1
Definitions
Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the
political and the national unit should be congruent.
Nationalism as a sentiment , or as a movement, can best be defined
in terms of this principle. Nationalist sentimentis the feeling of anger
aroused by the violation of the principle, or the feeling of satisfaction
aroused by its fulfilment. A nationalist movementis one actuated by a
sentiment of this kind.
There is a variety of ways in which the nationalist principle can be
violated. The political boundary of a given state can fail to include all
the members of the appropriate nation; or it can include them all but
also include some foreigners; or it can fail in both these ways at once,
not incorporating all the nationals and yet also including some nonnationals.
Or again, a nation may live, unmixed with foreigners, in a
multiplicity of states, so that no single state can claim to be the
national one.
But there is one particular form of the violation of the nationalist
principle to which nationalist sentiment is quite particularly sensitive:
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 particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state - a
contingency already formally excluded by the principle in its general
formulation - should not separate the power-holders from the rest.
The nationalist principle can be asserted in an ethical, 'universalistic'
spirit. There could be, and on occasion there have been,
nationalists-in-the-abstract, unbiassed in favour of any special nationality
of their own, and generously preaching the doctrine for all
nations alike: let all nations have their own political roofs, and let all
2 DEFINITIONS
f th al refrain from including non-nationals under it. There is
o em so .. . ali
no formal contradiction in asserting such non-egoistic nation Ism.
As a doctrine it can be supported by s~me ~ood argumen~s, .s~ch 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 sacroegoismoof 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 satisfaction of some spells
the frustration of others. Thi s argument is further and immeasurably
strengthened by the fact that very many of the potential nations of
this world live, or until recently have lived, not in compact territorial
units but intermixed with 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 unwillingness to suffer such fates may 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 number s of resident foreigners,
or ~ven bY,the presence of the occasional foreigner in, say, a national
ruling fanuly. Just how many resident foreigners or foreign members
of the ruling class there must be before the prin ciple is effectively
DEFINITIONS 3
violated cannot be stated with precision. There is no sacred percentage
figure, below which the foreigner can bebenignly tolerated,
and above which he becomes offensive and his safety and life are at
peril . No doubt the figure will vary with circumstances. The impossibility
of providing a generally applicable and precise figure, however,
does not undermine the usefulness of the definition.
State and nation
Our definition of nationalism was parasitic on two as yet undefmed
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-ordered 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 political authority, and those to whom it delegates this right.
Among the various sanctions of the maintenance of order, the ultimate
one - 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 definition corresponds fairly well with
the moral intuitions of many , probably most, members of modem
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 monopolize legitimate
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 fulfil their obligations to
their overlord; or again, a state counting tribal populations among its
subjects does not necessarily object to the institution of the feud, as
long as those who indulge in it refrain from 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 dutifully reported at the nearest police station before and
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
t enforce their monopoly of legitimate violence, and which
means 0 . bl' ,
nonetheless remain, in many respects, recogrnza estates '.
Weber's underlying principle does, however, seem valid ,n.ow,
however strangely ethnocentric it may be .as a general definition,
ith its tacit assumption of the well-centralIzed Western state , The
:te ~onstitutes one highly distinctive and important ~laboration of
the social division of labour. Where there 1S no dIVIsIOnof labour,
one cannot even begin to speak of the state. But not any or every
specialism makes a st~te: the state i~ the, ~peciali~ati?n ~d concentration
of order maintenance. The state ISthat mstitunon or set
of institutions specifically concerned with the enforcement of order
(whatever else they may also be concerned with). The state exists
where specialized order-enforcing agencies , such as police forces and
courts, have separated out from the rest of social life. They are the
state.
Not all societies are state-endowed. It immediately follows that 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. Nationali sts have generally fulminated against the
distribution of political power and the nature of political boundaries,
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 reality was in
any serious doubt. The state was only too conspicuously present. It
was its boundarie s and/or the distribution of power , and possibly of
other advantage s, within it which were resented.
Thi s in itself is highly significant. Not only is our definition of
nationalism parasitic on a prior and assumed definition of the state:
~t also,seems to be the case that nation alism emerges only in milieux
ill which the existence of the state is already very much taken for
granted . The existence of politically centralized units and of a
moral-political climate in which such centralized unit s are taken for
granted and a~e treated,~s normative, is a necessary though by no
means a sufficient conditi on of nationali sm .
By way of anticipation, some general historical observations
should be made about the state. Mankind has passed through three
fundamental stages 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 despotic and others law-abiding. They differ a very
great deal in their form. The agrarian phase of human history is the
period during which , so to speak, the very existence of the state is an
option. Moreover, the form of the state 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 absence of the state is
inescapable. Paraphrasing Hegel , 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 enormousl y large, and depend for the standard
of living to which they have become accustomed (or to which
they ardentl y wish to become accustomed) on an unbelievably intricate
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 credulit y.
So the problem of nationalism does not arise when there is no
state. It does not follow that the problem of nationalism arises for
each and every state. On the contrary , it arises only for somestates. It
remains to be seen which ones do face this problem.
DEFINITIONS 5
The nation
The definition of the nation presents difficulties graver than those
attendant on the definition of the state. Although modern man tends
6 D EFINITIONS
to take the centralized state (and, more specifically, the centralized
national state) for granted , nevertheless he is capable, with relat ively
little effort, of seeing its contingency, and of imagining a social situation
in which the state is absent. He is quite adept at visualizing the
'state of nature'. An anthropologi st can explain to him that the tribe is
not necessarily a state writ small, and that forms of tribal organization
exist which can be described as stateless. By contrast, the idea
of a man without a nation seems to impose a far great er strain on the
modern imagination. Chamisso, an emigre Fr enchm an in Germany
during the Napoleonic period, wrote a powerful proto-Kafkae sque
novel about a man who lost his shadow: though no doubt part of the
effectiveness of this novel hinges on the intended amb iguit y of the
parable, it is difficult not to suspect that, for the auth or , the Man
without a Shadow was the Man without a Na tion . Wh en his followers
and acquaintances detect his aberrant shadowlessness they
shun the otherwise well-endowed Peter Schlemihl. 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 hum an
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 iu any of these particulars is not inconceivable and
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 attrib ute
of humanity, but it has now come to appear as such.
In fact, nations, like states, are a contingency, and not a uni versal
necessity. Neither nations nor states exist at all times and in all
circumstances. Moreover, nations and states are not the same conti ngency.
Nationalism holds that they were destined for each other'
that either without the other is incomplete, and constitutes a
tragedy. Bur before they could become intend ed for each other each
of them had to emerge, and their emergence was indep ende nt and
conungenr. The state has certainly emerged without the help of the
nauon. Some nations have certainly emerged without the blessings
of theiro wn state. It is more debatab le whether the norm ative idea of
the nation in its mod did . ., ern sense, I not presuppo se the pno r eXIStence
of the state.
What then is this contingent, but in our age seemingly universal
and normative , idea of the nation? Discussion of two very makeshift,
temporary definitions will help to pinpoint this elusive concept.
I 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
signs and associations 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 artefacts of men's convictions and loyalties
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 firmly
recognize certain mutual rights and duties to each other in virtue of
their shared membership of it. It is their recognition of 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 voluntaristic,
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
definition , 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.
DEFINITIONS 7
•
2
Culturein AgrarianSociety
One development which takes place during the agrarian epoch of
human history is comparable in importance with the emergence of
the state itself: the emergence of literacy and of a specialized clerical
class or estate, a clerisy. Not all agrarian societies attain literacy:
paraphrasing Hegel once again, we may say that at first none could
read; then some could read; and eventually all can read. That, at any
rate, seemsto 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
occasionedby the keeping of records. Once developed, however, the
written word acquires other uses, legal, contractual, administrative.
Godhimselfeventually puts his covenant with humanity and his rules
for the comportment of his creation in 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 c1erisy to the state, and its own internal
organization: it may be centralized or it may be loose, it may be
hereditary or on the contrary constitute an open guild, and so forth.
Literacy, the establishment of a reasonably permanent and stan~ardized
script, means in effect the possibility of cultural and cogniuve
storage and centralization. The cognitive centralization and
codification effected by a c1erisy, 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
9
I+- -+ - Iaterally insulated
communities of
agricultural producers
CULTURE IN AGRARIAN SOCIETY
R'0~'0~",~",~0::"'0::~~'f-stratified, horizontally
segregated layers of
military , administrat ive,
clerical and sometimes
commerc ial ruling class
Figure 1 General form of the social structure of agrarian societies.
