N ations and

N ationalism
E rnest G ellner
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE PAST
General Editor
R.I. Moore
Advisory Editors
Gerald Aylmer
loan Lewis
Patrick Wormald
 Other Books by Ernest Gellner

Words and Things

Thought and Change
Saints of the Atlas
Contemporary Thought and Politics
The Devil in Modern Philosophy
Legitimation of Belief
Spectacles and Predicaments
M uslim Society
Relativism in the Social Sciences
The Psychoanalytic M ovem ent
The Concept of Kinship and Other Essays
Plough, Sword, and Book
State and Society in Social Thought
Culture, Identity, and Politics
Conditions of Liberty
Encounters with N ationalism
N ations and
N ationalism

E rn est G elln er

Cornell University Press

ITHACA, NEW YORK
 © Ernest Gellner 1983

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First published 1983 by Cornell University Press

First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 1983

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Contents

Editor’s preface

Acknowledgements

1 Definitions 1
State and nation 3
The nation 5

2 Culture in Agrarian Society 8

Power and culture in the agro-literate polity 9
Culture 11
The state in agrarian society 13
The varieties of agrarian rulers 14

3 Industrial Society 19
The society of perpetual growth 24
Social genetics 29
The age of universal high culture 35
4 The Transition to an Age of Nationalism 39
A note on the weakness of nationalism 43
Wild and garden cultures 50

5 What is a Nation? 53
The course of true nationalism never did run smooth 58

6 Social Entropy and Equality in Industrial Society 63

Obstacles to entropy 64
Fissures and barriers 73
A diversity of focus 75

7 A Typology of Nationalisms 88
The varieties of nationalist experience 97
Diaspora nationalism 101
 Contents
8 The Future of Nationalism no
Industrial culture — one or many? 114

9 Nationalism and Ideology 123

Who is for Nuremberg? 130
One nation, one state 134

10 Conclusion 137
What is not being said 137
Summary 139

Select Bibliography 144

Index
Editor’s Preface

Ignorance has many forms, and all of them are dangerous. In the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries our chief effort has been to free
ourselves from tradition and superstition in large questions, and
from the error in small ones upon which they rest, by redefining the
fields of knowledge and evolving in each the distinctive method
appropriate for its cultivation. The achievement has been incal­
culable, but not without cost. As each new subject has developed a
specialist vocabulary to permit rapid and precise reference to its own
common and rapidly growing stock of ideas and discoveries, and
come to require a greater depth of expertise from its specialists,
scholars have been cut off by their own erudition not only from
mankind at large, but from the findings of workers in other fields,
and even in other parts of their own. Isolation diminishes not only
the usefulness but the soundness of their labours when energies are
exclusively devoted to eliminating the small blemishes so embar­
rassingly obvious to the fellow-professional on the next patch,
instead of avoiding others that may loom much larger from, as it
were, a more distant vantage point. Marc Bloch observed a contra­
diction in the attitudes of many historians: ‘when it is a question of
ascertaining whether or not some human act has really taken place,
they cannot be too painstaking. If they proceed to the reasons for
that act, they are content with the merest appearance, ordinarily
founded upon one of those maxims of common-place psychology
which are neither more nor less true than their opposites.’ When the
historian peeps across the fence he sees his neighbours, in literature,
perhaps, or sociology, just as complacent in relying on historical
platitudes which are naive, simplistic or obsolete.
New Perspectives on the Past represents not a reaction against
specialization, which would be a romantic absurdity, but an attempt
to come to terms with it. The authors, of course, are specialists, and
their thought and conclusions rest on the foundation of distinguished
professional research in different periods and fields. Here they will
viii E ditor’s Preface
free themselves, as far as it is possible, from the restraints of subject,
region and period within which they ordinarily and necessarily
work, to discuss problems simply as problems, and not as ‘history’
or ‘politics’ or ‘economics’. They will write for specialists, because
we are all specialists now, and for laymen, because we are all laymen.
A series with such a goal could be inaugurated by no author more
apt than Ernest Gellner, and by no subject more fitting than natio­
nalism, whose force in shaping and reshaping the modern world is so
obvious, and which yet remains obdurately alien and incompre­
hensible to those who are not possessed by it. Gellner’s lucid
command of the intellectual resources of several fields - philosophy,
sociology, intellectual history and social anthropology are prominent
here - has produced an explanation of nationalism which could not
have been devised by an expert in any single one of them, and which
makes it, for the first time, historically and humanly intelligible.

R.I. Moore
Acknowledgements

The writing of this book has benefited enormously from the moral
and material support from my wife Susan and my secretary Gay
Woolven. The penultimate draft was valuably criticized by my son
David. The number of people from whose ideas and information I
benefited over the years, whether in agreement or disagreement, is
simply too large to be listed, though the extent of my debt, conscious
and other, must be enormous. But needless to say, only I may be
blamed for the contentions found in this book.

Ernest Gellner
Tuzenbach: In years to com e, you say, life on earth w ill be mar­
vellous, beautiful. T h a t’s true. But to take part in that now , even
from afar, one m ust prepare, one m ust w ork . . .
Yes, one must work. Perhaps you think - this German is getting
over-excited. But on my word o f honour. I’m Russian. I cannot even
speak German. My father is O rthodox . . .

Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters

Politika u nds byla vsak sptse mene smelejst form ou kultury.

(Our politics however was a rather less daring form of culture.)

J. Sladecek, Osmasedesdty (’68), Index, Koln, 1980,

(written under this pen name by Petr Pithart, sub­
sequently prime minister o f the Czech lands, and
previously circulated in samizdat in Prague).

Our nationality is like our relations to women: too implicated in our

moral nature to be changed honourably, and too accidental to be
worth changing.

George Santayana
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 sentiment is the feeling of anger
aroused by the violation of the principle, or the feeling of satisfaction
aroused by its fulfilment, A nationalist movement is 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 non­
nationals. 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 sensi­
tive: if the rulers of the political unit belong to a nation other than
that of the majority of the ruled, this, for nationalists, constitutes a
quite outstandingly intolerable breech of political propriety. This
can occur either through the incorporation of the national territory
in a larger empire, or by the local domination of an alien group.
In brief, nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which
requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones,
and, in 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, ‘universal-
istic’ spirit. There could be, and on occasion there have been,
nationalists-in-the-abs tract, unbiassed in favour of any special nation­
ality of their own, and generously preaching the doctrine for all
nations alike: let all nations have their own political roofs, and let all
2 D efinitions
of them also refrain from including non-nationals under it. There is
no formal contradiction in asserting such non-egoistic nationalism.
As a doctrine it can be supported by some good arguments, such as
the desirability of preserving cultural diversity, of a pluralistic inter­
national 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 excep­
tions 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
Mussolini called the sacro egoismo of nationalism. It may also be that
the political effectiveness of national sentiment would be much
impaired if nationalists had as fine a sensibility to the wrongs com­
mitted by their nation as they have to those committed against it.
But over and above these considerations there are others, tied to
the specific nature 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 reasonable calculation, 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. This 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 homo­
geneous, 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 numbers of resident foreigners,
or even by the presence of the occasional foreigner in, say, a national
ruling family. Just how many resident foreigners or foreign members
of the ruling class there must be before the principle is effectively
 D efinitions 3
violated cannot be stated with precision. There is no sacred per­
centage figure, below which the foreigner can be benignly tolerated,
and above which he becomes offensive and his safety and life are at
peril. No doubt the figure will vary with circumstances. The imposs­
ibility of providing a generally applicable and precise figure, how­
ever, does not undermine the usefulness of the definition.

State and nation

Our definition of nationalism was parasitic on two as yet undefined

terms: state and nation.
Discussion of the state may begin with Max Weber’s celebrated
definition of it, as that agency within society which possesses the
monopoly of legitimate violence. The idea behind this is simple and
seductive: in well-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 ulti­
mate one - force - may be applied only by one special, clearly identi­
fied, 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 modern
societies. Nevertheless, it is not entirely satisfactory. There are
‘states’ - or, at any rate, institutions which we would normally be
inclined to call by that name - which do not 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 D efinitions
means to enforce their monopoly of legitimate violence, and which
nonetheless remain, in many respects, recognizable ‘states’.
Weber’s underlying principle does, however, seem valid now^
however strangely ethnocentric it may be as a general definition,
with its tacit assumption of the well-centralized Western state. The
state constitutes one highly distinctive and important elaboration of
the social division of labour. Where there is no division of labour,
one cannot even begin to speak of the state. But not any or every
specialism makes a state: the state is the specialization and con­
centration of order maintenance. The ‘state’ is that institution 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. Nationalists 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 boundaries and/or the distribution of power, and possibly of
other advantages, within it which were resented.
This in itself is highly significant. Not only is our definition of
nationalism parasitic on a prior and assumed definition of the state:
it also seems to be the case that nationalism emerges only in milieux
in which the existence of the state is already very much taken for
granted. The existence of politically centralized units, and of a
moral-political climate in which such centralized units are taken for
granted and are treated as normative, is a necessary though by no
means a sufficient condition of nationalism.
 D efinitions 5
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 special­
ized order-enforcing institution, does not really arise. By contrast,
most, but by no means all, agrarian societies have been state-
endowed. 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 enormously large, and depend for the stan­
dard of living to which they have become accustomed (or to which
they ardently wish to become accustomed) on an unbelievably intri­
cate general division of labour and co-operation. Some of this co­
operation might under favourable conditions be spontaneous and
need no central sanctions. The idea that all of it could perpetually
work in this way, that it could exist without any enforcement and
control, puts an intolerable strain on one’s credulity.
So the problem of nationalism does not arise when there is no
state. It does not follow that the problem of nationalism arises for
each and every state. On the contrary, it arises only for some states. It
remains to be seen which ones do face this problem.

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 relatively
little effort, of seeing its contingency, and of imagining a social situ­
ation in which the state is absent. He is quite adept at visualizing the
‘state of nature’. An anthropologist can explain to him that the tribe is
not necessarily a state writ small, and that forms of tribal organiz­
ation exist which can be described as stateless. By contrast, the idea
of a man without a nation seems to impose a far greater strain on the
modern imagination. Chamisso, an emigre Frenchman in Germany
during the Napoleonic period, wrote a powerful proto-Kafkaesque
novel about a man who lost his shadow: though no doubt part of the
effectiveness of this novel hinges on the intended ambiguity of the
parable, it is difficult not to suspect that, for the author, the Man
without a Shadow was the Man without a Nation. When his fol­
lowers and acquaintances detect his aberrant shadowlessness they
shun the otherwise well-endowed Peter Schlemiehl. A man without a
nation defies the recognized categories and provokes revulsion.
Chamisso’s perception - if indeed this is what he intended to
convey - was valid enough, but valid only for one kind of human
condition, and not for the human condition as such anywhere at any
time. A man must have a nationality as he must have a nose and two
ears; a deficiency in 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 attribute
of humanity, but it has now come to appear as such.
In fact, nations, like states, are a contingency, and not a universal
necessity. Neither nations nor states exist at all times and in all
circumstances. Moreover, nations and states are not the same contin­
gency. Nationalism holds that they were destined for each other;
that either without the other is incomplete, and constitutes a
tragedy. But before they could become intended for each other, each
of them had to emerge, and their emergence was independent and
contingent. The state has certainly emerged without the help of the
nation. Some nations have certainly emerged without the blessings
of their own state. It is more debatable whether the normative idea of
the nation, in its modern sense, did not presuppose the prior exis­
tence of the state.
 D efinitions 7
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.
1 Two men are of the same nation if and only if they share the
same culture, where culture in turn means a system of ideas and
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 loyal­
ties and solidarities. A mere category of persons (say, occupants of a
given territory, or speakers of a given language, for example)
becomes a nation if and when the members of the category 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
fellows of this kind which turns them into a nation, and not the other
shared attributes, whatever they might be, which separate that
category from non-members.
Each of these provisional definitions, the cultural and the volun­
taristic, has some merit. Each of them singles out an element which
is of real importance in the understanding of nationalism. But
neither is adequate. Definitions of culture, presupposed by the first
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.
Culture in Agrarian Society

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, seems to be the way in which literacy fits in with the three great
ages of man. In the middle or agrarian age literacy appertains to
some only. Some societies have it; and within the societies that do
have it, it is always some, and never all, who can actually read.
The written word seems to enter history with the accountant and
the tax collector: the earliest uses of the written sign seem often to be
occasioned by the keeping of records. Once developed, however, the
written word acquires other uses, legal, contractual, administrative.
God himself eventually 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 clerisy 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
dardized script, means in effect the possibility of cultural and cogni­
tive storage and centralization. The cognitive centralization and
codification effected by a clerisy, and the political centralization
which is the state, need not go hand in hand. Often they are rivals;
sometimes one may capture the other; but more often, the Red and
 C ulture in Agrarian S ociety 9
the Black, the specialists of violence and of faith, are indeed inde­
pendently operating rivals, and their territories are often not co­
extensive.

Power and culture in the agro-literate polity

These two crucial and idiosyncratic forms of the division of labour -

the centralizations of power and of culture/cognition - have pro­
found 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.

Figure 1 General form of the social structure of agrarian societies.

In the characteristic agro-literate polity, the ruling class forms a

small minority of the population, rigidly separate from the great
majority of direct agricultural producers, or peasants. Generally
10 C ulture in Agrarian S ociety
speaking, its ideology exaggerates rather than underplays the in­
equality of classes and the degree of separation of the ruling stratum.
This can in turn be sub-divided into a number of more specialized
layers: warriors, priests, clerics, administrators, burghers. Some of
these layers (for example, Christian clergy) may be non-hereditary
and be re-selected in each generation, though recruitment may be
closely predetermined by the other hereditary strata. The most
important point, however, is this: both for the ruling stratum as a
whole, and for the various sub-strata within it, there is great stress
on cultural differentiation rather than on homogeneity. The more
differentiated in style of all kinds the various strata are, the less fric­
tion 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 differ­
ences 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 mixed
ancestry and reinforced by recruits from below.
Below the horizontally stratified minority at the top, there is
another world, that of the laterally separated petty communities of
the lay members of the society. Here, once again, cultural differen­
tiation is very marked, though the reasons are quite different. Small
peasant communities 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 en­
genders dialectal and other differences. No-one, or almost no-one,
has an interest in promoting cultural homogeneity at this social level.
The state is interested in extracting taxes, maintaining the peace,
and not much else, and has no interest in promoting lateral com­
munication between its subject communities.
The clerisy may, it is true, have a measure of interest in imposing
certain shared cultural norms. Some clerisies are contemptuous of
and indifferent towards folk practices, while others, in the interest of
monopohzing access to the sacred, to salvation, therapy and so forth,
combat and actively denigrate folk culture and the freelance folk
shamans who proliferate within it. But, within the general conditions
prevailing in agro-literate polities, they can never really be
 C ulture in Agrarian S ociety 11
successful. Such societies simply do not possess the means for
making literacy near-universal and incorporating the broad masses
of the population in a high culture, thus implementing the ideals of
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 en­
thusiasm, but to be honoured more in the breach than in the obser­
vance 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,
neither has much inclination for the other in the conditions prevailing
in the agrarian age. Let us take each of them in turn.

Culture

Among the higher strata of agro-literate society it is clearly advan­

tageous 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, permanence and naturalness. That which is
inscribed into the nature of things and is perennial, is consequently
not personally, individually offensive, nor psychically intolerable.
12 C ulture in Agrarian Society
By contrast, in an inherently mobile and unstable society the
maintenance of these social dams, separating unequal levels, is
intolerably difficult. The powerful currents of mobility are ever
undermining them. Contrary to what Marxism has led people to
expect, it is pre-industrial society which is addicted to horizontal
differentiation within societies, whereas industrial society streng­
thens 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 locally important differentiations can be intense. But even if the
local group is internally more or less homogeneous, it is most un­
likely to link its own idiosyncratic culture to any kind of political
principle, to think in terms of a political legitimacy defined in a way
which refers to the local culture. For a variety of obvious reasons,
such a style of thinking is, in these conditions, most unnatural, and
would indeed seem absurd to those concerned, were it explained to
them. 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 pretensions; quite the reverse. The
most it can do is identify the village of origin or anyone who opens
his mouth at the local market.
In brief, cultures proliferate in this world, but its conditions do
not generally encourage what might be called cultural imperialisms,
the efforts of one culture or another to dominate and expand to fill
out a political unit. Culture tends to be branded either horizontally
(by social caste), or vertically, to define very small local com­
munities. The factors determining political boundaries are totally
distinct from those determining cultural limits. Clerisies sometimes
endeavour to extend the zone of a culture, or rather, of the faith they
codified for it; and states sometimes indulge in crusades, faith-
endorsed aggression. But these are not the normal, pervasive con­
ditions of agrarian society.
It is important to add that cultures in such a world proliferate in a
very complex way: in many cases, it is far from clear how a given
individual is to be assigned to his ‘cultural background’. A Hima­
layan peasant, for instance, may be involved with priests and monks
and shamans of several religions in different contexts at different
 C ulture in Agrarian S ociety 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 main­
tenance 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 now­
adays associated with a putative nation, aspiring to internal homo­
geneity 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 agrarian society

In these circumstances there is little incentive or opportunity for

cultures to aspire to the kind of monochrome homogeneity and poli­
tical 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?
Pohtical 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 seg­
ments, peasant communes and so forth, running their own affairs,
with a fairly high political participation ratio (to adapt S. Andreski’s
useful phrase), and with only 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 semi-
autonomous local units.
The question which concerns us is whether, in our world, con­
taining these types of unit, there are forces making for that fusion of
culture and polity which is the essence of nationalism. The answer
14 C ulture in Agrarian S ociety
must be No. The local communities depend for their functioning on
a good measure of face-to-face contact, and they cannot expand in
size radically without 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 political expression, even in aspiration, let
alone in achievement. But when a pan-Hellenic polity was estab­
lished under Macedonian leadership, it very rapidly grew into an
empire transcending by far the bounds of Hellenism. In ancient
Greece, chauvinistic though the Greeks were in their own way, there
appears to have been no slogan equivalent to Ein Reich, Ein Volk,
Ein Fuehrer,

The varieties of agrarian rulers

The agro-literate polity is a kind of society which has been in exis­

tence some five millennia or so and which, despite the variety of its
forms, shares certain basic features. The great majority of its citizens
are agricultural producers, living in inward-turned communities,
and they are dominated by a minority whose chief distinguishing
attributes are the management of violence, the maintenance of order,
and the control of the official wisdom of the society, which is even­
tually enshrined in script. This warrior-and-scribe ruling class can
be fitted into a rough typology, in terms of the following set of
oppositions:
1 Centralized Uncentralized
2 Gelded Stallions
3 Closed Open
4 Fused Specialized
1 Both a clerisy and a military class can be either centralized or
decentralized. The medieval Catholic Church is a splendid example
of an effectively centralized clerisy which can dominate the moral
 C ulture in Agrarian S ociety 15
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 stern
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 warrior/bureaucrat/
cleric either of ancestry, or of posterity, or of both. The techniques
used included the use of eunuchs, physically incapable of possessing
posterity; of priests whose privileged position was conditional on
celibacy, thereby preventing them from avowing posterity; of
foreigners, whose kin links could be assumed to be safely distant; or
of members of otherwise disfranchised or excluded groups, who
would be helpless if separated from the employing state. Another
technique was the employment of ‘slaves’, men who, though in fact
privileged and powerful, nevertheless, being ‘owned’ by the state,
technically had no other legitimate links, and whose property and
position could revert to the state at any time, without even the fiction
of a right to due process, and thus 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 Kali-
phate. 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

^Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves^ Cambridge, 1978, ch. 4.

