable
tensions. Men can tolerate terribleinequalities, if they are stable and
hallowed by custom. But in a hectically mobile society, custom has
no time to hallow anything. A rolling stone gathers no aura, and a
mobile population does not allow any aura to attach to its stratifmtion.
Stratification and inequality do exist, and sometimes in
extreme form; neverthelessthey have a muted and discreet quality,
attenuated by a kind of gradualnessof the distinctions of wealth and
standing, a lack of social distanceand a convergenceof life-styles, a
kind of statistical or probabilistic quality of the differences (as
opposed to the rigid, absolutized, chasm-like differences typical of
agrarian society), and by the illusion or reality of social mobiity.
That illusion is essential, and it cannot persist without at least a
measure of reality. Just how much reality there is in this appearance
of upward and downward mobility varies and is subject to learned
dispute, but there can he no reasonable doubt that it does have a
good deal of reality: when the system of roles itself is changing so
much, the occupants of positions within it cannot be, as some leftwing
sociologists claim, tied to a rigid stramcational system. Compared
with agrarian society, this society is mobile and egalitarian.
But there is more than all this to the egalitarianism and mobility
engendered by thedistinctivelyindustrial,growth-orientedeconomy.
There are some additional subtler traits of the new division of
labour, which can perhaps best be approached by considering the
differencebetween the division of labour in an industrialsociety and
that of a particularly complex, well-developed agrarian one. The
obvious differencebetween the two is that one is more stableand the
other is more mobile. In fact, one of them g e n d y willsitself to he
stable, and the other wills itself to he mobile; and one of them pretends
to be more stable than social reality permits, while the other
often claimsmore mobility, in the interestof pretendingto satisfyits
galitmianideal,thanits real constraintsactually permit. Nevertheless,
though both systems tend to exaggerate their own cenud
26 INDUSTRIALSOCIETY
features, they do indeed markedly possess the trait they claim as
their own when contrasted with each other: one is rigid, the other
mobile. But if that is the obvious contrast, what are the subtler
features which accompany it?
Compare in detail the division of labour in a highly advanced
agrarian society with that of an averageindustrialone. Every kind of
function,forinstancenow hasat leastone kindof specialistassociated
withit. Car mechanicsare becomingspecializedin termsof the make
of car they service. The industrial society will have a larger population,
and probably, by most natural ways of counting, a larger
number of different jobs. In that sense, the division of labour has
been pushed much further within it.
But by somecriteria, it may well be that a fully developed agrarian
society aaually has the more complex division of labour. The
specialismswithin it are more distant from each other than are the
possibly more numerous specialisms of an industrial society, which
tend to have what can only be described as a mutual affiity of style. ;
Some of the specialisms of a matureagrarian society will be extreme: i
they will be the fruits of lifelong, very prolonged and totally dedic- 1
ated training, which may have commenced in early youth and re- ;
quired an almost complete renunciation of other concerns. The 1
achievements of craft and art production in these societies are I
extremely labour- and skill-intensive, and often reach levels of iintricacy and perfection never remotely equalled by anything later 1
attained by industrialsocieties, whosedomesticarts and decorations, '
gastronomy, tools and adornments are notoriously shoddy.
Notwithstanding their aridity and sterility, the scholastic and
ritual complexity mastered by the schoolmen of a developed agrarian
society is often such as to strain the very limits of the human mind.
In brief, although the peasants, who form the great majority of an
agrarian society, are more or less mutually interchangeable when it
comes to the performance of the social tasks which are normally
assigned to them, the important minority of specialists within such
societies are outstandingly complementaryto each other; each one of
them, or each group of them, is dependent on the othersand, when
sticking to its last, its specialism, quite incapable of self-sufficiency.
It is curious that, by contrast, in industrial society, notwithstanding
its larger number of specialisms, the distance between
specialists is far less great. Their mysteries are far closer to mutual
intelligibility, their manuals have idioms which overlap to a much
greater extent, and re-training, though sometimes difficult, is not
generally an awesome task.
So quite apart from the presence of mobility in the one case and
stabilityin the other, there is a subtle but profound and important
qualitative differencein the division of labour itself. Durkheim was
in error when he in effect classed advanced pre-industrial civilizations
and industrial society together under the single heading of
'organic solidarity', and when he failed to introduce properly this
further distinction within the wider category of organic solidarity or
of complementary division of labour. The difference is this: the
major part of training in industrial society is g m - c training, not
specif~callyconnected with the highly specialized professional activity
of the person in question, and preceding it. Industrial society
may by most criteria be the most highly specializedsociety ever; but
irs educational system is unquestionably the least specialized, the
most universallystandardized, that has ever existed. The same kind
of training or education is given to all or most children and adolescents
up to an astonishinglylate age. Specializedschools have prestige
only at the end of the educational process, if they constitute a
kind of completion of a prolonged previous unspecialized education;
specialized schools intended for a younger, earlier intake
have negative prestige.
Is this a paradox, or perhaps one of those illogical survivals from
an earlier age? Those who notice the 'gentlemady' or leisure-class
elements in higher education have sometimes supposed so. But,
although some of the frills and affectations amched to higher education
may indeed by irrelevancies and sunivals, the central fact the
pervasiveness and importance of generic, unspecialized training
-is conjoined to highly specialized industrial society not as a paradox,
but as somethingaltogether fitting and necessary. The kind of
specializationfoundin indusuial societyrests preciselyon a common
foundation of unspecialized and standardized training.
A mo+m army subjects its recruits first to a shared generic
training, in the course of which they are meant to acquire and internalize
the basic idiom, ritual and skills common to the army as a
whole; and only subsequentlyare the recruitsgiven morespecialized
rraining. It is assumed or hoped that every properly trainedrecruit
can be re-trained from one specialism to another without too much
loss of time, with the exception of a relatively small number of very
highly trained specialists. A modern society is, in this respect, like a
28 INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
modem army, only more so. It provides a very prolonged and fairly
thorough training for all its recruits, insisting on certain shared
qualifications: literacy, numeracy, basicwork habitsandsocialskills,
familiarity with basic technical and social skills. For the large
majority of the population the distinctive skills involved in working
life are superimposed on the basic training, either on the job or as
part of a much less prolonged supplementary training; and the :
assumption is that anyone who has completed the generic training
common to the entire population can be re-trained for most other 1
jobs without too much difficulty. Generay speaking, the additional !
skills required consist of a few techniques that can be learned fairly :
quickly, plus 'experience', a kind of familiarity with a milieu, its 1
personneland its manner of operation. This may take a little time to
acquire, and it sometimes reinforced by a little protective mystique, I
but seldom really amounts to very much. There is also a minority of i
genuine specialists, people whose effective occupancy of their posts
really depends on very prolonged additional training, and who are i
not easily or at all replaceable by anyone not sharing their own par- 1
ticular educational background and talent.
I
The ideal of universalliteracy and the right to educationis a wellknown
part of the pantheon of modem values. It is spoken of with
respect by statesmen and politicians, and enshrined in declarations
of rights, constitutions, party programmes and so forth. So far,
nothing unusual. The same is m e of represenrativeand accountable
government, free elections, an independent judickay, freedom of
speech and assembly, and so on. Many or most of these admirable
values are often and systematically ignored in many parts of the
world, without anyone battingan eyelid. Very often, it is safe to consider
these phrases as simple verbiage. Most constitutions guaranteeingfree
speech and electionsareas informativeabout the societies
they allegedly define as a man saying 'Good morning' is about the
weather. All this is well known. What is so very curious, and highly
signifant, about the principle of universaland centrally guaranteed
education, is that it is an idealmore honoured in the observance than
in the breach. In this it is virtuallyuniqueamong modem ideals; and
this calls for an explanation. Professor Ronald Dore has powerfully
criticizedthis tendency,' particularlyamong developingsocieties, of
'Ronald Dore, TheDiploma Disease, London, 1976. For an approachto the
s d implications of literacy at an earlier stage, see Jack Gmdy (ed.),
Literacy in TradirioMlSocieries, Cambridge, 1968.
INDUSTRIALSOCIETY 29
ovenadngformal 'paper' qualifications, and no doubt it has harmful
side effects. But I wonder whether he fully appreciates the deep
roots of what he castigates as the Diploma Disease. We live in a
world in which we can no longer respect the informal, intimate
transmission of skills, for the social structures within which such
transmission could occur are dissolving. Hence the only kind of
knowledge we can respect is that authenticated by reasonably imp
a n d centres of learning, which issue ceracates on the basis of
honest, impartially administered examinations. Hence we are
doomed to suffer the Diploma Disease.
All tbis suggests that the kind of education described- universal,
standardized, and generic - really plays some essential part in the
effective working of a modem society, and is not merely part of its
verbiage or self-advertisement. This is in fact so. To understand
what that role is, we must, to borrow a phrase from Marx (though
not perhapsin the sense in which he used it), considernot merely the
mode of production of modern society, but above alJ its mode of
reprodufrion.
Social generics
The reproduction of socialindividualsand groupscan be carried out
either on the one-to-one or on-the-job principle, or by what may be
called the centralizedmethod. There are, of course, manymixed and
intermediate ways of doing this job, but their considerationcan best
be postponed until after the discussion of these two extreme, as it
were polar, pssibities.
Theone-to-one, on-the-jobmethodis practisedwhen a family, kin
unit, village, tribal segment or similar fairly small unit takes the
individualinfants born into it, and by allowingand obliging them to
Sharein the communallife, plusafew morespecific methodssuch as
training, exercises, precepts, rites &passage and so forth, eventually
"Uns these infants into adults reasonably similar to those of the
precedinggeneration; and in this manner the society and its culture
prpetuate themselves.
The centralizedmethod of reproductionis one in Ghich the local
method is significantlycomplemented (or in extreme cases, wholly
replaced) by an educationalor mining agency which is distinctfrom
the local community, and which takes over the preparation of the
young human beingsin question, and eventuallyhands them back to
the wider society to fulfil their roles in it, when the process of
trainingis completed. An extreme version of this system developeda
high degree of perfection and effectiveness in the Ottoman empire,
when under the devshinne and janissary systems, young boys, either
secured as a tax obligation from conquered populations, or purchased
as slaves, were systematically trained for war and administration
and, ideally, wholly weanedand separatedfrom their families
and communities of origin. A less total version of this system was
and in part still is practised by the British upper class, with its
reliance on boarding schools from an early age. Variants of this
system can on occasion be found even in relatively simple, preliterate
agrarian societies.
Societiesconsistingof sub-communitiescan be divided into those ;
in which the sub-communities can, if necessary, reproduce themselves
without help from the rest of society, and those in which
mutual complementarity and interdependence are such that they i
cannot do rhis. Generally speaking, the segments and rural com- I
rnunities of agrarian society can reproduce rhemselves indepq- ;
dently. The anthropological concept of a segmentary society con- I
tains precisely this idea: the 'segment' is simply a smaller variant of
the larger society of which it is a part, and can do on a smaller scale
I
everything done by the larger unit. I!
Furthermore, one must disringuishbetween economic and educationalself-sufficiency,
in the sense of capacity for self-reproduction.
The ruling strata of an agrarian society are, of course, dependenton
a surplus drawn from the rest of society, but they may nevertheless
be educationally quite self-sufficient. Various other kinds of nonself-sficiency
can also be engendered by social rules, such as those
which makecommunitiesdependenton external ritual specialists, or
on the supply of brides from outside. Here we are concerned with
educational, not economic capacity for group self-reproduch
There are numerous complex, mixed and intermediate forms of
group reproduction. When feudal lords send their sons as halftrajnees,
half-hostages to the local court, when masters accept
apprentices who are not their sons, and so forth, we are obviously in
the presence of such mixed systems.
Generally speaking, the situation in agrarian society seems to be
this: the great majorityof the population belongs to self-reproducing
INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY 31
units, suchas in effect educate their young on the job, in theirstride,
as part and parcel of the general business of living, without relying
much or at all on any kind of educational specialist. A minority of
the population receives specialized training. Thesociety will contain
one or more strata of full-time educators, who both reproduce themselves
by taking on aoprentices, and perform part-time s e ~ c e sfor
the rest of the community: ritual, therapeutic, admonitory, secretarial,
and so on. It may be useful to distinguish betweenone-to-one,
intra-community training, and call it acculturation, and specialized
exenaining (on the analogy of exogamy), which calls for skills outside
the community, and call that education proper.
A very important stratum in literate agrarian society are the
clerks, thosewho can read and transmit literacy, and who thus form
one of the classes of specialists in that society. They may or may not
form a a d d or be incorporated in an organization. As, generally
speaking, writing soon transcends its purely technical use in recordkeeping,
and acquires moral and theological sinificance, the clerks
or clerics are almost invariably far more than mere graphotechnicians.
It is not just writing, but what is written that counts,
and, in agrariansociety, the ratio of the sacred to the profane, within
the realm of the written, tends to be heavily weighted in favour of
the first. So the writersand readers are specialists and yet more than
specialists; they are both part of a society, and claim to be the voice
of the whole of it. Their specialism says somethihg, something
special, more so perhaps than that of the woodcarvers and other
designers, and much more than that of the tinkers.
Specialists are often feared and despised in this kind of society.
The clerics may be viewed ambivalently, but in the main their
Sanding is rather high. They are both specialists and a part of
societyamong others, and yet also, as stated, claim to be the voice of
the totality. They are in an inherently paradoxical situation. Logicians
possess, in their armoury of allegedly deep and significant
puzzles, ,the Problem of the Barber: in a village, all men can be
divided into those who shave themselves, and those who are shaved
by the barber. But what of the barber himself? Is he a self-shaver,
or one of the barber-shaved? In this form, let us leave it to the
logicians. But the clerics are somewhat in the barber's situation.
They reproduce their own guild by training entrants, but they also
givea bit of training or provide services for the rest of society. Do
they or do they not shave themselves?The tension and its problems
(and they are not just logical)are with them, and they are not easily
resolved.
In the end, modem society resolves this conundrum by turniog
everyone into a cleric, by turning this potentially universal class into
an effectively universal one, by ensuring that everyone without (
exception is taught by it, that exo-education becomes the universal j
norm, and that no-one culturally speaking, shaves himself. Modern I
I
society is one in which no sub-community, below the size of one ;
capable of sustaining an independent educational system, can any 1
longer reproduce itself. The reproduction of fully socialized indivi- 1
duals itself becomes part of the division of labour, and is no longer
performed by sub-communities for themselves. i1That is what developed modern societies are like. But why must
this be so? What fate impels them in this direction?Why, to repeat
the earlier question, is this one ideal, that of universal literacy and
education, taken with this most unusual, untypical seriousness?
Part of the answer has already been given, in connectionwith the
stress on occupational mobility, on an unstable, rapidly changing
division of labour. A society whose entire political system, and
indeed whose cosmology and moral order, is based in the last analysis
on economic growth, on the universal incremental Danegeld and
the hope of a perpetual augmentation of satisfactions, whose legitimacy
hingeson its capacity to sustain and satisfy this expectation, is
thereby committed to the need for innovation and hence to a
changing occupationalstructure. From this it follows that certainly
between generations, and very often within single life-spans, men
must be ready for reallocation to new tasks. Hence, in part, the
importance of the generic training, and the fact that the little bit
extra of training, such as is attached to most jobs, doesn't amountto
too much, and is moreover contained in manuals intelligible to all
possessorsof the society's generic training. (While the little bit extra
seldom amounts to much, the shared and truly essentialgenericcore
is supplied at a rather high level, not perhaps when compared with
the intellectual peaks of agrarian society, but certainly when placed
alongside its erstwhile customary average.)
But is is not only mobility and re-training which engender this
imperative. It is also the content of most professional activities.
Work, in i n d u s d society, does not mean moving matter. The
paradigmof work is no longer ploughing, reaping, thrashing. Work,
in the main, is no longer the manipulation of things, but of
INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY 33
meanings. It generally involves exchanging communications with
other people, or manipulating the controls of a machine. The proportion
of peopleat the coal face of nature, directlyapplying human
physical force to natural objects, is constantly diminishing. Most
jobs, if not actually involvingwork 'with people', involvethe control
of buttons or switches or leaverswhich need to be understood,and are
explicable, once again, in some standard idiom intelligible to all
comers.
For the first time in human history, explicit and reasonably precisecommunication
becomes generally, pervasivelyused and important.
In the closed local communitiesof the agrarianor nibal worlds,
when it came to communication, context, tone, gesture, personality
and situation were everything. Communication, such as it was, took
place without the benefit of precise formulation, for which the locals
had neither taste nor aptitude. Explicitnessand the niceties of precise,
rule-bound formulation were left to lawyers, theologians or
ritualspecialists, and were parts of their mysteries. Among intimates
of a close community, explicirness would have been pedantic and
offensive, and is scarcely imaginable or intelligible.
Human language must have been used for countless generations in
such intimate, closed; context-bound communities, whereas it has only
been used to the full by schoohenand jurists, and all kinds of contextevadingconceptualpuritans,
for a very small number of generations.
Itis avery puzzlingfact that an institution, namely human language,
should have this potential for being used as an 'elaborate code', in
Basil Bernstein's phrase, as a formal and fairly context-free instrument,
given that it had evolved in a milieu which in no way called for
this development, and did not selectively favour it if it manifested
irself. This puzzle is on a par with problems such as that posed by
the existence of skills (for example, mathematical ability) which
throughout most of the period of the existence of humanity had no
survival value, and thus could not have been in any direct way produced
by natural selection. The existence of language suitable for
such formal, context-liberated use is such a puzzle; but it is also,
clearly, a fact. This potentiality, whatever its origin and explanation,
happened to be there. Eventually a kind of society emerged -and it
isnow becomingglobal -in which this potentiality reallycomes into
its own, and within which it becomes indispensable and dominant.
To sum up this argument: a society has emerged based on a highpowered
technology and the expectancy of sustained growth, which
34 ~ U S T R WSOCIETY
requires both a mobile division of labour, and sustained, frequent
and precise communicationbetween strangersinvolvinga sharing of
explicit meaning, transmitted in a standard idiom and in writing
when required. For a number of converging reasons, this society
must be thoroughly exo-educational: each individual is trained by
specialists,not just by his own local group, if indeed he has one. Its
segments and units-and this society is in any case large, fluid, and
in comparison with traditional, agrarian societies very short of
internal structures - simply do not possess the capacity or the resources
to reproduce their own personnel. The level of literacy and
technicalcompetence, in a standardized medium, a common conceptual
currency, which is required of members of this society if they
are to be properly employable and enjoy full and effective moral
citizenship, is so high that it simply cannot be provided by the kin or
local units, such as they are. It can only be provided by something
resembling a modem 'national' educational system, a pyramid at
whose base there are primary scbools, staffed by teachers trained at
secondary schools, staffed by university-trained teachers, led by the
productsof advancedgraduate schools. Such a pyramid providesthe
criterionfor the minimumsizefor a viable political unit. No unit too
small to accommodate the pyramid can function properly. Units
cannot be smalh than this. Constraintsalso operate which prevent
them being too large, in various circumstances; but that is another
issue.
The fact that sub-units of society are no longer capable of selfreproduction,
that centralized exo-education is the obligatory norm,
that such education complements(thoughit does not wholly replace)
localized acculaation, is of the very &st importancefor the political
sociology of the modem world, and its implications have,
strangely enough, been seldom understood or appreciated or even
examined. At the base of the modem social order stands not the
executioner but the professor. Not the guillotine, but the (aptly
named) doctorat d'btar is the main tool and symbol of state power.
The monopoly of legitimateeducation is now more important, more
central than is the monopoly of legitimate violence. When this is
understood, then the imperative of nationalism, its roots, not in
human nature as such, but in a certain kind of now pervasive social
order, can also be understood.
Contrary to popular and even scholarly belief, nationalism does
not have any very deep roots in the human psyche. The human
INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY 35
psyche can be assumed to have persisted unchanged through the
many many millennia of the existence of the human race, and not to
have become either better or worse during the relatively brief and
very recent age of nationalism. One may not invoke a general substrate
to explain a specific phenomenon. The substrate generates
many surface possibilities. Nati~nalism,the organization of human
groupsinto large, centrallyeducated, culturally homogeneousunits,
is but one of these, and a very rare one at that. What is crucial for its
genuineexplanationis roidentifyits speciiic roots. It is thesespecific
roots which alone can properly explain it. In this way, specific
factors are superimposed on to a shared universal human substrate.
The roots of nationalism in the distinctivestructural requirements
of industrialsocietyare very deepindeed. This movementis the fruit
neither of ideological aberration, nor of emotional excess. Although
those who participatein it generally, indeed almost without exception,
fail to understand what it is that thev do. the movement is~ ..----.nonetheless
the external manifestation of a deep'adjustment in the
relationship between polity and culture which is quite unavoidable.
The age of universal high &re
Let us recapitulate the general and central fearures of indusuial
society. Universal literacy and a high level of numerical, technical
and general sophisticationare among its functional prerequisites. Its
members are and must be mobile, and ready to shift from one
activity to another, and must possess that generic training which
enables them to follow the manuals and instructions of a new activity
or occupation. In the course of their work they must constantly
communicate with a large number of other men, with whom they
frequently have no previous association, and with whom communication
must consequentlybeexplicit, rarherthanrelying on context.
They >mustalso be able to communicate by means of written, impersonal,
contm-free, to-whom-it-may-concern type messages. Hence
these communications must be in the same shared and standardized
linguisticmedium and script. The educational system which guarantees
this social achievement becomes large and is indispensable, but
at the same time it no longer possesses monopoly of access to the
written word: its clientele is co-extensive with the society at large,
and the replaceability of individuals within the system by others
36 INDUSTRIAL SOCIEN
applies to the educational machine at least as much as to any other
segment of society,and perhaps more so. Some very great teachers
and researchers may perhaps be unique and irreplaceable, but the
average professor and schoolmastercan be replaced from outside the
teaching profession with the greatest of ease and often with little, if
any, loss.
What are the implications of all this for the society and for its
members? The employability, dignity, security and self-respect of
individuals, typically, and for the majority of men now hinges on
their education; and the limits of the culture within which they were
educated are also the limits of the world within which they can,
morally and professionally, breathe. A man's education is by far his
most precious investment, and in effect confers his identity on him.
Modem man is not loyal to a monarch or a land or a faith, whatever
he may say, but to a culture. And he is, generally speaking, gelded.
The Mamluk condition has become universal. No important links
bind him to a kin group; nor do they stand between him and a wide,
anonymous community of culture.
The obverse of the fact that a school-transmitted culnue, not a
folk-transmitted one, alone confers his usabilityand dignityand selfrespect
on industrial man, is the fact that nothing else can do it for
him to any comparable extent. It would be idle to pretend that
ancesuy, wealth or connectionsare unimportant in modem society,
and that they are not on occasion even sourcesof pride to their beneficiaries;
all the same, advantages secured in these ways are often
explained away and are viewed at best ambivalently. It is interesting
to ask whether the pemasive work ethic has helped to produce this
state of affairs, or whether, on the contrary, it is a reflection of it.
Drones and rentiers persist, of course, but they are not very conspicuous,
and this in itself is highly signiticant. It is an important
fact that such privilege and idleness as survive are now discreet,
tending to prefer obscurity to display, and needing to be uncovered
by eager researchers bent on unmasking the inequality which lurks
underneath the surface.
It was not so in the past, when idle privilege was proud and
brazen, as it persists in beingin some survivingagrarian societies, or
in societies which continueto uphold the ethos of pre-industrial life.
Curiously enough, the notion of conspicuous waste was coined by
a work-oriented member of a work-addicted society, Thorsten
Veblen, scandalized by what he saw as the sunrivals from a
INDUSTRIAL SOCIEN 37
pre-industrial, predatory age. The egalitarian, work- and careeroriented
surface of industrial society is as sig cant as its inegalitarian
hidden depths. Life, after all, is lived largely on the surface,
even if imporrant decisions are on occasion made deep down.
The teacher class is now in a sense more important - it is indispensable-
and in dother sense much less so, having lost its monopoly
of access to the cultural wisdom enshrined in scripture. In a
society in which everyone is gelded by indentification with his professional
post and his mining, and hardly anyone derives much or
any security and support from whatever kin links he may have, the
teaching clerics no longer possess any privileged access to administrative
posts. When everyone has become a Mamluk, no special
mamluk class predominates in the bureaucracy. At long last the
bureaucracy can recruit from the population at large, without
needing to fear the amval of dozens of cousins as unwanted attachments
of each single new entrant.
Exo-socialization,education proper, is now the virtually universal
norm, Men acquire the skills and sensibilities which make them
acceptable to their fellows, which fit them to assume places in
society, and which make them 'what they are', by being handed over
by their kin groups (normally nowadays, of course, their nuclear
family) to an educational machine which alone is capable of providing
the wide range of training required for the generic cultural
base. This educational infrastructure is large, indispensable and
expensive. Its maintenance seems to be quite beyond the fmancial
powers of even the biggest and richest organizations within society,
such as the big industrial corporations. These often provide their
personnel with housing, sports and leisure clubs, and so forth; they
do not, except marginally and in special circumstances, provide
schooling. (They may subsidize school bas, but that is another
matter.) The organization man works and plays with his organization,
but his children srill go to state or independent schools.
So, on the one hand, this educational infrastructure is too large
and costly for any organization other than the biggest one of all, the
state. But at the same time, though only the state can sustainso large
a burden, only the stateis also strongenough to control so important
and crucial a function. Culture is no longer merely the adornment,
confirmation and legitimation of a social order which was also sustained
by harsher and coercive constraints; culture is now the
necessary shared medium, the life-blood or perhaps rather the
minimal shared atmosphere, within which alone the members of the
society can brearhe and survive and produce. For a given society, it
must be one in which they can all breathe and speak and produce; so !
it must be the same culture. Moreover, it must now be a great or high ;
(literate, training-wsrained)culture, and it can no longer be a diverIsified,
locality-tied, illiterate little culture or tradition.
But some organism must ensure that this literate and unif~edculture
is indeed being effectively produced, that the educational
product is not shoddy and sub-standard. Only the state can do this,
and, even in countries in which important parts of the educational
i
machine are in private hands or those of religious organizations, the
state does take over quality control in this most important of industries,
the manufacture of viable and usable human beings. That
shadow-state dating back to the time when Europeanstateswere not
merely fragmented but socially weak- the centralized Church- did
put up a fight for the control of education, but it was in the end ineffectual,
unless the Church fought on behalf of an inclusive high
culture and thereby indirectly on behalf of a new nationalist state.
Time was when education was a cottageindustry, when men could
be made by a village or clan. That time has now gone, and gone forever.
(In education, small can now be beautiful o@yif it is coverdy
parasitic on the big.) Exo-socialization, the production and reproduction
of men outside the local intimate unit, is now the norm, and
must be so. The imperative of exo-socialization is the main clue to
why state and culture must now be linked, whereas in the past their
connection was thin, formitous, varied, loose, and often minimal.
Now it is unavoidable. That is what nationalism is about, and why
we live in an age of nationalism.
The Transition to an Age of Nationalism
The most important steps in the argument have now been made.
Mankind is irreversibly committed to indusuial society, and therefore
to a society whose productive system is based on cumulative
science and technology. This alone can sustain anything like the
present and anticipated number of inhabitants of the planet, and
give them a prospect of the kind of standard of living which man
now takes for granted, or aspires to take for granted. Agrarian
society is no longer an option, for its restoration would simply condemn
the great majority of mankind to death by starvation, not to
mention dire and unacceptablepovertyfor the minorityof survivors.
Hence there is no point in discussing, for any practical purpose, the
channsand the horrors of the culturaland political accompaniments
of the agrarian age: they are simply not available. We do not
properly understand the range of options available to industrial
society, and perhaps we never shall; but we understand some of its
essentialconcomitants. The kind of cdtural homogeneitydemanded
by nationalism is one of them, and we had better make our peace
withit. It is not the case, as Elie Kedourie claims,' that nationalism
imposes homogeneity; it is rather that a homogeneity imposed by
objective, inescapable imperative eventually appears on the surface
in the form of nationalism.
Most of mankindenters the industrialage from the agrarianstage.