These two crucial and idiosyncratic forms of the division of labour the
centralizations of power and of culture/cognition - have profound
and special implications for the typical social structure of the
agro-literate polity. Their implications are best considered jointly,
and they can be schematized as shown in figure 1.
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
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
10 CULTURE IN AGRARIAN SOCIETY
peaking its ideology exaggerates rather than underplays the in~uality
~fclasses and the degree of separation of the ruling st~at~m.
This can in turn be sub-divided into a number of more specialized
layers: warriors, priests , clerics, administrators , burghers. So~e of
these layers (for example, Christian clergy) may be ?on-heredltar y
and be re-selected in each generation , though recruitment may be
closely predetermined by the other hereditary st.rata. The most
important point , however, is this: both .fo: ~e ruhng . 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
authority and 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 inixed
ancestry and reinforced by recruits from below.
Below the horizontall y stratified minorit y at the top , there is
another world, that of the laterally separated petty communities of
the lay member s of the society. Here , once again , cultural differentiation
is very marked , though the reasons are quite different. Small
peasant communitie s generally live inward-turned lives, tied to the
locality by economic need if not by political prescription. Even if the
population of a given area starts from the same linguistic base-line which
very often is not the case - a kind of culture drift soon engenders
dialectal and other differences. No-one , or almost no-one ,
has an interest in promoting cultur al homogeneit y at thi s social level.
The state is interested in extracting taxes, maintaining the peace,
and ?ot .much else, and has no interest in promoting lateral commurucauon
between its subject commu nities.
The c1erisy may, it is true , have a measure of int erest in impo sing
certain .shared cultura l norm s. Some clerisies are contemptuous of
and mdiffe.rent towards folk practices, while others, in the interest of
monopolizing access to the sacred, to salvation, therapy and so forth ,
combat and actively denigrat e folk culture and the freelance folk
sham~s wh? prolIfer~te within it. But , within the general condition s
prevailing m agro-literare polities, they can never really be
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
the clerisy. The most the clerisy can achieve is to ensure that 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 everything in it militates against the definition
of political units in terms of cultural boundaries.
In other words, had nationalism been 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, culture and
power, destined for each other according to nationalist theory,
neitherhas much inclination for the other in the conditions prevailing
in the agrarian age. Let us take each of them in turn.
CULTURE IN AGRARIAN SOCIETY 11
Culture
Among the higher strata of agro-literate society it is clearly advantageous
to stress, sharpen and 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 agro-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 underwriting inequalities, it
fortifies them and makes them palatable , by endowing them with the
aura of inevitability , permanen ce and naturalne ss. That which is
inscribed into the nature of things and is perennial , is consequentl y
not personally, individually offensive, nor psychically intolerable .
12 CULTURE IN AGRARIAN SOCIETY
By contrast, in an inherently mobile an~ unstable society ~e
maintenance 'of these social dams, separaung uneq~~l levels, 1S
intolerably difficult. The powerful currents of mobility are ever
undermining them. Contrary to what. M~rxism. has led pe~ple to
expect, it is pre-industrial society which .1S add1~ted t~ horizontal
differentiation within societies, whereas mdustnal 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, preoccupation with horizontal , often subtle
but locallyimportant differentiations can 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 think in terms of a political legitimacy defmed 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. Local culture is almost invisible. The self-enclosed community
tends to communicate in 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 pretension s; quit e 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 might be called cultural imperialisms,
the efforts of one culture or another to dominate and expand to fill
out a ~litical unit. Culture tends to be branded either horizontally
(by ~~1al caste), or vertically, to defme very small local com~~ues.
The factors determining political boundaries are totally
disunct from those determining cultural limits. Clerisies sometimes
end~avour to ~xtend the zone of a culture, or rather, of the faith they
codified for It; and states sometimes indulge in crusades faithe~~orsed
aggression. But these are not the normal , pervasi~e condiuons
of agrarian society.
It is important to ~dd that cultures in such a world proliferate in a
~e~ ~ompl.ex way: m .many cases, it is far from clear how a given
:div1dUal 1S to be. assigned to his 'cultural background'. A Himay;o
:a sant, for instance, may be involved with priests and monks
an s amans 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 economic and political
survival may hinge, precisely, on the adroit manipulation and maintenance
of these ambiguities, on keeping options and connections
open. Its members may not have the slightest interest in, or taste for,
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 homogeneity is preached
or not . It can find little resonance.
The state in agrariansociety
In these circumstances there is little incentive or opportunity for
cultures to aspire to the kind of monochrome homogeneity and political
pervasiveness and domination for 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, tribal segments,
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 moderate inequality ; and on the other ,
large territories controlled by a concentration of force at one point. A
very characteristic political form is, of course, one which fuses these
two principles: a central dominant authority co-exists with semiautonomous
local units.
The question which concerns us is whether, in our world, containing
these types of unit, there are forces making for that fusion of
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 functioning on
a good measure of face-to-face contact, and they cannot expa~~ in
sizeradicallywithout transforming themselves out of all recognition.
Hence these participatory communities seldom exhaust the culture
of which they are part; they may have their local accent 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 language of 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 horizontal cultural differentiation between Hellenes ), this
sense of unity had little politicalexpression, 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 Yolk,
Ein Fuehrer.
Thevarietiesof agrarianrulers
The agro-literate polity is a kind of society which has been in existence
some five millennia or so and which, despite the variety of its
forms, ~hares certain basic features. The great majority of its citizens
are agncultural producers, living in inward-turned communities
and they are dominated by a minority whose chief distinguishing
attribut es are the management of violence, the maintenance of order
and the con~rol o~ the official wisdom of the society, which is even~
tually enshrmed m script. This warrior-and-scribe ruling class can
be fit~e~ in to a rough typology, in terms of the following set of
opposiuons:
I Centralized Uncentralized
2 Gelded Stallions
3 Closed Open
4 Fused Specialized
I Both a clerisy and a rnilit I
decentralized Th di I ary ~ ass can be either centraliz ed or
of an effectiv~ly e me ~evadl CatholIc Church is a splendid example
centra ze clensy which can dominat e the moral
climate of a civilization. The ulama 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
military or clerical office-holders of links with particular kin groups,
whose interests are then liable to sway the officers from the stem
path of duty , and whose support 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 warriorlbureaucratl
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, thereb y 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 property and
position could revert to the state at any time, without even the fiction
of a right to due process , and thu s without creating any rights on the
parts of some local or kin group of the destituted official.
Literal eunuchs were frequently employed;' Celibate priests were,
of course, prominent in Christendom . Slave military bureaucracies
were conspicuous in Islamic polities after the decline of the Kaliphate.
Foreigners were often prominent in palace elite guards and in
the financial secretariats of the empires.
However, gelding was not universal. The Chinese bureaucracy
was recruited from the 'gentry'; 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
·CULTURE IN AGRARIAN SOCIETY 15
'Keirh Hopkins , Conquerorsand S laves, Cambridge, 1978, ch. 4.
CULTUREIN AGRARIANSOCIETY
16
. d retai their positions for their offspring, may be called
SOCIally, an retain
stallions. , , . d mili
3 There are advantages in clerisies, bureaucracIes an tary
I be
, open and in their being closed.European clergy and
c asses ing , . I )
Chinese bureaucrats were technically open (as were M~shm u ama ,
th h th ere recruited predominantly from a restricted stratum.
oug eyw d di ,
In Hinduism, priests and warrior-rulers ~~ both closed an , istmct,
d their mutual (theoretical) impenetrability may be essential to the
:rking of the system. They are both closed and non-fus~d, distin~t.
In Islam (excluding Mamluk and Janissary periods) neither clensy
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 specializedgroups. 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-holders are caught in a kind of field of tension between local
communities which are sub-national in scale, and a horizontal estate
or caste which is more than national. The y are loyal to a stratum
which is much more interested in differentiating itself from those
below than in diffusing its own culture to them, and which quite
often extends its own limits beyond the bound s 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-extensi ve with a
state (and in that case, it did display a certain kind of nationalism ).
The only stratum which can in any sense be said to have a cultural
policy is the clerisy. Sometimes, as in the case of the Brahmins , its
policy is in effect to create a cornplementarity and mutual interdependence
between itself and the other orders. It seeks to strengthen
ItS own position by making itself indispensable, and the comple~entary
roles it ascribes to itself and to the laity, far from reqU1fl~g
ItS own universalization, formally preclude it. Notwithstandmg
th £ h . I ' . , .. ,e act t at It c aims monopolisric authority over ritual
propriety, It does not wish to see itself emulated. It has little wish for
the smcerest form of flattery, imitation, though it does provoke it.