16 C ulture in Agrarian S ociety
socially, and retain their positions for their offspring, may be called
stallions.
3 There are advantages in clerisies, bureaucracies and military
classes being open., and in their being closed. European clergy and
Chinese bureaucrats were technically open (as were Muslim ulama)^
though they were recruited predominantly from a restricted stratum.
In Hinduism, priests and warrior-rulers are both closed and distinct,
and their mutual (theoretical) impenetrability may be essential to the
working of the system. They are both closed and non-fused, distinct.
In Islam (excluding Mamluk and Janissary periods) neither clerisy
nor the military are gelded.
4 Finally, the ruling class may either fuse the military and
clerical (and possibly other) functions, or carefully segregate them
into specialized groups. Hinduism formally separated them. Euro­
pean 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. They 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 bounds of the local polity,
and is trans-political and in competition with the state. Only seldom
(as in the case of the Chinese bureaucracy) is it co-extensive with a
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 complementarity and mutual inter­
dependence between itself and the other orders. It seeks to streng­
then its own position by making itself indispensable, and the com­
plementary roles it ascribes to itself and to the laity, far from re­
quiring its own universalization, formally preclude it. Notwith­
standing the fact that it claims monopolistic authority over ritual
propriety, it does not wish to see itself emulated. It has little wish for
the sincerest form of flattery, imitation, though it does provoke it.
Elsewhere, as in Islam, the clerisy from time to time takes its own
missionary duties, to be practised among the habitually relapsing
 C ulture in Agrarian S ociety 17
weaker brethren 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, every­
one is allowed to do all three of these things, if his aptitudes and en­
ergy allow. (This latent egalitarianism is very important for the suc­
cessful adaptation of Islam to the modern world.) Thus there is no
formal or theological obstacle to a clerical missionary cultural policy
d outrance. In practice there is still a problem: if everyone really sys­
tematically 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 im­
posed 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 cog­
nitive 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.
18 C ulture in Agrarian Society
Note also that in the agrarian order only some elite strata in some
societies were systematically 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 indefinitely. The guardians, be
they Mamluks or Janissaries, bureaucrats or prebend-holders, be­
come corrupted, acquire interests and links and continuity, or are
seduced by the pursuit of honour and wealth and the lure of self­
perpetuation. Agrarian man seems to be made of a corruptible'metal.
His successor, industrial man, seems to be made of purer, though
not totally pure, metal. What happens when a social order is acci­
dentally 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 Robey putting the obligations to his
calling above the claims of kinship? In an age of universalized clerisy
and Mamluk-dom, the relationship of culture and polity changes
radically. A high culture pervades the whole of society, defines it, and
needs to be sustained by the polity. That is the secret of nationalism.
Industrial Society

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 p>erformed 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 industriahsm,
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 he far less in his fascin­
ating but speculative and inconclusive hypothesis about the genesis
of the capitahst 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 industriahsm only occurred after
Weber, and as a consequence of the emergence of non-capitalist
industrial societies, nevertheless this reformulation of the crucial
20 I ndustrial S ociety
question is already implicit in Weber’s preoccupation with bureau­
cracy, alongside his concern with the entrepreneurial spirit. If a cen­
tralized bureaucracy exemplifies the new Geist just as much as does
the rational businessman, then clearly we are concerned with indust­
rialism, rather than with capitalism as such.
In the Weberian, and I think in any plausible account of the new
spirit, the notion of rationality must be central and important. Weber
himself was not particularly deft in 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 eight­
eenth century, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, both of whom,
under the fond delusion that they were analysing the human mind as
such, an sich^ 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 bureaucrat. 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. Order­
liness 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 indepen­
dent 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 o f‘irrelevant’ considerations; and consequently
it carries the bureaucratic requirement of symmetry of treatment as
an immediate corollary. The imperative of symmetry does not quite
so immediately imply the corollary of efficiency (and indeed, as an
empirical fact, bureaucrats, even or especially perfectly honest and
conscientious ones, are not always particularly efficient, as Weber
himself noted); nevertheless, any sustained and non-superficial
implementation of the requirement of orderliness will imply the use
of a general and neutral idiom for the specification both of ends and
of fact, of the environment in which the ends are to be pursued.
 I ndustrial S ociety 21
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 im­
pression 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 Des­
cartes. 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 har­
vesting, 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 intell­
igible and acceptable ideal. Modern philosophies of knowledge are
frequently our expression and codification of this idea and aspir­
ation, which in turn is not a philosophical whim, but has profound
social roots.
22 I ndustrial S ociety
Equalization and homogenization of facts is incomplete unless
accompanied by what may be called the separation of all separables,
the esprit d'analyse^ the breaking up of all complexes into their con­
stituent parts (even if it can only be done in thought), and the refusal
to countenance conceptual package deals. It is precisely by binding
things together that traditional visions perpetuate themselves and
the prejudgements contained within them; and it is by insisting on
prising things apart that we have liberated ourselves from them.
These package-deals, and the discontinuous conceptual spaces, are
the equivalents, in the sphere of ideas, of the stable social groupings
and structures at the level of men. Likewise, the unified and stan­
dardized, as it were metric world of facts, as conceived in the philo­
sophies of Hume or Kant, is the analogue of the anonymous and
equal collectivities of men in a mass society. In the present argu­
ment, we are concerned with men and their groupings, rather than
with ideas; but the unification of their ideas in continuous and uni­
tary 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
social aggression 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
improved their lot, and sometimes it may even have been true that
improvements came not as single spies but in battalions. But the
improvement was never perpetual, nor expected to be so. Something
special must have happened to have engendered so unusual and
remarkable an expectation.
And indeed, something unusual, something unique, had hap­
pened. The conception of the world as homogeneous, subject to
systematic, indiscriminate laws, and as open to interminable
exploration, offered endless possibilities of new combinations of
means with no firm prior expectations and limits: no possibilities
would be barred, and in the end nothing but evidence would decide
how things were, and how they could be combined to secure desired
 I ndustrial Society 23
effects. This was a totally new vision. The old worlds were, on the
one hand, each of them, a cosmos: purposive, hierarchial, ‘meaning­
ful’; and on the other hand, not quite unified, consisting of sub­
worlds 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? Ours is. This is the pre-condition, the price
of a world of endless discovery. Inquiry must not be bound by the
natural affinities 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 com­
portment 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 and the advancement
of the economy of which he is a part hinges, once again, on his un­
trammelled 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 con­
temporary 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 main­
tenance 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 per­
ceptions 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
24 Industrial S ociety
the consequences of such perpetual growth have striking parallels
with the vision which was its condition.

The society of perpetual growth

If cognitive growth presupposes that no element is indissolubly

linked a priori to any other, and that everything is open to re­
thinking, then economic and productive growth requires exactly the
same of human activities and hence of human roles. Roles become
optional and instrumental. The old stability of the social role struc­
ture is simply incompatible with growth and innovation. 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 per­
sistence 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
nationalism is thereby solved. Nationalism is rooted in a certain kind
of division of labour, one which is complex and persistently, cumu­
latively changing.
High productivity, as Adam Smith insisted so much, requires a
complex and refined division of labour. Perpetually growing pro­
ductivity requires that this division be not merely complex, but also
perpetually, and often rapidly, changing. This rapid and continuous
change both of the economic role system itself and of the occupancy
of places within it, has certain immediate and 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
precariousness of bourgeois fortunes, though he erroneously attri­
buted stability of social station to pastoralists, mistaking their
genealogical myths for reality.
The immediate consequence of this new kind of mobility is a
certain kind of egalitarianism. Modern society is not mobile because
 Industrial S ociety 25
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 re­
quired 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 strati­
fication. 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 left-
wing sociologists claim, tied to a rigid stratificational system. Com­
pared 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
obvious difference 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 pre­
tends 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. Neverthe­
less, though both systems tend to exaggerate their own central
26 I ndustrial S ociety
features, they do indeed markedly possess the trait they claim as
their own when contrasted with each other: one is rigid, the other
mobile. But if that is the obvious contrast, what are the subtler
features which accompany it?
Compare in detail the division of labour in a highly advanced
agrarian society with that of an average industrial one. Every kind of
function, for instance now has at least one kind of specialist associated
with it. Car mechanics are becoming specialized in terms of the make
of car they service. The industrial society will have a larger pop­
ulation, 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 some criteria, it may well be that a fully developed agrarian
society actually has the more complex division of labour. The
specialisms within it are more distant from each other than are the
possibly more numerous specialisms of an industrial society, which
tend to have what can only be described as a mutual affmity of style.
Some of the specialisms of a mature agrarian society will be extreme:
they will be the fruits of lifelong, very prolonged and totally dedic­
ated training, which may have commenced in early youth and re­
quired 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 complexity mastered by the schoolmen of a developed agrarian
society is often such as to strain the very limits of the human mind.
In brief, although the peasants, who form the great majority of an
agrarian society, are more or less mutually interchangeable when it
comes to the performance of the social tasks which are normally
assigned to them, the important minority of specialists within such
societies are outstandingly complementary to each other; each one of
them, or each group of them, is dependent on the others and, when
sticking to its last, its specialism, quite incapable of self-sufficiency.
It is curious that, by contrast, in industrial society, notwith­
standing its larger number of specialisms, the distance between
specialists is far less great. Their mysteries are far closer to mutual
intelligibility, their manuals have idioms which overlap to a much
 I ndustrial S ociety 27
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 civiliz­
ations 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 generic training, not
specifically connected with the highly specialized professional act­
ivity of the person in question, and preceding it. 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 adoles­
cents up to an astonishingly late age. Specialized schools have pres­
tige only at the end of the educational process, if they constitute a
kind of completion of a prolonged previous unspecialized edu­
cation; 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 so. But,
although some of the frills and affectations attached to higher edu­
cation 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 para­
dox, but as something altogether fitting and necessary. The kind of
specialization found in industrial society rests precisely on a common
foundation of unspecialized and standardized training.
A modern army subjects its recruits first to a shared generic
training, in the course of which they are meant to acquire and inter­
nalize 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 speciahsts. A modern society is, in this respect, like a
28 I ndustrial S ociety
modern army, only more so. It provides a very prolonged and fairly
thorough training for all its recruits, insisting on certain shared
qualifications: literacy, numeracy, basic work habits and social skills,
familiarity with basic technical and social skills. For the large
majority of the population the distinctive skills involved in working
life are superimposed on the basic training, either on the job or as
part of a much less prolonged supplementary training; and the
assumption is that anyone who has completed the generic training
common to the entire population can be re-trained for most other
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 seldom really 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 easily or at all replaceable by anyone not sharing their own par­
ticular educational background and talent.
The ideal of universal literacy and the right to education is a well-
known 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 con­
sider these phrases as simple verbiage. Most constitutions guaran­
teeing free speech and elections are as informative about the societies
they allegedly define as a man saying ‘Good morning’ is about the
weather. All this is well known. What is so very curious, and highly
significant, about the principle of universal and centrally guaranteed
education, is that it is an ideal more honoured in the observance than
in the breach. In this it is virtually unique among modern ideals; and
this calls for an explanation. Professor Ronald Dore has powerfully
criticized this tendency,^ particularly among developing societies, of
^Ronald Dore, The Diploma Disease^ London, 1976. For an approach to the
social implications of literacy at an earlier stage, see Jack Goody (ed.).
Literacy in Traditional Societies, Cambridge, 1968.
 I ndustrial S ociety 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 im­
partial 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 modern 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 modern 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 specific methods such as
training, exercises, precepts, rites de passage and 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 I ndustrial Society
the local community, and which takes over the preparation of the
young human beings in question, and eventually 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 developed a
high degree of perfection and effectiveness in the Ottoman empire,
when under the devshirme and janissary systems, young boys, either
secured as a tax obligation from conquered populations, or pur­
chased as slaves, were systematically trained for war and adminis­
tration 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, pre­
literate agrarian societies.
Societies consisting of sub-communities can be divided into those
in which the sub-communities can, if necessary, reproduce them­
selves 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 com­
munities of agrarian society can reproduce themselves indepen­
dently. The anthropological concept of a segmentary society con­
tains precisely this idea: the ‘segment’ is simply a smaller variant of
the larger society of which it is a part, and can do on a smaller scale
everything done by the larger unit.
Furthermore, one must distinguish between economic and educa­
tional 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 non-
self-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
group reproduction. When feudal lords send their sons as half-
trainees, half-hostages to the local court, when masters accept
apprentices who are not their sons, and so forth, we are obviously in
the presence of such mixed systems.
Generally speaking, the situation in agrarian society seems to be
this: the great majority of the population belongs to self-reproducing
 I ndustrial S ociety 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 them­
selves by taking on apprentices, and perform part-time services for
the rest of the community: ritual, therapeutic, admonitory, secre­
tarial, 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 out­
side 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 may or may not
form a guild or be incorporated in an organization. As, generally
speaking, writing soon transcends its purely technical use in record­
keeping, and acquires moral and theological significance, the clerks
or clerics are almost invariably far more than mere grapho-
technicians. 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 voice of
the totality. They are in an inherently paradoxical situation. Logi­
cians 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 Industrial S ociety
(and they are not just logical) are with them, and they are not easily
resolved.
In the end, modern society resolves this conundrum by turning
everyone into a cleric, by turning this potentially universal class into
an effectively universal one, by ensuring that everyone without
exception is taught by it, that exo-education becomes the universal
norm, and that no-one culturally speaking, shaves himself. Modern
society is one in which no sub-community, below the size of one
capable of sustaining an independent educational system, can any
longer reproduce itself. The reproduction of fully socialized indivi­
duals 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 cosmology and moral order, is based in the last analy­
sis on economic growth, on the universal incremental Danegeld and
the hope of a perpetual augmentation of satisfactions, whose legiti­
macy 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
possessors of the society’s generic training. (While the little bit extra
seldom amounts to much, the shared and truly essential generic core
is supplied at a rather high level, not perhaps when compared with
the intellectual peaks of agrarian society, but certainly when placed
alongside its erstwhile customary average.)
But is is not only mobility and re-training which engender this
imperative. It is also the content of most professional activities.
Work, in industrial society, does not mean moving matter. The
paradigm of work is no longer ploughing, reaping, thrashing. Work,
in the main, is no longer the manipulation of things, but of
 Industrial S ociety 33
meanings. It generally involves exchanging communications with
other people, or manipulating the controls of a machine. The pro­
portion 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
of buttons or switches or leavers which need to be understood, and are
explicable, once again, in some standard idiom intelligible to all
comers.
For the first time in human history, explicit and reasonably pre­
cise communication becomes generally, pervasively used and impor­
tant. 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 pre­
cise, 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 to the full by schoolmen and jurists, and all kinds of context-
evading 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 instru­
ment, given that it had evolved in a milieu which in no way called for
this development, and did not selectively favour it if it manifested
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 pro­
duced 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 high-
powered technology and the expectancy of sustained growth, which
34 Industrial S ociety
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 re­
sources to reproduce their own personnel. The level of literacy and
technical competence, in a standardized medium, a common concep­
tual currency, which is required of members of this society if they
are to be properly employable and enjoy full and effective moral
citizenship, is so high that it simply cannot be provided by the kin or
local units, such as they are. It can only be provided by something
resembling a 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 smaller than 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 self­
reproduction, 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 politi­
cal 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) doctoral d'etat 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
 I ndustrial S ociety 35
psyche can be assumed to have persisted unchanged through the
many many millennia of the existence of the human race, and not to
have become either better or worse during the relatively brief and
very recent age of nationalism. One may not invoke a general sub­
strate 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 specific roots. 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 excep­
tion, 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 universal high 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 follow the manuals and instructions of a new activity
or occupation. In the course of their work they must constantly
communicate with a large number of other men, with whom they
frequently have no previous association, and with whom communi­
cation must consequently be explicit, rather than relying on context.
They must also be able to communicate by means of written, imper­
sonal, 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 guaran­
tees 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 I ndustrial S ociety
applies to the educational machine at least as much as to any other
segment of society,and perhaps more so. Some very great teachers
and researchers may perhaps be unique and irreplaceable, but the
average professor and schoolmaster can be replaced from outside the
teaching profession with the greatest of ease and often with little, if
any, loss.
What are the implications of all this for the society and for its
members? The employability, dignity, security and self-respect of
individuals, typically, and for the majority of men now hinges on
their education^ and the limits of the culture within which they were
educated are also the limits of the world within which they can,
morally and professionally, breathe. A man’s education is by far his
most precious investment, and in effect confers his identity on him.
Modern 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 self-
respect 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 bene­
ficiaries; all the same, advantages secured in these ways are often
explained away and are viewed at best ambivalently. It is interesting
to ask whether the 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 con­
spicuous, 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, as it persists in being in some surviving agrarian societies, or
in societies which continue to uphold the ethos of pre-industrial life.
Curiously enough, the notion of conspicuous waste was coined by
a work-oriented member of a work-addicted society, Thorsten
Veblen, scandalized by what he saw as the survivals from a
 I ndustrial S ociety 37
pre-industrial, predatory age. The egalitarian, work- and career-
oriented surface of industrial society is as significant as its inegali­
tarian 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 indis­
pensable - and in another sense much less so, having lost its mono­
poly of access to the cultural wisdom enshrined in scripture. In a
society in which everyone is gelded by indentification v/ith his pro­
fessional 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 adminis­
trative 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 attach­
ments 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 pro­
viding 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 financial
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 organi­
zation, 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 sus­
tained by harsher and coercive constraints; culture is now the
necessary shared medium, the life-blood or perhaps rather the
38 Industrial S ociety
minimal shared atmosphere, within which alone the members of the
society can breathe and survive and produce. For a given society, it
must be one in which they can all breathe and speak and produce; so
it must be the same culture. Moreover, it must now be a great or high
(literate, training-sustained) culture, and it can no longer be a diver­
sified, locality-tied, illiterate little culture or tradition.
But some organism must ensure that this literate and unified cul­
ture 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 indus­
tries, the manufacture of viable and usable human beings. That
shadow-state dating 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 in­
effectual, unless the Church fought on behalf of an inclusive high
culture and thereby indirectly on behalf of a new nationalist state.
Time was when education was a cottage industry, when men could
be made by a village or clan. That time has now gone, and gone for­
ever. (In education, small can now be beautiful only if it is covertly
parasitic on the big.) Exo-socialization, the production and repro­
duction of men outside the local intimate unit, is now the norm, and
must be so. The imperative of exo-socialization is the main clue to
why state and culture must now be linked, whereas in the past their
connection was thin, fortuitous, varied, loose, and often minimal.
Now it is unavoidable. That is what nationalism is about, and why
we live in an age of nationalism.
The Transition to an Age of Nationalism

The most important steps in the argument have now been made.
Mankind is irreversibly committed to industrial society, and there­
fore 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 con­
demn 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
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 convergence of 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 T he T ransition to N ationalism
occasionally, by accident, it produced a dynastic state which corre­
sponded, more or less, with a language and a culture, as eventually
happened on Europe’s Atlantic seabord. (The fit was never very
close. Culture in agrarian society is much more pluralistic than its
empires, and generally much broader than its small participatory
social units.)
All this being so, the age of transition to industrialism was bound,
according to our model, also to be an age of nationalism, a period of
turbulent readjustment, in which either political boundaries, or
cultural ones, or both, were being modified, so as to satisfy the new
nationalist imperative which now, for the first time, was making itself
felt. Because rulers do not surrender territory gladly (and every
change of a political boundary must make someone a loser), because
changing one’s culture is very frequently a most painful experience,
and moreover, because there were rival cultures struggling to cap­
ture 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 follows from 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 scene by 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 conse­
quences of industrialism. Though nationalism is indeed an effect of
industrial social organization, it is not the only effect of the imposi­
tion of this new social form, and hence it is necessary to disentangle
it from those other developments.
The problem is illustrated by the fascinating relationship between
the Reformation and nationalism. The stress of the Reformation on
literacy and scripturalism, its onslaught on a monopolistic priest­
hood (or, as Weber clearly saw, its universalization rather than
abolition of priesthood), its individualism and links with mobile
 T he T ransition to N ationalism 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 indus­
trial 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 none­
theless be turned in that direction during the age when the drives to
industrialism and to nationalism were making their impact. For­
mally 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 famili­
arity with the sacred.^ 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.