(The tiny minority which enters it directly from the pre-agrarian
condition does not affect the argument, and the same points apply to
it.) The social organization of agrarian society, however, is not at all
favourableto the nationalist principle, to the convergenceof political
and cultural units, and to the homogeneity and school-transmitted
nature of culture within each political unit. On the contrary, as in
medievalEurope, it generatespoliticalunits whichare either smaller
or much larger than culnual boundaries would indicate; only very
'Elie Kedourie, Naziamlinn, London, 1960.
40 THE TRANSITION TO NATIONALISM
occasionally, by accident, it produced a dynastic state which corresponded,
more or less, with a language and a culture, as eventually
happened on Europe's Atlantic seabord. (The fit was never very
close. Culture in agrarian society is much more pluralistic than its
empires, and generally much broader than its small participatory
social units.)
All this being so, the age of transition to industrialism was bound,
according to our model, also to be an age of nationalism, a period of
turbulent readiustment, in which either political boundaries, or
cultural ones, or both, were being modified, so as to satisfy the new
nationalistimperativewhich now, for the fusttime, was makingitself
felt. Because rulers do not surrender territory gladly (and every
change of a political boundary must make someone a loser), because
changing one's culture is very frequently a most painful experience,
and moreover, because there were rival cultures struggling to capm
e the souls of men, just as there were rival centres of political
authoritystriving to subom men and capture territory: given all this,
it immediately follows from our model that this period of transition
was bound to be violent and contlict-ridden. Actual historical facts
fully confirm these expectations.
Nevertheless, it would not be correct to proceed by simply
workingout the implicationsof the implementationof the nationalist
imperative for agrarian society. Industrial society did not arrive on
the scene by divinefiat. It was itself the fruit of developmentswithin
one particular agrarian society, and these developments were not
devoid of their own turbulence. When it then conquered the rest of
the world, neither this global colonization, nor the abandonment of
empire by those who had been carried forward on the wave of
industrial supremacy but eventually lost rheir monopoly of it, were
peaceful developments. All this means that in actual history the
effects of nationalism tend to be conflated with the other consequences
of industrialism. Though nationalismis indeed an effect of
industrial social organization, it is not the only effect of the imposition
of this new social form, and hence it is necessary to disentangle
it from those other developments.
The problem is illustrated by the fascinating relationship between
the Reformation and nationalism. The stress of the Reformation on
literacy and scripturalism, its onslaught on a monopolistic priesthood
(or, as Weber clearly saw, its universalization rather than
abolition of priesthood), its individualism and links with mobile
urban populations, all make it a kind of harbinger of social features
and attitudes which, accordingto our model, produce the nationalist
age. The role of Protestantism in helping to bring about the indusmal
world is an enormous, complexand contentious topic; and there
is not much point in doing more than cursorily alluding to it here.
But in parts of the globein which both industrialism and nationalism
came later and under external impact, the full relationship of
Protestant-type attitudes and nationalism is yet to be properly
explored.
This relationship is perhaps the most conspicuous in Islam. The
cultural history of the Arab world and of many other Muslim lands
during the past hundred years is largely the story of the advance and
victory of Reformism, a kind of IslamicProtestantism with a heavy
stresson scrip&alism and above all a sustained hostility to spiritual
brokerage, to the local middlemen between man and God (and, in
practice, between diverse groups of men), who had become so very
prominent in pre-modem Islam. The history of this movement and
thatof modemArab (andother)nationalismscan hardly beseparated
from each other. Islam always had an in-built proclivity or potential
for this kind of 'reformed' versionof the faith, and had been seduced
away from it, presumably, by the social need of autonomous rural
groups for the incarnated, personalized location of sanctity which is
invaluable for local mediation purposes. Under modem conditions
its capacity to be a more abstractfaith, presidingover an anonymous
community of equal believers, could reassert itself.
But even religions which might be thought to have had little
inherent potential for such 'protestant' interpretation, could nonetheless
be turned in that direction during the age when the drives to
indusmalism and to nationalism were making their impact. Formally
speaking, one would not expectShintoismto have any marked
resemblance to, say, English nonconformity. Nevertheless, during
the Japanese modernization drive, it was the sober, orderly, as it
were Quaker e1,ements in it (which evidently can be found or
imposed anywhere if one tries hard enough) which were stressed to
the detriment of any ecstatic elements and any undue privatefamiliarity
with the sacred.' Had ancient Greece survived into the modem
age, Dionysiaccultsmight have assumed a more sobergarb as Hellas
lurched forward along the path of development.
'Personal communicationfrom Ronald Dore.
42 THE TRANSITION TO NATIONALISM
Apart from the links between the Protestant and nationalistethos,
there are the direct consequences of industrialization itself. The
general and pervasive consequences of an established industrial
order have already been discussed, in connection with our general
model linking the industrial division of labour with the irnplementation
of the nationalist principle. But certain specific consequences
of early industriahation which do not generally persist later nevertheless
have a signScant role to play. Early industrialism means
populationexplosion, rapid urbanization, labour migration, and also
the economic and political penetration of previously more or less
inward-turnedcommunities, by a global economyand a centralizing
polity. It means that the at least relatively stableand insulated Babel
system of traditional agrarian communities, each inward-turned,
kept separate by geography sideways, and by an enormous social
distanceupwards, is replacedby quitea new kind of Babel, with new
cultural boundaries that are not stable but in constant and dramatic
movement, and which are seldom hallowed by any kind of custom.
There is also a link between nationalism and the processes of
colonialism, imperialism and de-colonization. The emergence of
industrial society in Western Europe had as its consequence the
virtual conquest of the entire world by Europeanpowers, and sometimes
by Europeansettler populations. In effect the whole of Africa,
America, Oceania, and very large parts of Asia came under European
domination; and the parts of Asia which escaped this fate were
often under strong indirect influence. This global conquest was, as
conquests go, rather unusual. Normally, political empire is the
reward of a military orientationand dedication. It is perpetrated by
societies strongly committed to warfare, either because, let us say,
their tribal form of life includes an automatic military training, or
because they possess a leading stratum committed to it, or for some
such similar reason. Moreover, the activity of conquest is arduous
and takes up a large part of the energy of the conquering group.
None of this was true of the European conquest of the world. It
was eventually carried out and completed by nations increasingly
oriented towards indusuy and trade, not by a militaristic machine,
nor by a swarm of temporarily cohesive tribesmen. It was achieved
*&out any total preoccupation with the process on the part of the
conqueror nations. The point made about the English, that they
acquired their Empire in a state of absence of mind, can to some
extent be generalized. (The English also, most laudably, lost the
THE TRANSITION TO NATIONALISM 43
Empire with a similar lack of attention.) When Europe was conquering
and dominatingthe world, it had, on the whole, other, more
pressing and internal things to occupy its attention. It did not even
pay the conquered nations the compliment of being specially interested
in the conquest. A few untypical periods of self-consciousand
vaingloriousimperialismapart, and disregarding the early conquest
of Latin America, which was inspired by good old-fashioned noncommercial
rapacity, that was how it was. The conquest had not
been planned, and was the fruit of economic and technological
superiority, and not of a military orientation.
With the diffusion of this technological and economic might, the
balance of power changed, and between about 1905 and 1960 the
pluralisticEuropean empire was lost or voluntarilyabandoned. Once
again, the specificcircumstancesof all this cannot be ignored; even if
the core or essenceof nationalism flows from the general, abstractly
formulable premisses which were initially laid out, nevertheless the
specific forms of nationalist phenomena are obviously affected by
these circuqstances.
A mte on rhe weakness of ~ ~ h 0 n a ~ k m
It is customary to commenton the strengthof nationalism.Thisis an
important mistake, though readily understandable since, whenever
nationalism has taken root, it has tended to prevail with ease over
other modem ideologies.
Nevertheless, the clue to the understanding of nationalism is its
weaknessat least as much as its strength. It was the dog who faded to
bark who provided the vital clue for SherlockHolmes. The numbers
of potential nationalismswhich failed to bark is far, far larger than
those which did, though they have captured all our attention.
We have already insisted on the dormant nature of this allegedly
powerful monster during the pre-industrialage. But eTJenwithin the
age of nationalism, there is a further importanf sense in which
nationalism remains astonishingly feeble. Nationalism has been
defined, in effect, as the striving to make culture and polity congruent,
to endow a culture with its own political roof, and not more
than one roof at that. Culture, an elusive concept, was deliberately
left undefined. But an at least provisionally acceptable criterion of
culture might be language, as at least a sufficient, if not a necessary
44 THETRANSITION TO NATIONALISM
touchstone of it. Allow for a moment a difference of language to
entail a difference of culture (though not necessarily the reverse).
If this is granted, at least temporarily, certain consequences
follow. I have heard the number of languages on earth estimated at
around 8000. The figure can no doubt be increased by counting
dialects separately. If we allow the 'precedent' argument, this becomeslegitimate:
if akindof differentialwhich insomeplacesdefines
a nationalism is allowed to engender a 'potential nationalism'
wherever else a similar difference is found, then the number of
potential nationalisms increases sharply. For instance, diverse
Slavonic, Teutonic and Romance languages are in fact often no
further apart than are the mere dialects within what are elsewhere
conventionally seen as unitary languages. Slav languages, for instance,
are probably closer to each other than are the various forms
of colloquial Arabic, allegedly a single language.
The 'precedent' argumentcan also generate potential nationalisms
by analogies invoking factors other than language. For instance,
Scottish nationalism indisputably exists. (It may indeed be held to
contradict my model.) It ignores language (which would condemn
some Scots to Irish nationalism,and the rest to English nationalism),
invoking instead a shared historical experience. Yet if such additional
links be allowed to count (as long as they don't contradict the
requirement of my model, that they can serve as a base for an
arenmlly homogeneous, internally mobile culmelpolity with one
educational machine servicing that culture under the surveillance of
that polity), then the number of potential nationalismsgoes up even
higher.
However, let us be content with the figure of 8000, once given to
me by a linguist as a rough number of languages based on what was
no doubt rather an arbitrary estimateof languagealone. The number
of states in the world at present is somefigureof the order of 200. To
this figure one may add all the irredentist nationalisms, which have
not yet attained their state (and perhaps never will), but which are
struggling in that direction and thus have a legitimate claim to be
counted among actual, and not merely potential, nationalisms. On
the other hand, one must also subtract all those states which have
come into being without the benefit of the blessing of nationalist
endorsement, and which do not satisfy the nationalistcriteria of political
l e g i b c y , and indeed defy them; for instance, all the diverse
mini-states dotted about the globe as survivals of a pre-nationalist
THE TRANSITION TO NATIONALISM 45
age, and sometimes brought forth as concessions to geographical
accident or political compromise. Once all these had been subtracted,
the resulting figure would again, presumably, not be too far
above 200. But let us, for the sake of charity, pretend that we have
four timesthat number of reasonablyeffectivenationalismson earth,
in other words, 800 of "them.Ibelieve this to be considerablylarger
than the facts would justify, but let it pass.
This rough calculation still gives us only one effective nationalism
for ren potential ones! And this surprising ratio, depressing presumably
for any enthusiasticpan-nationalist, if such a person exists,
could be made much larger if the 'precedent' argumentwere applied
to the full to determinethe number.of potential nationalisms,and if
thecriteriaof entry into the classof effectivenationalismswere made
at all stringent.
What is one to conclude from this? That for every single nationalism
which has so far raised its ugly head, nine others are still
waiting in the wings? That all the bomb-throwing, martyrdoms,
exchangeofpopulations, and worse, which haveso far bet humanity,
are still to be repeated tenfold?
I think not. For every effective nationalism, there are n potential
ones, groups defmed either by shared culture inherited from the
agrarian world or by some other link (on the 'precedent' principle)
which could give hope of establishing a homogeneous industrial
community, but which neverthelessdo not bother to struggle, which
fail to activate their potential nationalism, which do not even try.
So it seems that the urge to make mutual cultural substitutability
the basis of the state is not so powerful after all. The members of
some groups do indeed feel it, but members of most groups, with
analogous claims, evidently do not.
To explain this, we must return to the accusation made against
nationalism: that it insists on imposing homogeneity on the populations
unfortunate enough to fall under the sway of authorities
possessed by the nationalist ideology. The assumption underlying
this accusation is that traditional, ideologically uninfected authorities,
such as the Ottoman Turks, had kept the peace and extracted
taxes, but otherwise tolerated, and been indeed profoundly indifferent
to, the diversity of faiths and cultures which they governed.
By contrast, their gunman successors seem incapable of resting in
peace till they have imposed the nationalist principle of cuius regio,
eius lingua. They do not want merely a fiscal surplus and obedience.
46 THE TRANSITION TO NATIONALISM
They thirst after the cultural and linguistic souls of their sub-
jects.
This accusation must be stood on its head. It is not the case that
nationalism imposes homogeneity out of a wilful cultural Machtbediifiiss;
it is the objectiveneed for homogeneity which is reflected
in nationalism.If it is the case that a modem industrialstate can only
function with a mobile, lirerate, culturally standardized, interchangeable
population, as we have argued, then the illiterate, halfstarved
populations sucked from their erstwhile rural cultural ghettoes
into the melting pots of shanty-towns yearn for incorporation
into someoneof those cultural pools which already has, or looks as if
it might acquire, a state of its own, with the subsequent promise of
full cultural citizenship, access to primary schools, employment,and
all. Often, these alienated, uprooted, wandering populations may
vacillatebetween diverseoptions, and they may often come to a provisional
rest at one or another temporary and transitional cultural
resting place.
But there are some options which they will refrain from trying to
take up. They will hesitate about trying to enter cultural pools
within which they know themselves to be spurned; or rather, within
which they expect tocontinue to be spurned. Poor newcomersare, of
course, almost always spurned. The question is whether they will
continue to be slighted, and whether the same fate will await their
children. This will depend on whether the newly arrived and hence
least privileged stratum possessestraits which its membersand their
offspring cannot shed, and which will continue to identify them:
genetically transmitted or deeply engrained religious-culturalhabits
are impossible or dillicult to drop.
The alienated victims of early industrialism are unlikely to be
tempted by cultural pools that are very small-a languagespoken by
a coupleof villagesoffers few prospects- or very diffused or lacking
in any literary traditions or personnel capable of carryingskills, and
so on. They require cultural pools which are large, and/or have a
good historic base, or intellectual personnelwell equipped to propagate
the culture in question. It is impossible to pick out any single
qualiiication, or set of qualitications, which will either guarantee the
success as a nationalist catalyst of the culture endowed with it (or
them), or which on the contrary will ensure its failure. Size, historicity,
reasonably compact territory, a capable and energetic intellectualclass:
allthesewillobviously help; but no singleoneis necessary,
THE TRANSITION TO NATIONALISM 47
and it is doubtful whether any fm predictive generalization can be
established in these terms. That the principle of nationalism will be
operative can be predicted; just which groupings will emerge as its
carriers can be only loosely indicated, for it depends on too many
historic contingencies.
Nationalism as such is fated to prevail, but not any one particular
nationalism. We know that reasonably homogeneous cultures, each
of them wid its own political roof, its own political servicing, are
becoming the norm, widelyimplemented but for few exceptions; but
we cannot predict just which cultures, with which political roofs,
will be blessed by success. On the contrary, the simple calculations
made above, concerning the number of cultures or potential nationalisms
and concerning the room available for proper national states,
clearly shows that most potential nationalisms must either fail, or,
more commonly, will refrain from even trying to fmd political ex-
pression.
This is precisely what we do find. Most cultures or potential
nationalgroups enter the age of nationalism without even the feeblest
effort to benefit from it themselves. The number of groups
which in terms of the 'precedent' argument could try to become
nations, which could defme themselves by the kind of criterion
which in some other place does in fact definesome real and effective
nation, is legion. Yet most of them go meekly to their doom, to see
theirculture(though not themselvesasindividuals)slowlydisappear,
dissolving into the wider culture of some new national state. Most
cultures are led to the dustheap of history by industrial civilization
without offeringany resistance. The linguistic distinctivenessof the
Scottish Highlands within Scotland is, of course, incomparably
greater than the cultural distinctivenessof Scotland within the UK;
but there is no Highland nationalism. Much the same is m e of
Moroccan Berbers. Dialectal and cultural differences within Germany
or Italy are as great as those between recognized Teutonic
or Romance languages. Southern Russians differ culturally from
Northem Russians, but, unlike Ukrainians, do not translate thisinto
a sense of nationhood.
Does this show that nationalism is, after all, unimportant? Or
even that it is an ideologicalartefact, an invention of febrile thinkers
which has mysteriously captured some mysteriously susceptible
nations? Not at all. To reach such a conclusion would, ironically,
comecloseto a tacit, obliqueacceptanceof the nationalistideologue's
48 THE TRANSITION TO NATIONALISM
most misguided claim: namely, that the 'nations' are there, in the
very nature of things, only waiting to be 'awakened' (a favourite
nationalist expression and image)from their regrettableslumber, by
the nationalist 'awakener'. One would be infening from the failure
of most potential nations ever to 'wake up', from the lack of deep
stirrings waiting for reveille, that nationalism was not important
after all. Such an inference concedes the social ontology of 'nations',
only admitting, with some surprise perhaps, that some of them lack
the vigour and vitality needed if they are to the destiny which
history intended for them.
But nationalism is wr the awakening of an old, latent, dormant
force, though that is how it does indeed present itself. It is in reality
the consequence of a new form of social organization, based on
deeply internalized, education-dependent high cultures, each protected
by its own state. It uses some of the pre-existent cultures,
generally transforming them in the process, but it cannot possibly
use them all. There are too many of them. A viable higher culturesustaining
modem state cannot fall below a certain minimal size
(unlessin effect parasitic on its neighbours); and there is only room
for a limited number of such states on this earth.
The high ratio of determined slumberers, who will not rise and
shine and who refuse to be woken, enables us to turn the tables on
nationalism-as-seen-by-itself. Nationalismseesitself as a natural and
universal orderingof the politicallife of mankind, only obscured by
that long, persistent and mysterious somnolence. As Hegel expressed
this vision: 'Nations may have had a long history before they
f d y reach their destination - that of forming themselves into
state^'^ Hegel immediately goes on to suggest that this pre-state
period is really 'pre-historical' (sic): so it would seem that on this
view the real history of a nation only begins when it acquiresits own
state. If we invoke the sleeping-beautynations, neither possessing a
state nor feeling the lack of it, against the nationalist doctrine, we
tacitly accept its social metaphysic, which sees nations as the bricks
of which mankind is made up. Critics of nationalismwho denounce
the politicalmovement but tacitly accept the existence of nations, do
not go far enough. Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying
men, as an inherent though long-delayed political destiny, are a
'G.W.F. Hegel,Lecturesa thePhiIosophy of W'orIdHisroty,tr. H.B. Nisbet,
Cambridge, 1975, p. 134.
THE TRANSITION TO NATIONALISM 49
myth;nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and
turnsthem into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates
pre-existingcultures: rhat is a reality, for better or worse, and in
general an inescapable one. Those who are its historic agents know
not what they do, but that is another matter.
But we must ndt accept the myth. Nations are not inscribed into
the nature of things, they do not constitutea political version of the
doctrine of natural kinds. Nor were national states the manifest
ultimate destiny of ethic or cultural groups. What do exist are cultures,
often subtly grouped, shading into each other, overlapping,
intertwined; and thereexist, usually but not always, political unitsof
all shapes and sizes. In the past the two did not generally converge.
There were good reasons for their failing to do so in many cases.
Their rulers established their identity by differentiating themselves
downwards, and the ruled micro-communities differentiated themselves
laterally from their neighbours grouped in similar units.
But nationalism is not the awakening and assertion of these
mythical, supposedlynatural and given units. It is, on the contrary,
the crystallization of new units, suitable for the conditionsnow prevailing,
though admittedly using as their raw material the cultural,
historical and other inheritancesfrom the pre-nationalistworld. This
force - the drive towards new units constructed on the principles
corresponding to the new division of labour- is indeed very strong,
though it is not the only force in the modem world, nor altogether
irresistible. In most cases it prevails, and above all, it determines the
nmm for the legitimacy of political units in the modem world: most
of them must satisfy the imperativesof nationalism, as described. It
sets the accepted standard, even if it does not prevail totally and
universally, and some deviant cases do succeed in defying the norm.
The ambiguity of the question - is nationalism strong or not? arises
from this: nationalism sees and presents itself as the affirmation
of each and every 'nationality'; and these alleged entities are
supposed just to be there, like Mount Everest, since long ago, antedating
the age of nationalism. So, ironically, in its own terms nationalism
is astonishinglyweak. Most of the potential nations, the latent
differentiable communities which could claim to be nations by
criteria analogous to those which somewhere else have succeeded,
fail altogether even to raise their claim, let alone press it effectively
and make it good. If, on the other hand, one interprets nationalism
in the manner which I hold to be correct, and which indeed
contradicts and offends its own self-image, then the conclusion must
be that it is a very strong force, though not perhaps a unique or
irresistible one.
Wild and garden cultures
One way of approaching the central issue is this. Cultures, like
plants, can be divided into savage and cultivated varieties. The
savage kindsare produced and reproduce themselvesspontaneously,
as parts of the life of men. No community is without some shared
system of communication and norms, and the wild systems of this
kind (in other words, cultures) reproduce themselves from generation
to generation without conscious design, supervision, surveillance
or special nutrition.
Cultivated or garden cultures are different, though they have
developed from the wild varieties. They possess a complexity and
richness, most usually sustained by literacy and by specialized personnel,
and would perishif deprivedof their distinctivenourishment
in the form of specialized insti~ti0nSof learning with reasonably
numerous, full-time and dedicated personnel. During the agrarian
epoch of human history the high culturesor great traditions became
prominent, important, and in one sense, but one sense only, dorninant.
Though they could nor altogether impose themselves on the
totality, or even the majority of the population, nevertheless they
generally succeeded in imposing themselves on it as authoritative,
even if (or because) they were inaccessible and mysterious. They
sometimes strengthened, and sometimes competed with, the centralized
state. They could also deputize for that state, when it
weakened or disintegrated during times of troubles or a dark age. A
church or a ritual system could stand in for the shadow of a past or
ghost empire. But the high cultures did not generally define the
limits of a political unit, and there are good reasons why, in the
agrarian age, they should not have been able to do so.
In the industrial age all this changes. The high cultures come to
dominate in quite a new sense. The old doctrines associated with
them mostly lose their authority, but the literateidiomsand styles of
communication they carried become far more effectively authoritative
and normative, and, above all, they come to be pervasive and
universal in society. In other words, virmally everyone becomes
THE TRANSITIONTO NATIONALISM 51
literate, and communicates in an elaborate code, in explicit, fairly
'grammatical' (regularized) sentences, not in context-bound grunts
and nods.
But the high culture, newly universalized in the population, now
badly needs political support and underpinning. In the agrarian age,
it sometimes had this and benefited from it, but at other times it
could dispense with political protection, and that was indeed one of
its strengths. In a dark age when anarchy prevailed and the king's
peace was no longer kept, Christian or Buddhist monasteries, dervish
zawiyus and Brahmin communities could survive and in some
measure keep alive the high culture without benefit of protection by
the sword.
Now that the task of the high culture is so much greater and so
much more onerous, it cannot dispense with a political infrasuucmre.
As a character in No Orchidsfor MissBlandish observed, every
girl ought to have a husband, preferably her own; and every high
culture now wants a state, and preferably its own. Not every wild
culture can.become a high culture, and those without serious prospects
of becoming one tend to bow out without a struggle; they do
not engender a nationalism. Those which think they do have a
chance-or, if anthropomorphictalk about culturesis to be avoided,
those whose human carrierscredit them wirhgood prospects-fight
it out among themselves for available populations and for the available
state-space. This is one kind of nationalist or ethnic conflict.
Where existing politicalboundaries, and those of old or crystallizing
high cultures with political aspirations, fail to be in harmony,
another kind of conflict so highly characteristicof the age of nationalism
breaks out.
Another analogy, in addition to the above botanical one, is available
to describe the new situation. Agrarian man can be compared
witha naturalspecieswhich survivein the natural environment.
Industrial man can be compared with an & d y produced or
bred species which can no longer breathe effectively in the naturegiven
atmosphere, but can only functioneffectivelyand survive in a
new, specially blended and dicially sustained air or medium.
Hence he livesin specially bounded and constructed units, a kind of
giant aquarium or breathing chamber. But these chambers need to
be erected and serviced. The maintenance of the life-giving and
life-preservingair or liquid within each of these giant receptaclesis
not automatic. It requires a specialized plant. The name for this
--u7~--lvlrrv1mm1-1~~N~15
plant is a national educationaland communications system. Its only
effective keeper and protector is the state.
Ir would not in principle be impossible to have a single such
culturaYeducationalgoldfish bowl for the entire globe, sustained by
a single political authority and a single educational system. In the
long run this may yet come to pass. But in the meantime, and for What is a Nation?
very good reasons yet to be discussed, the global norm is a set of
discontinuous breathing chambers or aquaria, each with its own
proprietary, not properly interchangeable, medium or atmosphere. We are now at last'in a position to attempt some kind of plausible
They do share some general traits. The fo~~nulafor the medium of answer to this question. Initially there were two especiallypromising
the fully developed industrialgoldfish bowis is fairly similar in type, candidates for the construction of a theory of nationality: will and
though it is rich in relatively supe cial, but deliberately stressed, culture. Obviously, each of them is important and relevant; but, just
brand-differentiating characteristics.
as obviously, neither is remotely adequate. It is insmctive to conThere
are some good and obvious reasons for this new pludism,
sider why this is so.
which will be exploredfurther. The industrialage inherited both the No doubt will or consent contitutes an important factor in the
political units and the cultures, high and low, of the preceding age. formationof most groups,large and small. lllankindhasalways been
There was no reason why they should allsuddenly fuse into a single organized in groups, of all kinds of shapes and sizes, sometimes
one, and thereweregood reasons why they should not: industrialism, sharply defined and sometimes loose, sometimes neatly nested and
in other words the type of production or of the division of labour sometimes overlapping or intertwined. The variety of these possiwhich
makes these homogeneous breathing tanks imperative, did bilities, and of the principleson whichthe groups were recruitedand
not arrive simultaneously in all parts of the world, nor in the same main~ined,is endless. But two generic agents or catalysts of group
manner. The differential timing of its arrival divided humanity into formation and maintenance are obviously crucial: will, voluntary
rival groups very effectively. These differences in arrival-rime of adherence and identification, loyalty, solidarity, on the one hand;
utilize some cultural, genetic or similar differentiae, left behind by constitute extreme poles along a kind of spectrum. A few communithe
agrarianworld. The datingof 'development' constitutes a crucial ties may be based exclusively or very predominantly on one or the
political diacritical mark, if it can seize upon some cultural differ- other, but they must be rare. Most persisdng groups are based on a
ence inherited from the agrarian age, and use it as its token. mixture of loyalty and identification (on willed adherence), and of
The process of industrialization took place in successive phases extraneous incentives, positive or negative, on hopes and fears.
Ewe define nations as groups which will themselves to persist as
with new gains and losses to be made and avoided. Internationalism communities,' the defdon-net that we have cast into the sea will
was often predicted by the prophetsand commentatorsof the indus- bringforth far too rich a catch. The haul whichweshall have trawled
trial age, both on the left and on the right, but the very opposite in wi. indeed include the communities we may easily recognize
came to pass: the age of nationalism.
as effective and cohesive nations: these genuine nations do in effect
will themselves to be such, and their life may indeed constitute a
kind of continuous, informal, ever self-reaffirming plebiscite. But
(unfortunately for this definition) the same also applies to many
'Ernest Renaa, 'Qu'estse qu'une Nation', republished in Ernen Renan et
P A l h g n e , Textes receuillis et comment6s par Emile Bure, NY, 1945.
54 WHAT IS A NATION?
other clubs, conspiracies, gangs, teams, parties, not to mention the
many numerous communities and associations of the pre-industrial
age which were nor recruited and defmed according to the nationalist
principle and which defy it. Will, consent, identifcation, were not
ever absent from the human scene, even though they were(and continue
to be) also accompanied by calculation, fear and interest. (It is
an interesting and moot question whether sheer inertia, the persistence
of aggregates and combinations, is to he counted as tacit
consent or as something else.)