,EI~ewhere, as m Islam, the clerisy from time to time takes its own
missionary duties, to be practised among the habituall y relapsing
weakerbrethren within the faith, with becoming seriousness.There is
here no rule enjoining that some must pray, some fight, and some
work, and that these estates should not presume to meddle with each
other's realm. As far as the actual prescriptions of the faith go, everyone
is allowed to do all three of these things, if his aptitudes and energy
allow. (This latent egalitarianism is very important for the successful
adaptation of Islam to the modern world.) Thus there is no
formal or theological obstacle to a clerical missionary cultural policy
aoutrance.In practice there is still a problem : if everyone really systematically
indulged in legal-theological studies, who would look
after the sheep, goats and camels? In certain parts of the Sahara there
are entire tribes designated, by inter-tribal compact, as People of the
Book. In practice , however, this only means that religious personnel
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 communities in which a really
very significant proportion of adult males indulged in the study 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. Sometimes their own rules prohibit it, and sometimes
external obstacles make it impossible; but the latter would in any
case constitute a sufficient and 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 , fortified 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-rooted social force, 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, will turn out to be crucial for
the understanding of nationalism .
CULTURE IN AGRARIAN SOCIETY 17
18 CULTUREIN AGRARIANSOCIETY
Note also that in the agrarian order only some elite strata in some
societiesweresystematically gelded, by one or another of the specific
techniques described above. Even when it is done , it is difficult , as
Plato foresaw, to enforce the gelding indefinitel y. 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.
Agrarianman seems to be made of a corruptiblemetal.
His successor, industrial man, seems to be made of 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 universalized derisy
and, Mamluk~dom, the relationship of culture and polity changes
radically. Ahigh culture pervades the whole of society, defines it, and
needs to be sustained by the polity, That is the secret of nationalism.
3
IndustrialSociety
The origins of industrial society continue to be an object of scholarly
dispute . It seems to me very probable that this will continue to be so
for ever. An enormously complex transformation occurred in a very
large, diversified and intricate society, and the event was unique:no
imitative industrialization can be treated as an event of the same 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
circumstances of early modern Western Europe ; and experiments on
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 really establish the aetiology of industrialism,
we can hope to make some progress in putting forward models of the
generic working of industrial society. In fact, the real merit and
importance of Max Weber's celebrated essay (The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism) seems to me to lie far less in his fascinating
but speculative and 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 (entirely salutary ) shift of concern from the origins of
capitalism to that of the origins of industrialism only occurred after
Weber, and as a consequence of the emergence of non-capitalist
industrial societies, nevertheless this reformulation of the crucial
20 INDusTRIALSOCIETY
. . alr d implicit in Weber's preoccupation with bureau-quesnon 1S ea y, . . .
al id his concern with the entrepreneunal SPUlt. If a cen-cracy, ongsl e , .
tralized bureaucracy exemplifies the new GeistJust as mU~h ~s 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 a~count of the new
spirit , the notion of rationalitymust.be ~e~tral and important. Weber
himself was not particularly deft ill giving coherent and adequate
definitions , particularly so in this case, though it is perfectly possible
to distil from the contexts of his use of this notion of rationality what
he meant by it, and that this underlying notion 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 Imrnanuel Kant, both of whom,
under the fond delusion that they were analysing the human mind as
such, an sick, anywhere , any time, were in 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
like cases, regularity, what might be called the very soul or honour of
a good bureau crat. The other is efficiency, the cool rational selection
of the best available means to given, clearly formulated and isolated
ends; in other words, the spirit of the ideal entrepreneur. Orderliness
and efficiency may indeed by seen as the bureaucratic and the
entrepreneurial elements in an overall spirit of rationality.
I do not myself believe that these two elements are really independent
of each other . The notion of means-ends efficiency implies that
the agent will always choose the self-same solution to a given
problem, irrespective of 'irrelevant' considerations; and consequently
it c~rries ~e bureaucratic requirement of symmetry of treatment as
an ~e~ate corollary. Th e imperative of symmetry does not quite
so ~ediately imply the corollary of efficiency (and indeed, as an
empirical fact, bureaucrat s, even or especially perfectly honest and
c~nSC1entlOUS ones, are not always particularly efficient, as Weber
~self noted); nevertheless , any sustained and non-superficial
lIDplementatlon 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 envi in whi h' ronment ill w IC the ends are to be pursued.
Such a language, by its clear specification of ends and means,
will in the end only permit the characterization of actions in a
way which ensures that clearly identified ends are attained by
means selected for their optimal effectiveness, and for nothing
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 measure of fact, a universal conceptual currency,
so to speak, for the general characterization of things; and the esprit
d'analyse, forcefully 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 modern spirit. By
the common or single conceptual currency I mean that all facts are
located within a single continuous logical space, that statements
reporting them can be conjoined and generally related to each other,
and so that in principle one single language describes the world and
is internally unitary ; or on the negative side, that there are no special,
privileged, insulated facts or realms, protected from contamination
or contradiction by others , and living in insulated independent logical
spaces of their own. Just this was, of course, the most striking trait
of pre-modern, pre-rational visions: the co-existence within them of
multiple, not properly united, but hierarchically related 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
from these various disparate fields, to probe for inconsistencies
between them , to try to unify them all, this would be a social
solecism or worse, probably blasphemy or impiety , and the very
endeavour would be unintelligible. By contrast , in our society it is
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 expression and codification of this idea and aspiration,
which in turn is not a philosophical whim, but has profound
social roots.
INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY 21
22 INDUSTRIALSOCIETY
Equalization and homogenization of facts i~ incomplete unless
. d by what may be called the separation of all separables,
accoOlparue . .
the espritd'analyse,the breaking up of al~ complexes into their constituent
parts (even if it can only be done m thought) , and the ~ef~sal
to countenance conceptual package deals. It ISprecisely by binding
things together that traditional visions perpetu~t~ the~se~v~s and
the prejudgeOlents contained within them ; and It IS by insistmg on
prising things apart that we have liberated ourselves from them.
These package-deals, and the discontinuous conceptu~ spaces, . are
the equivalents, in the sphere of ideas, of the stable SOCIalgroupmgs
and smrctures at the level of men. Likewise, the unified and standardized,
as it were metric world of facts, as conceived in the philosophies
of HUDleor 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 unification of their ideas in continuous and unitary
systems is connected with their re-grouping in internally 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 first society to invent the
concept and ideal of progress , of continuous improvement . Its
favoured mode of social control is universal Danegeld, buyihg off
socialaggression with material enhancement; its greatest weakness is
its inability to survive any temporary reduction of the social bribery
fund, and to weather the loss of legitimacy which befalls it if the
cornucopia becomes temporarily jammed and the flow falters. Many
societies in the past have on occasion discovered innovations and
~proved their lot, and sometimes it may even have been true that
~proveOlents came not as single spies but in battalions. But the
improvement was never perpetual, nor expected to be so. Something
special OlUSthave happened to have engendered so unusual and
remarkable an expectation.
And indeed, something unusual, something unique, had happened.
~he ~o~ception of the world as homogeneous, subject to
systeOla~c, indiscriminate laws, and as open to interminable
exploratI~n, offered endless possibilities of new combinations of
means WIth no firm ~rior expectations and limits: no possibilities
would ?ebarred, and m ,the end nothing but evidence would decide
how things were, and how they could be combined to secure desired
effects. This was a totally new vision. The old worlds were, on the :r
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 on the 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
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 we can isolate the
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? Oursis. This is the pre-condition, the price
of a world of endless discovery. Inquiry must not be bound by the
natural affmities and liaisons of things, built into this or that vision
and style of life. And, of course, Hume's account of causation is not
merely an admirable summary of the background picture facing the
untrammelled , eternal inquirer; it is also an account of the comportment
of his economic counterpart, the modern entrepreneur.
Not for the merchant or manufacturer of the age of reason the fusion
of labour, technique, material and mould, prescribed by custom,
tied to a social order and rhythm; his progress arid the advancement
of the economy of which he is a part hinges, once again, on his untrammelled
selection of whatever means, in the light of the evidence
and of nothing else, serves some clear aim such as the maximization
of profit. (His predecessor or indeed his surviving feudal contemporary
would have been hard put to it to single out a solitary,
. isolable criterion of success. Profit for them would have been merged
in a number of inseparable other considerations, such as the maintenance
of their positions in the community. Adam Smith saw only
too clearly the difference between a Glasgow burgher and, say,
Cameron of Lochiel. Hume's theory of causation ratifies the perceptions
of the 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) concerns us here, because we are primarily interested in
the consequences of an ever-growing, ever-progressing society. But
INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY 23
24 INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
the consequences of such ~rpetu~.growth have striking parallels
with the vision which was Its condinon.