^Personal communication from Ronald Dore.

42 T he T ransition to N ationalism
Apart from the links between the Protestant and nationalist ethos,
there are the direct consequences of industrialization itself. The
general and pervasive consequences of an established industrial
order have already been discussed, in connection with our general
model linking the industrial division of labour with the implemen­
tation of the nationalist principle. But certain specific consequences
of early industrialization which do not generally persist later never­
theless 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 some­
times by European settler populations. In effect the whole of Africa,
America, Oceania, and very large parts of Asia came under Euro­
pean 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
was eventually carried out and completed by nations increasingly
oriented towards industry and trade, not by a militaristic machine,
nor by a swarm of temporarily cohesive tribesmen. It was achieved
without any total preoccupation with the process on the part of the
conqueror nations. The point made about the English, that they
acquired their Empire in a state of absence of mind, can to some
extent be generalized. (The English also, most laudably, lost the
 T he T ransition to N ationalism 43
Empire with a similar lack of attention.) When Europe was con­
quering ^nd dominating the world, it had, on the whole, other, more
pressing and internal things to occupy its attention. It did not even
pay the conquered nations the compliment of being specially inter­
ested 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 non­
commercial 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 modern 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 con­
gruent, to endow a culture with its own political roof, and not more
than one roof at that. Culture, an elusive concept, was deliberately
left undefined. But an at least provisionally acceptable criterion of
culture might be language, as at least a sufficient, if not a necessary
44 T he T ransition to N ationalism
touchstone of it. Allow for a moment a difference of language to
entail a difference of culture (though not necessarily the reverse).
If this is granted, at least temporarily, certain consequences
follow. I have heard the number of languages on earth estimated at
around 8000. The figure can no doubt be increased by counting
dialects separately. If we allow the ‘precedent’ argument, this be­
comes legitimate: if a kind of differential which in some places defines
a nationalism is allowed to engender a ‘potential nationalism’
wherever else a similar difference is found, then the number of
potential nationalisms increases sharply. For instance, diverse
Slavonic, Teutonic and Romance languages are in fact often no
further apart than are the mere dialects within what are elsewhere
conventionally seen as unitary languages. Slav languages, for in­
stance, are probably closer to each other than are the various forms
of colloquial Arabic, 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 Scots to Irish nationalism, and the rest to English nationalism),
invoking instead a shared historical experience. Yet if such addi­
tional links be allowed to count (as long as they don’t contradict the
requirement of my model, that they can serve as a base for an
eventually homogeneous, internally mobile culture/polity with one
educational machine 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 states in 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 attained their state (and perhaps never will), but which are
struggling in that direction and thus have a legitimate claim to be
counted among actual, and not merely potential, nationalisms. On
the other hand, one must also subtract all those states which have
come into being without the benefit of the blessing of nationalist
endorsement, and which do not satisfy the nationalist criteria of poli­
tical legitimacy, and indeed defy them; for instance, all the diverse
mini-states dotted about the globe as survivals of a pre-nationalist
 T he T ransition to N ationalism 45
age, and sometimes brought forth as concessions to geographical
accident or political compromise. Once all these had been sub­
tracted, the resulting figure would again, presumably, not be too far
above 200. But let us, for the sake of charity, pretend that we have
four times that number of reasonably effective nationalisms on earth,
in other words, 800 of them. I believe this to be considerably larger
than the facts would justify, but let it pass.
This rough calculation still gives us only one effective nationalism
for ten potential ones! And this surprising ratio, depressing pre­
sumably for any enthusiastic pan-nationalist, if such a person exists,
could be made much larger if the ‘precedent’ argument were applied
to the full to determine the number of potential nationalisms, and if
the criteria of entry into the class of effective nationalisms were made
at all stringent.
What is one to conclude from this? That for every single nation­
alism which has so far raised its ugly head, nine others are still
waiting in the wings? That all the bomb-throwing, martyrdoms,
exchange of populations, and worse, which have so far beset human­
ity, are still to be repeated tenfold?
I think not. For every effective nationalism, there are n potential
ones, groups defined 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
some groups do indeed feel it, but members of most groups, with
analogous claims, evidently do not.
To explain this, we must return to the accusation made against
nationalism: that it insists on imposing homogeneity on the popu­
lations unfortunate enough to fall under the sway of authorities
possessed by the nationalist ideology. The assumption underlying
this accusation is that traditional, ideologically uninfected authori­
ties, such as the Ottoman Turks, had kept the peace and extracted
taxes, but otherwise tolerated, and been indeed profoundly indif­
ferent to, the diversity of faiths and cultures which they governed.
By contrast, their gunman successors seem incapable of resting in
peace till they have imposed the nationalist principle of cuius regio,
eius lingua. They do not want merely a fiscal surplus and obedience.
46 T he T ransition to N ationalism
They thirst after the cultural and linguistic souls of their sub­
jects.
This accusation must be stood on its head. It is not the case that
nationalism imposes homogeneity out of a wilful cultural Macht-
bedurfniss; it is the objective need for homogeneity which is reflected
in nationalism. If it is the case that a modern industrial state can only
function with a mobile, literate, culturally standardized, inter­
changeable population, as we have argued, then the illiterate, half-
starved populations sucked from their erstwhile rural cultural ghet-
toes into the melting pots of shanty-towns yearn for incorporation
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, access to primary schools, employment, and
all. Often, these alienated, uprooted, wandering populations may
vacillate between diverse options, and they may often come to a pro­
visional 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 continue to 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:
genetically transmitted 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
a couple of villages offers few prospects - or very diffused or lacking
in 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 propa­
gate the culture in question. It is impossible to pick out any single
qualification, or set of qualifications, which will either guarantee the
success as a nationalist catalyst of the culture endowed with it (or
them), or which on the contrary will ensure its failure. Size, histori­
city, reasonably compact territory, a capable and energetic intellec­
tual class: all these will obviously help; but no single one is necessary.
 T he T ransition to N ationalism 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 any one 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 nation­
alisms 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
pression.
This is precisely what we do find. Most cultures or potential
national groups enter the age of nationalism without even the feeb­
lest effort to benefit from it themselves. The number of groups
which in terms of the ‘precedent’ argument could try to become
nations, which could define themselves by the kind of criterion
which in some other place does in fact define some real and effective
nation, is legion. Yet most of them go meekly to their doom, to see
their culture (though not themselves as individuals) slowly disappear,
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 Ger­
many 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 T he T ransition to N ationalism
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 o f ‘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 ex­
pressed this vision: ‘Nations may have had a long history before they
finally reach their destination - that of forming themselves into
states’^ Hegel immediately goes on to suggest that this pre-state
period is really ‘pre-historical’ {sic): so it would seem that on this
view the real history of a nation only begins when it acquires its own
state. If we invoke 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 enough. Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying
men, as an inherent though long-delayed political destiny, are a

*G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History^\x. H.B. Nisbet,

Cambridge, 1975, p. 134.
 T he T ransition to N ationalism 49
myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and
turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliter­
ates 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 cul­
tures, often subtly grouped, shading into each other, overlapping,
intertwined; and there exist, usually but not always, political units 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 them­
selves 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 pre­
vailing, though admittedly using as their raw material the cultural,
historical and other inheritances from the pre-nationalist world. 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 modern world, nor altogether
irresistible. In most cases it prevails, and above all, it determines the
norm for the legitimacy of political units in the modern 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 affir­
mation of each and every ‘nationality’; and these alleged entities are
supposed just to be there, like Mount Everest, since long ago, ante­
dating the age of nationalism. So, ironically, in its own terms nation­
alism 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
50 T he T ransition to N ationalism
contradicts and offends its own self-image, then the conclusion must
be that it is a very strong force, though not perhaps a unique or
irresistible one.

Wild and garden cultures

One way of approaching the central issue is this. Cultures, like

plants, can be divided into savage and cultivated varieties. The
savage kinds are produced and reproduce themselves spontaneously,
as parts of the life of men. No community is without some shared
system of communication and norms, and the wild systems of this
kind (in other words, cultures) reproduce themselves from gener­
ation to generation without conscious design, supervision, surveill­
ance 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 per­
sonnel, 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, domi­
nant. 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 cen­
tralized state. They could also deputize for that state, when it
weakened or disintegrated during times of troubles or a dark age. A
church or a ritual system could stand in for the shadow of a past or
ghost empire. But the high cultures did not generally define the
limits of a political unit, and there are good reasons why, in the
agrarian age, they should not have been able to do so.
In the industrial age all this changes. The high cultures come to
dominate in quite a new sense. The old doctrines associated with
them mostly lose their authority, but the literate idioms and styles of
communication they carried become far more effectively authori­
tative and normative, and, above all, they come to be pervasive and
universal in society. In other words, virtually everyone becomes
 T he T ransition to N ationalism 51
literate, and communicates in an elaborate code, in explicit, fairly
‘grammaticar (regularized) sentences, not in context-bound grunts
and nods.
But the high culture, newly universalized in the population, now
badly needs political support and underpinning. In the agrarian age,
it sometimes had this and benefited from it, but at other times it
could dispense with political protection, and that was indeed one of
its strengths. In a dark age when anarchy prevailed and the king’s
peace was no longer kept, Christian or Buddhist monasteries, der­
vish 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 infrastruc­
ture. As a character in No Orchids for Miss Blandish observed, every
girl ought to have a husband, preferably her own; and every high
culture now wants a state, and preferably its own. Not every wild
culture can become a high culture, and those without serious pros­
pects 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 avail­
able 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 nation­
alism breaks out.
Another analogy, in addition to the above botanical one, is avail­
able 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 nature-
given 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
52 T he T ransition to N ationalism
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,
which will be 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 were good 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 differ­
ence 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 losses to be made and avoided. Internationalism
was often predicted by the prophets and commentators of the indus­
trial age, both on the left and on the right, but the very opposite
came to pass: the age of nationalism.
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 especially promising
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 con­
sider why this is so.
No doubt will or consent contitutes an important factor in the
formation of most groups, large and small. Mankind has always been
organized in groups, of all kinds of shapes and sizes, sometimes
sharply defined and sometimes loose, sometimes neatly nested and
sometimes overlapping or intertwined. The variety of these possi­
bilities, 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 few communi­
ties 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 define nations as groups which will themselves to persist as
communities,* the definition-net that we have cast into the sea will
bring forth far too rich a catch. The haul which we shall have 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 definition) the same also applies to many

^Ernest Renan, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une Nation’, republished in Ernest Renan et

VAllemagne, Textes receuillis et commentes par Emile Bure, NY, 1945.
54 What is a N ation?
other clubs, conspiracies, gangs, teams, parties, not to mention the
many numerous communities and associations of the pre-industrial
age which 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 con­
tinue to be) also accompanied by calculation, fear and interest. (It is
an interesting and moot question whether sheer inertia, the persis­
tence 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
defined horizontally or in other ways. In brief, even if will were the
basis of a nation (to paraphrase an idealist definition of the state), it
is also the basis of so much else, that we cannot possibly define the
nation in this manner. It is only because, in the modern, nationalist
age, national units are the preferred^ favoured objects of identification
and willed adherence, that the definition seems tempting, because
those other kinds of group are now so easily forgotten. Those who
take the tacit assumptions of nationalism for granted erroneously
also credit them to humanity at large, in any age. But a definition
tied to the assumptions and conditions of one age (and even then
constituting an exaggeration), cannot usefully be used to help to
explain the emergence of that age.
Any definition 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 boun­
daries 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 differ­
entiation does not, and indeed cannot, normally or generally con­
verge either with the boundaries of political units (the jurisdictions
of effective authorities) or with the boundaries of units blessed by
the democratic sacraments of consent and will. The agrarian world
simply could not 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,
literacy- and education-based systems of communication), a process
rapidly gathering pace throughout the world, has made it seem, to
anyone too deeply immersed in our contemporary assumptions, that
 What is a N ation? 55
nationality may be definable in terms of shared culture. Nowadays
people can live only in units defined by a shared culture, and inter­
nally mobile and fluid. Genuine cultural pluralism ceases to be viable
under current conditions. But a little bit of historical awareness or
sociological sophistication should dispel the illusion that this was
alw^ays so. Culturally plural societies often worked well in the past:
so well, in fact, that cultural plurality was sometimes invented where
it was previously lacking.
If, for such cogent reasons, these two apparently promising paths
towards the definition of nationality are barred, is there another
way?
The great, but valid, paradox is this: nations can be defined only
in terms of the age of nationalism, rather than, as you might expect,
the other way round. It is not the case that the ‘age of nationalism’ is
a mere summation of the awakening and political self-assertion of
this, that, or the other nation. Rather, when general social con­
ditions make for standardized, homogeneous, centrally sustained
high cultures, pervading entire populations and not just elite minori­
ties, a situation arises in which well-defined educationally sanctioned
and unified cultures constitute very nearly the only kind of unit 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 poli­
tical units constitutes a scandal.
Under these conditions, though under these conditions only^
nations can indeed be defined 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 undis­
cussed.) These conditions do not define 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 N ation?
Dead languages can be revived, traditions invented, quite fictitious
pristine purities restored. But this culturally creative, fanciful, posi­
tively inventive aspect of nationalist ardour ought not to allow any­
one to conclude, erroneously, that nationalism is a contingent, arti­
ficial, ideological invention, which might not have 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 cul­
tural shreds and patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary his­
torical 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 incar­
nations, 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 them­
selves brazenly and openly, spurning the camouflage. At Nurem­
berg, 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 interest 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, continuity and solidarity, and they systematically obscure
and play down the difference between such a tacitly reductionist
‘faith’, and the real thing which had preceded it and had played such
a crucial part in earlier European history, a part which could never
have been played by the unrecognizably diluted, watered-down
current versions.
But the fact that social self-worship, whether virulent and violent
or gentle and evasive, is now an openly avowed collective self­
worship, rather than a means of covertly revering society though the
 What is a N ation? 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 popu­
lation. It means that generalized diffusion of a school-mediated,
academy-supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of reason­
ably 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 self­
presentation when the narod or Volk is ruled by officials of 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 will have 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., Sovremennye Etnicheskie Protsessy v SSSR (Con­

temporary Ethnic Processes in the USSR), Moscow, 1975.
58 What is a N ation?
like to express their real or imagined sentiments and roots, and who
will no doubt indulge in as much nationalist behaviour as the politi­
cal situation may allow.
So a sociological self-deception, a vision of reality through a prism
of illusion, still persists, but it is not the same as that which was
analysed by Durkheim. Society no longer worships itself through
religious symbols; a modern, streamlined, on-wheels high culture
celebrates itself in song and dance, which it borrows (stylizing it in
the process) from a folk culture which it fondly believes itself to be
perpetuating, defending, and reaffirming.

The course of true nationalism never did run smooth

A characteristic scenario of the evolution of a nationalism - and we

shall have cause to return to this kind of scenario - ran something
like this. The Ruritanians were a peasant population speaking a
group of related and more or less mutually intelligible dialects, and
inhabiting a series of discontinuous but not very much separated
pockets within the lands of the Empire of Megalomania. The Ruri­
tanian language, or rather the dialects which could be held to com­
pose it, was not really spoken by anyone other than these peasants.
The aristocracy and officialdom spoke the language of the Megalo-
manian court, which happened to belong to a language group dif­
ferent from the one of which 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, especially higher 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 country­
side 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 collec­
ted by village schoolmasters late in the nineteenth century, and made
well known to the international musical public by the compositions
of the great Ruritanian national composer L.). The pitiful opp­
ression of the Ruritanian peasantry provoked, in the eighteenth
century, the guerrilla resistance led by the famous Ruritanian social
 What is a N ation? 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, soon after
the promulgation of the Popular Socialist Republic of Ruritania.
Honesty compels one to admit that the social bandit was captured
by his own compatriots, and that the tribunal which condemned him
to a painful death had as its president another compatriot. Further­
more, 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 village defence units which had opposed the social bandit and his
gangs, rather than the said social bandit himself, in the interest of
not encouraging opposition to the police.
A careful analysis of the 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 dis­
close much evidence of any serious discontent on the part of the
peasantry with their linguistic and cultural situation, however grieved
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 - 1 often sang it
by the camp fire at the holiday camp to which I was sent during the
summer vacations - celebrates the fate of a shepherd boy, grazing
three bullocks on the seigneurial clover (sic) near the woods, who
was surprised by a group of social bandits, requiring him to sur­
render 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 songs do
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 N ation?
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 ideas in 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 encouragement
from a few foreign, non-Ruritanian ethnographers, musicologists
and historians who had come to explore Ruritania. The continuing
labour migration, increasingly widespread 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
language of Megalomania. No genetically transmitted trait, no deep
religious custom, differentiated an educated Ruritanian from a simi­
lar 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 Megalo­
mania) is quite full of Ruritanian names, though often rather comi­
cally spelt in the Megalomanian manner, and adapted to Megalo­
manian phonetic expectations. The point is that after a rather harsh
and painful start in the first generation, the life chances of the off­
spring of the Ruritanian labour migrant were not unduly bad, and
probably at least as good (given his willingness to work hard) as
those of his non-Ruritanian Megalomanian fellow-citizens. So these
offspring shared in the eventually growing prosperity and general
embourgeoisement of the region. Hence, as far as individual life
chances went, there was perhaps no need for a virulent Ruritanian
nationalism.
Nonetheless something of the kind did occur. It would, I think,
be quite wrong to attribute conscious calculation to the participants
in the movement. Subjectively, one must suppose that they had the
motives and feelings which are so vigorously expressed in the litera­
ture of the national revival. They deplored the squalor and neglect of
their home valleys, while yet also seeing the rustic virtues still to be
found in them; they deplored the discrimination to which their co­
nationals 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 N ation? 61
least many of their fellows. The manner in which, when the inter­
national political situation 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 conscious long­
term calculation of interest on anyone’s part. The nationalist intel­
lectuals were full of warm and generous ardour on behalf of the co­
nationals. 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, ambassadors and
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
steel mill (quite useless, as it then turned out) to the very heart of the
Ruritanian valleys, thus totally ruining quite a sizeable area of sur­
rounding arable land and pasture. It would be genuinely wrong to
try to reduce these sentiments to calculations of material advantage
or of social mobility. The present theory is sometimes travestied as 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 con­
scious of either. But when labour migration and bureaucratic em­
ployment 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 some­
one hostile to it. This very concrete experience taught them to be
aware of their culture, and to love it (or, indeed, to wish to be rid of
it) without any conscious calculation of advantages and prospects of
social mobility. In stable self-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 was not) it would,
in quite a number of cases (though by no means in all), have been a
very sound one. In fact, given the at least relative paucity of Ruri­
tanian intellectuals, those Ruritanians who did have higher qualifi­
cations 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 N ation?
ethnic groups. As for the peasants and workers, they did not benefit
immediately; but the drawing of a political boundary around the
newly defined ethnic Ruritania did mean the eventual fostering and
protection of industries in the area, and in the end drastically
diminished the need for labour migration from it.
What all this amounts to is this: during the early period of indus­
trialization, entrants into the new order who are drawn from cultural
and linguistic groups that are distant from those of the more ad­
vanced 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 eco­
nomic 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
newly emergent world. It enables them to conceive and express their
resentments and discontents in intelligible terms. Ruritanians had
previously thought and felt in terms of family unit and village, at
most in terms of a valley, and perhaps on occasion in terms of
religion. But now, swept into the melting pot of an early industrial
development, they had no valley and no village: and sometimes no
family. But there were other 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 encour­
agement from those journalists and teachers. And it was not an
illusion: the attainment of some of the objects of the nascent Ruri­
tanian national movement did indeed bring relief of the ills which
had helped to engender it. The relief would perhaps have come any­
way; but in this national form, it also brought forth a new high cul­
ture and its guardian state.
This is one of the two important principles of fission which deter­
mine the emergence of new units, when the industrial world with its
insulated cultural breathing tanks comes into being. It could be
called the principle of barriers to communication, barriers based on
previous, pre-industrial cultures; and it operates with special force
during the early period of industrialization. The other principle, just
as important, could be called that of inhibitors of social entropy; and
it deserves separate treatment.
Social Entropy and Equality in
Industrial Society