The tacit self-identifiation has operated on behalf of all kinds of
groupings, larger or smaller than nations, or cutting across them, or
defined horizontally or in other ways. In brief, even if will were the
basis of a nation (to paraphrase an idealist definition of the state), it
is also the basis of so much else, that we cannot possibly define the
nation in this manner. It is only because, in the modem, nationalist
age, nationalunits are thepreferred, favouredobjects of iden cation
and willed adherence, that the definition seems tempting, because
those other kinds of group are now so easily forgotten. Those who
take the tacit assumptions of nationalism for granted erroneously
also credit them to humanity at large, in any age. But a d e f ~ t i o n
tied to the assumptions and conditions of one age (and even then
constituting an exaggeration), cannot usefully be used to help to
explain the emergence of that age.
Any d e f ~ t i o nof nations in terms of shared culture is another net
which brings in far too rich a catch. Human historyis and continues
to be well endowed with cultural differentiations. Cultural boundaries
are sometimes sharp and sometimes fuzzy; the patterns are
sometimes bold and simple and sometimes tortuous and complex.
For all the reasons we have stressed so much, this richness of differentiation
does not, and indeed cannot, normally or generally converge
either with the boundaries of political units (the jurisdictions
of effective authorities) or with the boundaries of units blessed by
the democratic sacraments of consent and will. The agrarian world
simply could not he so neat. The industrial world tends to become
so, or at least to approximate to such simplicity; but that is another
matter, and there are now special factors making it so.
The establishment of pervasive high cultures (standardized,
literacy-and education-basedsystems of communication), a process
rapidly gathering pace throughout the world, has made it seem, to
anyone too deeply immersed in our contemporaryassumptions, that
WHAT IS A NATION? 55
nationality may be defmble in terms of shared culture. Nowadays
people can live only in units defmed by a shared culture, and internallymobileand
fluid. Genuine cultural pluralism ceases to be viable
under current conditions. But a little bit of historical awareness or
sociological sophistication should dispel the illusion that this was
always so. Culturally plural societies often worked well in the past:
so well, in fact, that cultural plurality was sometimesinvented where
it was previously lacking.
If, for such cogent reasons, these two apparently promising paths
towards the definition of nationality are barred, is there another
way?
The great, but valid, paradox is this: nations can be defmed only
in terms of the age of nationalism, rather than, as you might expect,
iheother way round. It is not the case that the 'age of nationalism' is
a mere summation of the awakening and political self-assertion of
this, that, or the other nation. Rather, when general social conditions
make for standardized, homogeneous, cenrrally sustained
high cultures, pervadingentire populationsand not justelite minorities,
asituationarisesin which well-defmededucationally sanctioned
and unified cultures constitute very nearly ihe only kind of unit with
which men willingly and often ardently identify. The cultures now
seem to be the natural repositoriesof political legitimacy. Only then
doesit come to appear that any defmce of their boundaries by political
units ~0nStituteSa scandal.
Under these conditions, though under these conditions only,
nations can indeed he defmed in terms both of will and of culture,
and indeed in terms of the convergence of them both with political
units. In these conditions, men will to be politically united with all
those, and only those, who share their culture. Polities then will to
extend their boundaries to the limits of their cultures, and to protect
and impose their cultur~with the boundaries of their power. The
fusion of will, culture and polity becomes the norm, and one not
easily or frequently defied. (Once, it had been almost universally
defied, with impunity, and had indeed passed unnoticed and undiscussed.)
These conditionsdo not definethe human situationas such,
but merely its industrial variant.
It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way
round. Admittedly, nationalism uses the pre-existing, historically
erited proliferation of cultures or cultural wealth, though it uses
em very selectively, and it most often transforms them radically.
56 WHATIS A NATION?
Dead languages can be revived, traditions invented, quite fictitious
pristine purities restored. But this culturally creative, fanciful, positively
inventive aspect of nationalist ardour ought not to allow anyone
to conclude, erroneously, that nationalism is a contingent, artificial,
ideological invention, which might not have happened, if only
those damned busy-body interferingEuropean thinkers, not content
to leave well alone, had not concocted it and fatefully injected it into
the bloodsmm of otherwise viable political communities. The cultural
shreds and patches used by nationalismare often arbitrary historical
inventions. Any old shred and patch would have served as
well. But in no way does it follow that the principle of nationalism
itself, as opposed to the avatars it happens to pick up for its incarnations,
is itself in the least contingent and accidental.
Nothing could be further from the truth than such a supposition.
Nationalism is not what it seems, and aboveallit is not what it seems
to itself. The cultures it claims to defend and reviveareoften its own
inventions, or are modified out of all recognition. Nonetheless the
nationalist principle as such, as distinct from each of its specific
forms, and from the individually distinctive nonsense which it may
preach, has very very deep roots in our shared cnrrent condition, is
not at all contingent, and will not easily be denied.
Durkheim taught that in religious worship society adores its own
camouflaged image. In a nationalist age, societies worship themselves
brazenly and openly, spurning the camouflage. At Nuremberg,
Nazi Germany did not worshipitself by pretendingto worship
God or even Wotan; it overtly worshipped itself. In milder but just
as significantform,enlightenedmodernisttheologiansdo not believe,
or even take much interest in, the doctrines of their faith which had
meant so much to their predecessors. They treat themwith a kind of
comic auto-functionalism,as valid simplyand only as the conceprual
and ritual tools by means of which a social tradition affirms its
values, continuity and solidarity, and they systematically obscure
and play down the difference between such a tacitly reductionist
'faith', and the real thing which had preceded it and had played such
a crucial part in earlier European history, a part which could never
have been played by the unrecognizably diluted, watered-down
current versions.
But the fact that social self-worship, whether virnlent and violent
or gentle and evasive, is now an openly avowed collective selfworship,
rather than a means of covertly revering society though the
WHAT IS A NATION? 57
image of God, as Durkheim insisted, does not mean that the current
style is any more veridical than that of a Durkheimian age. The
community may no longer be seen through the prism of the divine,
but nationalism has its own amnesias and selections which, even
when they may be severelysecular, can be profoundlydistortingand
deceptive.
The basic deception and self-deception practised by nationalism is
this: nationalism is, essentially, the general imposition of a high
culture on society, where previously low cultures had taken up the
lives of the majority, and in some cases of the totality, of the population.
It means that generalized diffusion of a school-mediated,
academy-supervised idiom, codified for the requirementsof reasonably
precise bureaucratic and technologicalcommunication. It is the
establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society, with mutually
substitutable atomized individuals, held together above all by a
shared culture of this kind, in place of a previous complex structure
of local groups, sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and
idiosyncratically by the micro-groupsthemselves. That is what really
happens.
But this is the very opposite of what nationalism affirmsand what
nationalists fervently believe. Nationalism usually conquers in the
name of a putative folk culture. Its symbolism is drawn from the
healthy, pristine, vigorous life of the peasants, of the Volk, the
narod. There is a certain element of truth in the nationalist selfp~esentationwhen
the narod or Volk is ruled by officialsof another,
an alien high culture, whose oppression must be resisted fmt by a
culturalrevivaland redfurnation, andeventually bya war of national
liberation. If the nationalism prospers it eliminates the alien high
culture, but it does not then replaceit by the old local low culture; it
revives, or invents, a local high (literate, specialist-transmitted)
cultureof its own, though admittedlyone which will have somelinks
with the earlier local folk styles and dialects. But it was the great
ladies at the Budapest Opera who really went to town in peasant
dresses, or dresses claimed to be such. At the present time in the
Soviet Union the consumers of 'ethnic' gramophone records are not
the remaining ethnic rural population, but the newly urbanized,
appartment-dwelling,educated and multi-lingual population,' who
'YU. V. Bromley er al., Sovrmnye Emcheskre Protsessy v SSSR (Contmporary
E h c Processesin the USSR),Moscow, 1975.
like to express their real or imaginedsentimentsand roots, and who
will no doubt indulge in as much nationalist behaviour as the political
situation may allow.
So a sociological self-deception,a visionof reality through a prism
of illusion, still persists, but it is not the same as that which was
analysed by Durkheim. Society no longer worships itself through
religious symbols; a modem, streamlined, on-wheels high culture
celebrates itself in song and dance, which it borrows (stylizing it in
the process) from a folk culture which it fondly believes itself to be
perpetuating, defending, and reaffirming.
The course of true nationalism m e 7 did mn m o t h
I
A characteristic scenario of the evolution of a nationalism -and we
shall have cause to return to this kind of scenario -ran something
like this. The Ruritanians were a peasant population speaking a
group of related and more or less mutually intelligible dialects, and
inhabiting a series of discontinuous but not very much separated
pockets within the lands of the Empire of Megalomania. The Ruritanian
language, or rather the dialects which could be held to compose
it, was not really spoken by anyone other than these peasa,~ts.
The aristocracy and officialdom spoke the language of the Megalornanian
court, which happened to belong to a language group &ferentfromthe
oneof which theRuritaniandialectswerean offshoot:
Most, but not all, Ruritanian peasantsbelonged to a church whose
limgy was taken from another linguisticgroup again, and many of
the priests, especially higher up in the hierarchy, spoke a language
which was a modem vernacular version of rhe liturgicallanguage of
this creed, and which was also very far removed from Ruritanian.
The petty traders of the small towns servingthe Ruritaniancounnyside
were drawn from a different ethnic group and religion still, and
one heartily detested by the Ruritanian peasanny.
In the past the Ruritanian peasantshad had many griefs, movingly
and beautifnlly recorded in theu iament-songs (painstakingly colIected
by village schoolmasterslatein the nineteenthcentury, and made
well known to the international musical public by the compositions
of the great Ruritanian national composer L.). The pitiful oppression
of the Ruritanian peasantry provoked, in the eighteenth
centnry, the guerrilla resistance led by the famous Ruritanian s o d
WHAT IS A NATION? 59
bandit K., whose deeds are said still to persist in the local folk
memory, not to mention several novels and two fdms, one of them
produced by the nationalartist Z., under highestauspices, soon after
the promulgation of the Popular Socialist Republic of Ruritania.
Honesty compels one bo admit that the social bandit was captured
by his own compatriots, and that the tribunalwhich condemnedhim
to a painful death had as its president another compatriot. Furrhermore,
shortly after Ruritania frst attained independence, a circular
passed between its Ministries of the Interior, Justice and Education,
considering whether it might not now be more politic to celebrate
thevillage defence units which had opposedthe social bandit and his
gangs, rather than the said social bandit himself, in the interest of
not encouraging opposition to the police.
A careful analysis of the foik songs so painstakingly collected in
the nineteenth century, and now incorporated in the repertoire of
the Ruritanian youth, camping and sports movement, does not disclose
much evidence of any serious discontent on the part of the
peasanuywirhtheirlinguistic and culturalsituation, howevergrieved
they were by other, more earthy matters. On the contrary, such
awareness as there is of linguistic pluralism within the lyrics of the
songs is ironic, jocular and good-humoured, and consists in pan of
biigual puns, sometimes in questionable taste. It must also be
admitted that one of the most moving of these songs- I often sang it
by the camp fire at the holiday camp to which I was sent during the
summer vacations- celebrates the fate of a shepherd boy, grazing
three bullocks on the seigneurial clover (sic) near the woods, who
was surprised by a group of social bandits, req ng him to surrender
his overcoat. Combining reckless folly with lack of political
awareness, the shepherd boy refused and was killed. I do not know
whether this song has been suirably re-written since Ruritania went
socialist. Anyway, to return to my main theme: though the songs do
oftencontain complaints about the condition of the peasantry, they
do not raise the issue of cultural nationalism.
That was yet to come, and presumablypost-dates the composition
of the said songs. In the nineteenth century a population explosion
occurred at the same time as cenain other areas of the Empire of
Megalomania - but not Ruritania - rapidly indusuialized. The
Ruritanian peasants were drawn to seek work in the indusuially
more developed areas, and some secured it, on the dreadful terns
prevailingat the time. As backward rustics speakingan obscureand
60 WHATIS A NATION?
seldom written or taught language, they had a particularly rough
deal in the towns to whose slums they had moved. At the same time,
some Ruritanian lads destined for the church, and educated in both
the court and the liturgicallanguages, becameinfluenced by the new
liberalideas in the courseof their secondaryschooling, and shifted to
a secular training at the university, ending not as priests but as
journalists, teachers and professors. They received encouragement
from a few foreign, non-Ruritanian ethnographers, musicologists
and historians who had come to explore Ruritania. The continuing
labour migration, increasingly widespread elementaryeducationand
conscription provided these Ruritanian awakeners with a growing
audience.
Of course, it was perfectly possible for the Ruritanians, if they
wished to do so (and many did), to assimilate into the dominant
language of Megalomania. No genetically transmitted trait, no deep
religious custom, differentiated an educated Ruritanian from a similar
Megalomanian. In fact, many did assimilate, often without
bothering to change their names, and the telephone directory of the
old capital of Megalomania (now the Federal Republic of Megalomania)
is quite fullof Ruritanian names, though often rather comically
spelt in the Megalomanian manner, and adapted to Megalomanian
phonetic expectations. The point is that after a rather harsh
and painful start in the first generation, the life chances of the offspring
of the Ruritanian labour migrant were not unduly bad, and
probably at least as good (given his willingness to work hard) as
those of his non-Ruritanian Megalomanian fellow-citizens. So these
offspring shared in the eventually growing prosperity and general
embourgeoisement of the region. Hence, as far as individual life
chances went, there was perhaps no need for a virulent Ruritanian
nationalism.
Nonetheless something of the kind did occur. It would, I think,
be quite wrong to attribute conscious calculation to the participants
in the movement. Subjectively, one must suppose that they had the
motives and feelings which are so vigorously expressed in the literature
of the national revival. They deplored the squalor and neglectof
their home valleys, while yet also seeing the rustic virtues still to be
found in them; they deplored the discrimination to which their conationals
weresubject, and the alienationfrom their nativeculture to
which they were doomed in the proletarian suburbs of the industrial
towns. They preached against these ills, and had the hearing of at
least many of their fellows. The manner in which, when the international
political situation came to favour it, Ruritania eventually
attainedindependence, is now part of the historical record and need
not be repeated here.
There is, one must repeat, no need to assume any consciouslongterm
calculation of interest on anyone's part. The nationalist intellectuals
were full of warm and generousardour on behalf of the conationals.
When they d o ~ e dfolk costume and trekked over the
hills, composing poems in the forest clearings, they did not also
dream of one day becoming powerful bureaucrats, ambassadors and
ministers. Likewise, the peasants and workerswhom they succeeded
in reaching felt resentment at their condition, but had no reveries
about plans of industrial developmentwhich one day would bring a
steel mill (quite useless, as it then turned out) to the very heart of the
Ruritanian valleys, thus totally ruining quite a sizeable area of surrounding
arable land and pasture. It would be genuinely wrong to
try to reduce these sentiments to calculations of material advantage
or of social mobility. The present theory is sometimes travestiedas a
reduction of national sentiment to calculation of prospects of social
promotion. But this is a misrepresentation. In the old days it made
no sense to ask whether the peasants loved their own culture: they
took it for granted, like the air they breathed, and were not conscious
of either. But when labour migration and bureaucratic employment
became prominent features within their social horizon,
they soon learned the difference between dealing with a co-national,
one understanding and sympathizing with their culture, and someone
hostile to it. This very concrete experience taught them to be
aware of their culture, and to love it (or, indeed, to wish to be rid of
it) without any conscious calculation of advantages and prospects of
social mobility. In stable self-containedcommunitiesculture is often
quite invisible, but when mobility and context-free communication
come to be of the essence of social life, the culture in which one has
been taught to communicate becomes the core of one's identity.
So had there been such calculation (which there was not) it would,
in quite a number of cases (though by no means in all), have been a
very sound one. In fact, given the at least relative paucity of Ruritanian
intellectuals, those Ruritanians who did have higher quafications
secured much better posts in independent Ruritania than
most of them could even have hoped for in Greater Megalomania,
where they had to compete with scholastically more developed
62 WHAT IS A NATION?
ethnic groups. As for the peasants and workers, they did not benefit
immediately; but the drawing of a political boundary around the
newly defined ethnic Ruritania did mean the eventual fosteringand
protection of industries in the area, and in the end drastically
diminished the need for labour migration from it.
What all this amounts to is this: during the early period of industrialization,entrants
into the new order who are drawn from cultural
and linguistic groups that are distant from those of the more advanced
centre, suffer considerable disadvantages which are even
greater than those of other economically weak new proletarianswho
have the advantage of sharing the culture of the political and economic
rulers. But the culturalllinguistic distance and capacity to
differentiate themselves from others, which is such a handicap for
individuals, can be and often is eventually a positive advantage for
entire collectivities, or potential collectivities, of these victims of the
newly emergent world. It enables them to conceive and express their
resentments and discontents in intelligible terms. Ruritanians had
previously thought and felt in terms of family unit and village, at
most in terms of a valley, and perhaps on occasion in terms of
religion. But now, swept into the melting pot of an early industrial
development, they had no valley and no village: and sometimes no
f d y . But therewere other impoverished and exploited individuals,
and a lot of them spoke dialects recognizably similar, while most of
the better-off spokesomethingquite alien; and so the n e i concept of
the Ruritanian nation was born of this contrast, with some encouragement
from those journalists and teachers. And it was not an
illusion: the attainment of some of the objects of the nascent Ruritanian
national movement did indeed bring relief of the ills which
had helped to engender it. The relief would perhaps have come anyway;
but in this national form, it also brought forth a new high culture
and its guardian state.
This is one of the two important principlesof fission which determine
the emergence of new units, when the industrial world with its
insulated cultural breathing tanks comes into being. It could be
called the principle of barriers to communication, barriers based on
previous, pre-industrial cultures; and it operates with special force
during the early period of industrialization. The other principle, just
as important, could be called that of inhibitors of social entropy; and
it deserves separate treatment.
Social Entropy and Equality in
Industrial Society
The transition from agrarian to industrial society has a kind of
entropy quality, a shift from pattern to systematic randomness.
Agrarian society, with its relatively stable specializations, its persisting
regional, kin, professional and rank groupings, has a clearly
marked social structure. Its elements are ordered, and not distributed
at random. Its sub-cultures underscoreand fortify thesestructural
differentiations,and they do not by setting up or accentuating
cultural difference within it in any way hamper the functioning of
the society at large. Quite the contrary. Far from frnding such cultural
differentiations offensive, the society holds their expression
and recognition to be most fitting and appropriate. Respect for them
is the very essence of etiquette.
Industrial society is different. Its territorial and work units are ad
hoc: membership is fluid, has a great turnover, and does not generally
engage or commit the loyalty and identity of members. In brief,
theold structures are dissipatedand largely replaced by an internally
random and fluid totality, within which there is not much (certainly
when compared with the preceding agrarian society) by way of
genuine sub-structures. There is very little in the way of any effective,
binding organization at any level between the individual and
the total community. This total and ultimate political community
thereby acquires a wholly new and very considerable importance,
beinglinked (as it seldom was in the past) both to the state and to the
cultural boundary. The nation is now supremely important, thanks
both to the erosion of sub-groupingsand the vastly increasedimportance
of a shared, literary-dependent culture. The state, inevitably,
is charged with the maintenance and supervision of an enormous
socialinfrastructure (the cost of which characteristically comes close
to one half of the total income of the society). The educational
system becomes a very crucial part of it, and the maintenance of
the culturalllinguistic medium now becomes the central role of
64 SOCIAL ENTROPY AND EQUALITY
education. The cirizens can only breathe conceptually and operate
within that medium, which is co-extensive with the territory of the
state and its educationaland cultural apparatus, and which needs to
be protected, sustained and cherished.
The role of culture is no longer to underscore and make visible
and authoritative the structural differentiationswithin society (even
if some of them persist, and even if, as may happen, a few new ones
emerge); on the contrary, when on occasion cultural differences do
tie in with and reinforce status differences, this is held to be somewhat
shameful for the society in question, and an index of partial
failure of its educationalsystem. The task with which that system is
entrusted is to turn out worthy, loyaland competentmembersof the
totalsociety whose occupancyof postswithin it will not be hampered
by factional loyalties to sub-groups within the total community; and
if some part of the educational system, by default or from surreptitious
design, actually produces internal cultural differences and
thereby permits or encourages discrimination, this is counted as
something of a scandal.
Obstacles to entropy
All this is only a reformulationof our general theory of the bases of
nationalism, of the new role of culture in mobile, educated, anonymous
societies. But an important point is brought out by stressing
the need for this random-seeming, entropic mobility and distribution
of individualsin this kind of society. Within it, though subcommunities
are partly eroded, and their moral authority is much
weakened, nevertheless people continue to differ in all kinds of
ways. People can be categorized as tall and short, as fat and thin,
dark and light, and in many other ways. Clearly, there is simply
no limit to the number of ways in which people can be classified.
Most of the possible classificationswill be of no interest whatever.
But some of them become socially and politically very important.
They are those which I am tempted to call entropy-resistant. A
classification is entropy-resistant if it is based on an attribute which
has a marked tendency not to become, even with the passageof time
since the initial establishment of an industrial society, evenly dispersed
throughout the entire society. In such an entropy-resistant
SOCIAL ENTROPY AND EQUMITY 65
case, those individuals who are characterized by the trait in question
will tend to be concentrated in one part or another of the total
society.
Suppose a society contains a certain number of individuals who
are, by an acciden~ofheredity, pigmentationally blue; and suppose
that, despite the passage of a number of generations since the initial
establishment of the new economy, and the official promulgation
and enforcement of a policy of la cam-&-eouverte aux talents, most
blues stubbornly persist in occupying places either at the top, or at
the bottom, of the society in question: in other words, the blues tend
to capture either too many, or too few of the advantagesavailable in
this society. That would make blueness a social-entropy-resistant
trait, in the sense intended.
Note, by the way, that it is always possible to invent traits which,
at any given moment, may seem entropy-resistant. It is always
possibleto invent a concept which will applyonly to this or that class
of people. But the entropy-resistanceof a concept, in this sense, will
normally be of interest only if it is a reasonably natural notion, one
already in use in the society in question, rather than artificially
invented for the present purpose. Then, if it is unevenly distributed
in the wider society, trouble may well ensue.
The rest of this argument can now easily be anticipated: entropyresistant
traits constitute a very serious problem for industrial
society. Almost the reverse was true of agrarian society. Far from
deploring entropy-resistant traits, that kind of society habitually
invented them, whenever it found itself insufficiently supplied with
this commodity by nature. It liked to suppose that certain categories
of men were natural rulers, and that others were natural slaves, and
sanctions were deployed-punitive, ideological- to persuademen eo
conformwith theseexvectations and indeed to internalizethem. The
society invented dubious human attributes or origins whose main
purpose was, precisely, to be entropy-resistant.The religiouselitein
Muslim tribal lands is often defined and legitimated in terms of
descent from the Prophet; status among central Asian tribes is often
expressed in terms of descent from Genghiz Khan's clan; European
aristocracies frequently believe themselves to be descended from a
distinct conquering ethnic group.
Entropy-resistance creates fissures, sometimes veritable chasms,
in the industrial societiesin which it occurs. How does this fissurepronenessdifferfrom
that engenderedmerely by cultural differences
66 SOCIALENTROPY AND EQUALITY
and communication problems which take place in early industrial
society, and which were discussed in the preceding section?
The two phenomena do have a certain affmity and overlap. But
the differences are also important. The differential access to the
languagelcultureof the moreadvancedpoliticaland economiccentre,
which hampers natives of more peripheral cultures and impels them
and their leaders towards a cultural and eventually political nationalism,
is, of course, also an entropy-resistance of a kind. The
migrant labourers who do not even speak a dialectal variant of the
main state languageused by bureaucratsand entrepreneurs, will, for
that very reason, be far more likely initially to remain at the bottom
of the social hierarchy, and hence incidentally be less able to correct
and compensate the disadvantages which haunt them, either for
themselves or for their children. On the other hand, when their language(or
rather, a standardizedand streamlinedversionof one of its
dialects) becomes the educational, bureaucraticand commerciallanguage
o'f a newly independent nationalist state, these particular disadvantages
wiU disappear, and their cultural characteristics will
cease to be entropy-resistant.
But it is important to note that in our hypothetical case they could
also have escaped their handicap by assimilatingto the old dominant
language and culture; and in fact, many men did take this path.
There is no reason to suppose that thosewho have trodden it are less
numerous than thosewho took the nationalist option. Indeed, many
must have taken both paths, successively or simultaneously.' For
instance, many have become irredentist nationalists on behalf of a
culture which was not that of their genuine origins, assimilating
first, and then taking up political cudgels to ensure full high culture
status, and its own political state roof, for their new culture.
But what differentiates this kind of case, crucially important
though it is, from other kinds of entropy-resistance, is this: if all that
is really at stake is a communication gap (but crucially linked to
general status and economic disadvantage), then this can be remedied
by either of the two methods discussed: a successful nationalism,
or assimilation; or an overlap of both. But there are forms of
entropy-resistance whose fissiparous social consequences cannot be
remedied by correctingthe communication disadvantagealone. The
secondoption, of assimilationthrough education, is barred. Thereis
'F. Colonna, InstituteursAlgh-iens, 1883-1939, Paris, 1975.
more than a communication barrier involved. If the first option
(successful irredentism, in effect) also happens to be closed by the
balanceof politicalpower, the situationis grave, and will continueto
fester.
Failure to communicate, such as arises between entrants from an
alien culture into an industrializing area, is one form of entropyinhibition
(though one which can often easily be overcome in a
generationor so); but the obverse does not hold, and not all entropyinhibitions
are due to a mere failure to communicate. Those which
are not due to a mere communication failure, and are remediable
neither by assimilationinto the dominant pool, nor by the creationof
a new independent pool using the native mediumof the entrants, are
correspondinglymore tragic. They constitute a problem whose solution
is not yet in sight, and which may well be one of the gravest
issues that industrial society has to face.
Let us return to our hypothetical case of a pigmentationally blue
sub-population within the wider society, and let us suppose that for
one reason or another this population is concentrated near the
bottom of the social scale. Industrial societies are quite inegalitarian
in providing their citizens with a wide variety of social positions,
some very much more advantageous than others; but they are also
egalitarian in that this system of posts forms a kind of continuum
(there are no radical discontinuities along it), and that there is a
widespread belief, possibly exaggerated but not wholly devoid of
truth, that it is possibleto move up and down, and that rigid barriers
in the system are illegitimate. Compared at any rate with most
agrarian societies, industrial society is astonishingly egalitarian, and
there is, in developed industrial society, a marked convergence of
life-stylesand a great dimunitionof social distance. But in our hypothetical
case of a blue-colouredpopulation, which is concentrated at
the bottom, the conjunction of easy idensability (blue is a conspicuous
colour) with the non-random, counter-entropic distribution
of this category of people (the blues) has some very unfortunate
consequences.
It is' safe to assume that populations frequently differ in some
measure in their innate talents. The supposition that all talents are
distributed with absolute equality is about as probable as a land
which is totally flat. It is equally obvious that when it comes to the
deployment of talents, social factors are far more important than
innateendowment. (Some of the populations most closely associated
with theachievementsof humanityin recent centurieswere backward
savagesnotso manygenerationsearlier, thoughitisunlikelythat their
genetic equipment could have changed much in the brief period
which elapsed between their barbarism and their world-historical
prominence- which seems to prove this pcint.) The whole question
does not matter too much, in as far as it is obvious that the spans of
abilityoccurringwithin given'ethnic' or'racial' groups are far greater
than the differences between the averages of such diverse groups.
Something very important follows from all this. The blues are
concentrated at the bottom, and it may even be that their performance
is, on average, inferior to that of groups more randomly distributed.
No-one knows whether this is due to genetic differences or
to social factors. But one thing is certain: within the blue population,
there will be many who are much abler, much more fit in terms of
whatever criteria of performance may currently be relevant and
applied, than very many members of non-blue segments of the total
population.
What will now happen, in the situation as described and defined?
The association of blueness with low position will have created a
prejudice against blues. When those at the bottom appear to be,
chromatically or in whatever way you choose, a random sample of
the population, then the prejudice against them cannot spread to
some other specific trait, for occupancy of the lowest position is not
specifically connected with any other trait, ex hypothesi. But if so
many of those at the bottom are blue, then the prejudice which is
engenderedamongslightlyhigher strata against those below them by
the fear of being pushed downwards, inevitablyspreads to blueness.