Thesocietyof perpetualgrowth
If cognitive growth presupposes that no elem~nt ~s indissolubly
linked a priori to any other, and that everything IS open to rethinking,
then economicand productive growth requires exactly the
same of human activities and hence of human roles. Roles become
optional and instrumental. The old stability ?f the s?cial role st~cture
is simply incompatible with growth and innovauon . Innovation
means doing new things, the boundaries of which cannot be the
same as those of the activities they replace. No doubt most societies
can cope with an occasional re-drawing of job-specifications and
guild boundaries, just as a football team can experimentally switch
from one formation to another, and yet maintain continuity. One
change does not make progress. But what happens when such
changes themselves are constant and continuous, when the persistence
of occupational change itself becomes the one permanent
feature of a social order?
When this question is answered, the main part of the problem of
nationalismis thereby solved. Nationalism is rooted in a certainkind
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 placeswithin it, has certain immediate and profoundly important
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
precarious~e~s of bourgeois fortunes, though he erroneously attributed
st~bility of social station to pastoralists, mistaking their
genealogicalmyths for reality.
T~e ~ediate consequence of this new kind of mobility is a
certain kind f ali . . . .
o eg tananism . Modem SOCIetyISnot mobile because
it is egalitarian; it is egalitarian because it 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 permanent game of musical chairs
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 terrible inequalities, 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 stratification.
Stratification and inequality do exist, and sometimes in
extreme form; nevertheless they have a muted and discreet quality,
attenuated by a kind of gradualness of the distinctions of wealth and
standing, a lack of social distance and a convergence of 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 mobility.
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 be 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 stratificational 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 the distinctively industrial, growth-oriented economy.
There are some additional .subtler traits of the new division of
labour, which can perhaps best be approached by considering the
difference between the division of labour in an industrial society and
that of a particularly complex, well-developed agrarian one. The
obviousdifference between the two is that one is more stable and the
other is more mobile. In fact, one of them generally wills itself to be
stable, and the other wills itself to be mobile; and one of them pretends
to be more stable than social reality permits, while the other
often claims more mobility, in the interest of pretending to satisfy its
egalitarian ideal, than its real constraints actually permit. Nevertheless,
though both systems tend to exaggerate their own central
INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY 25
26 INDUSTRIALSOCIETY
features, they do indeed markedly possess the t~ait. ~ey 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 l~bour ~ a highly adv~ced
agrarian societywith that of an averagemd~stnal one:~very kiI.td of
function, for instancenowhas at least one kind of specialist associated
with it. Carmechanicsare becoming specializedin terms of 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 wellbe that a fully developed agrarian
society actually has the more complex division of labour . The
specialismswithin it are more distant from each other than are the
possiblymore numerous specialisms of an industrial society, which
tend to have what can only be described as a mutual affinity of style.
Someof the specialismsof a mature agrarian society will be extreme:
they will be the fruits of lifelong, very prolonged and totally dedicated
training, which may have commenced in early youth and required
an almost complete renunciation of other concerns. The
achievements of craft and art production in these societies are
extremely labour- and skill-intensive, and often reach levels of
intricacy and perfection never remotely equalled by anything later
attained by industrial societies, whose domestic arts and decorations ,
gastronomy, tools and adornments are notoriously shoddy.
Notwithstanding their aridity and sterility, the scholastic and
ritual complexitymastered by the schoolmen of a developed agrarian
societyis 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
co~es to the performance of the social tasks which are normally
assigned to them, the important minority of specialists within such
societiesare outstandingly complementary to each other ; each one of
them, or each group of them, is dependent on the others and when
stic~g to i.tslast, its specialism, quite incapable of self-suffI~iency.
It ~s c~nous that, by contrast, in industrial society, notwithstan~g
i~S larger number of specialisms, the distance between
~peCI~St~ .ISfar less great. Their mysteries are far closer to mutual
mtelliglbility, 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
stability in the other, there is a subtle but profound and important
qualitative difference in 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 generictraining, not
specifically connected with the highly specialized professional activity
of the person in question, and precedingit. Industrial society
may by most criteria be the most highly specialized society ever; but
its educational system is unquestionably the least specialized, the
most universally standardized, that has ever existed. The same kind
of training or education is given to all or most children and adolescents
up to an astonishingly late age. Specialized schools 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 'gentlemanly' or leisure-class
elements in higher education have sometimes supposed SQ. But,
although some of the frills and affectations attached to higher education
may indeed by irrelevancies and survivals, the central fact the
pervasiveness and importance of generic, unspecialized training
- is conjoined to highly specialized industrial society not as a paradox,
but as something altogether fitting and necessary. The kind of
specialization found in industrial society rests precisely on a common
foundation of unspecialized and staridardized training.
A modern 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 subsequently are the recruits given more specialized
training. It is assumed or hoped that every properly trained recruit
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
INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY 27
28 INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
modem army, only more so. It provides a very prolonged ~d fairly
thorough training for all its recruits, insisting .on cert~ sh~red
qualifications:literacy, numeracy, basic wo!k ha~1tS and socialskills,
familiarity with basic technical and SOCIals~s. For. the la~ge
majority of the population the distinctive skills mvolved m.working
life are superimposed on the basic training, either on the Job or as
part of a much less prolonged' supplementary training; an~ ~e
assumption is that anyone who has completed the genenc trainmg
common to the entire population can be re-trained for most other
jobs without too much difficulty. Generally 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
personnel and its manner of operation. This may take a little time to
acquire, and it sometimes reinforced by a little protective mystique ,
but seldomreally amounts to very much. There is also a minority of
genuine specialists, people whose effective occupancy of their posts
really depends on very prolonged additional training, and who are
not easilyor at all replaceable by anyone not sharing their own particular
educational background and talent.
The ideal of universal literacy and the right to education is 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 true of representative and accountable
government, free elections, an independent judiciary, 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 batting an eyelid. Very often, it is safe to consider
these phrases as simple verbiage. Most constitutions guaranteeing
free speech and elections are as informative about the societies
they allegedly defme as a man saying 'Good morning' is about the
~ea~er. All this is well known. What is so very curious, and highly
SIgnificant,about the principle of universal and centrally guaranteed
education, is that it is an ideal more honoured in the observance than
in.thebreach. In this it is virtually unique among modem ideals; and
~~ <:al1s fo~ an explana~on. ~rofessor Ronald Dore has powerfully
criticized this tendency, particularly among developing societies of
lRo~~ Do~e, !heDip~ Disease,London, 1976.For an approach to'the
~ial ~plicat1~~s of lite~cy at an earlier stage, see Jack Good (ed.)
LueracyIn TraduionalSocieties, Cambridge, 1968. y,
INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY 29
overrating formal '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 impartial
centres of learning, which issue certificates on the basis of
honest, impartially administered examinations. Hence we are
doomed to suffer the Diploma Disease.
All this 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 perhaps in the sense in which he used it), consider not merely the
mode of production of modem society, but above all its mode of
reproduction.
Social genetics
The reproduction of social individuals and groups can be carried out
either on the one-to-one or on-the-job principle, or by what may be
called the centralized method. There are, of course, many mixed and
intermediate ways of doing this job, but their consideration can best
be postponed until after the discussion of these two extreme, as it
were polar, possibilities.
The one-to-one, on-the-job method is practised when a family, kin
unit, village, tribal segment or similar fairly small unit takes the
individual infants born into it, and by allowing and obliging them to
share in the communal life, plus a few more specificmethods such as
training, exercises, precepts, ritesdepassageand so forth, eventually
turns these infants into adults reasonably similar to those of the
preceding generation; and in this manner the society and its culture
perpetuate themselves.
The centralized method of reproduction is one in which the local
method is significantly complemented (or in extreme cases, wholly
replaced) by an educational or training agency which is distinct from
30 INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
the local community, and which takes over the preparation of the
young human beings in questio~, and ev~nt~allY hands them back to
the wider society to fulfil their roles In It, when the process of
training is completed. An extreme version of this system develop~d a
high degree of perfection and effectiveness in the Ottoman em~lfe,
when under the devshirmeand 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 weaned and separated from 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.
Societies consisting of sub-communities can 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
cannot do this. Generally speaking, the segments and rural communities
of agrarian society can reproduce themselves indepen-•
dently. The anthropological concept of a segmentary society contains
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
everything done by the larger unit.