The transition from agrarian to industrial society has a kind of

entropy quality, a shift from pattern to systematic randomness.
Agrarian society, with its relatively stable specializations, its per­
sisting regional, kin, professional and rank groupings, has a clearly
marked social structure. Its elements are ordered, and not distri­
buted at random. Its sub-cultures underscore and fortify these struc­
tural differentiations, and they do not by setting up or accentuating
cultural difference within it in any way hamper the functioning of
the society at large. Quite the contrary. Far from finding such cul­
tural differentiations offensive, the society holds their expression
and recognition to be most fitting and appropriate. Respect for them
is the very essence of etiquette.
Industrial society is different. Its territorial and work units are ad
hoc: membership is fluid, has a great turnover, and does not gener­
ally engage or commit the loyalty and identity of members. In brief,
the old structures are dissipated and largely replaced by an internally
random and fluid totality, within which there is not much (certainly
when compared with the preceding agrarian society) by way of
genuine sub-structures. There is very little in the way of any effec­
tive, binding organization at any level between the individual and
the total community. This total and ultimate political community
thereby acquires a wholly new and very considerable importance,
being linked (as it seldom was in the past) both to the state and to the
cultural boundary. The nation is now supremely important, thanks
both to the erosion of sub-groupings and the vastly increased impor­
tance of a shared, literary-dependent culture. The state, inevitably,
is charged with the maintenance and supervision of an enormous
social infrastructure (the cost of which characteristically comes close
to one half of the total income of the society). The educational
system becomes a very crucial part of it, and the maintenance of
the cultural/linguistic medium now becomes the central role of
64 S ocial E ntropy and E quality
education. The citizens can only breathe conceptually and operate
within that medium, which is co-extensive with the territory of the
state and its educational and cultural apparatus, and which needs to
be protected, sustained and cherished.
The role of culture is no longer to underscore and make visible
and authoritative the structural differentiations within society (even
if some of them persist, and even if, as may happen, a few new ones
emerge); on the contrary, when on occasion cultural differences do
tie in with and reinforce status differences, this is held to be some­
what shameful for the society in question, and an index of partial
failure of its educational system. The task with which that system is
entrusted is to turn out worthy, loyal and competent members of the
total society whose occupancy of posts within it will not be hampered
by factional loyalties to sub-groups within the total community; and
if some part of the educational system, by default or from surrep­
titious design, actually produces internal cultural differences and
thereby permits or encourages discrimination, this is counted as
something of a scandal.

Obstacles to entropy

All this is only a reformulation of our general theory of the bases of

nationalism, of the new role of culture in mobile, educated, anony­
mous societies. But an important point is brought out by stressing
the need for this random-seeming, entropic mobility and distri­
bution of individuals in this kind of society. Within it, though sub­
communities are partly eroded, and their moral authority is much
weakened, nevertheless people continue to differ in all kinds of
ways. People can be categorized as tall and short, as fat and thin,
dark and light, and in many other ways. Clearly, there is simply
no limit to the number of ways in which people can be classified.
Most of the possible classifications will be of no interest whatever.
But some of them become socially and politically very important.
They are those which I am tempted to call entropy-resistant. A
classification is entropy-resistant if it is based on an attribute which
has a marked tendency not to become, even with the passage of time
since the initial establishment of an industrial society, evenly dis­
persed throughout the entire society. In such an entropy-resistant
 S ocial E ntropy and E quality 65
case, those individuals who are characterized by the trait in question
will tend to be concentrated in one part or another of the total
society.
Suppose a society contains a certain number of individuals who
are, by an accident of heredity, pigmentationally blue; and suppose
that, despite the passage of a number of generations since the initial
establishment of the new economy, and the official promulgation
and enforcement of a policy of la canine ouverte aux talents^ most
blues stubbornly persist in occupying places either at the top, or at
the bottom, of the society in question: in other words, the blues tend
to capture either too many, or too few of the advantages available in
this society. That would make blueness a social-entropy-resistant
trait, in the sense intended.
Note, by the way, that it is always possible to invent traits which,
at any given moment, may seem entropy-resistant. It is always
possible to invent a concept which will apply only to this or that class
of people. But the entropy-resistance of a concept, in this sense, will
normally be of interest only if it is a reasonably natural notion, one
already in use in the society in question, rather than artificially
invented for the present purpose. Then, if it is unevenly distributed
in the wider society, trouble may well ensue.
The rest of this argument can now easily be anticipated: entropy-
resistant traits constitute a very serious problem for industrial
society. Almost the reverse was true of agrarian society. Far from
deploring entropy-resistant traits, that kind of society habitually
invented them, whenever it found itself insufficiently supplied with
this commodity by nature. It liked to suppose that certain categories
of men were natural rulers, and that others were natural slaves, and
sanctions were deployed - punitive, ideological - to persuade men to
conform with these expectations and indeed to internalize them. The
society invented dubious human attributes or origins whose main
purpose was, precisely, to be entropy-resistant. The religious elite in
Muslim tribal lands is often defined and legitimated in terms of
descent from the Prophet; status among central Asian tribes is often
expressed in terms of descent from Genghiz Khan’s clan; European
aristocracies frequently believe themselves to be descended from a
distinct conquering ethnic group.
Entropy-resistance creates fissures, sometimes veritable chasms,
in the industrial societies in which it occurs. How does this fissure-
proneness differ from that engendered merely by cultural differences
66 S ocial E ntropy and E quality
and communication problems which take place in early industrial
society, and which were discussed in the preceding section?
The two phenomena do have a certain affinity and overlap. But
the differences are also important. The differential access to the
language/culture of the more advanced political and economic centre,
which hampers natives of more peripheral cultures and impels them
and their leaders towards a cultural and eventually political nation­
alism, is, of course, also an entropy-resistance of a kind. The
migrant labourers who do not even speak a dialectal variant of the
main state language used by bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, will, for
that very reason, be far more likely initially to remain at the bottom
of the social l^ierarchy, and hence incidentally be less able to correct
and compensate the disadvantages which haunt them, either for
themselves or for their children. On the other hand, when their lan­
guage (or rather, a standardized and streamlined version of one of its
dialects) becomes the educational, bureaucratic and commercial lan­
guage of a newly independent nationalist state, these particular dis­
advantages will disappear, and their cultural characteristics will
cease to be entropy-resistant.
But it is important to note that in our hypothetical case they could
also have escaped their handicap by assimilating to the old dominant
language and culture; and in fact, many men did take this path.
There is no reason to suppose that those who have trodden it are less
numerous than those who took the nationalist option. Indeed, many
must have taken both paths, successively or simultaneously.^ For
instance, many have become irredentist nationalists on behalf of a
culture which was not that of their genuine origins, assimilating
first, and then taking up political cudgels to ensure full high culture
status, and its own political state roof, for their new culture.
But what differentiates this kind of case, crucially important
though it is, from other kinds of entropy-resistance, is this: if all that
is really at stake is a communication gap (but crucially linked to
general status and economic disadvantage), then this can be reme­
died by either of the two methods discussed: a successful nation­
alism, or assimilation; or an overlap of both. But there are forms of
entropy-resistance whose fissiparous social consequences cannot be
remedied by correcting the communication disadvantage alone. The
second option, of assimilation through education, is barred. There is

‘F. Colonna, Instituteurs AlgerienSy 1883-1939, Paris, 1975.

 S ocial E ntropy and E quality 67
more than a communication barrier involved. If the first option
(successful irredentism, in effect) also happens to be closed by the
balance of political power, the situation is grave, and will continue to
fester.
Failure to communicate, such as arises between entrants from an
alien culture into an industrializing area, is one form of entropy-
inhibition (though one which can often easily be overcome in a
generation or so); but the obverse does not hold, and not all entropy-
inhibitions are due to a mere failure to communicate. Those which
are not due to a mere communication failure, and are remediable
neither by assimilation into the dominant pool, nor by the creation of
a new independent pool using the native medium of the entrants, are
correspondingly more tragic. They constitute a problem whose solu­
tion is not yet in sight, and which may well be one of the gravest
issues that industrial society has to face.
Let us return to our hypothetical case of a pigmentationally blue
sub-population within the wider society, and let us suppose that for
one reason or another this population is concentrated near the
bottom of the social scale. Industrial societies are quite inegalitarian
in providing their citizens with a wide variety of social positions,
some very much more advantageous than others; but they are also
egalitarian in that this system of posts forms a kind of continuum
(there are no radical discontinuities along it), and that there is a
widespread belief, possibly exaggerated but not wholly devoid of
truth, that it is possible to move up and down, and that rigid barriers
in the system are illegitimate. Compared at any rate with most
agrarian societies, industrial society is astonishingly egalitarian, and
there is, in developed industrial society, a marked convergence of
life-styles and a great dimunition of social distance. But in our hypo­
thetical case of a blue-coloured population, which is concentrated at
the bottom, the conjunction of easy identifiability (blue is a con­
spicuous colour) with the non-random, counter-entropic distribu­
tion of this category of people (the blues) has some very unfortunate
consequences.
It is safe to assume that populations frequently differ in some
measure in their innate talents. The supposition that all talents are
distributed with absolute equality is about as probable as a land
which is totally flat. It is equally obvious that when it comes to the
deployment of talents, social factors are far more important than
innate endowment. (Some of the populations most closely associated
68 S ocial E ntropy and E quality
with the achievements of humanity in recent centuries were backward
savages not so many generations earlier, though it is unlikely that their
genetic equipment could have changed much in the brief period
which elapsed between their barbarism and their world-historical
prominence - which seems to prove this point.) The whole question
does not matter too much, in as far as it is obvious that the spans of
ability occurring within given ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ groups are far greater
than the differences between the averages of such diverse groups.
Something very important follows from all this. The blues are
concentrated at the bottom, and it may even be that their perfor­
mance is, on average, inferior to that of groups more randomly dis­
tributed. No-one knows whether this is due to genetic differences or
to social factors. But one thing is certain: within the blue population,
there will be many who are much abler, much more fit in terms of
whatever criteria of performance may currently be relevant and
applied, than very many members of non-blue segments of the total
population.
What will now happen, in the situation as described and defined?
The association of blueness with low position will have created a
prejudice against blues. When those at the bottom appear to be,
chromatically or in whatever way you choose, a random sample of
the population, then the prejudice against them cannot spread to
some other specific trait, for occupancy of the lowest position is not
specifically connected with any other trait, ex hypothesi. But if so
many of those at the bottom are blue, then the prejudice which is
engendered among slightly higher strata against those below them by
the fear of being pushed downwards, inevitably spreads to blueness.
In fact, non-blue groups low down the scale will be specially prone to
anti-blue feelings, for they will have precious little else to be proud
of, and they will cling to their only and pathetic distinction, non­
blueness, with special venom.
However, very many of the blues will be on the way up, in spite of
prejudice against them. The concentration of the blues at the bottom
is only statistical, and many blues (even if they are themselves but a
minority within their own blue sub-population) will, by dint of hard
work, ability or luck be on the way up and have achieved a higher
position. What happens to them?
We have assumed that blueness is, for one reason or another,
ineradicable. So the condition of the ascending blues will be painful
and fraught with tension. Whatever their individual merits, to their
 S ocial E ntropy and E quality 69
random non-blue acquaintances and encounters (and it is of the
essence of a mobile complex industrial society that so many human
contacts are random, fleeting, but nonetheless significant), they will
still be the dirty, lazy, poor, ignorant blues; for these traits, or
similar ones, are associated with the occupancy of positions low
down on the social scale.
In all this, the rising blue is perhaps not much worse off than the
rising Ruritanian migrant worker in our previous example; but there
is one overwhelmingly important difference. Ruritanian culture can
be shed; blueness cannot. We have also assumed that the Ruri-
tanians had a territorial base: there is an area, the Ruritanian heart­
land, where peasants speaking some version of Ruritanian were in a
majority. So, once again, Ruritanians had two ways out: assimilation
into Megalomanian language or culture, or the establishment of a
glorious independent Ruritania, where their patois would be turned
into an official and literary language. Each of the two alternatives has
been successfully tried in different places and by different people.
Ex hypothesis however, the blues are devoid of the first of these two
options. Their give-away blueness stays with them, do what they
will. Moreover, Megalomanian culture is old and has a well-
established self-image, and blueness is excluded from it.
What about the second option, the establishment of national
independence? As a matter of historical and contemporary fact,
populations finding themselves in the kind of situation correspon­
ding to those of our blues sometimes do, and sometimes do not,
possess a territorial base of their own. In the former case, they
thereby do have at least one of the two options available to the Ruri­
tanians, and if it is politically and militarily feasible they may take it.
If, however, the hypothetical blues possess no territorial base in
which they can plausibly hope to establish an independent blue land,
or alternatively, if they do have one, but this blue homeland is, for
one reason or another, too exiguous and unattractive to secure the
return to it of the blues dispersed in other regions), then the plight of
the blues is serious indeed.
In this kind of situation grave sociological obstacles, not easily
removable by mere good will and legislation or by political irreden-
tism and activism, block the way to that cultural homogeneity
and social entropy which is not merely the norm of advanced
industrial society, but also, it seems, a condition of its smooth
functioning. Where this systematic entropy-inhibition occurs, it may
70 S ocial E ntropy and E quality
well constitute one of the gravest dangers that industrial society must
face. Conversely, while the blue populations are blocked in both
directions, neither smooth assimilation nor independence being
easily available to them, some other populations may be doubly
blessed. In a federal state, populations such as our hypothetical
Ruritanians may simultaneously possess an autonomous Ruritania in
which Ruritanian is the official language, and yet also, at the same
time, thanks to the small cultural distance between them and other
cultures in the federal state, and to the non-identifiability of assimi­
lated Ruritanians, be able to move smoothly, frictionlessly, in an
entropic way, in the wider state. It is, I suppose, for Ruritanians to
decide whether this double advantage is worth the price they pay;
namely, that the Ruritanian canton or federal autonomous republic
is not fully independent. Some cases which fit this general descrip­
tion remain within the wider federal state voluntarily, and some have
been deprived of this option by force. Quebec would seem to exem­
plify the first situation; Iboland, in Nigeria, the second.
The question then arises: what are the kinds of attribute in the real
world which resemble the ‘blueness’ of our hypothetical example?
Genetically transmitted traits are one specimen of such blueness, but
one specimen only; and the other, non-gene tic species of it are at
least as important. One must also add that not any genetically trans­
mitted trait will have the effect of producing a fissure in society.
Ginger-headedness, for example, causes some people to be teased as
children; and on the other hand, redheads among women are some­
times deemed specially attractive. Moreover, some ethnic groups are
said to have a disproportionate number of red-headed members; but
despite these facts and/or folk beliefs, red hair does not, all in all,
generate conflicts or social problems.
Part of the explanation must be, to use the term previously intro­
duced for this purpose, that red hair is fairly entropic, notwith­
standing any alleged ethnic correlation. Physical traits which, though
genetic, have no strong historic or geographical associations tend to
be entropic; and even if they do mildly correlate with social advan­
tage or disadvantage, this tends to remain socially unperceived. By
contrast, in Ruanda and Urundi physical height related to ethnic
affiliation and political status in a very marked way, both in fact and
in ideology, the conquering pastoralists being taller than the local
agriculturalists, and both being taller than the pygmies. But in most
other societies, this correlation is loose enough not to become socially
 Social E ntropy and E quality 71
significant. Etonians, it appears, are on average taller than others;
but tall guardsmen in the ranks are not deemed upper class.
Physical or genetically transmitted traits are but one kind of ‘blue­
ness’. What of the others? It is a supremely important and inter­
esting fact that some deeply engrained religious-cultural habits
possess a vigour and tenacity which can virtually equal those which
are rooted in our genetic constitution. Language and formal doc­
trinal belief seem less deep rooted and it is easier to shed them; but
that cluster of intimate and pervasive values and attitudes which, in
the agrarian age, are usually linked to religion (whether or not they
are so incorporated in the official high theology of the faith in
question) frequently have a limpet-like persistence, and continue to
act as a diacritical mark for the populations which carry them. For
instance, at the time when Algeria was legally counted as a part of
France, the assimilation of Algerian migrant workers in France was
not hampered by any physical, genetic difference between, say, a
Kabyle and a southern French peasant. The generally impassable
fissure between the two populations, precluding an assimilationist
solution, was cultural and not physical. The deeply rooted com­
munal conflict in Ulster is not based, obviously, on any communi­
cations gap between the two communities, but on an identification
with one of two rival local cultures which is so firm as to be com­
parable to some physical characteristic, even if, in reality, it is
socially induced. Terrorist organizations whose nominal doctrine, or
rather verbiage, is some kind of loose contemporary revolutionary
Marxism, are in fact exclusively recruited from a community once
defined by a religious faith, and continuing to be defined by the
culture which had been linked to that faith.
A fascinating and profoundly revealing event recently occurred
in Yugoslavia: in Bosnia the ex-Muslim population secured at long
last, and not without arduous efforts, the right to describe them­
selves as Muslim, when filling in the ‘nationality’ slot on the cen­
sus. This did not mean that they were still believing and practising
Muslims, and it meant even less that they were identifying as
one nationality with other Muslims or ex-Muslims in Yugoslavia,
such as the Albanians of Kosovo. They were Serbo-Croat speakers
of Slav ancestry and Muslim cultural background. What they meant
was that they could not describe themselves as Serb or as Croat
(despite sharing a language with Serbs and Croats), because these
identifications carried the implications of having been Orthodox or
72 S ocial E ntropy and E quality
Catholic; and to describe oneself as ‘Yugoslav’ was too abstract,
generic and bloodless.
They preferred to describe themselves as ‘Muslim’ (and were
now at last officially allowed to do so), meaning thereby Bosnian,
Slav ex-Muslims who feel as one ethnic group, though not differ­
entiable linguistically from Serbs and Croats, and though the faith
which does distinguish them is now a lapsed faith. Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes once observed that to be a gentleman one does not
need to know Latin and Greek, but one must have forgotten them.
Nowadays, to be a Bosnian Muslim you need not believe that there
is no God but God and that Mohamed is his Prophet, but you do
need to have lost that faith. The point of transition from faith to
culture, to its fusion with ethnicity and eventually with a state, is
neatly illustrated by an exchange in that classic study of the role
of the military in a developing country, Anton Chekhov’s Three
Sisters:
Tuzenbach: Perhaps you think - this German is getting over-excited.
But on my word of honour. I’m Russian. I cannot even speak German.
My father is Orthodox.

