Chapter two

Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft dichotomy in Anderson’s approach to community since the key distinction seems to be between face-to-face community based on familiarity and interaction and impersonal community based on the exercise of imagination. I believe, however, that it is the recognition of the role that imagination plays in all forms of community life that helps account for the extraordinary influence of Anderson’s concept of “imagined community. In any case, that is what I have taken from it.

38 See J. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, (New York: Norton, 1999), 234-39.

39 For examples of the large body of literature that reasons in this way, see M. Walzer, What it Means to be an American, R. Smith, Civic Ideals, 80-81, and S. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity.

40 Of course, I do not want to suggest that such reflections always lead to greater inclusiveness. Our connections to others just as easily and as often lead us to exclude people that we otherwise would have included within our sense of community.

41T. Devine, A History of the Scottish Nation, (London: Penguin, 2000), 231-35. See also H. Trevor-Roper, “The Highland Tradition in Scotland,” in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition.

42 Indeed, it would make sense to talk of imagined individuals when talking of the rational actors in rational choice and social contract theories. They exist only to the extent to which we use our imagination to strip away their connections to others. One could even talk of a community of imagined individuals, the sense of connection to others that we would expect from the disconnected rational individuals whom we have conjured up in our imagination. Civil society, as Hegel conceives of it in The Philosophy of Right, would be a good example of such a community.

43 Though not necessarily harmony or an especially strong sense of devotion to the common good. As Oscar Lewis notes in his correction of Gemeinschaft models, proximity and familiarity only make conflicts, say over the use of land, more bitter among the inhabitants of a peasant village. O. Lewis, "The Folk-Urban Ideal Types., in P. Hauser and L. Schnore (eds.), The Study of Urbanization. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965, 491-517, 498.

44C. S. de Montesquieu, Mes Pensées, in Oeuvres Complètes, 2 Vols., (Paris: Pleiade, 1951), I:981. Julia Kristeva (Nations without Nationalism, 63) is especially enthusiastic about these lines. She declares that they should be inscribed on the walls of in every French school.

45 See A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 Vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), I: 349-50, II:347-48. See also T. Engberg-Pderesen, “Discovering the Good” in M. Schofield and G. Striker (eds.), The Norms of Nature: Studies in Hellenistic Ethics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 145-83, 175-77 and M. Nussbaum, “Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Political Philosophy (1995).

46 J.-J. Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy, 219, Emile, 39.

47 J. Rawls, “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7 (1987): 1-25, and idem, Political Liberalism, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 133-72.

48 The classic discussion of this phenomenon is F. Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), Introduction. For an interesting application, see P. Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

49 I develop this argument at length in Chapter 7, “Moral Pluralism and the Value of Community.”

50 See especially M. Canovan, Nationhood and Political Theory, 22.

51Hence definitions, like Rupert Emerson’s, that characterize the nation “as a community of people who feel they belong together in the double sense that they share deeply significant elements of a common heritage and have a common destiny for the future” (R. Emerson, From Empire to Nation, 95).

52As Benedict Anderson emphasizes, although not in his famous definition of the nation as a bounded sovereign community. Anderson suggests that nations provide mortal beings with a collective subject that can stretch the tales we tell about ourselves beyond the limited span of a human life (Imagined Communities, 9-12).

53Like the early Irish nationalist leader, Daniel O’Connell, who “dismissed the Irish language robustly, as a drawback in the modern world.” See R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, (London: Penguin, 1988), 300.

54Craig Calhoun, Nationalism, 39.

55J. Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).

56 As in Benedict Anderson’s famous definition of the nation as a community imagined as bounded and sovereign (Imagined Communities, 6-7).

57Liah Greenfeld (Nationalism, 5-7), for example, speaks of “the zigzag pattern of semantic change” that characterizes the nation.

58S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe (900-1300), (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 255-56.

59See, for example, E. Fehrenbach, “Nation,” in Handbuch der Politische-Soziale Grundbegriffe in Frankreich 1680-1782, (1986), 7:75-107, 76-77, and P. Nora, “Nation” in F. Furet and M. Ozouf (eds.), Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989), 742-53, 743.

60D. Diderot et al, l’Encyclopédie, (Neufchatel: Faulche &Compans, 1765), 11:36.

61E. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, 8. Or a nation “exists where a significant number of people consider themselves to be nation or behave as if they formed one” (H. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, 5).

62See S. Nathanson, “Nationalism and the Limits of Global Humanism in R. McKim and J. McMahan (eds.), The Morality of Nationalism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 176-87, 177 for a discussion of this infinite regress. See also P. Gilbert, Philosophy of Nationalism, 12-13, for a good critique of this approach