Furthermore, one must distinguish between economic and educational
self-sufficiency, in the sense of capacity for self-reproduction.
The ruling strata of an agrarian society are, of course, dependent on
a surplus drawn from the rest of society, but they may nevertheless
be educationally quite self-sufficient. Various other kinds of nonse~-sufficiency
can also be engendered by social rules, such as those
which make communities dependent on external ritual specialists, or
on the supply of brides from outside. Here we are concerned with
educational, not economic capacity for group self-reproduction.
There are numerous complex, mixed and intermediate forms of
gr~up reproduction. When feudal lords send their sons as halftramees~
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 speakin th . . .. . . ~, e situation ill agrarian society seems to be
this. the great majority of the population belongs to self-reproducing
INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY 31
units, such as in effect educate their young on the job, in their stride,
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 . The society will contain
one or more strata of full-time educators, who both reproduce themselves
by taking on apprentices, and perform part-time services for
the rest of the community: ritual, therapeutic, admonitory, secretarial,
and so on. It may be useful to distinguish between one-to-one,
intra-community training, and call it acculturation, and specialized
exo-training (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, those who can read and transmit literacy, and who thus form
one of the classes of specialists in that society. They mayor may not
form a guild or be incorporated in an organization. As, generally
speaking, writing soon transcends its purely technical use in recordkeeping,
and acquires moral and theological significance, 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 agrarian society, 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 writers and 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 something, 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
standing is rather high. They are both specialists and a part of
society among others, and yet also, as stated, claim to be the voiceof
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
give a bit of training or provide services for the rest of society. Do
,they or do they not shave themselves? The tension and its problems
32 INDUSTRIALSOCIETY
(and they are not just logical)are with them, and they are not easily
resolved. b .
In the end, modern society resolves this conun~m y tu~g
everyoneinto a cleric, by turning this po~entiallY universal cla~s into
an effectively universal one, by ensunng that everyone ~lthOUt
exception is taught by it, that exo-edu~ation becom~s the universal
norm and that no-one culturally speaking, shaves hrmself. Modern
society is one in which no sub-community, below the size of one
capable of sustaining an independent educational sys.te~, c~n ~~
longer reproduce itself. The reproduction of fully socla~lZed individuals
itself becomes part of the division of labour, and IS no longer
performed by sub-communities for themselves.
That 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 connection with the
stress on occupational mobility, on an unstable , rapidly changing
division of labour. A society whose entire political system, and
indeed whose cosmologyand 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
hinges on its capacity to sustain and satisfy this expectation, is
thereby committed to the need for innovation and hence to a
changing occupational structure . 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 amount to
too much, and is moreover contained in manuals intelligible to all
possessorsof the society's generic training. (While the little bit extra
seldomamounts to much, the shared and truly essential generic core
is s~pplied at a rather high level, not perhaps when compared with
the intellectual peaks of agrarian society, but certainly when placed
alongsideits erstwhile customary average.)
. But i~ is not only mobility and re-training which engender this
imperauve . It is also the content of most professional activities.
Work? in industr~ society, does not mean moving matter. The
~aradigm o~ wo~k IS no longer ploughing, reaping, thrashing. Work,
m 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 people at the coal face of nature, directly applying human
physical force to natural objects, is constantly diminishing. Most
jobs, if not actually involving work 'with people', involve the control
ofbuttons or switches or leavers which need to be understood,and are
explicable, once again, in some standard idiom intelligible to all
corners.
For the first time in human history, explicit and reasonably precisecommunication
becomes generally, pervasively used and important.
In the closed local communities of the agrarian or tribal 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. Explicitness and the niceties of precise,
rule-bound formulation were left to lawyers, theologians or
ritual specialists, and were parts of their mysteries. Among intimates
of a close community, explicitness 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 by schoolmen and jurists, and all kinds of contextevading
conceptual puritans, for a very small number of generations.
It is a very puzzling fact 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 calledfor
this development, and did not selectively favour it if it manifested
itself. 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
is now becoming global- in which this potentiality really comes 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 INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
requires both a mobile division of labour, and sustained, frequent
and precise communication between strangers involving a 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 cannotbe provided by the kin or
local units, such as they are. It can only be provided by something
resembling a modern 'national' educational system, a pyramid at
whose base there are primary schools, staffed by teachers trained at
secondary schools, staffed by university-trained teachers, led by the
products of advanced graduate schools. Such a pyramid provides the
criterion for the minimum size for a viable political unit. No unit too
small to accommodate the pyramid can function properly. Units
cannot be smallerthan this. Constraints also 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 (though it does not wholly replace)
localized acculturation, is of the very first importance for the political
sociology of the modern world; and its implications have,
strangely enough, been seldom understood or appreciated or even
examined. At the base of the modern social order stands not the
executioner but the professor. Not the guillotine, but the (aptly
named) doctorat d'euu is the main tool and symbol of state power.
The monopoly of legitimate education 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 generalsubstrate
to explain a specific phenomenon. The substrate generates
many surface possibilities. Nationalism, the organization of human
groups into large, centrally educated, culturally homogeneous units,
is but one of these, and a very rare one at that. What is crucial for its
genuine explanation is to identify its specificroots. It is these specific
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 distinctive structural requirements
of industrial society are very deep indeed. This movement is the fruit
neither of ideological aberration, nor of emotional excess. Although
those who participate in it generally, indeed almost without exception,
fail to understand what it is that they 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 universalhigh culture
Let us recapitulate the general and central features of industrial
society. Universal literacy and a high level of numerical, technical
and general sophistication are 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 followthe 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 consequently be explicit, rather than relying on context.
They must also be able to communicate by means of written, impersonal,
context-free, to-whom-it-may-concern type messages. Hence
these communications must be in the same shared and standardized
linguistic medium 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 SOCIETY
applies to the educational machine at least as much as to any other
segment of society,and perhaps more so. So~e very great teachers
and researchers may perhaps be unique and irreplaceable , ~ut the
average professor and schoolmaster can be replaced from ?uts~de th~
teaching profession with the greatest of ease and often WIth little, if
any, loss. ...
What are the implications of all this for the SOCIetyand 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 culture, not a
folk-transmitted one, alone confers his usability and dignity and 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
ancestry, wealth or connections are unimportant in modern society,
and that they are not on occasion even sources of pride to their beneficiaries;
all the same, advantages secured in these ways are often
explained awayand are viewed at best ambivalently. It is interesting
to ask whether the pervasive 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 significant. 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, ~s it ~rsists in being in some surviving agrarian societies, or
ID s~leues which continue to uphold the ethos of pre-industriallife.
Cunously ~nough, the notion of conspicuous waste was coined by
a work-onented member of a work-addicted society Thorsten
Veblen, scandalized by what he saw as the survivals' from a
INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY 37
pre-industrial, predatory age. The egalitarian, work- and careeroriented
surface of industrial society is as significant as its inegalitarian
hidden depths. Life, after all, is lived largely on the surface,
even if important decisions .are on occasion made deep down.
The teacher class is now in a sense more important - it is indispensable
- and in another 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 training, 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 arrival 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 bills, but that is another
matter. ) The organization man works and plays with his organization,
but his children still 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 sustain so large
a burden, only the state is also strong enough 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
38 INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
minimal shared atmosphere, within which alone the members of the
societycan breathe and survive and produce. For a given society, it
must beone in which they can all breathe and speak and produce; so
it must be the sameculture. Moreover, it must now be a great or high
(literate, training-sustained) culture, and it can no longer be a diversified,
locality-tied, illiterate little culture or tradition .
But some organism must ensure that this literate and unified culture
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
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-statedating back to the time when European states were 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 waswhen education wasa cottage industr y, when men could
bemade by a village or clan. That time has now gone, and gone forever.
(In education, small can now be beautiful only if it is covertly
parasitic on the big.) Exo-socialization, the production and reproduction
of men outside the localintimate unit , is now the norm, and
must be so. The imperative of exo-socialization is the main clue to
why state and culture mustnow be linked, whereas in the past their
connection was thin, fortuitous, varied, loose, and often minimal.
No,,: it ~s unavoidable. That is what nationalism is about, and why
we live ID an age of nationalism.
4
The Transition to an Age of Nationalism
The most important steps in the argument have now been made.
Mankind is irreversibly committed to industrial 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 unacceptable poverty for the minority of survivors.