Infact, non-bluegroups low down the s d ewill be speciallyprone to
anti-blue feelings, for they will have precious little else to be proud
of, and they will cling to their only and pathetic distinction, nonblueness,
with special venom.
However, very many of the blues will be on the way up, in spite of
prejudiceagainst them. The concentrationof the bluesat the bottom
is only statistical, and many blues (even if they are themselves but a
minority within their own blue sub-population)will, by dint of hard
work, ability or luck be on the way up and have achieved a higher
position. What happens to them?
We have assunled that blueness is, for one reason or another,
ineradicable. So the condition of the ascending blues will be painful
and fraught with tension. Whatever their individual merits, to their
SOCIALENTROPY AND EQUALITY 69
random non-blue acquaintances and encounters (and it is of the
essence of a mobile complex industrial society that so many human
contacts are random, fleeting, but nonetheless sign5cant), they will
still be the dirty, lazy, poor, ignorant blues; for these traits, or
similar ones, are associated with the occupancy of positions low
down on the social scale.
In all this, the rising blue is perhaps not much worse off than the
rising Ruritanian migrant worker in our previousexample; but there
is one overwhelminglyimportant difference. Ruritanian culture can
be shed; blueness cannot. We have also assumed that the Ruritanians
had a territorial base: there is an area, the Ruritanian heartland,
where peasants speaking some version of Ruritanian were in a
majority. So, onceagain, Ruritanians had two ways out: assimilation
into Megalomanian language or culture, or the establishment of a
glorious independent Ruritania, where their patois would be turned
intoan officialand literarylanguage. Each of the two alternativeshas
been successfully tried in different places and by different people.
Ex hypothesi, however, the blues are devoid of the first of these two
options. Their give-away blueness stays with them, do what they
will. Moreover, Megalomanian culture is old and has a wellestablished
self-image, and blueness is excluded from it.
What aboui the second option, the establishment of national
independence? As a matter of historical and contemporary fact,
populations finding themselves in the kind of situation corresponding
to those of our blues sometimes do, and sometimes do not,
possess a territorial base of their own. In the former case, they
thereby do have at least one of the two options availableto the Runtanians,
and if it is politicallyand militarilyfeasible they may take it.
If, however, the hypothetical blues possess no territorial base in
which they can plausibly hope to establish an independent blue land,
or alternatively, if they do have one, but this blue homeland is, for
one reason or another, too exiguous and unattractive to secure the
returnto it of the bluesdispersedin other regions), then the plight of
the blues is serious indeed.
In this kind of situation grave sociological obstacles, not easily
removable by mere good will and legislation or by political irredentism
and activism, block the way to that cultural homogeneity
and social entropy which is not merely the norm of advanced
industrial society, but also, it seems, a condition of its smooth
functioning. Where this systematicentropy-inhibitionoccurs, it may
wellconstituteone of the gravest dangersthat industrialsociety must
face. Conversely, while the blue populations are blocked in both
directions, neither smooth assimilation nor independence being
easily available to them, some other populations may be doubly
blessed. In a federal state, populations such as our hypothetical
Ruritaniansmay simultaneously possessan autonomous Ruritania in
which Ruritanian is the official language, and yet also, at the same
time, thanks to the small cultural distance between them and other
cultures in the federal state, and to the non-identifiability of assimilated
Ruritanians, be able to move smoothly, frictionlessly, in an
entropic way, in the wider state. It is, I suppose, for Ruritanians to
decide whether this double advantage is worth the price they pay;
namely, that the Ruritanian canton or federal autonomous republic
is not fully independent. Some cases which fit this general description
remain within the widerfederal state voluntarily, and some have
been deprived of this option by force. Quebec would seem to exemplify
the fist situation; Iboland, in Nigeria, the second.
The question then arises: what are the kinds of attribute in the reali
world which resemble the 'blueness' of our hypothetical example?
Geneticallytransmitted traits are one specimenof such blueness, but
one specimen only; and the other, non-genetic species of it are at
least as important. One must also add that not any genetically transmitted
trait will have the effect of producing a fissure in society.
Ginger-headedness, for example, causes some people to be teased as
children; and on the other hand, redheads among women are sometimes
deemed specially attractive. Moreover, some ethnic groups are
said to have a disproportionatenumber of red-headed members; but
despite these facts andlor folk beliefs, red hair does not, all in all,
generate conflicts or social problems.
Part of the explanation must be, to use the term previouslyintroduced
for this purpose, that red hair is fairly entropic, notwithstandingany
allegedethnic correlation. Physicaltraits which, though
genetic, have no strong historic or geographicalassociations tend to
be entropic; and even if they do d d l y correlatewith social advanI
tage or disadvantage, this tends to remain socially unperceived. By
contrast, in Ruanda and Urundi physical height related to ethnic
fiation and political status in a very marked way, both in fact and
in ideology, the conquering pastoralists being taller than the local
agriculturalists,and both being taller than the pygmies. But in most
other societies, this correlationis looseenough not to becomesociallyI
SOCIAL ENTROPY AND EQUALITY 71
significant. Etonians, it appears, are on average taller than others;
but tall guardsmen in the ranks are not deemed upper class.
Physicalor geneticallytransmitted traits are but one kind of 'blueness'.
What of the others? It is a supremely important and interesting
fact that some- deeply engrained religious-cultural habits
possess a vigour and tenacity which can virtually equal those which
are rooted in our genetic constitution. Language and formal doctrinal
belief seem less deep rooted and it is easier to shed them; but
that cluster of intimate and pervasive values and attitudes which, in
the agrarian age, are usually linked to religion (whether or not they
are so incorporated in the official high theology of the faith in
question) frequently have a limpet-like persistence, and continue to
act as a diacritical mark for the populations which carry them. For
instance, at the time when Algeria was legally counted as a part of
France, the assimilation of Algerian migrant workers in France was
not hampered by any physical, genetic difference between, say, a
Kabyle and a southern French peasant. The generally impassable
fissure between the two populations, precluding an assimilationist
solution, was cultural and not physical. The deeply rooted communal
conflict in Ulster is not based, obviously, on any communications
gap between the two communities, but on an identification
with one of two rival local cultures which is so firm as to be comparable
to some physical characteristic, even if, in reality, it is
sociallyinduced. Terrorist organizations.whosenominal doctrine, or
rather verbiage, is some kind of loose contemporary revolutionary
Marxism, are in fact exclusively recruited from a community once
defined by a religious faith, and continuing to be defined by the
culture which had been linked to that faith.
A fascinating and profoundly revealing event recently occurred
in Yugoslavia: in Bosnia the ex-Muslim population secured at long
last, and not without arduous efforts, the right to describe themselves
as Muslim, when filling in the 'nationality' slot on the census.
This did not mean that they were still believing and practising
Muslims, and it meant even less that they were identifying as
one nationality with other Muslims or ex-Muslims in Yugoslavia,
such as the Albanians of Kosovo. They were Serbo-Croat speakers
of Slav ancestry and Muslim cultural background. What they meant
was that they could not describe themselves as Serb or as Croat
(despite sharing a language with Serbs and Croats), because these
identifications carried the implications of having been Orthodox or
Catholic; and to describe oneself as 'Yugoslav' was too abstract,
generic and bloodless.
They preferred to describe themselves as 'Muslim' (and were
now at last officially allowed to do so), meaning thereby Bosnian,
Slav ex-Mushs who feel as one ethnic group, though not differentiable
linguistically from Serbs and Croats, and though the faith
which does distinguish them is now a lapsed faith. Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes once observed that to be a gentleman one does not
need to know Latin and Greek, but one must have forgotten them.
Nowadays, to be a Bosnian Muslim you need not believe that there
is no God but God and that Mohamed is his Prophet, but you do
need to have lost that faith. The point of transition from faith to
culture, to its fusion with ethnicity and eventually with a state, is
neatly illustrated by an exchange in that classic study of the role
of the military in a developing country, Anton Chekhov's Three
Sisters:
Tuzenbach:Perhaps you think- this German is getting over-excited.
Buton mywordof honour,I'm Russian. I cannot evenspeak German.
My father is Orthodox.
The Baron, despite his Teutonic name and presumably ancestry,
defends his Slav status by reference to his Orthodox religion.
To say this is not to claim that each and every pre-industrial
religion will tend to make a new appearance as an ethnic loyalty
in the industrial melting-pot. Such a view would be absurd. For
one thing, as in the case of languages and of cultural differentiations,
theagrarianworld is often far too well providedwith religions. There
were too many of them. Their number was too large, when compared
with the number of ethnic groups and nationalstatesfor which
there can possibly be room in the modern world. So they simply
could not all suryive (even in transmogrified form, as ethnic units),
however tenacious they might be. Moreover, as in the case of
languages, many of them are not really so very tenacious. It is the
high religions, those which are fortified by a script and sustained
by specializedpersonnel, whichsometimes, but by no meansalways,
become the basis of a new collectiveidentity in the industrial world,
making the transition, so to speak, from a culture-religion to a
culture-state. Thus in the agrarian world, high culture co-exists
with low cultures, and needs a church (or at least a clerkly guild)
to sustain it. In the industrid world high cultures prevail, but
they need a state not a church, and they need a state each. That is
one way of summing up the emergence of the nationalist age.
High cultures tend to become the basis of a new nationality(as in
Algeria) when before the emergence of nationalism the religion
defined fairly closely all the under-privileged as against the privileged,
even or especiallyif the under-privilegedhad no other positive
shared characteristic (such as language or common history). There
had previously been no Algerian nation prior to the nationalist
awakening in this century, as Ferhat Abbas, one of the principal
early nationalist leaders in that country, observed. There had been
the much wider community of Islam, and a whole set of narrower
communities, but nothing corresponding even remotely to the inhabitants
of the present national territory. In such a case a new
nation is in effect born, defined as the totalityof all the adherents of
a givenfaith, within a given territory. (In the case of the Palestinians
today, language and culture and a shared predicament, but not religion,
seem to be producing a similar crystallization.) To perform the
diacritical, nation-definingrole, the religion in question may in fact
need to transform itself totally, as it did in Algeria: in the nineteenth
century, Algerian Islam with its reverence for holy lineages was for
all practical purposes co-extensive with rural shrine and saint cults.
In the twentieth century it repudiated all this and identified with a
reformist scripturalism, denying the legitimacy of any saintly mediation
between man and God. The shrines had defined tribes and
tribal boundaries; the scripturalism could and did defme a nation.
Fissures and barriers
Our general argument might be re-stated as follows. Industrialization
engenders a mobile and culturally homogeneous society,
which consequently has egalitarian expectations and aspirations,
such as had been generally lacking in the previous stable, stratified,
dogmatic and absolutist agrarian societies. At the same time, in its
early stages, industrial society also engenders very sharp and painful
and conspicuous inequality, all the more painful because accompanied
by great disturbance, and because those less advantageously
placed, in that period, tend to be not only relatively, but also absolutely
miserable. In that situation - egalitarian expectation, nonegalitarian
reality, misery, and cultural homogeneity already desired
but not yet implemented - latent political tension is acute, and
becomes actual if it can seize on good symbols, good diacritical
marks to separate ruler and ruled, privileged and underprivileged.
Characteristically, it may seize on language, on genetically transmitted
traits ('racism'), or on culture alone. It is very strongly
impelled in this direction by the fact that in industrializingsocieties\
communicationand henceculture assumesa new and unprecedented
importance. Communication becomes important because of complexity,
interdependence and mobility of productive life, within
which far more numerous, complex, precise and context-free messages
need to be transmitted than had ever been the case before.
Among cultures, it is the ones linked to a high (literate) faith
which seem most likely to fill the role of crystallizer of discontent.
Local folk faiths and cultures, like minor dialects, are less likely to
aspire so high. During the early period of industrialization, of
course, low cultures are also liable to be seized on and turned into
diacritical markers of the disadvantaged ones, and be used to identifyand
unite them, if they look politicallypromising, notablyif they
define large and territorially more or less compact populations.
During that early stage, several contrasts are liable to be superimposed
on privilege and underprivilege: ease of access to the
new style of life and.its educational precondition, as opposed to
hampered access (easy or inhibited communication), a high and low
culture.
This is the type of fissure-generation where the lack of actual
communication is crucial, because it marks out and highlights an
objective difference. Later, when owing to general development the
communication barrier and the inequalities are no longer so great,
and when a shared industrial style enables people to communicate
even across diverse languages, it is rather the persistent unevenly
distributed ('counter-entropic') traits which become really crucial,
whether they be genetic or deep-cultural. At that stage, the transformation
of erstwhile low cultures into a new high one, in the
interests of providing a banner for a whole wide category of the
underprivilegedwho may previously have lacked any way of hailing
each other and uniting, is no longer quite so probable; the period of
acute misery, disorganization, near-starvation,total alienation of the
lower strata is over. Resentment is now engendered less by some
objectively intolerable condition (for deprivation now is, as the
phrase goes, relative); it is now brought about above all by the
SOCIAL ENTROPY AND EQUALITY
non-randomsocialdistribution of somevisibleand habituallynoticed
trait.
The difference between the two stages, early and late, can be put
as follows.In the earlystage there is a terrible difference between the
life chances of the well-off and the starving poor, those who can
swim in the new industrial pool and those who are only painfully
learning to do so. Even then, the conflict will seldom become acute
or escalate indefinitely, contrary to Marxist predictions, unless the
privileged and the others can identify themselves and each other
culturally, 'ethnically'. But if they can so tell each other apart, then,
generally speaking, a new nation (or nations) is born; and it can
organize itself around either a high or a previously low culture. If a
high culture is not ready-made and available, or has already been
taken over by a rival group, why then a low oneis transformed into a
high one. This is the age of the birth (or allegedly 'rebirth') of
nations, and of the transmuting of low cultures into newly literate
high ones.
The next stage is different. It is no longer the case that an acute
objective social discontentor a sharp social differentiation is seeking
out any old cultural differentiationthat may be to hand, and will use
it if it can to create a new barrier, indeed eventually a new frontier.
Nowit is only a genuineprior barrier to mobility and equality which
will, having inhibited easy identifcation, engender a new frontier.
The difference is considerable.
A diversity of focus
Some special cases desemespecific comment. Islamic civilization in
the agrarian age conspicuously illustrated our thesis that agrarian
societiesare not prone to use culture to definepoliticalunits; in other
words, that they are not given to being nationalistic. The loose guild
of ulam, of scholars-lawyers-theologiansY
1
who set the tone and
morally dominated the traditional Muslim world, was trans-poltical
and trans-ethnic, and not tied to any state (once the Khalifatewith
its monopolistic pretensions to providing the unique political roof
for the entire community had disintegrated), nor to any 'nation'.
IN. Keddie (ed.), Scholars, Sain~and Sufi, Berkeley, 1972; E. Gelher,
Muslim Society, Cambridge, 1981.
76 SOCIAL ENTROPY AND EQUALITY
The folk Islam of shrine and holy lineage, on the other hand, was
sub-ethnic and sub-political (as far as major units, resembling historic
and 'national' states, are concerned), serving and reinforcing
instead the vigorous local self-defence and self-administrationunits
(tribes). So Islam was internally divided into a high and a low culture,
the two flowing into each other, of course, and intimately
related and intertwined, but also periodically erupting into conflict,
when 'remembrancers' revived the alleged pristine zeal of the high
culture, and united tribesmen in the interests of purification and of
their own enrichment and political advancement. But the changes
produced in this way did not, in the traditional order (though they
occurred quite often) produce any deep, fundamental structural
change. They only rotated the personnel, they did not fundamentally
alter the society.'
With the comingof the travail of modernization, things turned out
quite differently. We have argued that in general this means, among
other things, the replacement of diversified, locality-tied low cultures
by standardized, formalized and codified, literacy-carried high
cultures. But Islamic society was ever ideally prepared, by an accident
of history, for this development. It possessed within itself both
a high and a low culture. They had the same name, and were not always
carefully distinguished, and were often deliberately conflated
and fused; they were linked to each other. Both, in the past, could be
and were the means of a whole-hearted, passionate identification
with a (supposedly unique). Islam, as an absolute, uncompromising
and final revelation. Islam had no church perhaps, but the church it
did not have was a broad one. In the modern world, the low or folk
variant can be and is disavowed, as a corruption, exploited if not
actually invented or instigated by the alien colonialist enemy, while
the high variant becomes the culture around which a new nationalism
can crystallize. This is particularly easy in the case of the one
linguisticgroup whose language is linked to that of the unique revelation;
it is also easy in those cases in which the entire nation is idened
with Islam and is surrounded by non-Muslim neighbours
(Somalis, Malays); or when the entire discriminated-againstpopulation,
though not linguistically homogeneous, is Muslim and
opposed to non-Muslim privileged power-holders (Algeria), or when
the nation is habitually defined in terms of one Muslim sect, and its
'Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, tr. F. Rosenthal, London, 1958.
resentment directed against a provocatively secularized and Westernized
ruling class and against non-Mush foreigners (Iran).
The uniqueness of Islam can perhaps be brought out best if we
recapitulate our general theme. The agrarian age of mankind is a
period in which some tan read and most cannot, and the industrial
ageis onein whichall can and must read. In the agrarianage, literate
high cultures co-exist with illiterate low or folk cultures. During the
period of transition between the two ages, some erstwhile low cultures
become new high cultures; and on occasion a new high culture
can be invented, re-createdby political willand cultural engineering,
based on elements drawn from a distant past, and reassembled to
create something in effect quite new, as in Israel.
But the high cultures which survive the period of transition cease
to be the medium and hallmark of a clerisy or a court and becoxie
instead the medium and emblem of a 'nation', and at the same time
undergoanother interesting transformation. When they were carried
by a court or courtly stratum or a clerisy, they tended to be transethnic
and even trans-political, and were easily exportable to wherever
that court was emulated or that clerisy respectedand employed;
and on the other hand, they were liable to be closely tied to the usually
rigid, dogmatictheology and doctrinal corpus, in terms of which
the clerisy in question was defined, and the court legitimated. As is
the way of literate ideologiesof the agrarian age, that corpus of doctrine
had absolutist pretensions, and was reinforced by claiming on
its own behalf not merely that it was true (what of that?) but that it
was the very norm of truth. At the same time it issued virulent
imprecations against all heretics and infidels, whose very doubts
about the unique and manifest truth was evidence of their moral turpitude,
of 'corruption on earth', in the vivid phrase used in death
sentences by the agrarian-faith-revivingregime at present in control
of Iran. These ideologiesare like fortresses-Einefeste Burg kt mein
Gon- which retain all sources of water within their bastion and thus
deny them to the enemy. They hold not merely a monopoly of truth
(a trivial matter, that), but above all, of the very sources and touchstones
of truth. The wells are all located within the ramparts, and
that settles the matter, for the enemy cannot reach them.
This was all very well, and a great advantage to them in the
agrarianage, when they only encountered enemies at worst similar to
themselves, and often feebler, unsophisticated, unfortified folk religions.
The industrial age is based on economic growth. This in turn
78 SOCIAL ENTROPY AND EQUALITY
hinges on cognitive growth, which was ratified (and perhaps even
significantly aided) by Cartesian and empiricist philosophies. Their
essence was to de-absolutize all substantive conviction about the
world, and to subject all assertions, without exception, to neutral
scrutiny by criteria ('experience7
, 'the light of reason') located
beyond the bounds and the ramparts of any one belief system. That
puts paid to their absolutist pretensions, for they must bow to a
judge outside their control. Evidence becomes king, or at least
king-maker. The wells of truth are henceforth located in neutral
territory, and no-onecan claim to own them.
That, at any rate, is the purely intellectual, doctrinal aspect of a
complexstory, the wholeof which cannot be pursued here, by which
the absolutist high cultures of the agrarian age are obliged to shed
their absolutism, and allow the wells of truth to pass into public,
neutral control. In brief, the price these high cultures pay for
becoming the idiom of entire territorial nations, instead of appertaining
to a clerkly stratum only, is that they become secularized.
They shed absolutist and cognitive pretensions, and are no longer
linked to a doctrine. Spain was one of the most retarded exceptions
to this, having retained at a remarkablylate date a nationalistregime
which incorporated the endorsement of absolutist Catholic claims in
its image of the nation. During the earlier and timid stages of Francoist
liberalization, the legalization of public Protestant worship was
opposed as a kind of provocative disturbance of Spanish unity and
identity. An absolute doctrine for all and a high culture for some,
becomes an absolute culture for all, and a doctrine for some. The
Church must surrender and dissolveitself if it is to capture the entire
society. TheGreatTradition must throw off its erstwhilelegitimating
doctrine, if it is to becomethe pervasiveand universal culture.
In general, what had once been an idiom for some and an obligatory
and prized idiom for all becomesan obligatory belief for all, and
a watered-down, nsn-serious, Sunday-suitfaith for some. That is the
generic fate of high culmes, if they survive the great transition. In
the classical North-West European case, one may say that the process
had two stages: the Reformation universalized the clerisy and
unified the vernacular and the liturgy, and the Enlightenment secularized
the now universalized clerisy and the now nation-wide linguisticidiom,
no longer bound to doctrine or class.
It is interesting to reflect what would have happened in Western
Europe had industrialization and all it involves begun during the
SOCIAL ENTROPY AND EQUALITY 79
High Middle Ages, before the development of vernacularliteratures
and the emergence of what was eventually destined to become the
basis of the various national high cultures. There would clearly have
been the prospect of a clerkly-led Latin, or perhaps Romance,
nationalism, as opposed to the relatively more local nationalisms
which did eventually crystallize, secularizing no longer a transpolitical
clerkly high culture, but a half-clerkly, half-courtly one.
Had it all happened earlier, a pan-Romance nationalism would have
been as plausibleas the pan-Slavismwhich was taken seriouslyin the
nineteenth century, or the pan-Arab nationalism of the twentieth,
which were also based on a shared clerkly high culture, co-existing
with enormous differences at the low or folk level.
Islam is precisely in this condition, experiencing a number of
transformations simultaneously. The most protestant of the great
monotheisms, it is ever Reformation-prone (Islam could indeed be
described as Permanent Reformation). One of its many successive
self-reformations virtually coincided with the coming of modern
Arab nationalism, and can only with great difficulty be disentangled
from it. The emergence of the nation and the victory of the reform
movement seem parts of one and the same process. The dissolution
of the vigorousold local and kin structures, whose strong and sometimes
deadly shadows survive as pervasive patronage networks
dominating the new centralized political.structures, goes hand in
hand with the elimination of the saint cults which had ratified the
mini-communal organization, and their replacement by a reformed
individualistunitarian theology, which leaves the individual believer
to relate himself, singly, to one God and one large, anonymous,
mediation-freecommunity- all of which is virtually the paradigmof
the nationalist requirement.
Other high cultures which make the transition need to pay the
price of abandoning their erstwhiledoctrinal underpinning and support.
The bulk of the doctrines they had carried so longare so utterly
absurd, so indefensible in an age of epistemic (evidence-revering)
philosophies, that they become an encumbrance rather than the
advantage which they had been. They are gladly, willingly shed, or
turned into 'symbolic' tokens meant to indicatea link to the past, the
continuity of a cormunity over time, and evasively ignored as far as
their nominal doctrinal content goes.
Not so with Islam. Islam had been Janus-faced in the agrarian
days. One face was adapted to the religiouilyand socially pluralistic
80 SOCIALENTROPY AND EQUALITY
country folk and groupings, the other set for the more fastidious,
scholarly, individualistand literate urban schoolmen. Moreover, the
dogma made obligatory for the latter was purified, economical, unitarian,
sufficiently so to be at least relatively acceptable even in the
modem age, when the baroque load carried by its rival on the north
shore of the Mediterranean is pretty intolerable, and needs to be
surreptitiously toned down and cast away, bit by bit. Little of this
underhand purification is required south of the Mediterranean - or
rather, the purification had already been carried out, loud and clear,
in the nameof freeing the true faith from ignorant, rural, if not alieninspired
superstition and corruption. Janus has relinquished one of
his two faces. So, within the Muslim world, and particularly of
course within the Arab part of it (but also among what might be
called the Arab-surrogate nations, who happen locally to define
themselves as the Muslims of a given area), a nationalism based on a
generalized anonymous territorial community can perpetuate the
specific doctrines previously carried by a clerkly stratum, proudly
and without disavowingthem. The ideal of the ulama comes closer to
reality, at leastwithin various nation-sizererritories, thanit had been
in the days of the kin-defined fragmentation.
Doctrinal elegance, simplicity, exiguousness, strict unitarianism,
without very much in the way of intellectuallyoffensive frills: these
helped Islam to survive in the modem world better than do doctrinally
more luxuriant faiths. But if that is so, one might well ask
why an agrarianideology such as Confucianism should not havesurvived
even better; for such a belief system was even more f d y
centred on rules of morality and the observance of order and hierarchy,
and even less concerned with theological or cosmological
dogma. Perhaps, however, a strict and emphatic, insistent unitarianism
is better here than indifference to doctrine coupled with concern
for morality. The moralities and political ethics of agro-literate
polities are just a little too brazenlydeferentialand inegalitarianfor a
modern taste. This may have made the perpetuation of Confucianism
implausible in a modern society, at least under the same
name and under the same management.
By contrast, the stress on the pure unitarianism of Islam, jointly
with the inevitable ambiguity of its concrete moral and political
precepts, could help to create the situation where one and the same
faith can legitimate both traditionalist regimes such as Saudi Arabia
or Northern Nigeria, and socially radical ones such as Libya, South
SOCIAL ENTROPY AND EQUALITY 81
Yemen or Algeria. The political conjurers could build their patter
around the strict theology, while they shuffledthe cards dealing with
political morality according to their own preference, without attracting
too much attention. The unitarianism, the (sometimes painful)
forswearing of the solaces of spiritual mediation and middlemen,
took the believers' minds awayfrom the intellectualtransformations,
which were turning a faith that had oncedealt with the inheritanceof
camelsinto one prescribing or proscribing, as the case might be, the
nationalization of oil wealth.
If Islam is unique in that it allows the use of a pre-industrial great
tradition of a clerisy as the national, socially pervasive idiom and
belief of a new-style community, then many of the nationalisms of
sub-Saharan Africa are interesting in that they exemplify the opposite
extreme: they often neither perpetuate nor invent a local high
culture (which could be difficult, indigenous literacy being rather
rare in this region), nor do they elevate an erstwhilefolk culture into
a new, politically sanctioned literate culture, as European nationalisms
had often done. Instead, they persist in using an alien, European
high culture. Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the best, and certainly
the most extensive, testing grounds for the attribution of great
power to the principle of nationalism, which requires ethnic and
political boundaries to converge. Sub-Saharan political boundaries
defy this principle h o s t without exception. Black Africa has inherited
from the colonial period a set of frontiers drawn up in total
disregard (and generally without the slightest knowledge) of local
cultural or ethnic borders.
One of the most interesting and striking features of the postcolonial
history of Africa has been that nationalist, irredentist attempts
to remedy this state of affairs, though not totally absent, have
nevertheless been astonishinglyfew and feeble. The efforts either to
replace the use of European languages as the state administrative
medium, or to adjust inter-state boundaries so as to respect ethnicity,
have been weak and infrequent. What is the explanation? Is
nationalism not a force in black Africa after all?
Wehavesuggesteda dichotomybetween'early' or communicationgap
nationalisms (in which the additional disadvantagea dislocated
ex-rural population incurs through not sharing the dominant culture
exacerbates its resentment over its other, 'objective' deprivations),
and a 'late' nationalism, engendered by obstacles other than those
of communication. In terms of this important contrast, African
nationalism on the whole belongs to the latter or counter-entropic
type. At its core we do not find labour migrants maltreated at the
factory gate by foremen speaking a different language; what we do
find is intellectuals capable of fluent communication, but debarred
as a categoryfrom positionsof real power by ashareddistinctivetrait:
colour. They are united by a shared exclusion, not a shared culture.
The phenomena associated with other early and communication-gap
types of nationalism are of course not absent, and are often very
important. The flashpoint of the South African conflict is obviously
the conditionof the Africanindustrial proletariat;and the role of the
urban lower classes in, for instance, the rise of Nkrumah was con-
spicuous.
