On Imagined Communities

Why are people willing to die for a nation, a thing they cannot see, made up overwhelmingly of strangers they will never meet? Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, published in 1983, set out to explain the strange power of nationalism, and its answer reshaped how scholars understand one of the most potent forces in modern political life. The nation, Anderson argued, is an imagined community, imagined because its members will never know most of their fellow members yet carry in their minds the image of their communion, a felt fellowship with millions of people they have never encountered.

The word imagined is the key, and Anderson was careful that it not be misread as fake. The nation is imagined, not imaginary. It is a genuine and powerful bond, but it is a constructed one, created rather than natural, and Anderson's project was to explain how it came to be created. Nations feel ancient and primordial to those who belong to them, as though they had always existed, but Anderson argued that the nation is a relatively recent invention, and he traced the specific historical conditions that made it possible to imagine a community on that vast scale.

Central to his account is what he called print capitalism. The spread of printing, and especially of newspapers and novels in common vernacular languages, allowed large numbers of strangers to imagine themselves as part of a single community moving through the same time, reading the same news on the same morning, sharing the same stories and the same language. The newspaper, in Anderson's striking image, let masses of people who would never meet nonetheless conceive of themselves as fellow members of a bounded, simultaneous community. The technology of mass communication, in other words, made the modern nation thinkable.

The book belongs in a library of the republic because the nation is the container within which modern self-government takes place, and understanding how that container was constructed is essential to thinking clearly about it. Nationalism can be a force for liberation and solidarity or for exclusion and violence, and Anderson's analysis helps explain both, by showing that national belonging is made rather than given, and therefore can be made in better or worse ways, drawn to include or to exclude. In an age of resurgent nationalism, the insight that the nation is an imagined community, built through shared media and stories, is more useful than ever.

It connects to the works on media and communication elsewhere on these shelves, since Anderson makes the form of communication central to the existence of the nation itself, and to the broader questions of solidarity and belonging that run through the collection. Imagined Communities is in copyright and widely available in print and digital editions. It is a work of scholarship but a readable one. Read it to understand how the nation, which feels so natural and eternal, was actually imagined into being, and what that means for the politics conducted in its name.