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EXCERPT FROM IMAGINED COMMUNITIES His 1983 Imagined Communities, from which the following essay is excerpted his aim was "to offer some tentative suggestions for a more satisfactory interpretation of the 'anomaly' of nationalism." In these paragraphs from his introduction, Anderson explains his definition of a nation as "an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign." Theorists of nationalism have often been perplexed, not to say irritated, by these three paradoxes: (1) The objective modernity of nations to the historian's eve vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists. (2) The formal universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concept—in the modern world everyone can, should, will "have" a nationality, as he or she "has" a gender—vs. the irremediable particularity of its concrete manifestations, such that, by definition, "(Greek" nationality is sui generis. (3) The "political" power of nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and even incoherence. In other words, unlike most other isms, nationalism has never produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbesses, Tocquevilles, Marrxes, or Webers. This "emptiness" easily gives rise, among cosmopolitan and polylingual intellectuals, to a certain condescension. Like Gertrude Stein in the face Oakland, one can rather quickly conclude that there is "no there there." It is characteristic that even so sympathetic a student of nationalism as Tom Nairn can nonetheless write that: "'Nationalism' is the pathology of modern developmental history is inescapable as 'neurosis' in the individual, with much the same essential ambiguity attaching to it, a similar built-in capacity for descent into dementia, rooted in the dilemmas of helplessness thrust upon most of the world (the equivalent of infantilism for societies) and largely incurable."' Part of the of the difficulty is that one lends unconsciously to hypostasize the existence of Nationalism-with-a-big-N (rather as one might Age-with-a-capital-A) and then classify "it" as an ideology. (Note that if everyone has an age, Age is merely an analytical expression.) it would, I think, make things easier if one treated it as if it belonged with "kinship" and "religion," rather than with "liberalism" or "fascism." In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.2 Renan referred to this imagining in his suavely back-handed way when he wrote that "Or ['essence d'uiie nation est que tous les .individuss aient beaucoup de choses en comminun, el aussi quo tous aient oubhe bien des choses."' With a certain ferocity Gellner makes a comparable point when he rules that "Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to sell-consciousness: It invents nations where they do not exist."' The drawback, however is that Gellner is so anxious to show that nationalism masquerades under false pretences that he assimilates "invention" to "fabrication" and "falsity,' rather than to "imagining" and "creation." In this way he implies that "true” communities which can be advantageously Juxtaposed to nations. In fact all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these). …. The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic , boundaries beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all members the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a whollly Christian planet. It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of divinely ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism between each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream,. of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state. Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism:: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices? I believe that the beginning of an answer lies in the cultural roots of nationalism.