The typical situation created by European domination in Africa
was this: effective administrations, political units controlling and
maintaining the peace in extensive and well-defined, stable areas,
were set up. These administrations were extremely, conspicuously
and indeed paradigmaticallycounter-entropic. The rulers and a few
others were white, and everyoneelse was black. It could hardly have
been simpler or more conspicuous. Seldom has there been a political
system whose guiding principle was so easily intelligible, so easy to
read.
In the traditional agrarian world this could have been counted a
positive advantage, a great aid in the avoidance of status-ambiguity
and all the ills of obscure, uncertain power-relations which that can
bring in its train. It would have augured well for the stability and
survival-worthiness of the system. The principle was not alien to
Africa, and some indigenous political structures had indeed used
variants of it. The Azande were a conquering aristocracy superimposed
on ethnically distinct subjects. A Fulani aristocracy ruled
many of the Northern Nigerian city states.
But this was no longer the traditional agrarian order. The Europeans
in Africa, though occasionally respectfd of local custom and
endorsing its authority, were there to set up a market- and tradeoriented,
educated ('civilized') and eventually industrial type of
society. But, for reasons which we have stressed at length and need
not now repeat, industrial or industrializing society is profoundly
allergic to counter-entropicinstitutions. Here there was an outstandingly
clear, conspicuousexampleof just that! This was not a case, as
in our earlier example, of a category of 'blues' being statistically too
frequently located in the lower layers of society, as in the European
irredentist nationalisms. Here there was a case of a small number of
whites ruling large, occasionally enormous black populations. The
nationalism which this engendered was simply the summation of all
the blacks, the non-whitesof a given historicallyaccidental territory,
now unified by the new administrativemachinery. The adherents of
the new nationalism did not necessarily share any positive traits.
After Independence, in the struggle for control of the newly won
states, the contestantsgenerally had their power-base in this or that
traditional, pre-existingethnic group. Nevertheless, the strikingfact
remains the stabilityof the ethnicity-defyingfrontiers that had been
arbitrarily drawn up by the colonialists, and the perpetuationof the
colonial languages as the media of government and education. It is
perhaps too soon to speculate whether these societies will reach the
age of internal homogeneity, mobility and generalized education
while continuing to use the colonial language, or whether at some
point they will brave the ardours of cultural self-transformation
involved in modernizing, adapting and imposing one of the indigenous
languages. This process has been pioneered, for instance, in
Algeria, with its extremely painful 'Arabization', which in practice
means imposing a distant literary languageon local Arab and Berber
dialects.' In black Africa, the linguistic indigenization is hampered
not merely by the conveniencesof the alien language, with its textbooksand
internationallinks, and with the heavy time-investmentin
it on the part of the ruling elite, but also by the local linguistic fragmentation,
far more extreme than that which had prevailed in
Europe; and by the fact that the selectionof any one of the rivallocal
languages would be an affront to all those to whom it is not a native
tongue- and this residue generally constitutes a majority, often an
overwhelminglylarge one.
For these reasonsthoseAfricanethnicgroups that werelinked to a
literatehigh culture through conversionto a world religion, Islam or
Christianity,werebetter equippedtodevelopaneffectivenationalism
ugh Roberts, 'The Unforeseen Developmentof the Kabyle Question in
Contemporary Algeria', in G o v a m t and Opposition, XVII (1982),
No. 3- The emergent Kabyle nationalism is interesting in that it expresses
the feeling of an erstwhile small-holding peasantry which has
done well out of urban migration, without losing its rural base. A similar
case may be that of the Basques. See Marianne Heiberg, 'Insiders/
outsiders: Basque nationalism', in European Jam1of Sociology, XVI
(1975), No. 2.
84 SOCIAL ENTROPY AND EQUALITY
than the others. The region in which the struggle between
these two faiths had traditionally gone on without a decisive victory
for either, the Horn of Africa, is also the area with the best examples
of what may be called classical nationalisms. It has been said of the
Boers that the only things which really distinguished them from
their Bantu enemies, when both were entering South Africa from
different directions, was the possession of the Book, the wheel and
the gun. In the Horn of Africa both the Amharas and the Somalis
possessed both gun and Book (not the same Book, but rival and different
editions), and neither bothered greatly with the wheel. Each
of these ethnic groups was aided in its use of these two pieces of
cultural equipment by its links to other members of the wider religious
civilization which habitually used them, and were willing to
replenish their stock. Both the Somalis and the Amharas were aided
by these bits of equipment in state-formation. The Somalis created a
few of those characteristicMuslim formations based on urban trade
and tribal pastoralcohesion, brought together by some religious personage;
the Amharas created in Ethiopia the one really convincing
Africanspecimenof a feudalism, a looseempire with local territorial
power-holders, linked to a national Church.
The gun and the Book, with their centralizing potential, enabled
these two ethnic groups to dominate the political history of this large
region, though neither of them was numerically predominant. Other
ethnic grups without the same advantages, even when far more
numerous - notably the Oromo (more commonly known as the
Galla)- were unable to stand up to them. At the time of the temporarily
successfidSomaliadvance against the Ethiopians in the 1970s,
it was plausible, and from the Somaliviewpoint attractive, to present
the Oromoas a kind of human population without a set form, a preethnic
raw material, waiting to be m e d either into Amharas or into
Somalis by the turn of political fortune and religious conversion.
This would make sense of their Somalization,shouldit come to pass.
The Oromo were to be seen as an enormous population of Adams
and Eves, from whom the apple of ethnicity had as yet been withheld,
and who were familiar only with the rudimentary fig leaf of
age-set organization. When incorporated in the Amhara state, their
local chiefs would become its officials and eventually go Christian
and M a r a ; but if brought into the Somali sphere, Islamization in
the name of the great local saint cults would eventually mean Somalization.
Since the Somali defeat in the war, however, the prospects
SOCIAL ENTROPY AND EQUALITY 85
of resistingAmhara domination in the Horn hinge largely on stimulating
the various national liberation fronts at long last emerging
within the Ethiopian empire, including that of the Oromo, who as
the largest group are also emerging as the most important; and hence
we are now less likely to hear of their pre-cultural status as ethnic
raw material.
The Amhara empire was a prison-house of nations if ever there
was one. When the old Emperor was toppled in 1974, the new rulers
promptly announced, as new rulers are liable to do, that henceforth
all ethnic groups were equal, and indeed free to choose their own
destiny. These admirable liberal sentiments were followed fairly
soon by a systematic liquidation of intellectualsdrawn from the nonAmharic
group, a regrettably rational policy from the viewpoint of
inhibiting the emergence of rival nationalisms within the empire.'
In brief, both these vigorous and, for the present, dominant
nationalismsillustrate the advantage of the availabilityof an old high
culture, once an invaluable asset for state-formation, but now also
crucial for fie attaining of an early political sense of ethnicity. In
each of these cases the ethnic group in question seems, within the
local area, co-extensive with its own faith, thus greatly aiding self-
definition.
The Somalis are also interesting in that they are one of the
examples (like the Kurds) of the blending of old tribalism based on
social structure with the new, anonymous nationalism based on
shared culture. The sense of lineage affiliationis strong and vigorous
(notwithstanding the fact that it is officially reprobated, and its
invocation actually proscribed), and it is indeed crucial for the
understanding of internal politics. This does not, I think,contradict
our general theory, which maintains that the hold of a shared literate
culture ('nationality') over modern man springs from the erosion of
the old structures, which had once providedeach man with his identity,
dignity and material security, whereas he now depends on
education for these things. The Somalis possess a shared culture,
which, when endowed with its own state (as indeed it is), can ensure
for each Somali access on good terms to bureaucratic employment.
'1oan Lewis, 'The Western SomaliLiberation Front (WSLF)and thelegacy
of Sheikh Hussein of Bale', in J. Tubiana (ed.), Modern Ethiopia, Rotterdam,
1980; and I.M. Lewis (ed.), Nationalism and SeIf-detmination in
the Horn of Afia, Indiana, 1983.
The life chances and psychic comfort of an individual Somali are
manifestly better within such a state, based on his culture, than they
are within a neighbouring state not so based. At the same time, however,
many Somalis remain pastoralists with an interest in the pasture
rights defined in the old terms, and retain reciprocal links with
kinsmen, links which appear not to be altogether forgotten in the
give and take of political life.
What it all amounts to is this: in most cases, theappeal of the new,
education-transmittedethnicity comes from both push and pull: the
attraction of the new employment opportunities and the repulsion
arising from the erosion of the old security-giving kin groupings.
The Somali case is not unique, even if it is particularlyconspicuous.
Persistenceof pastoralismand certainkinds of labour migration or of
trade networks may cause extensive kin organization to survive in
the modem world. When this happens, we get a juxtaposition of
tribal loyalty to structure and of nationalloyalty to culture (and a literate
culture at that). But it is scarcely conceivable that the modern
world could have emerged had the structural, mini-organizational
rigidities remained strong everywhere. The great stories of successful
economic development were about societies whose wealth and power
had the demonstration effect which pointed humanity towards the
new style of life; and those stories or paradigms were not and could
not be of that kind. The general emergence of modernity hinged on
theerosionof the multiplepetty b&ding localorganizationsand their
replacement by mobile, anonymous, literate, identity-conferring
cultures. It is this generalized condition which made nationalism
normative and pervasive; and this is not contradicted by the occasional
superimposition of both of these types of loyalty, the occasional
use of kin links for a kind of interstitial, parasitic and partial
adaptation to the new order. Modern industry can be paternalistic,
and nepotisticat the top; but it cannotrecruit its productiveunits on
the basis of kin or territorial principles, as tribal society had done.
The contrast I am here drawing between culture-mediatednationalism
and structure-mediated tribalismis, of course, meant to be a
genuine analytical distinction between two objectively distinguishable
kinds of organization; it must not be confused with the relativistic
or emotive opposition between my nationalism and your tribalism.
That is merely the languageof praise and invectiveby means
of which rival potential nationalisms combat each other, in which 'I
am a patriot, you are a nationalist and he is a tribalist', and that
remains so whoever happens to be speaking. In this sense nationalismsare
simply those tribalisms, or for that matter any other kind
of group, which through luck, effort or circumstance succeed in
becoming an effectiveforce under modern circumstances. They are
only identifiableex pbstfactum. Tribalism never prospers, for when
it does, everyone will respect it as a true nationalism, and no-onewill
dare call it tribalism.
A Typology of Nationalisms
A useful typology of nationalisms can be constructed by simply
working out the various possible combinations of the crucial factors
which enter into the making of a modern society. The first factor to
be introduced into this deductively established model is that of
power.Here there is no need to play with binary or any other alternatives.
There is no point in considering the possibility of the absence
or diffusion of centralized power in a modern society. Modern
societies are always and inevitably centralized, in the sense that the
maintenanceof order is the task of one agency or group of agencies,
and not dispersed throughout the society. The complex division of
labour, the complementarity and interdependence and the constant
mobility: all these factors prevent citizens from doubling up as producers
and participants in violence. There are societies - notably
some pastoral ones - where this is feasible: the shepherd is simultaneously
the soldier, and often also the senator, jurist and minstrel
of his tribe. The entire culture, or very nearly, of the whole society
seems encapsulated in each individualrather than distributed among
them in different forms, and the society seems to refrainfrom specialization,
at least in its male half, to a very remarkable degree. The
few specialists whom this kind of society tolerates it also despises.
Whatever may be feasible among near-nomadic pastoralists, it is
not remotely possible in complex modem industrial society. The
specialists who compose it cannot take time off to shoot their way
from home to office, take precautionary measures against a surprise
raid by membersof a rival corporation,or join in a nocturnal reprisal
raid themselves. Bootleggers may have done this, but they did not
become the model for the modem Organization Man. M a-type
businessflourishes on the whole only in areas where illegality makes
theinvocationof officialenforcement agencies dficult. There would
seem to be more movement from this kind of enterprise into legitimate
business, than the other way. In fact, members of modem
societies have little training or practice in applying or resisting
A TYPOLOGY OF NATIONALISMS 89
violence. Some sectors of modern society on occasion escape this
generalization, like those who must live with urban violence in
decaying urban centres; and there is at any rate one economically
complex society, namely Lebanon, which so far seems to have survived
the disintegrationof effective central authority with astonishing
resilience and success.
But these relatively minor exceptions do not undermine the basic
contention that in a modern society the enforcement of the social
order is not something evenly diffused throughout society - as is
characteristically the case among tribesmen with segmentary social
organization- but is concentratedin the hands of some of the membersof
society. In simpler terms, it is always the case that somewield
this power and some do not. Some are closer to the command posts
of the enforcement agencies than others. This engenders the admittedly
loose, but nevertheless useful distinction between the powerholders
and the rest, a contrast which provides us with the first
element in our simplified model of modern society, which is to
generate, through diverse combinations of the further elements, the
various possible types of nationalism.
The next element in the model is access to education or to a viable
modern high culture (the two here being treated as equivalent). The
notion of education or a viable modern high culture is once again
fairly loose but nonetheless useful. It refers to that complex of skills
which makes a man competent to occupy most of the ordinary positionsin
a modem society, and which makes him, so to speak, able to
s w h with ease in this kind of cultural medium. It is a syndrome
rather than a strict list: no single item in it is, perhaps, absolutely
indispensable. Literacy is no doubt central to it, though on occasion
skilful and dbbrmillardindividuals can get by in the modern world,
or even amass fortunes, without it. The same goes for elementary
nurneracy and a modicum of technical competence, and a kind of
non-rigid, adaptablestate of mind often encouraged by urban living,
and inhibited by rural traditions. By and large, one can say-and this
is, of course, important for our argument - that suitably gifted
individuals or well-placed sub-communities can sometimes acquire
this minimal syndrome independently, but that its wide and effective
diffusion presupposes a well-maintained and effective centralized
educational system.
In connection with this access to education (in this sense), there
are alternatives and different possible situations. With regard to
power there are none: it is always the case, in an industrial society,
that some have it and some do not. This provided us with our baseline
situation, a society loosely divided into power-holders and the
rest. But in connection with access to education, there is no such
predetermined distinction. In terms of the given power-bifurcated
society, there are now four distinct possibilities: it may be that only
the power-holdershave access, that they use their power-privilege to
preservefor themselvesthe monopolyof this access; or alternatively,
that both the power-holders and the rest have this access; or again,
only the rest (or some of them) have such access, and the powerholders
do not (a situation not as absurd, implausible or unrealistic
as might appear at first sight); or fmally, as sometimeshappens, that
m i t k party enjoysthe benefitsof such access, or to put it in simpler
terms, that the power-holders, and those over whom the power
is exercised, are both of them packs of ignoramuses, sunk, Karl
Marx's phrase, in the idiocy of rural life. This is a perfectly plausible
and realistic situation, not uncommon in the course of past human
history, and not totally unknown even in our age.
The four possibilities envisaged or, rather, generated by our
assumptions (each with two sub-alternatives in figure 2, to be explained)
do correspond to realistic historic situations. When the
category of those who have power roughly correspondsto those who
also have access to the kind of educational training fitting them for
the new life, we have something corresponding, all in all, to early
industrialism. The powerless new migrants, newly drawn in from
the land, are politically disenfranchized and culturally alienated,
helpless vis-a-vis a situation in which they have no leverage and
which they cannot understand. They constitute the classical early
proletariat, as described by Marx and Engels (and as quite wrongly
attributed by them to the subsequent stages of industrial society),
and such as is often reproduced in the shantytowns of lands which
were submerged by the wave of industrialism later.
The second combination, on the other hand, corresponds to late
industrialismas it actually is (and not as was erroneously predicted):
great power inequality persists, but cultural, educational, life-style
differenceshave diminishedenormously. The stra cation systemis
smoothand continuous, not polarized, nor consistingof qualitatively
differentlayers. There is a convergenceof life-style and a diminution
of social distance, and the access to the new learning, to the gateway
of the new world, is open to virtually all, and if by no meanson terms
of perfect equality, at least without seriously debarringanyone eager
to acquire it. (Only possessors of counter-entropic traits, as described,
are seriously hampered.)
The third and seemingly paradoxical siruaticin, in which those
who wield power are )ata disadvantage when it comes to acquiring
the new skiUs, does in fact occur, and represents a by no means
unusual historicconstellation. In traditionalagrarian societies ruling
strata are often imbued with an ethos which values warfare, impulsive
violence, authority, land-owning, conspicuous leisure and expenditure,
and which spurns orderliness, time or other budgeting,
trade, application, thrifr, systematic effort, forethought and book
learning. (The manner in which some of these traits could nevertheless
become fashionableand dominant, and come to characterize the
dominant strata of society, is after all rhe subject matter of the most
famous of all sociological speculations, namely Weber's account of
the origin of the capitalist spirit.) In consequence, these latter traits
are then normally found only among more or less despised urban,
commercial,+learning-orientedgroups, which may be tolerated and
intermittently persecuted by their rulers. So far so good: within the
traditional order, the situation acquires a certain stability. Personnel
may change, the structure remains. The thrifty work-oriented
accumulators are not normally permitted to displace the leisured
class oriented to conspicuous consumption, because the latter regularlyfleece
and occasionallymassacre them. (In the Indian case those
who acquired a surplus tended to put all their money in temples to
mitigate or to avoid fleecing.)
But with the coming of the industrial order, in the form of the
diffusion of market relations, new military and productive technologies,
colonial conquest and so forth, the erstwhile stability is lost
forever. And within this new unstable and turbulent world it is the
values and style and orientationof those despised urban commercial
groups which provide a great advantage and easy access to new
sources of wealth and power, while the old compensatory mechanisms
of expropriationmay no longer be availableor effective.' The
'~lbert0. Hirschman, The Passim and the Interests, Princeton, 1977. It
is, of course, possible that the individualist, mobile spirit preceded by
many centuries, in one society at any rate, the coming of industrial order:
see Alan Macfariane, The Origins of English Individualism, Oxford, 1978.
That would not contradict our thesis, though it mighr throw light on the
early emergence of national sentiment in England. For a summary of the
counting house becomes more powerful than the sword. The singleminded
use of the sword no longer takes you very far.
The old rulers may, of course, sense the wind of changeand mend
their ways. They did so in Prussia and Japan. But it is not at all
psychologicallyeasy for them to do it quickly (or, sometimes, to do it
at all), and quite often they may not do it fast enough. The result
then is the situation envisaged: it is now the ruled, or at least some of
them, who are at a positiveadvantage, when it comes to access to the
new education and skills.
Finally, there is the fourth scenario: neither rulers nor ruled may
have any access to the relevant skills. This is the standard situation
in any stagnant agrarian society, unaffected by the industrial world,
in which both rulers and ruled are sunk in whatever combination of
conspicuous display, superstition, ritualism, alcoholism or other
diversion may be locallyfavoured, and when neither of them wish or
are able to take the new way out.
By combining the (ever-present) inequality of power with the
various possible patterns of the distribution of the access to education,
we have obtainedfour possiblesituations: equalaccess, equal
lack of access, and access tilted either in favour of or against the
power-holders.But we have as yet not introduced the element which
is most crucial from the viewpoint of nationalism: identity or diversity
of culture.
It goes without saying here that the term 'culture' is being used in
an anthropological, not a normativesense: what is meant by the term
is the distinctive style of conduct and communication of a given
community. The term 'culture' on its own is never used in this discussion
in its other sense, as Kultur, high culture or great tradition, a
style of conduct &d communication endorsed by the speaker as
superior, as setting a norm which should be, but alas often is not,
satisfied in real life, and the rules of which are usually codified by a
set of respected, norm-givingspecialistswithin the society. 'Culture'
without qualification means culture in the anthropological, nonnormative
sense; Kultur appears as high culwe. The relationship
between the two kinds of 'culture' is of course a matter of central
importancefor our subject. The high (normative) cultures or traditions
which specially concern us are, of course, literate ones. Hence
way in which the present theory of nationalism fits into a wider social
philosophy, see John A. Hall,Diagnoses of Our Time,London, 1981.
A TYPOLOGY OF NATIONALISMS 93
the problem of access to them appears, in the present discussion, as
access to education. The phrase 'access to a culture' consequently
means access to culture (anthropologicalsense) which is denied to a
person in virtue of his membership of another culture, and not in
virtue of lack of 'education'. This perhaps pedanticclarificationwas
essential if misunderstanding of the argument was to be avoided.
To avoid premature complications, the diversity of cultures is
introduced in the simplest possibleform. Emulating the economists
who sometimes discuss worlds containingonly one or two comrnodities,
we assume that in each case our society is either mono-cultural
(everyone endowed with the same culture, in the anthropological
sense), or alternatively, that there are two such cultures, the powerholders
being a different culture from the rest. The complicationsin
the real world arising from the simdtaneous presence in one sphere
of three, four or more cultures, does not very seriously affect the
argument.
The imposition of this further binary opposition 'cultural unity1
cultural duality' on our already established four-fold typology, immediately
generates eight possible situations (see Figure 2). Note
first of all that lines 1, 3, 5 and 7 correspond to situations where,
whatever inequalities of power or access to education may prevail,
nationalism has no grip, for lack of (ex hypothexz2 cultural differentiation.
Other conflicts may occur, and it is an interesting question
whether indeed they do. The evidence seems to indicate that the
classes engendered by early industrialism (let alone the smoother,
milder stratificationproduced by its later form), do not take off into
permanent and ever-escalating conflict, unless cultural differentiationprovides
the spark, theline-upas it were, the means of identifying
both oneself and the enemy. Clearly there was a good deal of
straight class conflict in, say, 1848: Tocqueville, who did not like it,
saw it as unambiguously as did Marx, who did. But it did not go on
becoming ever sharper and more uncontrollable.
Marxism, on the other hand, likes to think of ethnic conflict as
camouflagedclass conflict, and believes that humanity would somehow
benefit if the mask were tom off, if only people became clearsighted
and thereby freed from nationalist prejudice and blinkers.
This would seem to be a misreading both of the mask and of the
reality beneath it. 'Anti-Semitism is the socialism of the stupid', the
phrase once went, though it was not conspicuously echoed in the
days of the Slansky trial or of the Polish purges of 1968, when a
socialist regime fomented anti-Semitism. The workers, allegedly,
have no country; nor, presumably, a native culture separating them
from other workers, especially immigrants; nor, it would seem, any
skin colour. Unfortunately the workers generally appear to be unaware
of these interesting and liberating sensitivity-deprivationsthough
not for any lack of being told of them. In fact, ethnicity
enters the political sphere as 'nationalism' at times when cultural
hcmogeneityor continuity (not classlessness)is required by the economic
base of sociallife, and when consequently culture-linkedclass
differences become noxious, while ethnically unmarked, gradual
class differences remain tolerable.
1 A A early industrialism without
ethnic catalyst
2 A B 'Habsburg' (and points east and south)
nationalism
E E
3 A A mature homogeneous
industrialism
4 A B classical liberal
Western nationalism
-E E
5 A A Decembrist revolutionary,
but not nationalist situation
6 A B diaspora nationalism
7 A A untypical pre -nationalist
situation
8 A B typical pre-nationalist
situation
Figure 2 A typology of nationalism-engendering and nationalism-thwarting
social situations
-standsfor negation, absence. Pstandsfor power, E for access to modem-styleeducation, and A
and B for names of individualcultures. Each numbered line representsone possible situation; a
line containing both A and B shows a situationin which two culturesco-existin a single temtory,
and a line with A and A stands for cultural homogeneity in a similar temtory. If A or B stand
underan E andlora P, then the culturalgroupin question doeshaveaccessto educationor power;
if it stands under -E or -P, it lacks such access. The siruation of any group is indicated by the
nearest E and P above it.
Line 1 corresponds to classical early industrialism, where both
power and educational accessare concentratedin the hands of some;
k"'
but in line 1 the deprived ones are not culturallydifferentiated from
the privileged ones, and consequently nothing, or at least nothing
very radical, happens in the end. The conflict and cataclysm predicted
by Marxism do not occur. Line 3 corresponds to late industrialism,
with generabed access to education, and absence of cultural
difference; and here there is even less reason to expect conflict
than in line 1. We shall yet have to discuss the difficult and important
question whether advanced industrialism as such in any case
constitutes a shared culture, overruling the - by now - irrelevant
differences of linguistic idiom. When men have the same concepts,
more or less, perhaps it no longer matters whether they use different
words to express them, you might say. If this is so, line 3 might
characterize the shared future of mankind, after the general consummation
of industrialism,if and whenit comes. This questionwill
be discussed later. Line 5, once again, gives rise to no nationalist
problemsand conflicts. A politicallyweaksub-groupis economically
or educationally privileged, but being indistinguishable from the
majority, is capable of swimmingin the general pool without detection,
and, like the proverbial Maoist guerrilla, it does not attract
hostile attention.
Lines 7 and 8 are jointly exempt from the nationalist Problmtik
for quite another reason: because the question of access to a new
high culture, which is a pre-condition ofentry into and benefitsfrom
thenew style of life, simply doesn't arise. Here, no-onehas it, so noone
has it more than anyone else. This, of course, is the element
which is crucial and central to our theory: nationalismis about entry
to, participation in, identificationwith, a literate high culture which
is co-extensive with an entire political unit and its total population,
and which must be of this kind if it is to be compatiblewith the kind
of division of labour, the type or mode of production, on which this
society is based. Here, in lines 7 and 8, this mode is absent, even in
the form of any awareness of it or aspiration towards it. There is no
high culture, or at any rate none which possesses a tendency and
capacity to generalize itself throughout the whole of society and to
become the condition of its effective economicfunctioning. Line 7 is
excluded from the nationalist issue twice over; once for the reasons
just given, and once because it also lacks cultural differentiation
which could give bite to its other problems, whatever they might be.
Line 8 is more typical of complex agrarian societies than line 7: the
ruling stratum is identifiableby a distinct culture, which serves as a
96 p p pppp K T ~ ~ o ~ o ~ ~OF NAT~O-MS
badge of rank, diminishingambiguity and thus strain. Line 7, with access to the acquisition of the bundle of skills which enable men to
its cultural continuity, is untypical for the agrarian world. perform well in the general conditions of an industrial division of
Note a further difference between the picture underlying this labour, as defied. I hold this approach to be entirely justified. The
typology, and the one customarily offered by Marxism. As already point is one much invoked by economistsof development of a laisser
indicated, our model expects and predicts vertical conflict, between faire persuasion. Quite impecunious populations (indentured transdiverse
horizontal layers, in a way which is quite different from planted Chinese coolies, for example) do astonishingly well when
Marxism. It anticipatesit only in those cases where 'ethnic' (cultural endowed with the apposite attitudes; while capital poured into unor
other diacritical marks) are visible and accentuate the differences suitable human contexts as an aid to development achieves nothing.
in educational access and power, and, above all, when they inhibit Capital, like capitalism, seems an overrated category.
the free flow of personnel across the loose lines of social stratification.'
It also predicts conflict sooner rather than later in the
development of industrialism (with the proviso that without ethic/ The varieties of nationalist experience
cultural differentiationvirulent and decisively explosive conflict will
not arise at all, early or late). But these differences in prediction are Our model was generated by the introduction of the three factors
best seen not in isolation, but as consequences of the differences in that alone really matter: power, education,and shared culture, in the
underlying interpretation. senses intended. Of the eight possible situations which the model
At this level there are at least two very important differences generates, five are as it were non-nationalist, four of them because
between the two viewpoints. One concerns a theme well explored there is no cultural differentiation, and two because the question of
and much commented on among critics of Marxism: its views on the access to a centrally sustained high culture does not arise (and one of
social stratification engendered by industrialism (or, in its own the specimens, of course, is included both in the four and in the
terms, 'capitalism'). Our model assumes that a sharp polarization two). That leaves us with three forms of nationalism.
and social discontinuitydoesindeed occur in earlyindustrialism, but Line 2 c6rresponds to what one may call the classical Habsburg
that this then becomes attenuated by social mobility, diminution of (and points south and east) form of nationalism. The power-holders
social distance, and convergence of life-styles. It is not denied that have privileged access to the central high culture, which indeed is
great differencesin ownership persist, but it suggests that the effec- their own, and to the whole bag of tricks which makes you do well
tive social consequencesof this, both hidden and perceived, become under modem conditions. The powerless are also the educationvery
much less important. deprived. They share, or groups of them share, folk cultures which,
Even more si&icant is the nature of the polarization that occurs withagood dealof effortandstandardizedandsustainedpropaganda,
in industrial society. What distinguishesour model from the Marxist can be turned into a rival new high culture, whether or not sustained
one is that control or ownership of capital wasn't even mentioned. by thememory, realor invented, of a historical politicalunit allegedly
Identity of culture, accessto power, and accessto education were the once build around that same culture or one of its variants. The reonly
elements fed as premisses into the model, and used for gener- quired effort is, however, very energeticallyput into this task by the
ating our eight possible situations. Capital, ownership and wealth intellectuals-awakeners of this ethnic group, and eventually, if and
were simply ignored, and deliberately so. These once so respected when circumstances are propitious, this group sets up a state of its
factors were replaced by another one, generically designated as own, which sustains and protects the newly born, or re-born as the
accessto education, by which was meant, as explained, possessionor case might be, culture.