Hence there is no point in discussing, for any practical purpose, the
charms and the horrors of the cultural and 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
essential concomitants. The kind of cultural homogeneity demanded
by nationalism is one of them, and we had better make our peace
with it. It is not the case, as Elie Kedourie claims,' that nationalism
imposes homogeneity; it is rather that a homogeneity imposed by .:s
objective, inescapable imperative eventually appears on the surface
in the form of nationalism .
Most of mankind enters the industrial age from the agrarian stage.
(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
favourable to 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
medieval Europe , it generates political units which are either smaller
or much larger than cultural boundaries would indicate; only very
(Elie Kedourie , Nationalism , 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 wa~ ~ever ve.ry
close. Culture in agrarian society is much m~re pluralistIc. ~an 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 readjustment, in which either political boundaries , or
cultural ones, or both, were being modified, so as to satisfy the new
nationalistimperativewhich now, for the first time, wasmaking itself
felt. Because rulers do not surrender territory gladly (and every
change of a political boundary must make someone a loser), because
changingone's culture is very frequently a most painful experience,
and moreover, because there were rival cultures struggling to capture
the souls of men, just as there were rival centres of political
authority striving to suborn men and capture territory: given all this,
it immediately followsfrom our model that this period of transition
was bound to be violent and conflict-ridden. Actual historical facts
fully confirm these expectations.
Nevertheless, it would not be correct to proceed by simply
working out the implications of the implementation of the nationalist
imperative for agrarian society. Industrial society did not arrive on
the sceneby divine fiat. It was itself the fruit of developments within
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 their 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 nationalism is indeed an effect of
~dustrial. socialorganization, it is not the only effect of the imposi~on
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
~e Reformation and nationalism. The stress of the Reformation on
literacy and scripturalism, its onslaught on a monopolistic priesthoo~
.(or, as Weber clearly saw, its universalization rather than
abolition of priesthood), its individualism and links with mobile
THE TRANSITION TO NATIONALISM 41
urban populations, all make it a kind of harbinger of social features
and attitudes which, according to our model, produce the nationalist
age. The role of Protestantism in helping to bring about the industrial
world is an enormous, complex and contentious topic; and there
is not much point in doing more than cursorily alluding to it here.
But in parts of the globe in 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 Islamic Protestantism with a heavy
stress on scripturalism 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-modern Islam. The history of this movement and
that of modern Arab (and other) nationalisms can hardly be separated
from each other. Islam always had an in-built proclivity or potential
for this kind of 'reformed' version of 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 modern conditions
its capacity to be a more abstract faith , presiding over 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
industrialism and to nationalism were making their impact. Formally
speaking, one would not expect Shintoism to have any marked
resemblance to, say, English nonconformity. Nevertheless, during
the Japanese 'modernization drive, it was the sober, orderly, as it
were Quaker elements 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 private familiarity
with the sacred.1
Had ancient Greece survived into the modern
age, Dionysiac cults might have assumed a more sober garb as Hellas
lurched forward along the path of development.
Ipersonal communication from Ronald Dore.
42 THE TRANSITION TO NATIONALISM
Apart from the links between the Pro~estant ~~ n~tion:Uist ethos,
there are the direct consequences of industrialization Itself. The
general and pervasive consequence.s of an e~tabli~hed industrial
order have already been discussed, m connection with our general
model linking the industrial division of labour with the implementation
of the nationalist principle. But certain specific consequences
of early industrialization which do not generally persist later nevertheless
have a significant role to play. Early industrialism means
population explosion, rapid urbanization, labour migration, and also
the economic and political penetration of previously more or less
inward-turned communities, by a global economy and a centralizing
polity. It means that the at least relatively stable and insulated Babel
system of traditional agrarian communities , each inward-turned,
kept separate by geography sideways, and by an enormous social
distance upwards, is replaced by quite a 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 European powers, and sometimes
by European settler 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 orientation and 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
w~s eventually ca.rried out and completed by nations increasingly
oriented towards industry and trade , not by a militaristic machine,
n~r by a swarm of temporaril y cohesive tribesmen . It was achieved
without any to.tal preoccupation with the process on the part of the
conq~eror n~uons. 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 dominating.the world , it had, on the.whole, ~ther, 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-conscious and
vainglorious imperialism apart, 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
pluralistic European empire was lost or voluntarily abandoned. Once
again, the specific circumstances of all this cannot be ignored; even if
the core or essence of 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 circumstances .
A note on the weakness of nationalism
It is customary to comment on the strength of nationalism. This is 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
weakness at least as much as its strength . It was the dog who failed to
bark who provided the vital clue for Sherlock Holmes . The numbers
of potential nationalisms which 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-industrial age. But even within the
age of nationalism, there is a further important 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 deliberatel y
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 differen~e of language to
tail' difference of culture (though not necessarily the reverse).en a .
If this is granted, at least temporarily, certain cons.equences
follow. I have heard the number of languages o~ 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 akind ofdifferential whic? in so~e plac~s de~me~
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 ~stance, diverse
Slavonic, Teutonic and Romance languages are m 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 colloquialArabic, allegedly a single language.
The 'precedent' argument can 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 Scotsto Irish nationalism, and the rest to English nationalism),
invoking instead a shared historical experience. Yet if such additionallinks
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
eventually homogeneous, internally mobile culture/polity with one
educationalmachine servicing that culture under the surveillance of
that polity), then the number of potential nationalisms goes 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 estimate of language alone. The number
of statesin the world at present is some figure of the order of 200. To
this figure one may add all the irredentist nationalisms which have. ,
not yet.att~ned their state (and perhaps never will), but which are
struggling m 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 wi~out the benefit of the blessing of nationalist
e~dorse~ent, and wh!ch do not satisfy the nationalist criteria of politI<:a1.legitimacy,
and mdeed defy them; for instance, all the diverse
num-states dotted about the globe as survivals of a pre-nationalist
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THE TRANSITION 'Fe NATlONA1.ISM 45
age, and sometimes brought forth as concessions te geegr-aphical
accident or political compromise. Once all these had Been subtracted,
the resulting figure would again, presumably, net bet00 far
above 200. But let us, for the sake of charity, pretend that we have
four times that number of reasonably effectivenationalismson earth,
in other words, 800 of them. I believe this to be considerablylarger
than the facts would justify, but let it pass.
This rough calculation still gives us only oneeffectivenationalism
for ten potential ones! And this surprising ratio, depressing presumably
for any enthusiastic pan-nationalist, if such a person exists,
could be made much larger if the 'precedent' argument wereapplied
to the full to determine the number of potential nationalisms, and if
the criteria of entry into the class of effectivenationalismsweremade
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,
exchangeof populations, and worse, which have so far beset 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 nevertheless do 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
somegroups 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 cuiusregia,
eiuslingua.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 subjects.
.'
This accusation must be stood on Its head. It ISnot the case that
nationalism imposes homogeneity out of a w~ful c~ltu~al Machibedurfniss;it
is the objective need for homog~nelty ,,:hich ISreflected
in nationalism. If it is the case that a modern industrial state can only
function with a mobile, literate, culturally standardized, interchangeable
population, as we have argued, then the illiterate, halfstarved
populations sucked from their erstwhile rural ~ultural ghettoes
into the melting pots of shanty-towns yearn for mcorporation
into some one of 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, accessto primary schools, employment, and
all. Often, these alienated, uprooted, wandering populations may
vacillatebetween diverse options, 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 to continueto be spurned . Poor newcomers are, 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 possesses traits which its members and their
offspring cannot shed, and which will continue to identify them :
geneticallytransmitted or deeply engrained religious-cultural habits
are impossible or difficult to drop .
The alienated victims of early industrialism are unlikely to be
tempted by cultural pools that are very small- a language spoken by
~ couple of villagesoffers few prospects - or very diffused or lacking
m any literary traditions or personnel capable of carrying skills, and
so on. ,They require cultural pools which are large, and/or have a
good historic base, or intellectual personnel well equipped to propagate,the
~ulture in question. It is impossible to pick out any single
qualification, or set of qualifications, which will either guarantee the
success as a ~ationalist catalyst of the culture endowed with it (or
~em), or which on the contrary will ensure its failure. Size, historiCIty,reasonably
compact territory, a capable and energetic intellectual
class:allthese willobvi I hi' b ' ,10USY e p, ut no single one ISnecessary,
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THE TRANSITION TO NATIONALISM 47
and it is doubtful whether any firm 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 anyone particular
nationalism. We know that reasonably homogeneous cultures, each
of them with its own political roof, its own political servicing, are
becoming the norm , widely implemented 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 find political ex-
pressron,
This is precisely what we do fmd. Most cultures or potential
national groups 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 defme some real and effective
nation, is legion. Yet most of them go meekly to their doom, to see
their culture (though not themselves asindividuals) slowlydisappear,
dissolving into the wider culture of some new national state. Most
cultures are led to the dustheap of history by industrial civilization
without offering any resistance. The linguistic distinctiveness of the
Scottish Highlands within Scotland is, of course, incomparably
greater than the cultural distinctiveness of Scotland within the UK;
but there is no Highland nationalism. Much the same is true 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
Northern Russians, but , unlike Ukrainians , do not translate this into
a sense of nationhood .