The Baron, despite his Teutonic name and presumably ancestry,

defends his Slav status by reference to his Orthodox religion.
To say this is not to claim that each and every pre-industrial
religion will tend to make a new appearance as an ethnic loyalty
in the industrial melting-pot. Such a view would be absurd. For
one thing, as in the case of languages and of cultural differentiations,
the agrarian world is often far too well provided with religions. There
were too many of them. Their number was too large, when com­
pared with the number of ethnic groups and national states for which
there can possibly be room in the modern world. So they simply
could not all survive (even in transmogrified form, as ethnic units),
however tenacious they might be. Moreover, as in the case of
languages, many of them are not really so very tenacious. It is the
high religions, those which are fortified by a script and sustained
by specialized personnel, which sometimes, but by no means always,
become the basis of a new collective identity in the industrial world,
making the transition, so to speak, from a culture-religion to a
culture-state. Thus in the agrarian world, high culture co-exists
with low cultures, and needs a church (or at least a clerkly guild)
to sustain it. In the industrial world high cultures prevail, but
 S ocial E ntropy and E quality 73
they need a state not a church, and they need a state each. That is
one way of summing up the emergence of the nationalist age.
High cultures tend to become the basis of a new nationality (as in
Algeria) when before the emergence of nationalism the religion
defined fairly closely all the under-privileged as against the privi­
leged, even or especially if the under-privileged had no other positive
shared characteristic (such as language or common history). There
had previously been no Algerian nation prior to the nationalist
awakening in this century, as Ferhat Abbas, one of the principal
early nationalist leaders in that country, observed. There had been
the much wider community of Islam, and a whole set of narrower
communities, but nothing corresponding even remotely to the in­
habitants of the present national territory. In such a case a new
nation is in effect born, defined as the totality of all the adherents of
a given faith, within a given territory. (In the case of the Palestinians
today, language and culture and a shared predicament, but not reli­
gion, seem to be producing a similar crystallization.) To perform the
diacritical, nation-defining role, the religion in question may in fact
need to transform itself totally, as it did in Algeria: in the nineteenth
century, Algerian Islam with its reverence for holy lineages was for
all practical purposes co-extensive with rural shrine and saint cults.
In the twentieth century it repudiated all this and identified with a
reformist scripturalism, denying the legitimacy of any saintly medi­
ation between man and God. The shrines had defined tribes and
tribal boundaries; the scripturalism could and did define a nation.

Fissures and barriers

Our general argument might be re-stated as follows. Industriali­

zation engenders a mobile and culturally homogeneous society,
which consequently has egalitarian expectations and aspirations,
such as had been generally lacking in the previous stable, stratified,
dogmatic and absolutist agrarian societies. At the same time, in its
early stages, industrial society also engenders very sharp and painful
and conspicuous inequahty, all the more painful because accom­
panied by great disturbance, and because those less advantageously
placed, in that period, tend to be not only relatively, but also abso­
lutely miserable. In that situation - egalitarian expectation, non­
egalitarian reality, misery, and cultural homogeneity already desired
74 S ocial E ntropy and E quality
but not yet implemented - latent political tension is acute, and
becomes actual if it can seize on good symbols, good diacritical
marks to separate ruler and ruled, privileged and underprivileged.
Characteristically, it may seize on language, on genetically trans­
mitted traits (‘racism’), or on culture alone. It is very strongly
impelled in this direction by the fact that in industrializing societies
communication and hence culture assumes a new and unprecedented
importance. Communication becomes important because of com­
plexity, interdependence and mobility of productive life, within
which far more numerous, complex, precise and context-free mess­
ages need to be transmitted than had ever been the case before.
Among cultures, it is the ones linked to a high (literate) faith
which seem most likely to fill the role of crystallizer of discontent.
Local folk faiths and cultures, like minor dialects, are less likely to
aspire so high. During the early period of industrialization, of
course, low cultures are also liable to be seized on and turned into
diacritical markers of the disadvantaged ones, and be used to iden­
tify and unite them, if they look politically promising, notably if they
define large and territorially more or less compact populations.
During that early stage, several contrasts are liable to be super­
imposed on privilege and underprivilege: ease of access to the
new style of life and its educational precondition, as opposed to
hampered access (easy or inhibited communication), a high and low
culture.
This is the type of fissure-generation where the lack of actual
communication is crucial, because it marks out and highlights an
objective difference. Later, when owing to general development the
communication barrier and the inequalities are no longer so great,
and when a shared industrial style enables people to communicate
even across diverse languages, it is rather the persistent unevenly
distributed (‘counter-entropic’) traits which become really crucial,
whether they be genetic or deep-cultural. At that stage, the trans­
formation of erstwhile low cultures into a new high one, in the
interests of providing a banner for a whole wide category of the
underprivileged who may previously have lacked any way of hailing
each other and uniting, is no longer quite so probable; the period of
acute misery, disorganization, near-starvation, total alienation of the
lower strata is over. Resentment is now engendered less by some
objectively intolerable condition (for deprivation now is, as the
phrase goes, relative); it is now brought about above all by the
 S ocial E ntropy and E quality 75
non-random social distribution of some visible and habitually noticed
trait.
The difference between the two stages, early and late, can be put
as follows. In the early stage there is a terrible difference between the
life chances of the well-off and the starving poor, those who can
swim in the new industrial pool and those who are only painfully
learning to do so. Even then, the conflict will seldom become acute
or escalate indefinitely, contrary to Marxist predictions, unless the
privileged and the others can identify themselves and each other
culturally, ‘ethnically’. But if they can so tell each other apart, then,
generally speaking, a new nation (or nations) is born; and it can
organize itself around either a high or a previously low culture. If a
high culture is not ready-made and available, or has already been
taken over by a rival group, why then a low one is transformed into a
high one. This is the age of the birth (or allegedly ‘rebirth’) of
nations, and of the transmuting of low cultures into newly literate
high ones.
’The next stage is different. It is no longer the case that an acute
objective social discontent or a sharp social differentiation is seeking
out any old cultural differentiation that may be to hand, and will use
it if it can to create a new barrier, indeed eventually a new frontier.
Now it is only a genuine prior barrier to mobility and equality which
will, having inhibited easy identification, engender a new frontier.
The difference is considerable.

A diversity of focus

Some special cases deserve specific comment. Islamic civilization in

the agrarian age conspicuously illustrated our thesis that agrarian
societies are not prone to use culture to define political units; in other
words, that they are not given to being nationalistic. The loose guild
of ulama^ of scholars-lawyers-theologians,^ who set the tone and
morally dominated the traditional Muslim world, was trans-political
and trans-ethnic, and not tied to any state (once the Khahfate with
its monopolistic pretensions to providing the unique political roof
for the entire community had disintegrated), nor to any ‘nation’.

^N. Keddie (ed.), Scholars, Saints and Sufis, Berkeley, 1972; E. Gellner,
Muslim Society, Cambridge, 1981.
76 S ocial E ntropy and E quality
The folk Islam of shrine and holy lineage, on the other hand, was
sub-ethnic and sub-political (as far as major units, resembling his­
toric and ‘national’ states, are concerned), serving and reinforcing
instead the vigorous local self-defence and self-administration units
(tribes). So Islam was internally divided into a high and a low cul­
ture, the two flowing into each other, of course, and intimately
related and intertwined, but also periodically erupting into conflict,
when ‘remembrancers’ revived the alleged pristine zeal of the high
culture, and united tribesmen in the interests of purification and of
their own enrichment and political advancement. But the changes
produced in this way did not, in the traditional order (though they
occurred quite often) produce any deep, fundamental structural
change. They only rotated the personnel, they did not fundamen­
tally alter the society.^
With the coming of the travail of modernization, things turned out
quite differently. We have argued that in general this means, among
other things, the replacement of diversified, locality-tied low cul­
tures by standardized, formalized and codified, literacy-carried high
cultures. But Islamic society was ever ideally prepared, by an acci­
dent of history, for this development. It possessed within itself both
a high and a low culture. They had the same name, and were not al­
ways carefully distinguished, and were often deliberately conflated
and fused; they were linked to each other. Both, in the past, could be
and were the means of a whole-hearted, passionate identification
with a (supposedly unique) Islam, as an absolute, uncompromising
and final revelation. Islam had no church perhaps, but the church it
did not have was a broad one. In the modern world, the low or folk
variant can be and is disavowed, as a corruption, exploited if not
actually invented or instigated by the alien colonialist enemy, while
the high variant becomes the culture around which a new nation­
alism can crystallize. This is particularly easy in the case of the one
linguistic group whose language is linked to that of the unique reve­
lation; it is also easy in those cases in which the entire nation is iden­
tified with Islam and is surrounded by non-Muslim neighbours
(Somalis, Malays); or when the entire discriminated-against popu­
lation, though not linguistically homogeneous, is Muslim and
opposed to non-Muslim privileged power-holders (Algeria), or when
the nation is habitually defined in terms of one Muslim sect, and its

'ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, tr. F. Rosenthal, London, 1958.

 S ocial E ntropy and E quality 77
resentment directed against a provocatively secularized and Wester­
nized ruling class and against non-Muslim foreigners (Iran).
The uniqueness of Islam can perhaps be brought out best if we
recapitulate our general theme. The agrarian age of mankind is a
period in which some can read and most cannot, and the industrial
age is one in which all can and must read. In the agrarian age, literate
high cultures co-exist with illiterate low or folk cultures. During the
period of transition between the two ages, some erstwhile low cul­
tures become new high cultures; and on occasion a new high culture
can be invented, re-created by political will and cultural engineering,
based on elements drawn from a distant past, and reassembled to
create something in effect quite new, as in Israel.
But the high cultures which survive the period of transition cease
to be the medium and hallmark of a clerisy or a court and becoirie
instead the medium and emblem of a ‘nation’, and at the same time
undergo another interesting transformation. When they were carried
by a court or courtly stratum or a clerisy, they tended to be trans­
ethnic and even trans-political, and were easily exportable to wher­
ever that court was emulated or that clerisy respected and employed;
and on the other hand, they were liable to be closely tied to the usu­
ally rigid, dogmatic theology and doctrinal corpus, in terms of which
the clerisy in question was defined, and the court legitimated. As is
the way of literate ideologies of the agrarian age, that corpus of doc­
trine had absolutist pretensions, and was reinforced by claiming on
its own behalf not merely that it was true (what of that?) but that it
was the very norm of truth. At the same time it issued virulent
imprecations against all heretics and infidels, whose very doubts
about the unique and manifest truth was evidence of their moral tur­
pitude, of ‘corruption on earth’, in the vivid phrase used in death
sentences by the agrarian-faith-reviving regime at present in control
of Iran. These ideologies are like fortresses - Einefeste Burg ist mein
Gott - which retain all sources of water within their bastion and thus
deny them to the enemy. They hold not merely a monopoly of truth
(a trivial matter, that), but above all, of the very sources and touch­
stones of truth. The wells are all located within the ramparts, and
that settles the matter, for the enemy cannot reach them.
This was all very well, and a great advantage to them in the
agrarian age, when they only encountered enemies at worst similar to
themselves, and often feebler, unsophisticated, unfortified folk reli­
gions. The industrial age is based on economic growth. This in turn
78 S ocial E ntropy and E quality
hinges on cognitive growth, which was ratified (and perhaps even
significantly aided) by Cartesian and empiricist philosophies. Their
essence was to de-absolutize all substantive conviction about the
world, and to subject all assertions, without exception, to neutral
scrutiny by criteria (‘experience’, ‘the light of reason’) located
beyond the bounds and the ramparts of any one belief system. That
puts paid to their absolutist pretensions, for they must bow to a
judge outside their control. Evidence becomes king, or at least
king-maker. The wells of truth are henceforth located in neutral
territory, and no-one can claim to own them.
That, at any rate, is the purely intellectual, doctrinal aspect of a
complex story, the whole of which cannot be pursued here, by which
the absolutist high cultures of the agrarian age are obliged to shed
their absolutism, and allow the wells of truth to pass into public,
neutral control. In brief, the price these high cultures pay for
becoming the idiom of entire territorial nations, instead of apper­
taining to a clerkly stratum only, is that they become secularized.
They shed absolutist and cognitive pretensions, and are no longer
linked to a doctrine. Spain was one of the most retarded exceptions
to this, having retained at a remarkably late date a nationalist regime
which incorporated the endorsement of absolutist Catholic claims in
its image of the nation. During the earlier and timid stages of Fran-
coist liberalization, the legalization of public Protestant worship was
opposed as a kind of provocative disturbance of Spanish unity and
identity. An absolute doctrine for all and a high culture for some^
becomes an absolute culture for a//, and a doctrine for some. The
Church must surrender and dissolve itself if it is to capture the entire
society. The Great Tradition must throw off its erstwhile legitimating
doctrine, if it is to become the pervasive and universal culture.
In general, what had once been an idiom for some and an obliga­
tory and prized idiom for all becomes an obligatory belief for all, and
a watered-down, non-serious, Sunday-suit faith for some. That is the
generic fate of high cultures, if they survive the great transition. In
the classical North-West European case, one may say that the pro­
cess had two stages: the Reformation universalized the clerisy and
unified the vernacular and the liturgy, and the Enlightenment secu­
larized the now universalized clerisy and the now nation-wide lin­
guistic idiom, no longer bound to doctrine or class.
It is interesting to reflect what would have happened in Western
Europe had industrialization and all it involves begun during the
 S ocial E ntropy and E quality 79
High Middle Ages, before the development of vernacular literatures
and the emergence of what was eventually destined to become the
basis of the various national high cultures. There would clearly have
been the prospect of a clerkly-led Latin, or perhaps Romance,
nationalism, as opposed to the relatively more local nationalisms
which did eventually crystallize, secularizing no longer a trans­
political clerkly high culture, but a half-clerkly, half-courtly one.
Had it all happened earlier, a pan-Romance nationalism would have
been as plausible as the pan-Slavism which was taken seriously in the
nineteenth century, or the pan-Arab nationalism of the twentieth,
which were also based on a shared clerkly high culture, co-existing
with enormous differences at the low or folk level.
Islam is precisely in this condition, experiencing a number of
transformations simultaneously. The most protestant of the great
monotheisms, it is ever Reformation-prone (Islam could indeed be
described as Permanent Reformation). One of its many successive
self-reformations virtually coincided with the coming of modern
Arab nationalism, and can only with great difficulty be disentangled
from it. The emergence of the nation and the victory of the reform
movement seem parts of one and the same process. The dissolution
of the vigorous old local and kin structures, whose strong and some­
times deadly shadows survive as pervasive patronage networks
dominating the new centralized political .structures, goes hand in
hand with the elimination of the saint cults which had ratified the
mini-communal organization, and their replacement by a reformed
individualist Unitarian theology, which leaves the individual believer
to relate himself, singly, to one God and one large, anonymous,
mediation-free community - all of which is virtually the paradigm of
the nationalist requirement.
Other high cultures which make the transition need to pay the
price of abandoning their erstwhile doctrinal underpinning and sup­
port. The bulk of the doctrines they had carried so long are so utterly
absurd, so indefensible in an age of epistemic (evidence-revering)
philosophies, that they become an encumbrance rather than the
advantage which they had been. They are gladly, willingly shed, or
turned into ‘symbolic’ tokens meant to indicate a link to the past, the
continuity of a community over time, and evasively ignored as far as
their nominal doctrinal content goes.
Not so with Islam. Islam had been Janus-faced in the agrarian
days. One face was adapted to the religiously and socially pluralistic
80 S ocial E ntropy and E quality
country folk and groupings, the other set for the more fastidious,
scholarly, individualist and literate urban schoolmen. Moreover, the
dogma made obligatory for the latter was purified, economical, Uni­
tarian, sufficiently so to be at least relatively acceptable even in the
modern age, when the baroque load carried by its rival on the north
shore of the Mediterranean is pretty intolerable, and needs to be
surreptitiously toned down and cast away, bit by bit. Little of this
underhand purification is required south of the Mediterranean - or
rather, the purification had already been carried out, loiid and clear,
in the name of freeing the true faith from ignorant, rural, if not alien-
inspired superstition and corruption. Janus has relinquished one of
his two faces. So, within the Muslim world, and particularly of
course within the Arab part of it (but also among what might be
called the Arab-surrogate nations, who happen locally to define
themselves as the Muslims of a given area), a nationalism based on a
generalized anonymous territorial community can perpetuate the
specific doctrines previously carried by a clerkly stratum, proudly
and without disavowing them. The ideal of the ulama comes closer to
reality, at least within various nation-size territories, than it had been
in the days of the kin-defined fragmentation.
Doctrinal elegance, simplicity, exiguousness, strict unitarianism,
without very much in the way of intellectually offensive frills: these
helped Islam to survive in the modern world better than do doc-
trinally more luxuriant faiths. But if that is so, one might well ask
why an agrarian ideology such as Confucianism should not have sur­
vived even better; for such a belief system was even more firmly
centred on rules of morality and the observance of order and hier­
archy, and even less concerned with theological or cosmological
dogma. Perhaps, however, a strict and emphatic, insistent unitari­
anism is better here than indifference to doctrine coupled with con­
cern for morality. The moralities and political ethics of agro-literate
polities are just a little too brazenly deferential and inegalitarian for a
modern taste. This may have made the perpetuation of Confu­
cianism implausible in a modern society, at least under the same
name and under the same management.
By contrast, the stress on the pure unitarianism of Islam, jointly
with the inevitable ambiguity of its concrete moral and political
precepts, could help to create the situation where one and the same
faith can legitimate both traditionalist regimes such as Saudi Arabia
or Northern Nigeria, and socially radical ones such as Libya, South
 S ocial E ntropy and E quality 81
Yemen or Algeria. The political conjurers could build their patter
around the strict theology, while they shuffled the cards dealing with
political morality according to their own preference, without attrac­
ting too much attention. The unitarianism, the (sometimes painful)
forswearing of the solaces of spiritual mediation and middlemen,
took the believers’ minds away from the intellectual transformations,
which were turning a faith that had once dealt with the inheritance of
camels into one prescribing or proscribing, as the case might be, the
nationalization of oil wealth.
If Islam is unique in that it allows the use of a pre-industrial great
tradition of a clerisy as the national, socially pervasive idiom and
belief of a new-style community, then many of the nationalisms of
sub-Saharan Africa are interesting in that they exemplify the oppo­
site extreme: they often neither perpetuate nor invent a local high
culture (which could be difficult, indigenous literacy being rather
rare in this region), nor do they elevate an erstwhile folk culture into
a new, politically sanctioned literate culture, as European nation­
alisms had often done. Instead, they persist in using an alien^ Euro­
pean high culture. Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the best, and cer­
tainly the most extensive, testing grounds for the attribution of great
power to the principle of nationalism, which requires ethnic and
political boundaries to converge. Sub-Saharan political boundaries
defy this principle almost without exception. Black Africa has in­
herited from the colonial period a set of frontiers drawn up in total
disregard (and generally without the slightest knowledge) of local
cultural or ethnic borders.
One of the most interesting and striking features of the post­
colonial history of Africa has been that nationalist, irredentist at­
tempts to remedy this state of affairs, though not totally absent, have
nevertheless been astonishingly few and feeble. The efforts either to
replace the use of European languages as the state administrative
medium, or to adjust inter-state boundaries so as to respect ethni­
city, have been weak and infrequent. What is the explanation? Is
nationalism not a force in black Africa after all?
We have suggested a dichotomy between ‘early’ or communication-
gap nationalisms (in which the additional disadvantage a dislocated
ex-rural population incurs through not sharing the dominant culture
exacerbates its resentment over its other, ‘objective’ deprivations),
and a ‘late’ nationalism, engendered by obstacles other than those
of communication. In terms of this important contrast, African
82 S ocial E ntropy and E quality
nationalism on the whole belongs to the latter or counter-entropic
type. At its core we do not find labour migrants maltreated at the
factory gate by foremen speaking a different language; what we do
fmd is intellectuals capable of fluent communication, but debarred
as a category from positions of real power by a shared distinctive trait:
colour. They are united by a shared exclusion, not a shared culture.
The phenomena associated with other early and communication-gap
types of nationalism are of course not absent, and are often very
important. The flashpoint of the South African conflict is obviously
the condition of the African industrial proletariat; and the role of the
urban lower classes in, for instance, the rise of Nkrumah was con­
spicuous.
The typical situation created by European domination in Africa
was this: effective administrations, political units controlling and
maintaining the peace in extensive and well-defined, stable areas,
were set up. These administrations were extremely, conspicuously
and indeed paradigmatically counter-entropic. The rulers and a few
others were white, and everyone else was black. It could hardly have
been simpler or more conspicuous. Seldom has there been a political
system whose guiding principle was so easily intelligible, so easy to
read.
In the traditional agrarian world this could have been counted a
positive advantage, a great aid in the avoidance of status-ambiguity
and all the ills of obscure, uncertain power-relations which that can
bring in its train. It would have augured well for the stability and
survival-worthiness of the system. The principle was not alien to
Africa, and some indigenous political structures had indeed used
variants of it. The Azande were a conquering aristocracy super­
imposed on ethnically distinct subjects. A Fulani aristocracy ruled
many of the Northern Nigerian city states.
But this was no longer the traditional agrarian order. The Euro­
peans in Africa, though occasionally respectful of local custom and
endorsing its authority, were there to set up a market- and trade-
oriented, educated (‘civilized’) and eventually industrial type of
society. But, for reasons which we have stressed at length and need
not now repeat, industrial or industrializing society is profoundly
allergic to counter-entropic institutions. Here there was an outstand­
ingly clear, conspicuous example of just that! This was not a case, as
in our earlier example, of a category of ‘blues’ being statistically too
frequently located in the lower layers of society, as in the European
 S ocial E ntropy and E quality 83
irredentist nationalisms. Here there was a case of a small number of
whites ruling large, occasionally enormous black populations. The
nationalism which this engendered was simply the summation of all
the blacks, the non-whites of a given historically accidental territory,
now unified by the new administrative machinery. The adherents of
the new nationalism did not necessarily share any positive traits.
After Independence, in the struggle for control of the newly won
states, the contestants generally had their power-base in this or that
traditional, pre-existing ethnic group. Nevertheless, the striking fact
remains the stabihty of the ethnicity-defying frontiers that had been
arbitrarily drawn up by the colonialists, and the perpetuation of the
colonial languages as the media of government and education. It is
perhaps too soon to speculate whether these societies will reach the
age of internal homogeneity, mobility and generalized education
while continuing to use the colonial language, or whether at some
point they will brave the ardours of cultural self-transformation
involved in modernizing, adapting and imposing one of the indi­
genous languages. This process has been pioneered, for instance, in
Algeria, with its extremely painful ‘Arabization’, which in practice
means imposing a distant literary language on local Arab and Berber
dialects.^ In black Africa, the linguistic indigenization is hampered
not merely by the conveniences of the alien language, with its text­
books and international links, and with the heavy time-investment in
it on the part of the ruling elite, but also by the local linguistic frag­
mentation, far more extreme than that which had prevailed in
Europe; and by the fact that the selection of any one of the rival local
languages would be an affront to all those to whom it is not a native
tongue - and this residue generally constitutes a majority, often an
overwhelmingly large one.
For these reasons those African ethnic groups that were linked to a
literate high culture through conversion to a world religion, Islam or
Christianity, were better equipped to develop an effective nationalism
^Hugh Roberts, ‘The Unforeseen Development of the Kabyle Question in
Contemporary Algeria*, in Government and Opposition^ XVII (1982),
No. 3. The emergent Kabyle nationalism is interesting in that it ex­
presses the feeling of an erstwhile small-holding peasantry which has
done well out of urban migration, without losing its rural base. A similar
case may be that of the Basques. See Marianne Heiberg, ‘Insiders/
outsiders: Basque nationalism*, in European Journal of Sociology^ XVI
(1975), No. 2.
84 S ocial E ntropy and E quality
than the others. The region in which the struggle between
these two faiths had traditionally gone on without a decisive victory
for either, the Horn of Africa, is also the area with the best examples
of what may be called classical nationalisms. It has been said of the
Boers that the only things which really distinguished them from
their Bantu enemies, when both were entering South Africa from
different directions, was the possession of the Book, the wheel and
the gun. In the Horn of Africa both the Amharas and the Somalis
possessed both gun and Book (not the same Book, but rival and dif­
ferent editions), and neither bothered greatly with the wheel. Each
of these ethnic groups was aided in its use of these two pieces of
cultural equipment by its links to other members of the wider reli­
gious civilization which habitually used them, and were willing to
replenish their stock. Both the Somalis and the Amharas were aided
by these bits of equipment in state-formation. The Somalis created a
few of those characteristic Muslim formations based on urban trade
and tribal pastoral cohesion, brought together by some religious per­
sonage; the Amharas created in Ethiopia the one really convincing
African specimen of a feudalism, a loose empire with local territorial
power-holders, linked to a national Church.
The gun and the Book, with their centralizing potential, enabled
these two ethnic groups to dominate the political history of this large
region, though neither of them was numerically predominant. Other
ethnic grups without the same advantages, even when far more
numerous - notably the Oromo (more commonly known as the
Galla) - were unable to stand up to them. At the time of the tempo­
rarily successful Somali advance against the Ethiopians in the 1970s,
it was plausible, and from the Somali viewpoint attractive, to present
the Oromo as a kind of human population without a set form, a pre­
ethnic raw material, waiting to be turned either into Amharas or into
Somalis by the turn of p)olitical fortune and religious conversion.
This would make sense of their Somalization, should it come to pass.
The Oromo were to be seen as an enormous population of Adams
and Eves, from whom the apple of ethnicity had as yet been with­
held, and who were familiar only with the rudimentary fig leaf of
age-set organization. When incorporated in the Amhara state, their
local chiefs would become its officials and eventually go Christian
and Amhara; but if brought into the Somali sphere, Islamization in
the name of the great local saint cults would eventually mean Soma­
lization. Since the Somali defeat in the war, however, the prospects
 S ocial E ntropy and E quality 85