The resultingsituation is of immediateand immense advantage to
'This fact about thecrucialfiskresin society seems to havebeenrecognized the said awakeners, and eventually may also be of someadvantage to
by an author who nevertheless continues to class himself as a Marxist. the other speakers of the culture, although it is hard to say whether
I
See Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, London, 1977. they might not have done just as well out of assimilation into the
I
AwlYPOI;OGPPOF~A~ONALISMS A TWOLOGYOF NATIONALISMS
culture of the original power-holders. Non-speakers of the new cul- So the political protection of Italian and German culture was
ture who happen to live in the territory now controlled by the new visibly and, to the Italiansand Germans offensively, inferior to that
state themselves in turn now face the options of assimilation, irre- whichwas provided for, say, French or English culture. But when it
dentist effort, emigration, disagreeable minority status and physical came to access to education, thefacilitiesprovided by these two high
liquidation. This model has been emulated in other parts of the culmes, to those who were born into dialectal variants of it, were
world, with occasionally the significant modification of what one not really in any way inferior. Both Italian and German were literary
may call the 'African' type (though it is not restricted to Africa), languages, with an effectivecentralized standardizationof their corwhich
arises when the local folk cultures are incapable of becoming rect forms and with flourishing literatures, technical vocabularies
the new high culture of the emergent state, either because they are and manners, educational institutions and academies. There was
too numerousor too jealous of each other, or for some other reason. little if any cultural inferiority. Rates of literacy and standards of
This has already received some discussion in connection with the education were not significantly lower (if lower at all) among Gerpseudo-hypothetical
Ruritania, above (chapter 5). But at that stage mans than they were among the French; and they were not signifiof
the discussion I was concerned primarily with the difference cantly low among the Italians, when compared with the dominant
between this Ruritanian (or line 2) type, and aspecialproblemfacing Austrians. German in comparison with French, or Italian in comadvanced
industrial societies through the presence of mobility- parison with the German used by the Austrians, were not disadvanresisting,
counter-entropic traits in their populations: the contrast taged cultures, and their speakers did not need to correct unequal
between brakes on mobility due to difficulties of communication, access to the eventual benefits of a modem world. All that needed to
and brakes due to difficultiesof cultural iden
tifi
cation, or if you like, be corrected was that inequality of power and the absence of a polidue
to thefacility of the identification of inequality, the tar-brushing tical roof over a culture (and over an economy), and institutions
effect or the giving-a-dog-a-bad-name effect. whichwould be identifiedwith it and committed to its maintenance.
The barrier on mobility due to persistent clusteringof some traits The Risorgimento and the udication of Germany corrected these
in underprivileged strata is a very serious problem, particularly for
developed industrial societies, and the distinction is an important There is a difference, however, between this kind of uificatory
one; but it is not identical with the one which concerns us now; n~tionalism,on behalf of a fully effective high culture which only
namely, the difference between lines 2 and 4. The situation symbo- needsanimprovedbitof politicalroofing, andtheclassicalHabsburglized
by line 4 is interesting: some have power and somedo not. The and-east-and-southtype of nationalism. This difference is the subdifference
correlates with, and can be seized in terms of, differences ject of a fascinating and rather moving essay by the late Professor
of culture. But when it comes to access to education, there is no John Plamenatz, an essay which might well have been called 'The
significant difference between the relevant populations. What hap- Sad Reflections of a Montenegrinin Oxford'.' Plamenatz called the
two kinds of nationalism the Western and the Eastern, the Western
The historic reality to which this model corresponds is the unifi- type being of the Risorgirnento or mificatory kind, typical of the
cation nationalisms of nineteenth-century Italy and Germany. Most nineteenth century and with deep links to liberal ideas, while the
Italians were ruled by foreigners, and in that sense were politically Eastern, though he did not stress it in so many words, was exempliunderprivileged.
The Germans, most of them, lived in fragmented fiedby the kind of nationalismhe knew to existin his nativeBalkans.
states, many of them small and weak, at any rate by European great There can be no doubt but that he saw the Western nationalism as
power standards, and thus unable to provide German culture, as a relatively benign and nice, and the Eastern kind as nasty, and
centralized modem medium, with its political roof. (By a further doomed to nastiness by the conditions which gave rise to it. (It
paradox, multi-national great power Austria was endeavouring to do
something of that kind, but much to the displeasure of some of its 'John Plamenatz, 'Two types of Nationalism', in E. Kamenka (ed.),
N a h l i s m , The Nature and Evolution of an Idea, London, 1973.
would be an interesting question to ask him whether he would have
consideredthemarkedly un-benignformstaken by theseonce-benign
or relatively liberal and moderateWestern nationalisms in the twentieth
century, as accidental and avoidable aberrations or not.)
The underlying logic of Plamenatz's argument is clear. The relatively
benign Western nationalisms were acting on behalf of welldeveloped
high cultures, normatively centralized and endowed with
a fairly well-defined folk clientele: all that was required was a bit of
adjustment in the political situation and in the international boundaries,
so as to ensure for these cultures, and their speakers and
practitioners,thesamesustainedprotectionas that which was already
enjoyed by their rivals. This took a few battles and a good deal of
sustained diplomatic activity but, as the making of historical omelettes
goes, it did not involve the breaking of a disproportionate or
unusual number of eggs, perhaps no more than would have been
broken anyway in the course of the normal politicalgame within the
general political framework and assumptions of the time.
By way of contrast, consider the nationalismdesignated as Eastern
by Plamenatz. Its implementationdid, of course, require battles and
diplomacy, to at least the same extent as the realization of Western
nationalisms. But the matter did not end there. This kind of Eastern
nationalism did not operate on behalf of an already existing, welldefined
and codified high culture, which had as it were marked out
and linguistically pre-converted its own territory by sustained literary
activities ever since the early Renaissance or since the Reformation,
as the case might be. Not at all. This nationalism was active
on behalf of a high culture as yet not properly crystallized, a merely
aspirant or in-the-makinghigh culture. It presided, or strove to preside,
in ferocious rivalry with similar competitors, over a chaotic
ethnographic map of many dialects, with ambiguous historical or
linguo-genetic allegiances, and containing populations which had
only just begun to identify with these emergent national high cultures.
Objectiveconditionsof the modem world were bound, in due
course, to oblige them to identify with one of them. But till this
occurred, they lacked the clearly defined cultural basis enjoyed by
their German and Italian counterparts.
These populations of eastern Europe were still locked into the
complex multiple loyalties of kinship, territory and religion. To
make them conform to the nationalist imperative was bound to take
more than a few battles and some diplomacy. It was bound to takea
great deal of very forceful cultural engineering. In many cases it was
also bound to involve population exchanges or expulsions, more or
less forcible assimilation, and sometimes liquidation, in order to
attainthatcloserela$on betweenstateandculturewhichistheessence
of nationalism. And all these consequences flowed, not from some
unusual brutality of the nationalistswho in the end employed these
measures (they were probably no worse and no better than anyone
else), but from the inescapable logic of the situation.
If the nationalist imperative was to be implementei in what
Plamenatz generically designated as Eastern conditions, then these
consequencesfollowed. A modem type of society cannot be implemented
without the satisfaction of something pretty close to the
nationalist imperative, which follows from the new style of division
of labour. The hunger for industrial affluence, once its benefits and
their availability are known and once the previous socialorder has in
any case been disrupted, is virtually irresistible. The conclusion to
which this series of steps leads us cannot be avoided. With luck,
understandingand determination, the price can be mitigated; but its
payment cannot be altogether avoided.
Diaspma nationalism
Our discussion of the difference between lines 2 and 4 of figure2 in a
way repeats Plamenatz's distinction between Western and Eastern
nationalisms; but it claims certain advantages over his treatment.
For one thing, the contrast is not simply asserted as a contingently,
historicallyencountered distinction, but is a derived consequenceof
a simple model into which, by way of hypothesis, certain very basic
and elementaryfactors have been fed. This constitutesan advantage
at any rate for those who, like myself, believe that such modelbuilding
should at least be attempted.
But there is a further benefit: this 'constructive' approach engenders
a further, third variant of nationalism, left out by Plamenatzaltogether,
but cogently generated by a further combination of those
self-same elements which also account, in different combinations,
for the two species which did preoccupy him. This third species can
best be called diaspora nationalism, and it is, as a matter of historical
fact, a distinctive, very conspicuous and important sub-species of
nationalism.
102 A TYPOLOGY OF NATIONALISMS
Traditional agrarian society, we have stressed, uses culture or
etbnicity primarily to distinguish privileged groups, thus underscoring
their distinctiveness and legitimacy, enhancing their aura,
and diminishing the danger of status ambiguity. If the rulers speak
one kind of languageor have one kind of accent and wear one kind of
habit, it would be a solecism, or much worse, for non-members of
the d i n g stratum to use the same mode of communication. It would
be a presumption, he-majeste', pollution or sacrilege, or ridiculous.
Ridicule is a powerful sanction. It constitutes a most powerfulsocial
sanctionagainst which reason is specially powerless, even or particularly
when the verdictis passed by the least quaMied of juries. Other
and possibly more brutal punishments can also be deployed.
But thesamesocial marker deviceof culture or ethnicityis used to
identify and separate off not merely privileged, but also underprivileged,
ambivalently viewed or pariah groups. And it is socially most
useful to have such groups. As we have noted, in pre-industrial
societies bureaucratic functions can best be performed by eunuchs,
priests, slaves and foreigners. To allow free-bornnative citizensinto
such key positionsis too dangerous. They are far too much subject to
pressures and temptations from their existing local and kin links to
use their position to benefit their kinsmen and clients, and to use
their kinsmen and clients in turn to strengthen their own positions
further. It is not till the coming of our own modem society, when
everyone becomes both a mamluk and a clerk, that everyonecan also
perform reasonably as a bureaucrat, without needing to be emasculated,
physidy or socially. Now men can be trusted to honour
what had been the politically awkward and untypical norms of
agrarian society, but have become the pervasiveand acceptable ones
in ours. We are now all of us castrated, and pitifully trustworthy.
The state can trust us, all in all, to do our duty, and need not turn us
into eunuchs, priests, slaves or mamluks frrst.
But the manningof posts in an administrativestructure is not the
only reason for having pariahs in the agrarian order. Pariah bureaucracies
are not the only form of exemption from full humanity, and
bureaucracy is not the only source of social power. Magic, the forging
of metals, finance, elite military corps, various other such
mysteriesand in some circumstancesany kind of key specialism may
confer dangerous power on the specialist whd has access to it. One
way of neutralizingthisdanger, whileat the same time toleratingthe
specialism and possibly confirming the monopoly of the guild or
A TYPOLOGY OF NATIONALISMS 103
caste, is to insist that this social niche may be occupied only by a
group easily idensiable culturally, destined for avoidance and contempt,
and excluded from political office, from the ultimate control
of the tools of cop-cion, and from honour.
Clear examples of such positions, often too dangerous to be given
to locals and full citizens, and consequently reserved for foreigners,
are palace guards and the providers of financial services. The handling
of large sums of money obviously confers great power, and if
that power is in the hands of someoneprecludedfrom using it for his
own advancement, because he belongs to a category excluded from
high and honourableoffice and from being able to command obedience,
then so much the better. In the traditional order, groups
occupying these positions take the rough with the smooth, accepting
with resignation the benefits, the perils and the humiliations of their
situation. They are generally born into it and have little choice in the
matter. Sometimes they may suffer a great deal, but often there are
benefits as well as losses involved in their position.
The situ'ationchangesradicallyand profoundly with the comingof
mobile, anonymous, centralized mass society. This is particularly
true for minorities specializingin fmancid, commercial, and generally
urban specialist occupations. With pervasive mobility and occupational
change, it is no longer feasible to retain the monopoly of
some activity for a particular cultural group. When so many members
of the wider society aspire to these often comfortable, and in
themselves (if not subject to co scation)lucrativeoccupations, they
can hardly be reserved for a minority, and still less for a stigmatized
one.
At the same time, however, these previously specialized and segregated
populations are liable to have a marked advantage when it
comes to the new pursuits and the new style. Their urban style of
life, habits of rational calculation, commercial probity, higher rates
of literacy and possibly a scriptural religion, all fit them better than
either the members of the old ruling class, or of the old peasantry,
for the new life-style.
It is often asserted, even by sophisticated sociologists such as Max
Weber, that these minorities have a double standard, one for their
own group, and another, instrumental and &oral, for outsiders.
They do indeed have a double standard, but it is exactly the other
way round. Their entire standing with the outside world previously
hinged on performing some specific service or supplying some
them perform much more successfully than their rivals in the new
economic free-for-all. Their background fits them for it so much
better. But at the same time their background also contains a tradition
of political impotence, and of the surrender of the communal
was inevitably always far more than a mere commercial deal. The right of self-defence. That, after all, had been the price of their
two partners in it were also kinsmen, clansmen, allies, enemies, and entering the profession in the first place: they had to make themso
forth; hence the deal was never restricted to a simple delivery of selves politically and militarily impotent, so as to be allowed to
this good at this price. There was alwaysa promise or a fear of greater handle tools that could be, in the wrong hands, so very powerfuland
advantagesor possiblebetrayal. Both sideswere involvedin bargains dangerous. But even without such a tradition, the politicaland miliand
calculationsfar more long-term and intangible, and thus had to tary weakness of such a group follows from its minority status and,
try to deliver more. If on the other hand they were dissatisfied with very often, from its dispersal among a variety of urban centres, and
the deal, powerfulconsiderations operated to inhibit complaints, lest its lack of a compact defensible territorial base. Some economically
all the other strands in the relationshipwere thereby also put at risk. brilliant groups of this kind have behind them a long tradition of
The advantage on the other hand of dealing with a minority, one dispersal, urbanizationand minority status: this is clearly the case of
with whom you could not eat, marry, or enter into political or mili- the Jews, Greeks, Armenians or Parsees. Other groups come to
tary alliance, was that both parties could concentrate on a rational occupy similar positions only as a result of recent migrations and
cost-benefit analysis of the actual specific deal in question, and aptitudes (or educational opportunities)only acquired or deployed in
expect, on the whole, to get what they bargained for, neither more modern times. Such is the situation of overseasChineseand Indians,
nor less. Within the minority community, of course, relationships or the Ibos in Nigeria.
were once again many-stranded, and hence deals were less rational The disastrous and tragic consequences, in modem conditions, of
and reliable, and more many-sided. But in the wider society, those the conjunction of economic superiority and cultural identif~ability
who lack status can honour a contract. Those on the other hand with political and military weakness, are too well known to require
who enjoyed a social station, and had to respectits rights and duties, repetition. The consequences range from genocide to expulsion.
were thereby deprived of much of the elbow-room required for nego- Sometimesa precarious and uneasy balance is maintained. The main
tiatingand observing specific contracts. Status and honour deprive a point is that the central power now finds itself in a very different
man of options, by imposingtoo many obligationsand commitments. situation, and subject to very different temptations and pressures
Deprivation of status enables a man to attend to the business at
I
from those which prevailed in the days of the agrarian division of
I hand, negotiate a rational deal, and observe its terms. labour. Then, there was no question of everyone becoming mobile,
So it is indeed true that the minority community had a double educated, specialized or commercial-minded; who would then have
standard, but in the oppositesense from what is normally supposed. tilled the land?
To the outsider they displayed that reliability which is the presupposed
anticipation of single-strandedmodern relations. It was with When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the businessman?
their fellows that their dealings had that rich many-strandedquality
which, to our modern sensibility, smacks of corruption. But, of Well, there were some. But they could not constitute the majorityor
course, with the coming of anonymous mobile mass society, single- the norm. An almost universally embourgeoised society was inconstranded,
one-shot deals have become quite normal, and not a
special feature of dealings between non-commensal groups. The general population then did not covet the minority role,
Under conditionsof modernizationthe erstwhilespecialized min- which was in any case stigmatized. The rulers welcomed a defenceority
groups bse their disabilities, but also alas their monopoly and less, fairly easily taxable, economically specialized group, tied to the
their protection. Their previous training and orientation often make rulers by its strictly sustained and reinforced defencelessness. But
A TYPOLOGY OF NATIONALISMS
now, the national 'development
7
requires precisely that everyone
should movein the directionwhich was once open only to a minority
problem by creating an Asian one, about which the Israelis have
and stigmatized group. Once the state had an interest in protecting
barely begun to think. In the diaspora, the Jewish religion referred
to Jerusalem; once back in Jerusalem, semi-secular Zionism for a
the minority, which was easy to milch. Now the state has more
time used the dated socialist or populist clichCsof nineteenth century
interest in depriving the minority of its economic monopolies, and,
because of the minority's visibility and wealth, it can buy off a great
Europe.) Nearly two thousand years of history had left no Jewish
deal of discontent in the wider population by dispossessing and
territorial base whatever, least of all in the land of Israel, and had
moreover left Jews as a set of discontinuousand fairly highly specipersecutingit;
and so the inevitable happens. This provides a most
enjoyable(exceptfor its victims)and pathetic theatre of humiliation,
alized strata within the structures of other societies, rather than the
inflicted on the once-envied group, to the delectation of the majorkind
of balanced population which can be the base of a more or less
autarchic modem state, of a geschlossener Handelstaat. Nevertheless,
ity. This pleasure can be savoured by a far larger category than just
this extraordinary transformationwas achieved, no doubt thanks in
the restricted group of inheritors of the positions vacated by the
large part to the incentive provided by the persecutions, first in
persecuted minority, and that too is a politically important coneastern
Europeand then throughout Europe during the period of the
sideration, making this course a politically attractive option for the
Holocaust. These persecutions illustrate, better than any others, the
Under these circumstances the minority is faced with the same
kind of fate which is likely to befall culturally distinguishable, economically
privileged and politically defenceless communities, at a
kind of options (though under different circumstances) as those
time when the age of specialized communities, of the traditional
which faced our Ruritanian labour migrants. It can assimilate; and
form of organic division of labour, is over.
sometimesindeed the entire minority, or some considerable parts of
The human transformation involved in the Jewish case went
it, succeed in doing just that. Alternatively, it canendeavour to shed
counter to the global trend: an urban, highly literate and sophistiboth
its specializationand its minoritystatus, and createa state of its
cated, co&opolitan population was at least partly returned to the
own, as the new protector of a now un-specialized, generic, newly
land and made more insular. Normally the nationalist process is
national culture. For a dispersed urban population the major probinversely
related to its own verbiage, talking of peasants and making
lem is, of course, the acquisition of the required territorial base. The
townsmen. Here it was r d y necessary to make a few surrogate
Ruritanian peasants, being peasants, inevitably had a territorial
peasants. In fact, they turned out to be peasants with certain crucial
base, destined soon to become the kingdom of Ruritania, and later
tribal traits: a form of local organizationwhich was made up of units
to becomethe SocialistPeople's Republicof Ruritania. But what was
that were simultaneously productive and military in their effective
an urban, specialized and dispersed group, with few or no rural role. The manufacture of such tribesmen-peasants from an urban
links, to do?
background could not conceivably be an easy matter, and the surroFor
these kinds of nationalism, the acquisition of territory was the gate peasant-soldiers were in fact formed by a species of secular
first and perhaps the main problem. The Helienes initially thought
monastic order. This needed an ideology, and by a historicaccident
not so much in terms of secession from the Ottoman Empire, as of the suitable mixture of socialism and populism was indeed available
inverting the hierarchy within it and taking it over, thereby reviving and pervasive in the intellectual miiieux in which the order did its
Byzantiurn. The first Greek rising took place not in Greece, but in recruiting. The pro-rural,anti-division-of-labour,collectivist themes
what is now Rumania, where the Greeks were a minority, and more- in this ideology were i d d y suited for the purpose. Whether the
I over one doing rather well out of the Ottoman system. The use kibbutzim do indeed providethe good life for modem man, as their
of what is now southern Greece as a territorial basis only came founders believed and hoped, remains an open question; but as a
I later.
The most famous and dramatic case of a successful diaspora %ugh Trevor-Roper,Jezoish and OfhaNatioMlism, London, 1962.
nationalism is Israel. It is also the 'last, least typical of European
piece of machinery for effectively re-settling the land by people
drawn from heavily urbanized and embourgeoised populations, and
effectively defending it in a military crisis with minimal and exiguous
means, they proved to be quite outstanding, and indeed
unequalled.
The problems of social transformation, cultural revivification,
acquisitionof territory, and coping with the natural enmity of those
with previous claims on the territory in question, illustrate the quite
special and acute problems faced by diaspora nationalisms. Those of
them which retain some residue of an ancient territory may face
problems which are correspondingly less acute. But the problems
which face a diaspora culture which does not take the nationalist
option may be as grave and tragic as those which face it if it does
adopt nationalism. In fact, one may say that it is the extreme peril of
the assimilationist alternative which makes the adherents of the
nationalist solution espouse their cause in this situation.
The gravity of the situation faced by diaspora populations if they
do not choose nationalism, and the manner in which the whole situation
can be deduced from the very general characteristics of the
transition from an agrarian to an industrial order, show that it is
quite wrong to invoke diaspora nationalismsas counter-examplesto
our theory of nationalism:
Greek and Armenian nationalism arose among populations which
were generally more prosperous and better able to understand the
wealth-generating economies of modem Europe than their Ottoman
Muslim overlords.'
In our Ruritaniancase, nationalismwas explained in terms of an
economically and politically disadvantaged population, able to distinguish
itself culturally, and thus impelled towards the nationalist
'ATatioMlismin Asia and Africa, ed. Elie Kedourie, London, 1970, p. 20. In
the same volume (p.132) Professor Kedourie challenges the doctrine that
industrial social organization makes for cultural homogeneity: 'Large
industrial enterprises have taken root and flourished in multi-lingualsocieties:
in Bohemia and the United Statesin the nineteenth century; in Hong
Kong, Israel, French Algeria, India,.Ceylon, and Malaya in the twentieth.
It has never been claimed that you can only haveindustrial enterprisein a
society which is already culturally homogeneous. What the theory does
claim is that if an industrial economy is establishedim a culturally heterogeneous
society (or if it even casts its advance shadow on it), then tensions
A TYPOLOGY OF NATIONALISMS 109
option. But the intolerable position, once the process of industrialization
begins, of culturally distinguishable populations which are
not at an economic disadvantage (quite the reverse), only at a political
disadvantage which is inherent in their minority status, follows
from the same general premisses, and points to the same conclusion,
though naturally by its own specificpath. To concentrateexclusively
on economic disadvantage, which admittedly is prominent in the
most typical cases, is to travesty our position. The industrial order
requires homogeneity within political units, at least sufficient to
permit fairly smooth mobility, and precluding the 'ethnic' identification
of either advantage or disadvantage, economic or political.
result which will engender nationalism. With the possible and temporary
exception of Hong Kong, whose population is recruited from Chinese not
wishing to live under the present mainlandChinesereglme, so that the very
principle of recruitment of the community selectsfor absenceof irredentist
longing, every single other country cited in Kedourie's list, far from constituting
a counter-example to the theory, in fact illustratesit, and indeed
provides veritable paradigms of the model which the theory proposes.
Bohemia was the sourceof much of the early nationalist activityand theory,
both German and Czech; the educational system of the United States was
notoriously geared to turning a heterogeneous immigrant population into
an ethnically homogeneous one, with the warm concurrence of the population
so processed. All the other countries listed illustrate the story of
nationalism, some of them in extreme and tragic form. It is true that in
India, cultural homogeneity sometimescuts across linguisticdiversity: Hindus
'speak the same language' even when *y do not speak the same
language. But the theory does not preclude that.
The Future of Nationalism
Our general diagnosisof nationalismis simple. Of the three stages of
human history, the second is the agrarian, and the third is the industrial.
Agrarian society has certain general features: the majority of
the population is made up of agricultural producers, peasants. Only
a minority of the society's population are specialists, whether military,
political, religious or economic. Most agrarian populations are
also affected by the two other great innovations of the agrarian age:
centralized government and the discovery of writing.
Agrariansociety- unlike, it would seem, both its predecessorand
successor societies - is Malthusian: both productive and defence
necessities impel it to seek a growing population, which then pushes
close enough to the available resources to be occasionallystricken by
disasters. The three crucial factors operating in this society (food
production, political centralization and literacy) engender a social
structure in which cultural and political boundaries are seldom con-
gruent.
Industrial society is quite different. It is not Malthusian. It is
based and dependent on cognitiveand economicgrowth which in the
end both outstrips and discourages further dramatic population
growth. Variousfactorsin it - universalliteracy, mobility and hence
individualism, political centralization, the need for a costly educational
infrastructure - impel it into a situation in which political
and cultural boundaries are on the whole congruent. The state is,
above all, the protector, not of a faith, but of a culture, and the maintainer
of the inescapably homogeneous and standardizing educational
system, which alone can turn out the kind of personnel
capable of switching from one job to another within a growing economy
and a mobile society, and indeed of performing jobs which involve
manipulating meanings and people rather than things. For
most of these men, however, the limitsof their culture are the limits,
not perhaps of the world, but of their own employabilityand hence
dignity.
THE FUTURE OF NATIONALISM 111
In most of the closed micro-communities of the agrarian age the
limits of the culture were the limits of the world, and the culture
often itself remained unperceived, invisible: no-one thought of it as
the ideal political boundary. Now, with mobility, it has become
visible and is the limit of the individual's mobility, circumscribing
the newly enlarged range of his employability; and thus it becomes
the natural political boundary. To say this is not to reduce nationalism
to mere anxiety about the prospects for social mobility. Men
really love their culture, because they now perceive the cultural
atmosphere(instead of taking it for granted), and know they cannot
really breathe or fulfil their identity outside it.
The high (literate) culture in which they have been educated is,
for most men, their most precious investment, the core of their
identity, their insurance, and their security. Thus a world has
emerged which in the main, minor exceptions apart, satisfies the
nationalist imperative, the congruence of culture and polity. The
satisfaction of the nationalist principlewas not a precondition of the
first appearanceof industrialism, but only the product of its spread.
A transition has to be made from a world which does not encourage
even the formulation of the nationalist ideal, let alone even
remotely make possibleits implementation,to an age which makesit
seem (erroneously) a self-evident ideal valid for all times, thus
turning it into an effective norm, which in most cases is implemented.
The period of this transition is inevitably a period of nationalist
activism. Mankind arrived in the industrial age with cultural
and political institutions which generally contradictedthe nationalist
requirements. Bringing society into line with the new imperatives
was inevitably a turbulent process.
The most violent phase of nationalism is that which accompanies
early industrialism, and the diffusion of industrialism. An unstable
social situation is created in which a whole set of painful cleavages
tend to be superimposed on each other: there are sharp political,
economic and educational inequalities. At the same time, new
culture-congruentpolities are emerging. In these conditions, if these
multiple and superimposed inequalities also coincide, more or less,
with ethnic and cultural ones, which are visible, conspicuous and
easily intelligible, they impel the new emerging units to place themselves
under ethnic banners.