Does this show that nationalism is, after all, unimportant? Or
even that it is an ideological artefact, an invention of febrile thinkers
which has mysteriously captured some mysteriously susceptible
nations? Not at all. To reach such a conclusion would, ironically,
come close to a tacit, oblique acceptance of the nationalist ideologue'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 regrettable slumber, by
the nationalist 'awakener' . One would be inferring 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 fulfil the destiny which
history intended for them.
But nationalism is not 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 pro tected
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 culture sustaining
modern state cannot fall below a certain minimal size
(unless in 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. Nationalism sees itself as a natural and
universal ordering of the political life 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
fmally reach their destination - that of forming themselves into
states" Hegel immediatel y 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 acquires its own
state. If we i~voke the sleeping-beauty nations , 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 nationalism who denounce
the political movement but tacitly accept the existence of nations do
not go far en~ugh. Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying
men, as an inherent though long-delayed political destiny, are a
IG.W.~. Hegei, LecturesonthePhilosophyo/World Historytr. H.B N' b t
Cambndge, 1975, p. 134. ' . IS e ,
THE TRANSITION TO NA\lJONALISM 49
myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and
turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates
pre-existing cultures: that 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 not accept the myth. Nations are not inscribed into
the nature of things, they do not constitute a political version of the
doctrine of natural kinds. Nor were national states the manifest
ultimate destiny of ethnic or cultural groups. What do exist are cultures,
often subtly grouped, shading into each other, overlapping,
intertwined; and there exist, usually but not always,politicalunits of
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, supposedly natural and given units. It is, on the contrary,
the crystallization of new units, suitable for the conditions now prevailing,
though admittedly using as their raw material the Cultural,
historical and other inheritances from 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
nonn for the legitimacy of political units in the modem world: most
of them must satisfy the imperatives of 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 astonishingly weak. 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
SO THE TRANSITION TO NATIONALISM
contradicts and offends its own self-image, then the conclusi~n must
be that it is a very strong force, though not perhaps a uruque or
irresistible one.
Wild and garden cultures
One way of approaching the central issue i~ this. Cu~tu~es, like
plants, can be divided into savage and culuvated vaneties. The
savagekinds are produced and reproduce themselves spontaneously,
as parts of the life of men. No community is wi~out some share~
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 perish if deprived of their distinctive nourishment
in the form of specialized institutions of learning with reasonably
numerous, full-time and dedicated personnel. During the agrarian
epoch of human history the high cultures or great traditions became
prominent , important , and in one sense, but one sense only, dominant.
Though they could not 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
lirnit~ of a political unit , and there are good reasons why, in the
agranan 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 mostlylose their authority, but the literate idioms and styles of
co~urncauon they carried become far more effectively authorita~ve
and .norm~tive, and, above all, they come to be pervasive and
universal m society. In other words, virtually everyone becomes
THE TRANSITION TO NATIONALISM SI
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 popiilation, 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
zawiyas 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 infrastructure
. As a character in No Orchidsfor MissBlandishobserved, 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 anthropomorphic talk about cultures is to be avoided,
those whose human carriers credit them with good 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 political boundaries , and those of old or crystallizing
high cultures with political aspirations, fail to be in harmony,
another kind of conflict so highly characteristic of 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
with a natural species which can survive in the natural environment .
Industrial man can be compared with an artificially produced or
bred species which can no longer breathe effectively in the naturegiven
atmosphere, but can only function effectively and survive in a
new, specially blended and artificially sustained air or medium.
Hence he lives in 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-preserving air or liquid within each of these giant receptacles is
not automatic. It requires a specialized plant. The name for this
S2 THE TRANSITION TO NATIONALISM
plant is a national educational and communications system. Its only
effective keeper and protector is the state.
It would not in principle be impossible to have a single such
cultural/educational goldfish 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
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.
They do share some general traits. The formula for the medium of
the fully developed industrial goldfish bowls is fairly similar in type,
though it is rich in relatively superficial, but deliberately stressed,
brand-differentiating characteristics.
There are some good and obvious reasons for this new pluralism,
whichwillbe explored further. The industrial age inherited both the
political units and the cultures, high and low, of the preceding age.
There was no reason why they should all suddenly fuse into a single
one, and there weregood reasons why they should not:industrialism,
in other words the type of production or of the division of labour
which makes these homogeneous breathing tanks imperative, did
not arrive simultaneously in all parts of the world, nor in the same
manner. The differential timing of its arrival divided humanity into
rival groups very effectively. These differences in arrival-time of
industrialism in various communities became acute if they could
utilize some cultural, genetic or similar differentiae, left behind by
the agrarian world. The dating of 'development ' constitutes a crucial
political diacritical mark, if it can seize upon some cultural difference
inherited from the agrarian age, and use it as its token .
The process of industrialization took place in successive phases
and in different conditions, and engendered various new rivalries
with new gains and lossesto be made and avoided. Internationalism
wasoften predicted by the prophets and commentators of the industrial
age, both on the left and on the right, but the very opposite
came to pass: the age of nationalism.
,
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. What is a Nation?
We are now at last in a position to attempt some kind of plausible
answer to this question. Initially there were two especiallypromising
candidates for the construction of a theory of nationality: will and
culture. Obviously, each of them is important and relevant; but, just
as obviously, neither is remotely adequate. It is instructive to consider
why this is so.
No doubt will or consent contitutes an important factor in the
formation of most groups, large and small. Mankind has alwaysbeen
organized in groups, of all kinds of shapes and sizes, sometimes
sharply defmed and sometimes loose, sometimes neatly nested and
sometimes overlapping or intertwined. The variety of these possibilities,
and of the principles on which the groups were recruited and
maintained, is endless. But two generic agents or catalysts of group
formation and maintenance are obviously crucial: will, voluntary .
adherence and identification, loyalty, solidarity, on the one hand;
and fear, coercion, compulsion, on the other. These two possibilities
constitute extreme poles along a kind of spectrum. A fewcommunities
may be based exclusively or very predominantly on one or the
other, but they must be rare. Most persisting groups are based on a
mixture of loyalty and identification (on willed adherence), and of
extraneous incentives, positive or negative, on hopes and fears.
If we defme nations as groups which will themselves to persist as
communities, I the definition-net that we have cast into the sea will
bring forth far too rich a catch. The haul which we shallhave trawled
in will indeed include the communities we may easily recognize
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 defmition) the same also applies to many
'Emest Renan, 'Qu'est -ce qu'une Nation', republished in ErnestRenan et
l'Allemagne, Textes receuillis et commentes par Emile Bure, NY, 1945.
S4 WHAT IS A NATION?
other clubs, conspiracies, gangs, teams, parties, not to mention the
many numerous communities and associations of the pre-industrial
agewhich were not recruited and defined according to the nationalist
principle and which defy it. Will, consent, identification, 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 be counted as tacit
consent or as something else.)
The tacit self-identification has operated on behalf of all kinds of
groupings, larger or smaller than nations, or cutting across them, or
defmed 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 defme the
nation in this manner. It is only because, in the modern, nationalist
age, national units are the preferred,favoured objects of identification
and willed adherence, that the defmition 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 defmition
tied to the assumptions and conditions of one age (and even then
constituting an exaggeration), cannot usefully be used to help to
explain the emergenceof that age.
Any defmition of nations in terms of shared culture is another net
which brings in far too rich a catch. Human history is 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
~e democratic sacraments of consent and will. The agrarian world
simply could not be 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,
lite~acy- and education-based systems of communication ), a process
rapidly gathermg pace throughout the world, has made it seem, to
anyone too deeply immersed in our contemporary assumptions , that
WHAT IS A NATION? SS
nationality may be defmable in terms of shared culture. Nowadays
people can live only in units defmed by a shared culture, and internallymobile
and fluid. Genuine cultural pluralism ceasesto be viable
under current conditions. But a little bit of historical awarenessor
sociologicalsophistication should dispel the illusion that this was
alwaysso. Culturally plural societies often worked well in the past:
sowell, in fact, that cultural plurality was sometimesinvented where
it was previously lacking.