of resisting Amhara domination in the Horn hinge largely on stimu­

lating the various national liberation fronts at long last emerging
within the Ethiopian empire, including that of the Oromo, who as
the largest group are also emerging as the most important; and hence
we are now less likely to hear of their pre-cultural status as ethnic
raw material.
The Amhara empire was a prison-house of nations if ever there
was one. When the old Emperor was toppled in 1974, the new rulers
promptly announced, as new rulers are liable to do, that henceforth
all ethnic groups were equal, and indeed free to choose their own
destiny. These admirable liberal sentiments were followed fairly
soon by a systematic liquidation of intellectuals drawn from the non-
Amharic group, a regrettably rational policy from the viewpoint of
inhibiting the emergence of rival nationalisms within the empire.^
In brief, both these vigorous and, for the present, dominant
nationalisms illustrate the advantage of the availability of an old high
culture, once an invaluable asset for state-formation, but now also
crucial for the attaining of an early political sense of ethnicity. In
each of these cases the ethnic group in question seems, within the
local area, co-extensive with its own faith, thus greatly aiding self-
definition.
The Somalis are also interesting in that they are one of the
examples (like the Kurds) of the blending of old tribalism based on
social structure with the new, anonymous nationalism based on
shared culture. The sense of lineage affiliation is strong and vigorous
(notwithstanding the fact that it is officially reprobated, and its
invocation actually proscribed), and it is indeed crucial for the
understanding of internal politics. This does not, I think, contradict
our general theory, which maintains that the hold of a shared literate
culture (‘nationality’) over modern man springs from the erosion of
the old structures, which had once provided each man with his iden­
tity, dignity and material security, whereas he now depends on
education for these things. The Somalis possess a shared culture,
which, when endowed with its own state (as indeed it is), can ensure
for each Somali access on good terms to bureaucratic employment.

^loan Lewis, ‘The Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF) and the legacy
of Sheikh Hussein of Bale’, in J. Tubiana (ed.), Modem Ethiopia:, Rotter­
dam, 1980; and LM. Lewis (ed.), Nationalism and Self-determination in
the Horn of Africa^ Indiana, 1983.
86 S ocial E ntropy and E quality
The life chances and psychic comfort of an individual Somali are
manifestly better within such a state, based on his culture, than they
are within a neighbouring state not so based. At the same time, how­
ever, many Somalis remain pastoralists with an interest in the pas­
ture rights defined in the old terms, and retain reciprocal links with
kinsmen, links which appear not to be altogether forgotten in the
give and take of political life.
What it all amounts to is this: in most cases, the appeal of the new,
education-transmitted ethnicity comes from both push and pull: the
attraction of the new employment opportunities and the repulsion
arising from the erosion of the old security-giving kin groupings.
The Somali case is not unique, even if it is particularly conspicuous.
Persistence of pastoralism and certain kinds of labour migration or of
trade networks may cause extensive kin organization to survive in
the modern world. When this happens, we get a juxtaposition of
tribal loyalty to structure and of national loyalty to culture (and a lit­
erate culture at that). But it is scarcely conceivable that the modern
world could have emerged had the structural, mini-organizational
rigidities remained strong everywhere. The great stories of successful
economic development were about societies whose wealth and power
had the demonstration effect which pointed humanity towards the
new style of life; and those stories or paradigms were not and could
not be of that kind. The general emergence of modernity hinged on
the erosion of the multiple petty binding local organizations and their
replacement by mobile, anonymous, literate, identity-conferring
cultures. It is this generalized condition which made nationalism
normative and pervasive; and this is not contradicted by the occa­
sional superimposition of both of these types of loyalty, the occa­
sional use of kin links for a kind of interstitial, parasitic and partial
adaptation to the new order. Modern industry can be paternalistic,
and nepotistic at the top; but it cannot recruit its productive units on
the basis of kin or territorial principles, as tribal society had done.
The contrast I am here drawing between culture-mediated natio­
nalism and structure-mediated tribalism is, of course, meant to be a
genuine analytical distinction between two objectively distinguish­
able kinds of organization; it must not be confused with the relati­
vistic or emotive opposition between my nationalism and your tri­
balism. That is merely the language of praise and invective by means
of which rival potential nationalisms combat each other, in which ‘I
am a patriot, you are a nationalist and he is a tribalist’, and that
 S ocial E ntropy and E quality 87
remains so whoever happens to be speaking. In this sense natio­
nalisms are simply those tribalisms, or for that matter any other kind
of group, which through luck, effort or circumstance succeed in
becoming an effective force under modern circumstances. They are
only identifiable ex post factum. Tribalism never prospers, for when
it does, everyone will respect it as a true nationalism, and no-one will
dare call it tribalism.
A Typology of Nationalisms

A useful typology of nationalisms can be constructed by simply

working out the various possible combinations of the crucial factors
which enter into the making of a modern society. The first factor to
be introduced into this deductively established model is that of
power. Here there is no need to play with binary or any other alter­
natives. There is no point in considering the possibility of the ab­
sence or diffusion of centralized power in a modern society. Modern
societies are always and inevitably centralized, in the sense that the
maintenance of order is the task of one agency or group of agencies,
and not dispersed throughout the society. The complex division of
labour, the complementarity and interdependence and the constant
mobility: all these factors prevent citizens from doubling up as pro­
ducers and participants in violence. There are societies - notably
some pastoral ones - where this is feasible: the shepherd is simul­
taneously the soldier, and often also the senator, jurist and minstrel
of his tribe. The entire culture, or very nearly, of the whole society
seems encapsulated in each individual rather than distributed among
them in different forms, and the society seems to refrain from speci­
alization, at least in its male half, to a very remarkable degree. The
few specialists whom this kind of society tolerates it also despises.
Whatever may be feasible among near-nomadic pastoralists, it is
not remotely possible in complex modern industrial society. The
specialists who compose it cannot take time off to shoot their way
from home to office, take precautionary measures against a surprise
raid by members of a rival corporation, or join in a nocturnal reprisal
raid themselves. Bootleggers may have done this, but they did not
become the model for the modern Organization Man. Mafia-type
business flourishes on the whole only in areas where illegality makes
the invocation of official enforcement agencies difficult. There would
seem to be more movement from this kind of enterprise into legiti­
mate business, than the other way. In fact, members of modern
societies have little training or practice in applying or resisting
 A T ypology of N ationalisms 89
violence. Some sectors of modern society on occasion escape this
generalization, like those who must live with urban violence in
decaying urban centres; and there is at any rate one economically
complex society, namely Lebanon, which so far seems to have sur­
vived the disintegration of effective central authority with astonish­
ing resilience and success.
But these relatively minor exceptions do not undermine the basic
contention that in a modern society the enforcement of the social
order is not something evenly diffused throughout society - as is
characteristically the case among tribesmen with segmentary social
organization - but is concentrated in the hands of some of the mem­
bers of society. In simpler terms, it is always the case that some wield
this power and some do not. Some are closer to the command posts
of the enforcement agencies than others. This engenders the admit­
tedly loose, but nevertheless useful distinction between the power-
holders and the rest, a contrast which provides us with the first
element in our simplified model of modern society, which is to
generate, through diverse combinations of the further elements, the
various possible types of nationalism.
The next element in the model is access to education or to a viable
modern high culture (the two here being treated as equivalent). The
notion of education or a viable modern high culture is once again
fairly loose but nonetheless useful. It refers to that complex of skills
which makes a man competent to occupy most of the ordinary posi­
tions in a modern society, and which makes him, so to speak, able to
swim with ease in this kind of cultural medium. It is a syndrome
rather than a strict list: no single item in it is, perhaps, absolutely
indispensable. Literacy is no doubt central to it, though on occasion
skilful and debrouillard individuals can get by in the modern world,
or even amass fortunes, without it. The same goes for elementary
numeracy and a modicum of technical competence, and a kind of
non-rigid, adaptable state of mind often encouraged by urban living,
and inhibited by rural traditions. By and large, one can say - and this
is, of course, important for our argument - that suitably gifted
individuals or well-placed sub-communities can sometimes acquire
this minimal syndrome independently, but that its wide and effec­
tive diffusion presupposes a well-maintained and effective centra­
lized educational system.
In connection with this access to education (in this sense), there
are alternatives and different possible situations. With regard to
90 A T ypology of N ationalisms
power there are none: it is always the case, in an industrial society,
that some have it and some do not. This provided us with our base­
line situation, a society loosely divided into power-holders and the
rest. But in connection with access to education, there is no such
predetermined distinction. In terms of the given power-bifurcated
society, there are now four distinct possibilities: it may be that only
the power-holders have access, that they use their power-privilege to
preserve for themselves the monopoly of this access; or alternatively,
that both the power-holders and the rest have this access; or again,
only the rest (or some of them) have such access, and the power-
holders do not (a situation not as absurd, implausible or unrealistic
as might appear at first sight); or finally, as sometimes happens, that
neither party enjoys the benefits of such access, or to put it in simpler
terms, that the power-holders, and those over whom the power
is exercised, are both of them packs of ignoramuses, sunk, in Karl
Marx’s phrase, in the idiocy of rural life. This is a perfectly plausible
and realistic situation, not uncommon in the course of past human
history, and not totally unknown even in our age.
The four possibilities envisaged or, rather, generated by our
assumptions (each with two sub-alternatives in figure 2, to be ex­
plained) do correspond to realistic historic situations. When the
category of those who have power roughly corresponds to those who
also have access to the kind of educational training fitting them for
the new life, we have something corresponding, all in all, to early
industrialism. The powerless new migrants, newly drawn in from
the land, are politically disenfranchized and culturally alienated,
helpless vis-d-vis a situation in which they have no leverage and
which they cannot understand. They constitute the classical early
proletariat, as described by Marx and Engels (and as quite wrongly
attributed by them to the subsequent stages of industrial society),
and such as is often reproduced in the shantytowns of lands which
were submerged by the wave of industrialism later.
The second combination, on the other hand, corresponds to late
industrialism as it actually is (and not as was erroneously predicted):
great power inequality persists, but cultural, educational, life-style
differences have diminished enormously. The stratification system is
smooth and continuous, not polarized, nor consisting of qualitatively
different layers. There is a convergence of life-style and a diminution
of social distance, and the access to the new learning, to the gateway
of the new world, is open to virtually all, and if by no means on terms
 A T ypology of N ationalisms 91
of perfect equality, at least without seriously debarring anyone eager
to acquire it. (Only possessors of counter-entropic traits, as des­
cribed, are seriously hampered.)
The third and seemingly paradoxical situation, in which those
who wield power are at a disadvantage when it comes to acquiring
the new skills, does in fact occur, and represents a by no means
unusual historic constellation. In traditional agrarian societies ruling
strata are often imbued with an ethos which values warfare, impul­
sive violence, authority, land-owning, conspicuous leisure and ex­
penditure, and which spurns orderliness, time or other budgeting,
trade, application, thrift, systematic effort, forethought and book
learning. (The manner in which some of these traits could neverthe­
less become fashionable and dominant, and come to characterize the
dominant strata of society, is after all the subject matter of the most
famous of all sociological speculations, namely Weber’s account of
the origin of the capitalist spirit.) In consequence, these latter traits
are then normally found only among more or less despised urban,
commercial, learning-oriented groups, which may be tolerated and
intermittently persecuted by their rulers. So far so good: within the
traditional order, the situation acquires a certain stability. Personnel
may change, the structure remains. The thrifty work-oriented
accumulators are not normally permitted to displace the leisured
class oriented to conspicuous consumption, because the latter regu­
larly fleece and occasionally massacre them. (In the Indian case those
who acquired a surplus tended to put all their money in temples to
mitigate or to avoid fleecing.)
But with the coming of the industrial order, in the form of the
diffusion of market relations, new military and productive techno­
logies, colonial conquest and so forth, the erstwhile stability is lost
forever. And within this new unstable and turbulent world it is the
values and style and orientation of those despised urban commercial
groups which provide a great advantage and easy access to new
sources of wealth and power, while the old compensatory mecha­
nisms of expropriation may no longer be available or effective.^ The
^Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests^ Princeton, 1977. It
is, of course, possible that the individualist, mobile spirit preceded by
many centuries, in one society at any rate, the coming of industrial order:
see Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism, Oxford, 1978.
That would not contradict our thesis, though it might throw light on the
early emergence of national sentiment in England. For a summary of the
92 A T ypology of N ationalisms
counting house becomes more powerful than the sword. The single-
minded use of the sword no longer takes you very far.
The old rulers may, of course, sense the wind of change and mend
their ways. They did so in Prussia and Japan. But it is not at all
psychologically easy for them to do it quickly (or, sometimes, to do it
at all), and quite often they may not do it fast enough. The result
then is the situation envisaged: it is now the ruled^ or at least some of
them, who are at a positive advantage, when it comes to access to the
new education and skills.
Finally, there is the fourth scenario: neither rulers nor ruled may
have any access to the relevant skills. This is the standard situation
in any stagnant agrarian society, unaffected by the industrial world,
in which both rulers and ruled are sunk in whatever combination of
conspicuous display, superstition, ritualism, alcoholism or other
diversion may be locally favoured, and when neither of them wish or
are able to take the new way out.
By combining the (ever-present) inequality of power with the
various possible patterns of the distribution of the access to edu­
cation, we have obtained four possible situations: equal access, equal
lack of access, and access tilted either in favour of or against the
power-holders. But we have as yet not introduced the element which
is most crucial from the viewpoint of nationalism: identity or diver­
sity of culture.
It goes without saying here that the term ‘culture’ is being used in
an anthropological, not a normative sense: what is meant by the term
is the distinctive style of conduct and communication of a given
community. The term ‘culture’ on its own is never used in this dis­
cussion in its other sense, as Kultur^ high culture or great tradition, a
style of conduct and communication endorsed by the speaker as
superior, as setting a norm which should be, but alas often is not,
satisfied in real life, and the rules of which are usually codified by a
set of respected, norm-giving specialists within the society. ‘Culture’
without qualification means culture in the anthropological, non-
normative sense; Kultur appears as high culture. The relationship
between the two kinds of ‘culture’ is of course a matter of central
importance for our subject. The high (normative) cultures or tradi­
tions which specially concern us are, of course, literate ones. Hence