Industrialization inevitably comes to different places and groups
at different times. This ensures that the explosive blend of early
industrialism(dislocation, mobility, acute inequalitynot hallowed by
time and custom) seeks out, as it were, all the available nooks and
crannies of cultural differentiation, wherever they be. Few of those
that can be effectively activated for nationalism, by coinciding however
loosely with the septic inequalities of the time, and defining
viable potential industrial states, fail so to be activated. As the tidal
wave of modernization sweeps the world, it makes sure that almost
everyone, at some time or other, has cause to feel unjustly treated,
I and that he can identify the culprits as being of another 'nation'. If
he can also identify enough of the victims as being of the same
I
'nation' as himself, a nationalism is born. If it succeeds, and not all
of them can, a nation is born.
There is a further element of economic rationality in the political
system of 'lateral boundaries' which nationalism engenders in the
I
modem world. Territorial boundaries are drawn and legally enforced,
while differences of status are neither marked nor enforced,
but rather camouflaged and disavowed. Notoriously, advanced economies
can swamp and inhibit newly emergingones, unless theseare
effectively protected by their own state. The nationalist state is not
the protector only of a culture, but also of a new and often initially
fragile economy. (It generally loses interest in protectinga faith.) In
those cases where a modern nation is born of what had previously
I been a mere stratum - peasants only, or urban specialists only- the
state's concerns with making its ethnic group into a balancednation,
1 and with developing its economy, become aspects of one and the
same task.
I
The question now arises whether nationalism will continue to
be a major force or a general political imperative in an age of
I advanced, perhaps even in some sense completed industrialism. As
~ the world is not yet too close to a satiation of the craving for economic
growth, any answer to this question will inevitably be speculative.
The speculation is nevertheless well worth attempting. The
I implications of growth for occupational and social mobility were
prominent in our argument. Constant occupational changes, reinforced
by the concern of most jobs with communication, the mani-I
pulation of meaning rather than the manipulation of things, makes
for at least a certain kind of social equality or diminished social distance,
and the need for a standardized, effectively shared medium of
communication. These factors underlie both modern egalitarianism
and nationalism.
But what happens if a satiated industrial society becomes once
again stabilized, un-mobile?The classicalimaginativeexploration of
this occurs in Aldous Huxley's Brave N m World. A satiated industrial
society is indeed conceivable: though there is no reason to suppose
that all possible technological innovations will one day be
exhausted, there is reason to suppose that beyond a certain point
further technical innovations may cease to have any significant further
impact on social structure and society generally, on the analogy
of a man who, beyond a certain point of wealth, can no longer in any
way alter his life-style in response to further enrichment. This analogy
may or may not be valid, and it is difficult to be coddent about
the answer to this question. The age of wealth-saturation for mankind
at large stillseems fairly distant, and so the issue does not affect
us too urgently at present.
But it is worth stating that much of our argument did hinge on the
implicationsof continuing commitment to global economic growth,
and hence to innovation and occupational change; it also presupposed
the persistence of a society based on the promise of affluence
and on generalized Danegeld. These assumptions, though
valid now, cannot be expected to remain so indefinitely (even if we
exclude the possibility of the termination of this kind of society by
some nuclear or similar disaster). Our culturally homogeneous,
mobileand, in its middle strata, fairly unstructured society may well
not last for ever, even if we disregard the possibility of cataclysms;
and when this kind of society no longer prevails, then what we have
presented as the social bases of nationalism will be profoundly
modified. But that is not something which will be visible in our
lifetimes.
In the shorter run, without looking ahead so far, we can expect
nationalism to become modified. Its acute stage arose, as stated, at
the time of the maximal gap between the industrially incorporated,
politically and educationally enfranchised populations, and those at
thegateof the new world but not yet insideit. As economic development
proceeded, this gap narrowed (pessimistic assertions to the
contrary notwithstanding).The gap may even continueto increasein
absoluteterms, but once both the privilegedand the underprivileged
are above a certain level, it is no longer felt and perceived to be so
acute. The difference between starvation and sufficiency is acute;
the difference between sufficiencywith more, or with fewer, largely
symbolic, -cia1 frills, is not nearly so great, especially when, in
an at least nominally egalitarian industrial society, those frills are all
made in the same style.
The diminution of the acuteness of nationalist fervour does not
mean, however, that counter-entropicminoritieswillnecessarilyfare
well. Their fate in the modem world has often been tragic, and to be
confident that these tragedies will not be repeated would be an
indulgence or facile, unwarranted optimism. A mature industrial
society requires smooth communication and smooth mobility for its
members. Attainmentof the former is the conditionof maturity; the
latter seems to be more elusive. Obstruction of mobility, where it
occurs, is one of the most seriousand intractable problems of industrial
society. The gap in prosperity may also increase between
nations, but when a frontier already exists between the haves and
have-nots, the tension between them cannot, as it were, create it
twice over, so from the viewpoint of nationalism this is irrelevant. (I
leave aside for the time being the possibility of some collective hostility
by an entire class of 'proletarian nations', politically sovereign,
towards the rich nations. If this occurs, it will in any case be something
other than nationalism. It would manifest an international
solidarity of the poor.)
So what happens to later nationalism, if disparities of wealth
between populations diminish with the extension of the indusmal
system?The answer to this question is not yet clear, but it does concern
us far more closely than the more distant vistas; for a fair
number of countriesalready at least approachthis condition.We can
look both at the implications of our theoreticalpremisses, and at the
concrete empirical, historical evidence. Afair amount of it is already
available. It all hinges, in effect, on the nature of industrial culture.
Industrial culture - one or many?
There are two possible visions of the future of culture in industrial
societies, and any number of intermediate compromise positions
between the poles which they represent. My own conception of
world history is clear and simple: the three great stages of man, the
hunting-gathering, the agrarian and the industrial, determine our
problems, but not our solution. In other words, Marxismwas wrong
twice over, not merely in multiplyingthe stages beyond the elegant,
economical and canonical three (trinitarians such as Comte, Frazer
or Karl Polanyiwere right, whether or not they had correctly identified
the elements of the trinity), but above all in suggesting that the
solution as well as the problem was determined for each stage:
The mode of production of material life determines the general
character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. ... In
broad outlinewecandesignatethe'Asiatic, the ancient, thefeudaland
the modem bourgeois modes of production can be indicated as progressive
epochs in the economic formation of society.'
But, in general, the determinationof society by the available economic
base does not seem to hold. Neither hunting nor agrarian
societies are all alike. What is specifically disastrous for the Marxist
philosophyof history is that the crucial superstructural features (the
state and literacy) do not correlate with the appearance of the really
decisive infrastructure change, namely the beginning of food production.
If James Woodburn is right, a crucial structural change
occurs already within the category of hunting societies, which can be
divided into those practising immediate return, and those with delayed
return hunting and gathering economies. The latter, by acquiring
the moral and institutional basis for long-term obligation,
already possess the organizational pre-conditions for developing
agriculture, if and when the pressures in that direction operate and
the technical means become a~ailable.~Division of tasks over time
engendersthe habitsof thought and action which then make possible
the permanentspecializationof rolesbetween individualsinvolved in
food production. Ifthis is so, then one great socio-structural change
precedes the past great leap to food production; while there is no
doubt but that the other great structural change, state-formation,
follows it, and is not in any immediate or single way linked to it.3
'K. Marx, IntroductiontoA Contributiontothe Critiqueof PoliticalEconomy,
in numerous editions and translations.
*James Woodburn, 'Hunters and gathers today and reconstruction of the
past', in E. Gellner (ed.), Soviet and WesiernAnthropology, London and
New York, 1980.
?he problems, empirical and theoretical, which face the doctrine of a
regular relation between social base and superstructure in Marxism, and
their greater acuteness once a milineal view of social development is
dropped, do receivesomeattentionin Soviet thought. Seefor instanceEero
Loone, Sm-iQ Filosofw Iswri (Contemporary Philosophy of History),
Tallin, 1980, especially Part IV.
116 THE FUTURE OF NATIONALISM
Mankind moved from a hunting-gatheringstate when all had leisure,
to an agrarian one when only some (the ruling elite) had it, to an
industrial age governed by the work ethic, when none have it. Or
you might say we moved from no delay in gratificationto some delay
and fmally to eternal delay.
So the idea of the material determination of society would seem to
be out, in general. But is it also out for industrial society, in the long
run? Is the general form of industrial society, at least, uniquely
determined by its productive infrastructure? The answer is not obvious,
and certainly not predetermined by the clear evidence to the
contrary for hunting and agrariansocieties. It could be that industrial
man will, in the end, have fewer social options than his hunter and
peasant ancestor. It could be that the thesis that all industrial societies
eventually come to resembleeach other is correct, or at any rate will
in the long run turn out to be such. With specificreference to culture
and nationalism, what may we expect?
It may be convenient to explore first this convergence thesis.
Suppose it were indeed the case that the industrial mode of production
uniquely determines the culture of society: the same technology
canalizes people into the same type of activity and the same
kinds of hierarchy, and that the same kind of leisurestyles were also
engendered by the existing techniques and by the needs of productive
life. Diverse languages might and probably would, of course,
survive: but the social uses to which they were being put, the meanings
available in them, would be much the same in any language
within this wider shared industrial culture.
In such a world, a man moving from one language to another
might indeed need to learn a new vocabulary, new words for familiar
things and contexts, and he might also, at worst, have to learn a new
grammar, in a more or less purely linguisticsense; but this would be
about the limit of the adjustment demanded of him. No new thought
styles would be required of him. He could all in all comport himself
like a tourist with a phrase book, confident that all he needed was to
locatethe new phrasefor an old and familiar need. The tourist would
move from one area to another, knowing that within each of them
human requirements are bounded by the want of a room, meal,
drink, petrol, tourist office, and a few other things. Likewise, in a
world in which the convergence thesis were wholly valid, interlinguistic
adjusunent would be a simple matter of exchanging
one verbal currency for another, within a well-run international
conceptual system in which exchange rates were fairly stable, fured
and reliable.
There is clearly an elementof truth in this. Industrial society has a
complex division of labour and interdependence internationally as
well as internally. Notwithstanding the care national states take not
to be too specializedand hence too dependent on others, the amount
of international trade is very great, and so is the accompanying conceptual
and institutional convergence. It is deeply significant that
credit cards are valid across Iron Curtains. You can freely use your
credit card in countries where you cannot freely speak your mind.
The dollar is quite legally used as currency in at least one socialist
system. Thereis notoriouslyan international, trans-ideologicalyouth
culmre.
In the industrial age only high cultures in the end effectively survive.
Folk cultures and little traditions surviveonly artificially, kept
going by language and folklore preservation societies. Moreover,
the high cultures of industrial societies are a special breed among
high cultures in general, and resemble each other more than do
agrarian high cultures. They are tied to a shared cognitivebaseand a
consciously global economy. They probably overlap more closely
than did the old high cultures that were once deeply pervaded by
distinctive theologies, by their culturally private, idiosyncratic cognitive
systems.
Is this the whole truth? Should one expect that eventually, with
the consummation of effective industrialization, inter-cultural and
inter-linguistic differences will degenerate into merely phonetic
ones, when only the superficial tokens of communication are variable,
while the semantic content and the social context of utterances
and actions become universal, non-regional?If that came to be, the
communication gap between diverse 'languages' could become negligibly
small, and the correspondingsocialgap, the counter-entropic,
mobility-inhibiting effect of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds
could become correspondinglyinsignificant. No nationalist
inhibitions would then impede inter-cultural amity and inter-
nationalism.
To some extent and in some areas, somethingof this kind does in
fact already happen: two equally sophisticatedwell-trained members
of the upper professionallayers of developedindustrial countriesfeel
little strain and need to adjust when visiting each other's lands,
irrespective of how competent they are at speaking each other's
language, in the literal sense. They happily co-operate in the multinational
corporation. They already 'speak each other's language',
even if they do not speak each other's language. At that level something
like an international labour market and interchangeability
already obtain. But can or will this situation become generalized?It
is ironic that intellectuals, the drivingforceof initialnauonalism, are
now, in a world of nation-states, often the ones who move with the
greatest ease between states, with the least prejudice, as once they
did in the days of an international inter-state clerisy.
If this freedom of international movement became general, nationalism
would cease to be a problem; or at any rate, communication
gapsengenderedby cultural differenceswould cease to be significant
and would no longer produce nationalist tensions. Nationalism as a
permanent problem, as a Damocles' sword hanging over any polity
which dares to d e b the nationalist imperative of the congruence of
politicaland cultural boundaries, would be removed, and cease to be
an ever-present and acute threat. In this hypothetical global continuum
of a basically homogeneousindustrial culture, differentiated
by languages which are distinct only phonetically and superficially
but not semantically, the age of nationalism would become a matter
of the past.
I do not believe that this will come to pass. I am inclined to follow
J.-F. Revel on this point.
Les peuples ne sont pas tous les msmes. 11sne I'etaient pas dans la
mi&re, ils ne le sont pas dans le luxe.'
(Nationsare not all alike. They weren't alikein poverty, and they are
not alike in luxury.)
The shared constraintsof industrial production, of a unique background
science, and of a complex internationalinterdependenceand
sustained continuous contact and communication, will no doubt
produce a certain measure of global cultural convergence, a fair
amount of which we can see already. This will prevent failure of
communication arising from cultural divergence from being quite
such a major factor in exacerbating tension between the more and
the less privileged. (It will not prevent other counter-entropictraits
from aggravating or provoking tensions.) Within developed countries,
countries within which the great majority of the citizens have
'J.F. Revel, En Frame, Paris, 1965.
reasonably good and not very unequal access to the dominant economically
effectivehigh culture, and where the existing inequalities
cannot be dredged to the surface and activated politically by a cultural
or 'ethnic' net, a certain amount of secondary cultural pluralism
and diversity may emerge again, and be politically innocuous.
Given generalized development, and something like equal access to
social perks, then related cultures, or those with a shared history,
will be able to cohabit amicably. The linguistic pluralityof the Swiss
canton of the Grisonsdoes not seem to have put the political unity of
that canton under stress. The same cannot be said of canton Bern,
where the inhabitants of the Jura were sufficientlydiscontented with
the German-speakingunit to effect, not without conflict, a reorganization
of-the Swiss Confederacy.
But it remains difficult to imagine two large, politically viable,
independence-worthy cultures cohabiting under a single political
roof, and trusting a single political centre to maintain and service
both cultureswith perfect or even adequateimpartiality. The degree
of sovereignty which national states will retain in various circumstances
can be foreseen - the restrictions on sovereignty by bodies
such as the United Nations, regional confederations and alliances
and so forth -is not a subject of this study, nor a topic which absolutely
needs to be discussed here; but it would seem overwhelmingly
likely that differences between cultural styles of life and communication,
despite a similar economic base, will remain large enough to
requireseparateservicing, and hencedistinct cultural-politicalunits,
whether or not they will be wholly sovereign.
How about the other extreme possibility? The alternative pole
corresponds to a situation in which distinct cultures would remain
just as incommensurateand incompatible as they are alleged to have
been among pre-industrialcultures, if not more so. This question is
complicated by the fact that it is by no means clear, among anthropologists
or others, just hozo totally incommensurate and selfsufficient
pre-industrial cultures were.
In its extreme form, the (recently quite fashionable) incommensurability
thesis runs something as follows: each culture or way of
life has its own standards not merely of virtue, but also of reality itself,
and no culture may ever legitimately be judged, let alone condemned,
by the standards of another, or by standards pretending to
be universal and above all cultures (for there are no such higher and
external norms). This position is usually urged by romantics, using
I
120 THE FUTURE OF NATIONALISM
it as a premiss for defendingarchaic beliefs and customs from rational
criticism, and insisting that the idea of extraneous, universally
rational standards is a myth. In this form, such a position would
seem to entaila virulent nationalism, in as far as it clearly entailsthat
the subjection of one culture to the political management administered
by members of another must always be iniquitous.
I am deeply sceptical about the applicability of the incommensurability
thesis even to agrarian societies. I do not believe it can
legitimately be used to deny the possibility of inter-cultural communication,
or of the comparative evaluation of agrarian and industrial
cultures. The incommensurability thesis owes some of its
plausibility to a tendency to take too seriously the self-absolutizing,
critic-anathematizing official faiths of late agrarian societies, which
indeed are generally so constructed as to be logically invulnerable
from outside and perpetually self-csnfiinning from inside. Despite
these notorious traits, which have now become repellent to men of
liberal inclinations, the adherents of these faiths have, in practice,
known how to transcend their own much advertised blinkers. They
are and were conceptually bilingual, and knew how to switch from
commensurate to incommensurate idioms with ease and alacrity.
Functionaries of nominally exclusive, truth-monopolizing faiths
nonetheless participateamicably in discussionsat the World Council
of Churches. The question concerning just how we manage to transcend
relativismis interestingand difficult, and certainly will not be
solved here. What is relevant, however, is that we somehow or other
do manage to overcome it, that we are not helplessly imprisoned
i within a set of cultural cocoons and their norms, and that for some
very obvious reasons (shared cognitive and productive bases and
greatly increased inter-social communication) we may expect fully
industrial man to be even less enslaved to his local culure than was
his agrarian predecessor.
On this issue the truth seems to me to lie somewhere in the
middle. The shared economic infrastructure of advanced industrial
society and its inescapable implications will continue to ensure that
men are dependent on culture, and that culture requires standardization
over quite wide areas, and needs to be maintained and serviced
by centralized agencies. In other words, men will continue to
owe their employability and social acceptability to sustained and
complex training, which cannot be supplied by kin or local group.
This being so, the definition of political units and boundaries will
THE FUTURE OF NATIONALISM 121
not be able to ignore with impunity the distribution of cultures. By
and large, ignoring minor and innocuousexceptions, the nationalist
imperativeof the congruenceof politicalunit and of culture will continue
to apply. In that sense, one need not expect the age of nationalism
to come to an end.
But the sharpness of nationalist conflict may be expected to diminish.
It was the social chasms created by early industrialism, and by
the unevenness of its diffusion, which made it acute. Those social
chasms were probably no worse than those which agrarian society
tolerates without batting an eyelid, but they were no longer softened
or legitimated by longevity and custom, and they occurred in a context
which in other ways encouraged hope and the expectation of
equality, and which required mobility. Whenever cultural Mferences
served to mark off these chasms, then there was trouble
indeed. When they did not, nothing much happened. 'Nations',
ethnicgroups, were not nationalist when states were formed in fairly
stable agrarian systems. Classes, however oppressed and exploited,
did not overturn the political system when they could not define
themselves'ethnically'. Only when a nation became a class, a visible
and unequally distributed category in an otherwise mobile system,
did it become politically conscious and activist. Only when a class
happened to be (more or less) a 'nation' did it turn from being a
class-in-itself into a class-for-itself, or a nation-for-itself. Neither
nations nor classes seem to be political catalysts: only nation-classes
or class-nations are such.
Aninterestingauthor whoattempts tosalvageMarxism, or unearth
or invent a new viable form of it, recognizes this fact.' Late industrial
society no longer engenders such deep social abysses, which
could then be activated by ethnicity. (It will continue to encounter
difficulties, sometimes tragic ones, from counter-entropictraits such
as 'race' which visibly contradict its overt egalitarianism.) It will
have to respect cultural differences where they survive, provided
that they are superficid and do not engender genuine barriers
between people, in which case the barriers, not their cultures, constitute
a grave problem. Though the old plethora of folk cultures is
unlikely to survive, exceptin a token and cellophane-packagedform,
an international plurality of sometimes fairly diverse high cultures
will no doubt (happily) remain with us. The infrastructural
'Nab, The Break-up of Britain.
investmentmadein them can be relied on to perpetuate them. Partly
because many boundaries have already adjusted themselves to the
boundaries of these cultures, and partly because the nationalist
imperative is now so widely respected that developed societies seldom
defy it brazenly, and try to avoid head-on confrontationswith
it: for these various reasons, late industrial society (if mankind is
spared long enough to enjoy it) can be expected to be one in which
nationalism persists, but in a muted, less virulent form.
Nationalism and Ideology
A conspicuous feature of our treatment of nationalism has been a
lack of interest in the history of nationalist ideas and the contributions
and nuances of individual nationalist thinkers. This is in
marked contrast to many other approaches to this subject. This
attitude does not spring from any generalized contempt for the role
of ideas in history. Some ideas and belief systems do make a very
great difference. (It is not necessarily the good ideas which make the
greatest impact. Some ideas are good and some bad, and some make
a great impact and some make none, and there is no systematic relationshipbe+meenthese
two oppositions.) For instance, the belief systems
known as Christianity and Marxism, are both of them contingent:
each of them consists of a complex of themes, which individually
may have been inherent in the situationin which it came into
being, but which, as a particular combination endowed with a name
and a historic existence and continuity, were only forged into some
kind of unity by a set of thinkers or preachers.
This unity in some measure survives the selective use made of
them subsequently. Moreover, once they emerged, rhey came on
occasion to dominate societies which happened to take their docnines
with great seriousness, and applied them (or some of them)
with great determination. This being so, if we are to understand the
fate of these societies, we are sometimes obliged to look carefully at
the words, doctrines and arguments of the thinkers who forged the
faiths that dominatethem. For instance, the particularethnographic
doctrines which happened to influence Marx and Engels in the
1870s, about the survival of the communalspirit in villages of backward
countries and the conditions of its perpetuation, are incorporated
in a crucial manner in Marxism, and probably hada decisive
and disastrous effect on Soviet agrarian policy.
But this does not seem to me to be the casewith nationalism. (This
incidentally may help to explain why nationalism, notwithstanding
its indisputable importance, has received relatively little attention
-luATlONAnSICTAND7DEOLOG
principle, accessible as such to all men, and violated only through
used to like, for them to get their teeth into.)' It is not so much that some perverse blindness, when in fact it owes its plausibility and
the prophets of nationalism were not anywhere near the First Divi- compelling nature only to a very special set of circumstances, which
sion, when it came to the business of thinking: that in itself would do indeed obtain now, but which were alien to most of humanity
not prevent a thinker from having an enormous, genuine and crucial and history. It preaches and defendscontinuity, but owes everything
influence on history. Numerous examples prove that. It is rather to a decisive and unutterably profound break in human history.
h a t these thinkers did not really make much difference. If one of It preaches and defends cultural diversity, when in fact it imposes
them had fallen, others would have stepped into his place. (They homogeneity both inside and, to a lesser degree, between political
liked saying something rather like this themselves, though not quite units. Its self-image and its true nature are inversely related, with
in the sense intended here.) No-one was indispensable. The quality an ironic neatness seldom equalled even by other successful ideoof
nationalistthought would hardly have been affected much by such logies. Hence it seems to me that, generally speaking, we shall not
substitutions. learn too much about nationalism from the study of its own
Their precisedoctrines are hardly worth analysing. We seem to be
in the presence of a phenomenon which springs directly and inevi- Shall we learn more from studying its enemies? A little more, but
tably from basic changes in our shared social condition, from we need to be cautious. Their main merit seems to me that they
changes in the overall relation between society, culture and polity. teach us not to take nationalism at its own valuation, on its own
The preciseappearanceand local form of this phenomenonno doubt terms, and as something self-evident. The temptation to do so is so
depends a very great deal on local circumstances which deserve deeply built into the modern condition, where men simply assume
study; but I doubt whether the nuancesof nationalistdoctrineplayed that culturally homogeneous units, with culturallysimilar rulers and
much part in modifying those circumstances. ruled, are a norm whose violation is inherently scandalous. To be
Generally speaking, nationalist ideology suffers from pervasive shocked out of this pervasive assumption is indeed something for
false consciousness. Its myths invert reality: it claims to defend folk which one must be grateful. It is a genuine illu~nination.
culture while in fact it is forging a high culture; it claims to protect But it would be just as disastrous to follow a declared enemy of
an old folk society while in fact helping to build up an anony- nationalism such as Elie Kedourie all the way, and treat nationalism
mous ~ m s ssociety. (Pre-nationalist Germany was made up of a as a contingent, avoidable aberration, accidentally spawned by
multiplicity of genuine communities, many of them rural. Post- European thinkers. Nationalism - the principle of homogenous cdnationalistunited
Germanywas mainlyindustrial and a masssociety.) mal units as the foundations of political life, and of the obligatory
cultural unity of rules and ruled - is indeed inscribed neither in the
he disproportionbetween the importanceof nationalismand the mount nature of things, nor in the hearts of men, nor in the pre-condicons
of thought given to it is noted by Professor Eric Hobsbawm in his 'Some of social life in general, and the contention that it isso inscribed is a
Reflections on Nationalism', in Imaginatwn and P r e e in t h Social falsehood which nationalist doctrine has succeeded in presenting as
S&a, Essays in Memmy of Peter Nettl, T.J. Nossiter, A.H. Hanson self-evident. But nationalism as a phenomenon, not as a doctrine
and Stein Rokkan, et al. (eds.), Atlantic Heights, NJ, 1972. He quotes presented by nationalists, is inherent in a certain set of social confrom
D. Mack Smith's I1 Risorgimmto (1968), some truly bizarre views ditions; and thoseconditions, it so happens, are the conditionsof ourof M a z G on the proper nationalist organizationof Europe, which would
have included Slovenia in a kind of Greater Switzerland, and joined up
Magyars, lhmanians and Czechs with, for some reason, Herzegovina. To deny this is at least as great a mistake as to accept nationalism
All in all Mazzini, outside Italy, seemed to have more senseof the polirical on its own terms. There is somethingbizarrein the suggestion that a
economies of scale and of territorial compacmasthan of culturalsensibili- forcesowidespread and pervasive,a flamethat springsupso strongly
ties. and spontaneously in so many disbnnected places, and which needs
so very little fanning to become a devouring forest blaze, should
spring from nothing more than some extremely abstruse lucubrations
of philosophers. For better or for worse, our ideasseldom have
quite such power.
In an age of cheap paper, print, and widespread literacy and easy
communication, any number of ideologies arespawnedand compete
for our favour; and they are often formulated and propagated by
men with greater literary and propagandist gifts than those which
nature chose to bestow on the prophets of nationalism. Yet these
other forms of nonsense have never had a remotely comparable
impacton mankind. This was not due to lesserliterarymerit on their
part. Nor can it be a matter of luck; the experiment has been repeated
in so many parts of the globe that, if chance were the king
here, one might com5dently expect a far more motley overall pattern,
with one kind of doctrine prevailing in one place and quite another
kind somewhere else. But it is not so: the trend of events points
much the same way in most places. And as we can trace a clear and
manifest connection between the general social conditions of our age
and this overwhelmingly predominant trend, then surely we are
justifiedin invokingthat link, rather than the accidentalappealof an
arbitrary idea, thrown up by the play of Europeanintellectual fancy
at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries!
In the case of nationalism (though the same is not always true of
other movements), the actual formulation of the idea or ideas, the
question concerning who said or wrote precisely what, doesn't
matter much. The keyidea is in any case so very simpleand easy that
anyonecan makeit up almost at any time, which is partly why nationalism
can claim that nationalism is always natural. What matters is
whether the conditions of life are such as to make the idea seem
compelling, rather than, as it is in most other situations, absurd.
In this connection it is worth saying something about the role of
communication in the dissemination of the nationalist idea. This
term plays a crucial part in the analysisof nationalismof at least one
noted author.' But the usual formulationof the connection between
nationalismand the facility of modern communicationsis somewhat
misleading. It gives the impression that a given idea (nationalism)
happens to be there, and then the printed word and the transistor
and other media help this notion to reach audiencesin distant valleys
'K.w. Deutsch, Nationalismand Social Communication, New York, 1966.
NATIONALISM AND IDEOLOGY 127
and self-containedvillages and encampments,audienceswhich in an
age not blessed with mass media would have remained untouched by
it.
That is altogether the wrong way to see it. The media do not
transmit an idea which happens to have been fed into them. It
matters precious little what has been fed into them: it is the media
themselves, the pervasiveness and importance of abstract, centralized,
standardized, one to many communication, which itself automaticallyengendersthe
coreidea of nationalism, quite irrespective of
what in particular is being put into the specific messages transmitted.
The most important and persistent message is generated by
the medium itself, by the role which such media have acquired in
modern life. That core message is that the language and style of the
transmissions is important, that only he who can understand them,
or can acquire such comprehension, is included in a moral and economic
community, and that he who does not and cannot, is excluded.
All this is crystal clear, and follows from the pervasiveness
and crucial role of mass communicationin this kind of society. What
is actually said matters little.