If , for such cogent reasons, these two apparently promising paths
towards the defmition of nationality are barred, is there another
way?
The great, but valid, paradox is this: nations can be defined only <
in terms of the age of nationalism, rather than, as you might expect, rthe
other way round. It is not the casethat the 'age of nationalism' is
a mere summation of the awakening and political self-assertionof
this, that, or the other nation . Rather, when general social conditions
make for standardized , homogeneous, centrally sustained <!
high cultures, pervading entire populations and not just eliteminorities,
a situation arises in which well-defmed educationallysanctioned
and unified cultures constitute very nearly the only kind ofunit with
which men willingly and often ardently identify. The cultures now
seem to be the natural repositories of political legitimacy. Only then
does it come to appear that any defiance of their boundaries by political
units constitutes a scandal.
Under these conditions, though under these conditions only,
nations can indeed be 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 culture 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 conditions do not defme the human situation as 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
inherited proliferation of cultures or cultural wealth, though it uses
them very selectively, and it most often transforms them radically.
56 WHAT IS A NATION?
Dead languages can be revived, traditions invent~d, quite. fictitio~s
pristine purities restored. But this culturally creative, fanciful, pOSItively
inventive aspect of nationalist ardou~ ought not t~ allow an~one
to conclude , erroneously, that nationahsm ISa contingent, artificial,
ideological invention , which might not hav~ happened, if only
those damned busy-body interfering European thinkers, not content
to leave well alone, had not concocted it and fatefully injected it into
the bloodstream of otherwise viable political communities. The cultural
shreds and patches used by nationalism are 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 above all it is not what it seems
to itself. The cultures it claims to defend and revive are often 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 current 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 worship itself by pretending to worship
God or even Wotan; it overtly worshipped itself. In milder but just
as significant form , enlightened modernist theologians do not believe,
or even take much intere st in, the doctrines of their faith which had
meant so much to their predecessors. They treat them with a kind of
comic auto-functionalism , as valid simply and only as the conceptual
and ritual tools by means of which a social tradition affirms its
values, continuit y and solidarity, and they systematically obscure
and play down the difference between such a tacitly reductionist
'faith '~ and th~ real thing which had preceded it and had played such
a crucial part ill 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 virulent and violent
or gentl d . .. e an 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 severely secular, can be profoundly distorting and
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 requirements of reasonably
precise bureaucratic and technological communication. 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-groups themselves. That is what really
happens.
But this is the very opposite of what nationalism affirms and 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 selfpresentation
when the narodor Volk is ruled by officialsof another,
an alien high culture, whose oppression must be resisted first by a
cultural revival and reaffirmation, and eventually by a war of national
liberation. If the nationalism prospers it eliminates the alien high
culture, but it does not then replace it by the old local low culture; it
revives, or invents, a local high (literate, specialist-transmitted)
culture of its own, though admittedly one which willhave some links
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 et al., Sooremennye Etnicheskie Protsessyv SSSR (Contemporary
Ethnic Processesin the USSR), Moscow,1975.
58 WHAT IS A NATION?
like to express their real or imagined .sen~ents an.droots, and w.h~
will no doubt indulge in as much natIonalist behaviOur as the political
situation may allow. . '
So a sociologicalself-deception, a vision of reality through ~ pnsm
of illusion, still persists, but it is not the same a~ th.at which was
analysed by Durkheim. Society no longer worships Its~lf through
religious symbols; a modern, streaml~ed~ on-wheels hi~h. cUI~~e
celebrates itself in song and dance, which It borrows (stylizing It m
the process) from a folk culture which it fondly believes itself to be
perpetuating, defending, and reaffirming.
Thecourseof true nationalismneverdid run smooth
A characteristic scenario of the evolution of a nationalism - and we
shall have cause to remrn 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 peasants .
The aristocracy and officialdom spoke the language of the Megalomanian
court, which happened to belong to a language group different
from the oneofwhich the Ruritanian dialects were an offshoot.
Most, but not all, Ruritanian peasants belonged to a church whose
liturgy was taken from another linguistic group again, and many of
the priests, especiallyhigher up in the hierarchy, spoke a language
which was a modern vernacular version of the liturgical language of
this creed, and which was also very far removed from Ruritanian .
The petty traders of the small towns serving the Ruritanian countryside
were drawn from a different ethnic group and religion still, and
one heartily detested by the Ruritanian peasantry .
In the past the Ruritanian peasants had had many griefs, movingly
and beautifully recorded in their lament-songs (painstakingly collected
by villageschoolmasters late in the nineteenth century, and made
well known to the international musical public by the compositions
of ~e great Ruritanian national composer L. ). The pitiful oppression
of the Ruritanian peasantry provoked , in the eighteenth
century, the guerrilla resistance led by the famous Ruritanian social
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 films, one of them
produced by the national artist Z., under highest auspices, soonafter
the promulgation of the Popular Socialist Republic of Ruritania.
Honesty compels one to admit that the social bandit wascaptured
by his own compatriots, and that the tribunal which condemned him
to a painful death had as its president another compatriot. Furthermore,
shortly after Ruritania first 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
the villagedefence units which had opposed the socialbandit 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 folk 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
peasantry with their linguistic and cultural situation, 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 part of
bilingual puns , sometimes in questionable taste. It must also be
admitted that one of the most moving of these songs- I often sangit
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, requiring 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 suitably re-written since Ruritania went
socialist. Anyway, to return to my main theme: though the songsdo
often contain complaints about the condition of the peasantry, they
do not raise the issue of cultural nationalism.
That was yet to come, and presumably post-dates the composition
of the said songs. In the nineteenth century a population explosion
occurred at the same time as certain other areas of the Empire of
Megalomania - but not Ruritania - rapidly industrialized. The
Ruritanian peasants were drawn to seek work in the industrially
more developed areas, and some secured it, on the dreadful terms
prevailing at the time. As backward rustics speaking an obscure and
60 WHAT IS 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 liturgical languages, became influenced by the new
liberal ideasin the course of their secondary schooling, and shifted to
a secular training at the university, ending not as priests but as
journalists, teachers and professors. They received encou~agem~nt
from a few foreign, non-Ruritanian ethnographers, musicologists
and historians who had come to explore Ruritania. The continuing
labour migration, increasinglywidespread elementary education and
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
languageof Megalomania. No genetically transmitted trait, no deep
religiouscustom, 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 full of 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,
?equite wrong to attribute conscious calculation to the participants
ill ~e movement. Subjectively, one must suppose that they had the
motivesand feelingswhich are so vigorously expressed in the literatur~
of the national revival.They deplored the squalor and neglect of
their home valleys, while yet also seeing the rustic virtues still to be
fo~d in them; they deplored the discrimination to which their eona~onals
were subject, and the alienation from their native culture to
which they were doomed in the proletarian suburbs of the industrial
towns. They preached against these ills, and had the hearing of at
WHAT IS A NATION? 61
least many of their fellows. The manner in which, when the international
political situati.on came to favour it, Ruritania eventually
attained independence, 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 generous ardour on behalf of the eonationals.
When they donned folk costume and trekked over the
hills, composing poems in the forest clearings, they did not also
dream of one day becoming powerful bureaucrats, ambassadorsand
ministers. Likewise, the peasants and workers whom they succeeded
in reaching felt resentment at their condition, but had no reveries
about plans of industrial development which one day would bring a
steelmill (quite useless, as it then turned out) to the veryheart of the
Ruritanian valleys, thus totally ruining quite a sizeablearea 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 sometimestravestiedas 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
socialmobility. In stable self-contained communities culture 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 wasnot) 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 qualifications
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 w.0~kers, they did not benefit
immediately; but the drawing of a political boundary aro~nd the
newly defined ethnic Ruritania did mean the.eventual fosterID~ and
protection of industries in the ~rea,. and ID ~e end drastically
diminished the need for labour migrauon 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 proletarians who
have the advantage of sharing the culture of the political and economic
rulers. But the cultural/linguistic 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
newlyemergent 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
family. But there wereother impoverished and exploited individuals,
and a lot of them spoke dialects recognizably similar, while most of
the better-off spoke something quite alien; and so the new 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 Ruritanjan
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 principles of fission which determine
the emergenceof new units, when the industrial world with its
insulated cu~tu~al breathing tanks comes into being . It could be
called the principle of barriers to communication barriers based on. . . '
pre~lOus, pre-mdustnal cultures; and it operates with special force
du~g the early period of industrialization . The other principle, just
~s important , could be called that of inhibitors of social entropy; and
It deserves separate treatment.