way in which the present theory of nationalism fits into a wider social
philosophy, see John A. Hall, Diagnoses of Our Time, London, 1981.
 A T ypology of N ationalisms 93
the problem of access to them appears, in the present discussion, as
access to education. The phrase ‘access to a culture’ consequently
means access to culture (anthropological sense) which is denied to a
person in virtue of his membership of another culture, and not in
virtue of lack of ‘education’. This perhaps pedantic clarification was
essential if misunderstanding of the argument was to be avoided.
To avoid premature complications, the diversity of cultures is
introduced in the simplest possible form. Emulating the economists
who sometimes discuss worlds containing only one or two commodi­
ties, we assume that in each case our society is either mono-cultural
(everyone endowed with the same culture, in the anthropological
sense), or alternatively, that there are two such cultures, the power-
holders being a different culture from the rest. The complications in
the real world arising from the simultaneous presence in one sphere
of three, four or more cultures, does not very seriously affect the
argument.
The imposition of this further binary opposition ‘cultural unity/
cultural duality’ on our already established four-fold typology, im­
mediately generates eight possible situations (see Figure 2). Note
first of all that lines 1, 3, 5 and 7 correspond to situations where,
whatever inequalities of power or access to education may prevail,
nationalism has no grip, for lack of (ex hypothesi) cultural differen­
tiation. Other conflicts may occur, and it is an interesting question
whether indeed they do. The evidence seems to indicate that the
classes engendered by early industrialism (let alone the smoother,
milder stratification produced by its later form), do not take off into
permanent and ever-escalating conflict, unless cultural differen­
tiation provides the spark, the line-up as it were, the means of identi­
fying both oneself and the enemy. Clearly there was a good deal of
straight class conflict in, say, 1848: Tocqueville, who did not like it,
saw it as unambiguously as did Marx, who did. But it did not go on
becoming ever sharper and more uncontrollable.
Marxism, on the other hand, likes to think of ethnic conflict as
camouflaged class conflict, and believes that humanity would some­
how benefit if the mask were torn off, if only people became clear­
sighted and thereby freed from nationalist prejudice and blinkers.
This would seem to be a misreading both of the mask and of the
reality beneath it. ‘Anti-Semitism is the socialism of the stupid’, the
phrase once went, though it was not conspicuously echoed in the
days of the Slansky trial or of the Pohsh purges of 1968, when a
94 A T ypology of N ationalisms
socialist regime fomented anti-Semitism. The workers, allegedly,
have no country; nor, presumably, a native culture separating them
from other workers, especially immigrants; nor, it would seem, any
skin colour. Unfortunately the workers generally appear to be un­
aware of these interesting and liberating sensitivity-deprivations -
though not for any lack of being told of them. In fact, ethnicity
enters the political sphere as ‘nationalism’ at times when cultural
homogeneity or continuity (not classlessness) is required by the eco-
nomic base of social life. and when consequently culture-linked class
differences become noxious. while ethnically unmarked, gradual
class differences remain tolerable.

P -p
E --E

1 A A e a r ly in d u s tria lis m w ith o u t

e th n ic c a ta ly s t

2 A B 'H a b s b u r g ' (a n d p o in ts e a st a n d so u th )
n a tio n a lis m
E E

3 A A m a tu re h o m o g e n e o u s
in d u s tria lis m
4 A B c la s s ic a l lib e ra l
W e s te rn n a tio n a lis m
E E

5 A A D e c e m b ris t r e v o lu t io n a r y ,
b u t n o t n a tio n a lis t s itu a tio n

6 A B d ia s p o ra n a tio n a lis m

'E -E

7 A A u n ty p ic a l p r e -n a t io n a lis t
s itu a tio n
8 A B ty p ic a l p r e -n a tio n a lis t
s itu a tio n
Figure 2 A typology of nationalism-engendering and nationalism-thwarung
social situations
~ s ta n d s f o r n e g a tio n , a b s e n c e . P s ta n d s f o r p o w e r , E f o r a c c e s s to m o d e r n - s t y le e d u c a tio n , a n d A
a n d B f o r n a m e s o f in d iv id u a l c u l tu r e s . E a c h n u m b e r e d lin e r e p r e s e n t s o n e p o s s ib le s itu a tio n ; a
lin e c o n ta in in g b o th A a n d B s h o w s a s itu a tio n in w h ic h tw o c u l tu r e s c o -e x is t in a s in g le te r r ito r y ,
a n d a lin e w ith A a n d A s ta n d s fo r c u l tu r a l h o m o g e n e ity in a s im ila r te r r ito r y . I f A o r B s ta n d
u n d e r a n E a n d / o r a P , th e n th e c u l tu r a l g r o u p in q u e s ti o n d o e s h a v e a c c e s s to e d u c a tio n o r p o w e r ;
if it s ta n d s u n d e r ~ E o r ~ P , it la c k s s u c h a c c e s s . T h e s itu a tio n o f a n y g r o u p is in d ic a te d b y th e
nearest E and P above it.

Line 1 corresponds to classical early industrialism, where both

power and educational access are concentrated in the hands of some;
 A T ypology of N ationalisms 95

but in line 1 the deprived ones are not culturally differentiated from
the privileged ones, and consequently nothing, or at least nothing
very radical, happens in the end. The conflict and cataclysm pre­
dicted by Marxism do not occur. Line 3 corresponds to late indus­
trialism, with generalized access to education, and absence of cul­
tural difference; and here there is even less reason to expect conflict
than in line 1. We shall yet have to discuss the difficult and impor­
tant question whether advanced industrialism as such in any case
constitutes a shared culture, overruling the - by now - irrelevant
differences of linguistic idiom. When men have the same concepts,
more or less, perhaps it no longer matters whether they use different
words to express them, you might say. If this is so, line 3 might
characterize the shared future of mankind, after the general con­
summation of industrialism, if and when it comes. This question will
be discussed later. Line 5, once again, gives rise to no nationalist
problems and conflicts. A politically weak sub-group is economically
or educationally privileged, but being indistinguishable from the
majority, is capable of swimming in the general pool without detec­
tion, and, like the proverbial Maoist guerrilla, it does not attract
hostile attention.
Lines 7 and 8 are jointly exempt from the nationalist Problematik
for quite another reason: because the question of access to a new
high culture, which is a pre-condition of entry into and benefits from
the new style of life, simply doesn’t arise. Here, no-one has it, so no-
one has it more than anyone else. This, of course, is the element
which is crucial and central to our theory: nationalism is about entry
to, participation in, identification with, a literate high culture which
is co-extensive with an entire political unit and its total population,
and which must be of this kind if it is to be compatible with the kind
of division of labour, the type or mode of production, on which this
society is based. Here, in lines 7 and 8, this mode is absent, even in
the form of any awareness of it or aspiration towards it. There is no
high culture, or at any rate none which possesses a tendency and
capacity to generalize itself throughout the whole of society and to
become the condition of its effective economic functioning. Line 7 is
excluded from the nationalist issue twice over; once for the reasons
just given, and once because it also lacks cultural differentiation
which could give bite to its other problems, whatever they might be.
Line 8 is more typical of complex agrarian societies than line 7: the
ruling stratum is identifiable by a distinct culture, which serves as a
96 A T ypology of N ationalisms
badge of rank, diminishing ambiguity and thus strain. Line 7, with
its cultural continuity, is untypical for the agrarian world.
Note a further difference between the picture underlying this
typology, and the one customarily offered by Marxism. As already
indicated, our model expects and predicts vertical conflict, between
diverse horizontal layers, in a way which is quite different from
Marxism. It anticipates it only in those cases where ‘ethnic’ (cultural
or other diacritical marks) are visible and accentuate the differences
in educational access and power, and, above all, when they inhibit
the free flow of personnel across the loose lines of social stratifi­
cation.^ It also predicts conflict sooner rather than later in the
development of industrialism (with the proviso that without ethnic/
cultural differentiation virulent and decisively explosive conflict will
not arise at all, early or late). But these differences in prediction are
best seen not in isolation, but as consequences of the differences in
underlying interpretation.
At this level there are at least two very important differences
between the two viewpoints. One concerns a theme well explored
and much commented on among critics of Marxism: its views on the
social stratification engendered by industrialism (or, in its own
terms, ‘capitalism’). Our model assumes that a sharp polarization
and social discontinuity does indeed occur in early industrialism, but
that this then becomes attenuated by social mobility, diminution of
social distance, and convergence of life-styles. It is not denied that
great differences in ownership persist, but it suggests that the effec­
tive social consequences of this, both hidden and perceived, become
very much less important.
Even more significant is the nature of the polarization that occurs
in industrial society. What distinguishes our model from the Marxist
one is that control or ownership of capital wasn’t even mentioned.
Identity of culture, access to power, and access to education were the
only elements fed as premisses into the model, and used for gener­
ating our eight possible situations. Capital, ownership and wealth
were simply ignored, and deliberately so. These once so respected
factors were replaced by another one, generically designated as
access to education, by which was meant, as explained, possession or

‘This fact about the crucial fissures in society seems to have been recognized
by an author who nevertheless continues to class himself as a Marxist.
See Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, London, 1977.
 A T ypology of N ationalisms 97
access to the acquisition of the bundle of skills which enable men to
perform well in the general conditions of an industrial division of
labour, as defined. I hold this approach to be entirely justified. The
point is one much invoked by economists of development of a laisser
faire persuasion. Quite impecunious populations (indentured trans­
planted Chinese coolies, for example) do astonishingly well when
endowed with the apposite attitudes; while capital poured into un­
suitable human contexts as an aid to development achieves nothing.
Capital, like capitalism, seems an overrated category.

The varieties of nationalist experience

Our model was generated by the introduction of the three factors

that alone really matter: power, education, and shared culture, in the
senses intended. Of the eight possible situations which the model
generates, five are as it were non-nationalist, four of them because
there is no cultural differentiation, and two because the question of
access to a centrally sustained high culture does not arise (and one of
the specimens, of course, is included both in the four and in the
two). That leaves us with three forms of nationalism.
Line 2 corresponds to what one may call the classical Habsburg
(and points south and east) form of nationalism. The power-holders
have privileged access to the central high culture, which indeed is
their own, and to the whole bag of tricks which makes you do well
under modern conditions. The powerless are also the education-
deprived. They share, or groups of them share, folk cultures which,
with a good deal of effort and standardized and sustained propaganda,
can be turned into a rival new high culture, whether or not sustained
by the memory, real or invented, of a historical political unit allegedly
once build around that same culture or one of its variants. The re­
quired effort is, however, very energetically put into this task by the
intellectuals-awakeners of this ethnic group, and eventually, if and
when circumstances are propitious, this group sets up a state of its
own, which sustains and protects the newly born, or re-born as the
case might be, culture.
The resulting situation is of immediate and immense advantage to
the said awakeners, and eventually may also be of some advantage to
the other speakers of the culture, although it is hard to say whether
they might not have done just as well out of assimilation into the
98 A T ypology of N ationalisms
culture of the original power-holders. Non-speakers of the new cul­
ture who happen to live in the territory now controlled by the new
state themselves in turn now face the options of assimilation, irre­
dentist effort, emigration, disagreeable minority status and physical
liquidation. This model has been emulated in other parts of the
world, with occasionally the significant modification of what one
may call the ‘African’ type (though it is not restricted to Africa),
which arises when the local folk cultures are incapable of becoming
the new high culture of the emergent state, either because they are
too numerous or too jealous of each other, or for some other reason.
This has already received some discussion in connection with the
pseudo-hypothetical Ruritania, above (chapter 5). But at that stage
of the discussion I was concerned primarily with the difference
between this Ruritanian (or line 2) type, and a special problem facing
advanced industrial societies through the presence of mobility-
resisting, counter-entropic traits in their populations: the contrast
between brakes on mobility due to difficulties of communication,
and brakes due to difficulties of cultural identification, or if you like,
due to the facility of the identification of inequality, the tar-brushing
effect or the giving-a-dog-a-bad-name effect.
The barrier on mobility due to persistent clustering of some traits
in underprivileged strata is a very serious problem, particularly for
developed industrial societies, and the distinction is an important
one; but it is not identical with the one which concerns us now;
namely, the difference between lines 2 and 4. The situation symbo­
lized by line 4 is interesting: some have power and some do not. The
difference correlates with, and can be seized in terms of, differences
of culture. But when it comes to access to education, there is no
significant difference between the relevant populations. What hap­
pens here?
The historic reality to which this model corresponds is the unifi­
cation nationalisms of nineteenth-century Italy and Germany. Most
Italians were ruled by foreigners, and in that sense were politically
underprivileged. The Germans, most of them, lived in fragmented
states, many of them small and weak, at any rate by European great
px)wer standards, and thus unable to provide German culture, as a
centralized modern medium, with its political roof. (By a further
paradox, multi-national great power Austria was endeavouring to do
something of that kind, but much to the displeasure of some of its
citizens.)
 A T ypology of N ationalisms 99
So the political protection of Italian and German culture was
visibly and, to the Italians and Germans offensively, inferior to that
which was provided for, say, French or Enghsh culture. But when it
came to access to education, the facilities provided by these two high
cultures, to those who were born into dialectal variants of it, were
not really in any way inferior. Both Italian and German were literary
languages, with an effective centralized standardization of their cor­
rect forms and with flourishing literatures, technical vocabularies
and manners, educational institutions and academies. There was
httle if any cultural inferiority. Rates of literacy and standards of
education were not significantly lower (if lower at all) among Ger­
mans than they were among the French; and they were not signifi­
cantly low among the Italians, when compared with the dominant
Austrians. German in comparison with French, or Italian in com­
parison with the German used by the Austrians, were not disadvan­
taged cultures, and their speakers did not need to correct unequal
access to the eventual benefits of a modern world. All that needed to
be corrected was that inequality of power and the absence of a poh-
tical roof over a culture (and over an economy), and institutions
which would be identified with it and committed to its maintenance.
The Risorgimento and the unification of Germany corrected these
imbalances.
There is a difference, however, between this kind of unificatory
nationalism, on behalf of a fully effective high culture which only
needs an improved bit of political roofing, and the classical Habsburg-
and-east-and-south type of nationalism. This difference is the sub­
ject of a fascinating and rather moving essay by the late Professor
John Plamenatz, an essay which might well have been called T he
Sad Reflections of a Montenegrin in Oxford’.^ Plamenatz called the
two kinds of nationalism the Western and the Eastern, the Western
type being of the Risorgimento or unificatory kind, typical of the
nineteenth century and with deep links to liberal ideas, while the
Eastern, though he did not stress it in so many words, was exemph-
fied by the kind of nationalism he knew to exist in his native Balkans.
There can be no doubt but that he saw the Western nationalism as
relatively benign and nice, and the Eastern kind as nasty, and
doomed to nastiness by the conditions which gave rise to it. (It

^John Plamenatz, Tw o types of Nationalism’, in E. Kamenka (ed.),

Nationalisniy The Nature arid Evolution of an Idea, London, 1973.
100 A T ypology of N ationalisms
would be an interesting question to ask him whether he would have
considered the markedly un-benign forms taken by these once-benign
or relatively liberal and moderate Western nationalisms in the twen­
tieth century, as accidental and avoidable aberrations or not.)
The underlying logic of Plamenatz’s argument is clear. The rela­
tively benign Western nationalisms were acting on behalf of well-
developed high cultures, normatively centralized and endowed with
a fairly well-defined folk clientele: all that was required was a bit of
adjustment in the political situation and in the international boun­
daries, so as to ensure for these cultures, and their speakers and
practitioners, the same sustained protection as that which was already
enjoyed by their rivals. This took a few battles and a good deal of
sustained diplomatic activity but, as the making of historical ome­
lettes goes, it did not involve the breaking of a disproportionate or
unusual number of eggs, perhaps no more than would have been
broken anyway in the course of the normal political game within the
general political framework and assumptions of the time.
By way of contrast, consider the nationalism designated as Eastern
by Plamenatz. Its implementation did, of course, require battles and
diplomacy, to at least the same extent as the realization of Western
nationahsms. But the matter did not end there. This kind of Eastern
nationahsm did not operate on behalf of an already existing, well-
defined and codified high culture, which had as it were marked out
and linguistically pre-converted its own territory by sustained liter­
ary activities ever since the early Renaissance or since the Refor­
mation, as the case might be. Not at all. This nationalism was active
on behalf of a high culture as yet not properly crystallized, a merely
aspirant or in-the-making high culture. It presided, or strove to pre­
side, in ferocious rivalry with similar competitors, over a chaotic
ethnographic map of many dialects, with ambiguous historical or
linguo-genetic allegiances, and containing populations which had
only just begun to identify with these emergent national high cul­
tures. Objective conditions of the modern world were bound, in due
course, to oblige them to identify with one of them. But till this
occurred, they lacked the clearly defined cultural basis enjoyed by
their German and Italian counterparts.
These populations of eastern Europe were still locked into the
complex multiple loyalties of kinship, territory and religion. To
make them conform to the nationalist imperative was bound to take
more than a few battles and some diplomacy. It was bound to take a
 A T ypology of N ationalisms 101
great deal of very forceful cultural engineering. In many cases it was
also bound to involve population exchanges or expulsions, more or
less forcible assimilation, and sometimes liquidation, in order to
attain that close relation between state and culture which is the essence
of nationalism. And all these consequences flowed, not from some
unusual brutality of the nationalists who in the end employed these
measures (they were probably no worse and no better than anyone
else), but from the inescapable logic of the situation.
If the nationalist imperative was to be implemented in what
Plamenatz generically designated as Eastern conditions, then these
consequences followed. A modern type of society cannot be imple­
mented without the satisfaction of something pretty close to the
nationalist imperative, which follows from the new style of division
of labour. The hunger for industrial affluence, once its benefits and
their availability are known and once the previous social order has in
any case been disrupted, is virtually irresistible. The conclusion to
which this series of steps leads us cannot be avoided. With luck,
understanding and determination, the price can be mitigated; but its
payment cannot be altogether avoided.