The manner in which conditions have changed, turning an idea
which was once bizarre into one which is compellingand seemingly
self-evident, can perhaps best be conveyed by invoking Kedourie's
own concluding and crucial words:
The only criterioncapableof publicdefenceis whether the new rulers
are less corrupt and grasping, or more just and merciful,or whether
there is no change at d,but the corruption, the greed, and the
tyranny merely find victims other than those of the departed rulers.
(E. Kedourie, Nationalism, p. 140)
The question which Professor Kedourie asks with such eloquence
is indeed one which a typical burgher in an agrarian society would
ask himself, if one morning he just heard that the local Pasha had
been overthrown and replaced by an altogether new one. If, at that
point, his wife dared ask the burgher what language the new Pasha
spoke in the intimacy of his home life - was it Arabic, Turkish,
Persian, French or English?- the hapless burgher.would give her a
sharp look, and wonder how he would cope will all the new dEculties
when, at the same time, his wife had gone quite mad. Probably
he would send her to a shrine that specialized in acute mental
aberration.
128 NATIONALISM AND IDEOLOGY
The question commended by Kedourie did indeed make sense in
societies in which government on the one hand, and economy and
society on the other, were distinct, where cultural continuity between
the two was an irrelevancy, and where, as the quotation
clearly implies, one may hope at best for merciful and just government,
but not for an accountable, participatory and representative
one. (Are these totally illusory aspirations among us, then?) But
something other than the dissemination of the words of obscure
European scribblers must have happened to make the wife's query,
once so manifestly mad, become the question which is now uppermost
in almost everyone's mind. And something has indeed happened.
The economy is now such as to require sustainedand precise
communication between all those who take part in it, and between
them and government, and the maintenance of the educational and
culturalinfrastructure has become one of the central tasksof government.
Hence the home idiom of the new Pasha, once so irrelevant, is
now the crucial sign as to whom the new power will favour and
whom it will exclude.
In a later book, Nationalism in Asia and Afn'ca (1970), Kedourie
does indeed ask questions about the European colonial domination
of the world which are, quite rightly, totally and ~ i ~ c a n t l ydifferent
from the question recommended at the end of Nationalism. He
comments at length on the failure of the European conquerors to
accept as equals those members of the conquered populations who
had acquired the necessaryqualifications and skills, and he evidently
considers this exclusiveness to be at least part of the explanation of
why European rule produced the nationalist reaction which in fact it
elicited. It is not entirely clear whether this is a criticism or merely a
neutral diagnosis, though it is difiicult not to feel that the former
element is present; and if so, it would seem that a question is now
being asked about rulers which is not only about their mercy and
rapacity!
The new question is whether the rulers are willing and able to run
a mobile society, one in which rulers and ruled can mergeand form a
cultural continuum. This, on my argument, is indeed the crucial
question which under modern conditionsis bound to be asked of all
rulers, and to complement and largely overshadow the older question.
But without these special modern conditions, why should their
exclusiveness have been a demerit or a weakness? Some past rulers
(Romans and Greeks) may at times have been open and receptive
NATIONALISM AND IDEOLOGY 129
(though the Romans did not exactly rush about offeringfree Roman
citizenship to any newly conqueredarea); but many others were not,
without necessarily suffering for it. On the contrary, under traditional
conditions, easy identifiability and seclusion of rulers must
often have been a great asset, conducive to stability. The Mamluks
did not benefit, as a class, when they intermarried with the market.
Why should exclusiveness suddenly have become so disastrous and
why should it have provoked such a virulent, widespreadand shared
reaction?
Kedourie himself provides the answer:
There is no gainsaying the fact that Europe has been the origin and
centre of a deep radical disturbance spreading over the world in everwidening
ripplesand bringing unsettlement and violence to the traditional
societies of Asia and Africa, whether these societies did or did
not experience direct European rule . .. This pulverization of traditional
societies, this bursting open of self-sufficient economies .. .
If one supplements this account, with which one could hardly
disagree, with the question of what kind of new re-organizaion is
feasible, given modem productive methods and the society which
they imply, then, I contend, one comes out with an answer which
makes modem nationalism more than either an ideological accident
or the fruit of mere resentment, and which shows it, in its general
forms if not in its details, to be a necessity.
It may be worth giving a short, no doubt incomplete, list of false
theories of nationalism:
1 It is natural and self-evidentand self generating. If absent, this
must be due to forceful repression.
2 It is an artificial consequence of ideas which did not need ever
to be formulated, and appeared by a regrettable accident. Political
life even in industrial societies could do without it.
3 The Wrong Address Theory favoured by Marxism: Just as
extreme Shi'ite Muslims hold that Archangel Gabriel made a mistake,
delivering the Message to Mohamed when it was intended for
Ali, so Marxists basically like to think that the spirit of history or
human consciousness madea terrible boob. The awakeningmessage
was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered
to nations. It is now necessary for revolutionary activists to
persuade the wrongful recipient to hand over the message, and the
zeal it engenders, to the rightful and intended recipient. The
unwillingnessof both the rightful and the usurping recipient to fall
in with this requirement causes the activist great irritation.
4 Dark Gods: Nationalism is the re-emergence of the atavistic
forces of blood or territory. This is the view shared often by both
lovers and haters of nationalism. The former think of these dark
forces as life-enhancing, the latter as barbarous. In fact, man of the
ageof nationalismis neither nicer nor nastier than men of other ages.
There is some slight evidence that he may be nicer. His crimes are
equalled by those of other ages. They are more conspicuous only
because, precisely, they have become more shocking, and because
they are executed with more powerful technologicalmeans.
Not one of these theories is remotely tenable.
I
I Who isfor Nurembng?
An author committed to the view that the ideological or doctrinal
history of nationalism is largely irrelevant to the understanding of it
should not perhapsindulgein debatesabout its intellectualancestry.
If it has no doctrinalancestryworth discussing, why should we argue
about who does and who does not figure in its genealogy?Nevertheless,
some remarksseem calledfor by Kedourie's influentialaccount
of its ideal origins.
Leaving aside the strange implicit exculpation of Hegel, what
seems both perplexing and unfair is the inculpation of Kant. Certainly
the notion of self-determinationis absolutely central to Kant's
, thought. Kant7
s main problem was the validation (and circumscription)
of both our scientific and our moral knowledge. The main
philosophic device he employs for the attainment of this end is the
contention that our guiding cognitive and moral principles are selfgenerated,
and inescapably so. As there is no final authority or validation
to be found outside, it must be inside.
That is the core of his thought. The authority of the principles we
live by resides in the fact that our minds necessarily have a certain
structure, which inescapably engenders them. This gives us, among
other things, an ethic of impartiality, and also the just ed hope of
finding exceptionlessregularitiesin nature. An orderly ethic and an
orderly science are thus, both of them, underwritten. The fact that
I the structure of our minds is given and rigid frees us from the fear
I that these bases of science and morality might be at the mercy of
I
caprice, that they might turn out to be quicksands. Though they are
based on us only, yet, on this view, we can be trusted, and provide a
reliable base. The fact that it is we, or rather, each single one of us
individually (though mutually respectful of each other) who assumes
responsibility for these principles, frees Kant from the fear of a regression
which was repellent both to the logician and to the protestant
within him: if the auaority and the justification were outside
us, (however elevated it might be), how could that authority in turn
be justified?
The authority of the self, unsusceptible to caprice, final and
absolute, terminatesthe regression. It avoids the scandal, intolerably
repugnant both to the logician and the moralistin Kant, of accepting
some outside authority, however elevated: the scandal of heteronomy,
as he himself called it, which is the antithesis of selfdetermination.
At the same time, the fortunate rigidity of the self
makes its authority reliable and usable.
Thatis the essenceof Kant7
s philosophy, the picture contained in
iris notion of 'self-determination'. What connection, other than a
purely verbalone, doesit havewith theself-determinationof nations,
which so concerns the nationalists? None. It is individual human
nature which is really sovereign for Kant - the transference of
sovereignty to it constituted his Copernican revolution - and it is
universaland identicalin all men. It is the universalin man which he
revered, not the specific, and certainly not the culturally specific.
In such a philosophy, there is no place for the mystique of the
idiosyncratic culture. There is in fact hardly any room for culture
in the anthropological sense at all. A person's identity and dignity
is for Kant rooted in his universal humanity, or, more broadly,
his rationality, and not in his cultural or ethnic specificity. It is
hard to think of a writer whose ideas provide less comfort for the
nationalist.
On the contrary: Kant7
s identification of man with that which is
rational and universal in him, his fastidious and persistent, highly
characteristic distaste for basing anything of importance on that
which is merely contingent, historical or specific, makes Kant a very
model for that allegedly bloodless, cosmopolitan, emaciatedethic of
the Enlightenment, which romantic nationalists spurned and detested
so much, and which they so joyously repudiated in favour of a
more earthy, shamelessly specific and partial commitment to kin or
territory or culture.
132 NATIONALISM AND IDEOLOGY
This point is of some generalinterest. Kant is the very last person
whose vision could be credited with having contributed to nationalism.
Nevertheless, this accusation is not simply an error, but
springsfrom somethingdeeper which deserves note. What is true is
that Kant felt an acute need to base our central values on ideas, on
ssmething less fragile, less contingent, less world-bound than the
mere tradition which happens to prevail in this land or that. His
whole philosophical strategy reflects this need and the acuteness
with which he felt it. He thought he could satisfy it by invoking the
universal structure of the human mind.
From the viewpoint of a crypto-romantic traditionalism which
spurns such pursuit of external, 'rational' bases for the practices of
life, which wishes to teach men to stay content within the limits of
concrete praxis, to accept the contingency of history, and to refrain
from seeking the illusory comfort and support of extraneous and
abstract ideas, Kant is certainly a deeply misguided figure. He was
most certainly a 'rationalist' in the sense in which Professor Michael
Oakeshott pejoratively uses the term, and Nationalism in Asia and
Africa seems to be argued within this general framework. In other
words, Kant most certainly does belong to the Prometheanstrand in
Europeanthought, whichperhapsreacheditsapogeein theeighteenth
century, which strives to steal the divine fire and will not be content
with the makeshift accidental compromises contained in specific
traditions. Kant makes his deep contempt for such attitudes, for
allowing oneself to be satisfied with merely contingent, historic
foundations, utterly plain.
Kant's insistence on individual self-determination as the only
genuinely valid morality was neither wilful nor romantic. It was, on
the contrary, a despairing attempt to preserve a genuine, objective,
binding, universal ethic (and knowledge). Kant accepted H u e ' s
argument that necessityand universalitysimply were not there to be
found in the empirical data; hence, he reasoned, they could only be
rooted in the ineluctablyimposed structure of the individual mind.
Admittedly, this faute de m k x solution also fitted in neatly with a
kindof protestant individualistpride, which scorns to find authority
outside. But the main reason why authority had to be inside the
individualwas because it simply could not be found anywhere else.
Nationalists, when they invoke the abstract principle of nationalism
against the traditional local institutions which had once
worked tolerably well, are indeed fellow-Prometheans. In fact,
NATIONALISM AND IDEOLOGY 133
nationalism has a Janus-like quality. It is Promethean in its contempt
for politicalcompromisewhichignores the nationalistimperative.
But it is also anti-Promethean, when it sees the nation and its
cultural development as something which, just because it is concrete
and historically specific, rightly overrides the abstract morality of
the internationalistsand humanists.
In this very, very generic, and above all negative sense, Kant and
the nationalistscan perhaps be classed together. Neither of them are,
in the required sense, respecters of tradition. (Or rather, nationalism
is opportunistically selective in the respect which it accords to tradition.)
Both are, in this wide sense, 'rationalists', seekingthe bases of
legitimacy in something beyond that which merely is.
Nationalists, in fact, might well acclaim conservative traditionalists
as brothers, as fellow-repudiators of the abstract rationalism of
the Enlightenment, and very often do so. Both of them wish to
respect or revere the concrete realities of history, and refuse to
subject them to the verdictof a bloodlessabstractpan-human reason.
Far from revelling in the defiant individualwill, nationalists delight
in feelings of submission or incorporation in a continuous entity
greater, more persistent and more legitimate than the isolated self.
In a curious way, Kedourie not only credits nationalism with a
theory of wilful self-determination, but also (erroneously in my
view) concedes the historical success of such a nationalism. A theory
sprang from the heads of certain philosophers, and those who
became converted to it succeeded, by sheer will, in imposing the
theory on hapless humanity! This stark version of his view, which
initially makes few concessions to the social circumstances which
favoured nationalism, would make its success seem a veritable triumph
of the wiU.
It just so happens, it seems to me, that nationalists or conservativesselect
different parts of the concretefor their reference: in the
one case, continuous institutions, and in the other, allegedly continuouscommunitiesor
speech, race, or other notion. But is that not
a disagreement on detail rather than principle? This affinty of
underlying attitude does not, of course, prove either of these positions
to be necessarily in error. I only invoke it to show that one
man's sense of concrete historical reality'is another man's trahison des
clercs. How are we to choose our realists?
So not all those who spurn a given position (traditionalism) thereforenecessarily
resembleeach other in any other way. This mistaken
- --
-NATIIONALISMAND~DEOLOGY
inference, reinforced by the homonym 'self-determination', seems to Zealand convenient and mandatory, and the separation does not
be at the base of the accusation of Kant. Kant did indeed speak of provoke resentment in anyone's breast, notwithstanding the techself-determination
(autonomy). But then, he also spoke a great deal nical violation of the national principle. Why not? There are Arabs
about the synthetic a p- status of our categories. It is well- who deplore the failure of the Arabs to unite, though Arabs of difestablished
history that no bombs have been ever thrown on behalf ferent countries differ culturallyfar more than Englishmen and New
of Kant's doctrine of the a pn'ori status of categories. But the Zealanders. The obvious answer seems to be that the international
same is just as true of his views on self-determination. If a connec- standingand general position of the English and of the New Zealantion
exists between Kant and nationalismat all, then nationalismis a ders does not s fer significantly from their failure to present themreaction
against him,and not his offspring. selves to the world as one unit. In fact, their standing does not suffer
from this fact at all, and the inconveniences of the alternative
arrangementwould be very considerable. By contrast, it is arguable
One nation, ow state that the political strength of Arabs, Latin AmericansY3and preunification
nineteenth-centuryItalians and Germans did suffer from
Nationalist sentiment is deeplyoffended by violations of the nationa- the fragmentation of their political roofs.
list principleof congruence of state and nation; but it is not equally Nevertheless, this particular violation of the national principle,
offended by all the various kinds of violation of it. It is most acutely the one nation-many states case, is clearly the least septic, the least
offended by ethnic divergence between d e r s and ruled. As Lord irritant of all the possible violations. The obstacles lying in the way
of its correction are obvious and powerful. If a given nation is
blessed with n states, it follows rigorously that the glorious dcaThen
began a time when the text simply was, that nationswould not
be governed by foreigners.Powerlegitimately attained,and exercised
tion of the nation will mean the diminutioh of the number of its
with moderation, was declared invalid.' prime e s t e r s , chiefsof staff, presidentsof theacademy, managers
and skippers of its football team, and so on, by a factor of n. For
Note that Acton shows that &is time began, whereas nationalists every person occupying a post of this kind after udication, there
pretend it was ever presentin a latent, suppressedform. But when it will be n-1 who will have lost it. In anticipation, all those n-1
comes to the arithmetical non-correspondence between nation and stand to lose by unification, even if the nation as a whole benefits.
state, it is more offended if, so to speak, thestateis toofew, than if it Admittedly the one fortunate enough to have retained or acquired
is too many. A culturally homogeneous population which has no the post in question is now laureate, director of the national theatre,
state at all to call its own is deeply aggrieved. (Its members are ob- and so on, of something bigger, more glorious, and associated with
liged to live in a state, or in states, run by other and alien cultural far greater resources than before. All the same, there can be little
groups.) A group which, on the other hand, has more than one state doubt that while it is better to be head of a big 'un than a little 'un,
associated with its culture, though it is also technicallyviolating the the difference is not so drastic as that between being a head, never
national principle, yet has less grievance, except perhaps in special mind of how much, and not beinga head at all. Even allowingfor the
circumstances. What are they? effect of the iunsionwhich may haveencouraged a lot more than one
Most New Zealanders and most citizens of the United Kingdom of the little 'uns EO expect that they will be the big 'un when the day
are so continuous culturally that without any shadow of doubt the comes, the fact remains that on balance, the rational opposition to
two units would never have separated, had they been contiguous must be considerable. Unification succeeds, neverthegeographically.
Distance made the effective sovereignty of New less, only in those cases where the external disadvantages of
'The continuedcomplaisanceof Latin Americansin thefaceof thissituation
'Quotec! in Nationalism, Its Meaning and History,by Hans Kohn, Princeton, is cogently invoked against our theory by Jos6 Merquior in 'Politics of
1955, pp. 122-3. Transition', Goventmt and Opposition, XVI (1981), No. 2, p. 230.
136 NATIONA~ISMAND ~ E O L O G Y
fragmentation are very great and visible, and those who suffer from
them can make their interests felt against those who will lose out in
the n-fold diminution of political jobs, and when the new leaders of
the larger unity somehow succeed in imposing themselves on the
others, by force or by political glamour. Conclusion
A book like this, which argues a simple and sharply defmed case,
nevertheless(or perhapsall the more) risks being misunderstood and
misrepresented. Attempts to present earlier and simpler versions of
this argument on previousoccasionshaveconvincedmeof the reality
of this danger. On the one hand, the very simplicity and starknessof
the position may lead readers to add to it their own associations,
which were not intended by the author. On the other hand, any new
position (which is what I fondly believe this one to be) can be articulated
only if the framefor assertingit is first set up, however quietly.
No originalassertion can be made, I think, by simply drawingon the
cards already available in the language pack that is in use. The pack
has been dealt too often, and all simple statements in it have been
made many times before. Hence a new contribution to a topic is
possible only by re-designing a pack so as to make a new statement
possible in it. To do this very visibly is intolerably pedantic and
tedious. The overt erection of a new scaffolding is tolerable in
mathematics, but not in ordinary prose. Good presentation consists
in fairly unobtrusively looseningthe habitualassociations, setting up
new ones on principles which becomeevident from the context, until
at last the context has been set up in which an assertion can be made
which is simple, and yet not a trite repetition of the old wisdom.
What is not being said
Only others can judge whether I have succeeded in this endeavour.
But experience has taught me that one is seldom if ever wholly
successful in this. Hence I wish to list a few assertions which have
neither been asserted nor are in any way required for the views which
have been propounded.
It is no part of my purpose to deny that mankind has at all times
lived in groups. On the contrary, men have always lived in groups.
138 CONCLUSION
Usually these groups persisted over time. One important factor in
their persistence was the loyalty men felt for these groups, and the
fact that they identified with them. This element in human life did
not need to wait for some dis~ctivekind of economy. This was, of
course, not the only factor helpingto perpetuate thesegroups, but it
was one among others. If one calls this factor, generically, 'patriotism',
then it is no part of my intention to deny that some measure
of such patriotism is indeed a perennial part of human life. (How
strong it was in relation to other forces is somethingwe need not try
to decide here.)
What is being claimed is that nationalism is a very distinctive
species of patriotism, and one which becomes pervasive and dominant
only under certain social conditions, whichin fact prevailin the
modem world, and nowhere else. Nationalism is a species of patriotism
distinguished by a few very important features: the units
which this kind of patriotism, namely nationalism, favours with its
loyalty, are culturallyhomogeneous, basedon a culture strivingto be
a high (literate)culture; they are largeenough to sustain the hope of
supporting the educationalsystem which can keep a literate culture
going; they are poorly endowed with rigid internal sub-groupings;
their populationsare anonymous, fluid and mobile, and they are unmediated;
the individual belongs to them directly, in virtue of his
cultural style, and not in virtue of membershipof nestedsub-groups.
Homogeneity, literacy, anonymity are the key traits.
It is not claimed that cultural chauvinism was generally absent
from the pre-industrial world, but only that it did not have its
modem political clout or aspirations. It is not denied that the
agrarian world occasionally threw up units which may have resembled
a modern national state; only that the agrarian world could
occasionallydo so, whilst the modem world is bound to do so in most
cases.
It is not claimed that, evenin the modem world, nationalismis the
onlyforceoperating, or an irresistibleone. It is not. It is occasiohally
defeated by some other force or interest, or by inertia.
It is not denied that one may on occasion have an overlay of preindustrial
structures and national sentiment. A tribal nation may
for a time be tribal internallyand nationalexternally. It is infact easy
to think of one or two marked cases of this kind (for example,
Somalis and Kurds). But a man may now claim to belong to one of
these national units simply in virtue of his culture, and he need not
disclose (and eventually, need not even have) a mediating sub-group
membership. It is not claimed that the present argument can explain
why some nationalisms, notably those of the Hitler and Mussolini
period, should have become so specially virulent. It only claims to
explain why nationalism has emerged and become pervasive.
All these disclaimers are not an insurance against counterexamples,
which would at the same time covertly reduce the content
of the centralthesis to something approachingnaught. They are only
the recognition that in a complex world, at the macro-level of institutions
and groupings, exceptionless generalizations are seldom if
ever available. This does not prevent overall trends, such as nationalism,
from being conspicuous - or being sociologically explicable.
Summary
In this matter as in some others, once we describe the phenomenon
we are ipterested in with precision, we come close to explaining it
correctly. (Perhaps we can only describe things well when we have
already understood them.) But consider the history of the national
principle; or consider two ethnographicmaps, one drawn up before
the age of nationalism, and the other after the principle of nationalism
had done much of its work.
The fist map resembles a painting by Kokoschka. The riot of
diversepointsof colour is such that no clear patterncan be discerned
in any detail, though the picture as a whole does have one. A great
diversity and pluralityand complexitycharacterizesall distinct parts
of the whole: the minute socialgroups, which are the atomsof which
the picture is composed, have complex and ambiguous and multiple
relations to many cultures; some through speech, others through
their dominant faith, another still through a variant faith or set of
practices, a fourth through administrative loyalty, and so forth.
When it comes to painting the politicalsystem, the complexity is not
less great than in the sphere of culture. Obedience for one purpose
and in one context is not necessarily the same as obediencefor some
other end or in some other season.
Look now insteadat the ethnographicand politicalmap of an area
of the modem world. It resembles not Kokoschka, but, say, Modigliani.
There is very little shading; neat flat surfaces are clearly
separatedfrom each other, it is generally plain where one beginsand
- ---
c O N C ~ S ~ N N p
another ends, and there is little if any ambiguity or overlap. Shifting to move from one occupational position to another, even within a
from the map to the reality mapped, we see that an overwhelming single life-span, and certainly between generations. They need a
part of political authority has been concentratedin the hands of one shared culture, and a literate sophisticated high culture at that. It
kind of institution, a reasonably large and well-centralizedstate. In obliges them to be able to communicate contextlesslyand with pregeneral,
each such state presides over, maintains, and is identified cision with all comers, in face-to-face ephemeral contacts, but also
with, one kind of culture, one style of communication, which pre- through abstract means of communication. All this - mobility,
vails within its borders and is dependent for its perpetuation on a communication, size due to refmement of specialization- imposed
centralized educational system supervised by and often actually run on the industrial order by its thirst for affluenceand growth, obliges
by the state in question, which monopolizes legitimate culture its social units to be large and yet culturally homogeneous. The
almost as much as it does legitimate violence, or perhaps more so. maintenance of this kind of inescapably high (because literate) culAnd
when we look at the society controlled by this kind of state, ture requires protection by a state, a centralized order-enforcing
we also see why all this must be so. Its economy depends on mobility agency or rather group of agencies, capable of garnering and deand
communication between individuals, at a level which can only ploying the resources which are needed both to sustain a high culbe
achieved if those individualshave been socialized into a high cul- ture, and to ensure its diffusion through an entire population, an
ture, and indeed into the same high culture, at a standard which achievement inconceivable and not attempted in the pre-industrial
cannot be ensured by the old waysof turning out human beings, as it
were on the job, as part of the ordinary business of living, by the The high cultures of the industrial age differ from those of the
local sub-communities. It canonly be achieved by a fairly monolithic agrarian order in a number of important and conspicuous ways.
educationalsystem. Also, the economic tasks set these individuals do Agrarian high cultures were a minority accomplishment carried by
not allow them to be both soldiers and citizens of local petty com- privileged specialists, and distinguished from the fragmented, uncodified
majority folk cultures over which they presided and which
they strdve to dominate. They defined a clerkly stratum seldom tied
So the economy needs both the new type of centralculture and the to a single political unit or linguistically delimited folk catchment
central state; the culture needs the state; and the state probably area. On the contrary, they tended and strove to be trans-ethnicand
needs the homogeneouscultural branding of its flock, in a situation trans-political. They frequently employed a dead or archaic idiom,
in which it cannot rely on largely eroded sub-groupseither to police and had no interest whatever in ensuring continuity between it and
its citizens, or to inspire them with thatminimum of moral zeal and the idiom of daily and economic life. Their numerical minority and
social identification without which social life becomes very difficult. their politicaldominance were of their essence; and it is probably of
Culture not community provides the inner sanctions, such as they the essence of agrarian society that its majority is constituted by
are. In brief, the mutual relationshipof a modem culture and state is food-producers excluded both from power and from the high culsomething
quite new, and springs, inevitably, from the require- ture. They were tied to a faith and church rather than to a state and
ments of a modem economy. pervasive culture. In China a high culture linked more to an ethic
What has been asserted is very simple. Food-producing society and a state bureaucracy than to a faith and church was perhaps
was above all a society which allowed some men not to be food- untypical, and in that way, but that way only, anticipated the
producers, but (excepting parasitic communities) nevertheless ob- modem linkage of state and culture. There the high literate culture
I
liged the majority of men to remain such. It is Industrial society has co-existed, and continues to co-exist, with a diversity of spoken
succeeded in dispensing with this need.1
It has pushed the division of labour to a new and unprecedented By contrast, an industrial high culture is no longer linked level,
but, more important still, it has engendered a new kind of whateverits history- to a faith and a church. Its maintenance seems
divisionof labour: one requiring the men taking part in it to be ready to require the resources of a state co-extensive with society, rather
- --- - --
C O N C L U S T O 7 ~
than merely those of a church superimposed on it. A growth-bound
economydependent on cognitive renovationcannot seriously link its and cannot normallysurvivewithout its own politicalshell, the state.
cultural machinery (which it needs unconditionally) to some doctrinal
faith which rapidly becomes obsolete, and often ridiculous.
So the culture needs to be sustained as a culture, and not as the
carrier or scarcely noticed accompaniment of a faith. Societycan and
does worship itself or its own culture directly and not, as Durkheim
taught, through the opaque medium of religion. The transitionfrom
one kind of high culture to the other is visible outwardly as the
coming of nationalism. But, whatever the truth about this complex
and crucial issue, the emergence of the industrial world was somehow
intimately linked to a Protestantism which happened to possess
some of the important traits that were to characterize the newly
emergingworld, and which also engendernationalism. The stress on
literacy and scripturalism, the priestless unitarianism which abolished
the monopoly of the sacred, and the individualism which
makes each man his own priest and conscienceand not dependent on
the ritual services of others: all foreshadowedan anonymous, iadividualistic,
fairly unstructured mass society, in which relativelyequal
access to a shared culture prevails, and the culture has its norms
publicly accessible in writing, rather than in the keeping of a privileged
specialist. Equal access to a scripturalist God paved the way to
equal accessto high culture. Literacyis no longer a specialism, but a
pre-condition of all the specialisms, in a society in which everyone is
a specialist. In such a society, one's prime loyalty is to the medium of
our literacy, and to its political protector. The equal access of
believers to God eventually becomes equal access of unbelievers to
education and culture.
Such is the world of modern state-sustained, pervasive and homogeneous
high cultures, within which there is relatively little ascription
of status and a good deal of mobility, presupposing a welldiffused
mastery of a shared sophisticated high culture. There is a
profound irony in Max Weber's celebrated account of the origins of
this world: it was engendered because certain men took their vocation
so very seriously, and it produced a world in which rigidly
ascribed vocations have gone, where specialisms abound but remain
temporary and optional, involving no final commitment, and where
the important, identity-conferring part of one's education or formation
is not the special skill, but the shared generic skills, dependent
on a shared high culture which defines a 'nation'. Such a
1
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