Diaspora nationalism

Our discussion of the difference between lines 2 and 4 of figure 2 in a

way repeats Plamenatz’s distinction between Western and Eastern
nationalisms; but it claims certain advantages over his treatment.
For one thing, the contrast is not simply asserted as a contingently,
historically encountered distinction, but is a derived consequence of
a simple model into which, by way of hypothesis, certain very basic
and elementary factors have been fed. This constitutes an advantage
at any rate for those who, like myself, believe that such model­
building should at least be attempted.
But there is a further benefit: this ‘constructive’ approach engen­
ders a further, third variant of nationalism, left out by Plamenatz al­
together, but cogently generated by a further combination of those
self-same elements which also account, in different combinations,
for the two species which did preoccupy him. This third species can
best be called diaspora nationalism, and it is, as a matter of historical
fact, a distinctive, very conspicuous and important sub-species of
nationalism.
102 A T ypology of N ationalisms
Traditional agrarian society, we have stressed, uses culture or
ethnicity primarily to distinguish privileged groups, thus under­
scoring their distinctiveness and legitimacy, enhancing their aura,
and diminishing the danger of status ambiguity. If the rulers speak
one kind of language or have one kind of accent and wear one kind of
habit, it would be a solecism, or much worse, for non-members of
the ruling stratum to use the same mode of communication. It would
be a presumption, lese-majeste^ pollution or sacrilege, or ridiculous.
Ridicule is a powerful sanction. It constitutes a most powerful social
sanction against which reason is specially powerless, even or particu­
larly when the verdict is passed by the least qualified of juries. Other
and possibly more brutal punishments can also be deployed.
But the same social marker device of culture or ethnicity is used to
identify and separate off not merely privileged, but also underprivi­
leged, ambivalently viewed or pariah groups. And it is socially most
useful to have such groups. As we have noted, in pre-industrial
societies bureaucratic functions can best be performed by eunuchs,
priests, slaves and foreigners. To allow free-born native citizens into
such key positions is too dangerous. They are far too much subject to
pressures and temptations from their existing local and kin links to
use their position to benefit their kinsmen and clients, and to use
their kinsmen and clients in turn to strengthen their own positions
further. It is not till the coming of our own modern society, when
everyone becomes both a mamluk and a clerk, that everyone can also
perform reasonably as a bureaucrat, without needing to be emascu­
lated, physically or socially. Now men can be trusted to honour
what had been the politically awkward and untypical norms of
agrarian society, but have become the pervasive and acceptable ones
in ours. We are now all of us castrated, and pitifully trustworthy.
The state can trust us, all in all, to do our duty, and need not turn us
into eunuchs, priests, slaves or mamluks first.
But the manning of posts in an administrative structure is not the
only reason for having pariahs in the agrarian order. Pariah bureau­
cracies are not the only form of exemption from full humanity, and
bureaucracy is not the only source of social power. Magic, the for­
ging of metals, finance, elite military corps, various other such
mysteries and in some circumstances any kind of key specialism may
confer dangerous power on the specialist who* has access to it. One
way of neutralizing this danger, while at the same time tolerating the
specialism and possibly confirming the monopoly of the guild or
 A T ypology of N ationalisms 103
caste, is to insist that this social niche may be occupied only by a
group easily identifiable culturally, destined for avoidance and con­
tempt, and excluded from political office, from the ultimate control
of the tools of coercion, and from honour.
Clear examples of such positions, often too dangerous to be given
to locals and full citizens, and consequently reserved for foreigners,
are palace guards and the providers of financial services. The hand­
ling of large sums of money obviously confers great power, and if
that power is in the hands of someone precluded from using it for his
own advancement, because he belongs to a category excluded from
high and honourable office and from being able to command obedi­
ence, then so much the better. In the traditional order, groups
occupying these positions take the rough with the smooth, accepting
with resignation the benefits, the perils and the humiliations of their
situation. They are generally born into it and have little choice in the
matter. Sometimes they may suffer a great deal, but often there are
benefits as well as losses involved in their position.
The situation changes radically and profoundly with the coming of
mobile, anonymous, centralized mass society. This is particularly
true for minorities specializing in financial, commercial, and gener­
ally urban specialist occupations. With pervasive mobility and occu­
pational change, it is no longer feasible to retain the monopoly of
some activity for a particular cultural group. When so many mem­
bers of the wider society aspire to these often comfortable, and in
themselves (if not subject to confiscation) lucrative occupations, they
can hardly be reserved for a minority, and still less for a stigmatized
one.
At the same time, however, these previously specialized and seg­
regated populations are liable to have a marked advantage when it
comes to the new pursuits and the new style. Their urban style of
life, habits of rational calculation, commercial probity, higher rates
of literacy and possibly a scriptural religion, all fit them better than
either the members of the old ruling class, or of the old peasantry,
for the new life-style.
It is often asserted, even by sophisticated sociologists such as Max
Weber, that these minorities have a double standard, one for their
own group, and another, instrumental and amoral, for outsiders.
They do indeed have a double standard, but it is exactly the other
way round. Their entire standing with the outside world previously
hinged on performing some specific service or supplying some
104 A T ypology of N ationalisms
specific good. Their name and revenue depended entirely on doing
this reliably y and they were indeed known for such professional reli­
ability. This was quite different from the relations prevailing inside a
moral community, where a commercial deal between two individuals
was inevitably always far more than a mere commercial deal. The
two partners in it were also kinsmen, clansmen, allies, enemies, and
so forth; hence the deal was never restricted to a simple delivery of
this good at this price. There was always a promise or a fear of greater
advantages or possible betrayal. Both sides were involved in bargains
and calculations far more long-term and intangible, and thus had to
try to deliver more. If on the other hand they were dissatisfied with
the deal, powerful considerations operated to inhibit complaints, lest
all the other strands in the relationship were thereby also put at risk.
The advantage on the other hand of dealing with a minority, one
with whom you could not eat, marry, or enter into political or mili­
tary alliance, was that both parties could concentrate on a rational
cost-benefit analysis of the actual specific deal in question, and
expect, on the whole, to get what they bargained for, neither more
nor less. Within the minority community, of course, relationships
were once again many-stranded, and hence deals were less rational
and reliable, and more many-sided. But in the wider society, those
who lack status can honour a contract. Those on the other hand
who enjoyed a social station, and had to respect its rights and duties,
were thereby deprived of much of the elbow-room required for nego­
tiating and observing specific contracts. Status and honour deprive a
man of options, by imposing too many obligations and commitments.
Deprivation of status enables a man to attend to the business at
hand, negotiate a rational deal, and observe its terms.
So it is indeed true that the minority community had a double
standard, but in the opposite sense from what is normally supposed.
To the outsider they displayed that reliability which is the presup­
posed anticipation of single-stranded modern relations. It was with
their fellows that their dealings had that rich many-stranded quality
which, to our modern sensibility, smacks of corruption. But, of
course, with the coming of anonymous mobile mass society, single-
stranded, one-shot deals have become quite normal, and not a
special feature of dealings between non-commensal groups.
Under conditions of modernization the erstwhile specialized min­
ority groups lose their disabilities, but also alas their monopoly and
their protection. Their previous training and orientation often make
 A T ypology of N ationalisms 105
them perform much more successfully than their rivals in the new
economic free-for-all. Their background fits them for it so much
better. But at the same time their background also contains a tradi­
tion of political impotence, and of the surrender of the communal
right of self-defence. That, after all, had been the price of their
entering the profession in the first place: they had to make them­
selves politically and militarily impotent, so as to be allowed to
handle tools that could be, in the wrong hands, so very powerful and
dangerous. But even without such a tradition, the political and mili­
tary weakness of such a group follows from its minority status and,
very often, from its dispersal among a variety of urban centres, and
its lack of a compact defensible territorial base. Some economically
brilliant groups of this kind have behind them a long tradition of
dispersal, urbanization and minority status: this is clearly the case of
the Jews, Greeks, Armenians or Parsees. Other groups come to
occupy similar positions only as a result of recent migrations and
aptitudes (or educational opportunities) only acquired or deployed in
modern times. Such is the situation of overseas Chinese and Indians,
or the Ibos in Nigeria.
The disastrous and tragic consequences, in modern conditions, of
the conjunction of economic superiority and cultural identifiability
with political and military weakness, are too well known to require
repetition. The consequences range from genocide to expulsion.
Sometimes a precarious and uneasy balance is maintained. The main
point is that the central power now finds itself in a very different
situation, and subject to very different temptations and pressures
from those which prevailed in the days of the agrarian division of
labour. Then, there was no question of everyone becoming mobile,
educated, specialized or commercial-minded; who would then have
tilled the land?
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the businessman?

Well, there were some. But they could not constitute the majority or
the norm. An almost universally embourgeoised society was incon­
ceivable.
The general population then did not covet the minority role,
which was in any case stigmatized. The rulers welcomed a defence­
less, fairly easily taxable, economically specialized group, tied to the
rulers by its strictly sustained and reinforced defencelessness. But
106 A T ypology of N ationalisms
now, the national ‘development’ requires precisely that everyone
should move in the direction which was once open only to a minority
and stigmatized group. Once the state had an interest in protecting
the minority, which was easy to milch. Now the state has more
interest in depriving the minority of its economic monopolies, and,
because of the minority’s visibility and wealth, it can buy off a great
deal of discontent in the wider population by dispossessing and
persecuting it; and so the inevitable happens. This provides a most
enjoyable (except for its victims) and pathetic theatre of humiliation,
inflicted on the once-envied group, to the delectation of the major­
ity. This pleasure can be savoured by a far larger category than just
the restricted group of inheritors of the positions vacated by the
persecuted minority, and that too is a politically important con­
sideration, making this course a politically attractive option for the
state.
Under these circumstances the minority is faced with the same
kind of options (though under different circumstances) as those
which faced our Ruritanian labour migrants. It can assimilate; and
sometimes indeed the entire minority, or some considerable parts of
it, succeed in doing just that. Alternatively, it can endeavour to shed
both its specialization and its minority status, and create a state of its
own, as the new protector of a now un-specialized, generic, newly
national culture. For a dispersed urban population the major prob­
lem is, of course, the acquisition of the required territorial base. The
Ruritanian peasants, being peasants, inevitably had a territorial
base, destined soon to become the kingdom of Ruritania, and later
to become the Socialist People’s Republic of Ruritania. But what was
an urban, specialized and dispersed group, with few or no rural
links, to do?
For these kinds of nationalism, the acquisition of territory was the
first and perhaps the main problem. The Hellenes initially thought
not so much in terms of secession from the Ottoman Empire, as of
inverting the hierarchy within it and taking it over, thereby reviving
Byzantium. The first Greek rising took place not in Greece, but in
what is now Rumania, where the Greeks were a minority, and more­
over one doing rather well out of the Ottoman system. The use
of what is now southern Greece as a territorial basis only came
later.
The most famous and dramatic case of a successful diaspora
nationalism is Israel. It is also the ‘last, least typical of European
 A T ypology of N ationalisms 107
nationalisms’, in Hugh Trevor-Roper’s words. ^(It solved a European
problem by creating an Asian one, about which the Israelis have
barely begun to think. In the diaspora, the Jewish religion referred
to Jerusalem; once back in Jerusalem, semi-secular Zionism for a
time used the dated socialist or populist cliches of nineteenth century
Europe.) Nearly two thousand years of history had left no Jewish
territorial base whatever, least of all in the land of Israel, and had
moreover left Jews as a set of discontinuous and fairly highly speci­
alized strata within the structures of other societies, rather than the
kind of balanced population which can be the base of a more or less
autarchic modern state, of a geschlossener Handelstaat. Nevertheless,
this extraordinary transformation was achieved, no doubt thanks in
large part to the incentive provided by the persecutions, first in
eastern Europe and then throughout Europe during the period of the
Holocaust. These persecutions illustrate, better than any others, the
kind of fate which is likely to befall culturally distinguishable, eco­
nomically privileged and politically defenceless communities, at a
time when the age of specialized communities, of the traditional
form of organic division of labour, is over.
The human transformation involved in the Jewish case went
counter to the global trend: an urban, highly literate and sophisti­
cated, cosmopolitan population was at least partly returned to the
land and made more insular. Normally the nationalist process is
inversely related to its own verbiage, talking of peasants and making
townsmen. Here it was really necessary to make a few surrogate
peasants. In fact, they turned out to be peasants with certain crucial
tribal traits: a form of local organization which was made up of units
that were simultaneously productive and military in their effective
role. The manufacture of such tribesmen-peasants from an urban
background could not conceivably be an easy matter, and the surro­
gate peasant-soldiers were in fact formed by a species of secular
monastic order. This needed an ideology, and by a historic accident
the suitable mixture of socialism and populism was indeed available
and pervasive in the intellectual milieux in which the order did its
recruiting. The pro-rural, anti-division-of-labour, collectivist themes
in this ideology were ideally suited for the purpose. Whether the
kibbutzim do indeed provide the good life for modern man, as their
founders believed and hoped, remains an open question; but as a

^Hugh Trevor-Roper, and Other Nationalism^ London, 1962.

108 A T ypology of N ationalisms
piece of machinery for effectively re-settling the land by people
drawn from heavily urbanized and embourgeoised populations, and
effectively defending it in a military crisis with minimal and exi­
guous means, they proved to be quite outstanding, and indeed
unequalled.
The problems of social transformation, cultural revivification,
acquisition of territory, and coping with the natural enmity of those
with previous claims on the territory in question, illustrate the quite
special and acute problems faced by diaspora nationalisms. Those of
them which retain some residue of an ancient territory may face
problems which are correspondingly less acute. But the problems
which face a diaspora culture which does not take the nationalist
option may be as grave and tragic as those which face it if it does
adopt nationalism. In fact, one may say that it is the extreme peril of
the assimilationist alternative which makes the adherents of the
nationalist solution espouse their cause in this situation.
The gravity of the situation faced by diaspora populations if they
do not choose nationalism, and the manner in which the whole situ­
ation can be deduced from the very general characteristics of the
transition from an agrarian to an industrial order, show that it is
quite wrong to invoke diaspora nationalisms as counter-examples to
our theory of nationalism:
Greek and Armenian nationalism arose among populations which
were generally more prosperous and better able to understand the
wealth-generating economies of modern Europe than their Ottoman
Muslim overlords.^

In our Ruritanian case, nationalism was explained in terms of an

economically and politically disadvantaged population, able to dis­
tinguish itself culturally, and thus impelled towards the nationalist

^Nationalism in Asia and Africa, ed. Elie Kedourie, London, 1970, p. 20. In
the same volume (p. 132) Professor Kedourie challenges the doctrine that
industrial social organization makes for cultural homogeneity: ‘Large
industrial enterprises have taken root and flourished in multi-lingual soci­
eties: in Bohemia and the United States in the nineteenth century; in Hong
Kong, Israel, French Algeria, India,. Ceylon, and Malaya in the twentieth.
It has never been claimed that you can only have industrial enterprise in a
society which is already culturally homogeneous. What the theory does
claim is that if an industrial economy is established in a culturally hetero­
geneous society (or if it even casts its advance shadow on it), then tensions
 A T ypology of N ationalisms 109
option. But the intolerable position, once the process of industriali­
zation begins, of culturally distinguishable populations which are
not at an economic disadvantage (quite the reverse), only at a poli­
tical disadvantage which is inherent in their minority status, follows
from the same general premisses, and points to the same conclusion,
though naturally by its own specific path. To concentrate exclusively
on economic disadvantage, which admittedly is prominent in the
most typical cases, is to travesty our position. The industrial order
requires homogeneity within political units, at least sufficient to
permit fairly smooth mobility, and precluding the ‘ethnic’ identifi­
cation of either advantage or disadvantage, economic or political.

result which will engender nationalism. With the possible and temporary
exception of Hong Kong, whose population is recruited from Chinese not
wishing to live under the present mainland Chinese regime, so that the very
principle of recruitment of the community selects for absence of irredentist
longing, every single other country cited in Kedourie’s list, far from con-
sdtuting a counter-example to the theory, in fact illustrates it, and indeed
provides veritable paradigms of the model which the theory proposes.
Bohemia was the source of much of the early nationalist activity and theory,
both German and Czech; the educational system of the United States was
notoriously geared to turning a heterogeneous immigrant population into
an ethnically homogeneous one, with the warm concurrence of the popu­
lation so processed. All the other countries listed illustrate the story of
nadonalism, some of them in extreme and tragic form. It is true that in
India, cultural homogeneity sometimes cuts across linguisdc diversity: Hin­
dus ‘speak the same language* even when they do not speak the same
language. But the theory does not preclude that.
The Future of Nationalism

Our general diagnosis of nationalism is simple. Of the three stages of

human history, the second is the agrarian, and the third is the indus­
trial. Agrarian society has certain general features: the majority of
the population is made up of agricultural producers, peasants. Only
a minority of the society’s population are specialists, whether mili­
tary, political, religious or economic. Most agrarian populations are
also affected by the two other great innovations of the agrarian age:
centralized government and the discovery of writing.
Agrarian society - unlike, it would seem, both its predecessor and
successor societies - is Malthusian: both productive and defence
necessities impel it to seek a growing population, which then pushes
close enough to the available resources to be occasionally stricken by
disasters. The three crucial factors operating in this society (food
production, political centralization and literacy) engender a social
structure in which cultural and political boundaries are seldom con­
gruent.
Industrial society is quite different. It is not Malthusian. It is
based and dependent on cognitive and economic growth which in the
end both outstrips and discourages further dramatic population
growth. Various factors in it - universal literacy, mobility and hence
individualism, political centralization, the need for a costly edu­
cational infrastructure - impel it into a situation in which political
and cultural boundaries are on the whole congruent. The state is,
above all, the protector, not of a faith, but of a culture, and the main-
tainer of the inescapably homogeneous and standardizing educa­
tional system, which alone can turn out the kind of personnel
capable of switching from one job to another within a growing eco­
nomy and a mobile society, and indeed of performing jobs which in­
volve manipulating meanings and people rather than things. For
most of these men, however, the limits of their culture are the limits,
not perhaps of the world, but of their own employability and hence
dignity.
 T he F uture of N ationalism 111
In most of the closed micro-communities of the agrarian age the
limits of the culture were the limits of the world, and the culture
often itself remained unperceived, invisible: no-one thought of it as
the ideal political boundary. Now, with mobility, it has become
visible and is the limit of the individual’s mobility, circumscribing
the newly enlarged range of his employability; and thus it becomes
the natural political boundary. To say this is not to reduce nationa­
lism to mere anxiety about the prospects for social mobility. Men
really love their culture, because they now perceive the cultural
atmosphere (instead of taking it for granted), and know they cannot
really breathe or fulfil their identity outside it.
The high (literate) culture in which they have been educated is,
for most men, their most precious investment, the core of their
identity, their insurance, and their security. Thus a world has
emerged which in the main, minor exceptions apart, satisfies the
nationalist imperative, the congruence of culture and polity. The
satisfaction of the nationalist principle was not a precondition of the
first appearance of industrialism, but only the product of its spread.
A transition has to be made from a world which does not encour­
age even the formulation of the nationalist ideal, let alone even
remotely make possible its implementation, to an age which makes it
seem (erroneously) a self-evident ideal valid for all times, thus
turning it into an effective norm, which in most cases is imple­
mented. The period of this transition is inevitably a period of natio­
nalist activism. Mankind arrived in the industrial age with cultural
and political institutions which generally contradicted the nationalist
requirements. Bringing society into line with the new imperatives
was inevitably a turbulent process.
The most violent phase of nationalism is that which accompanies
early industrialism, and the diffusion of industrialism. An unstable
social situation is created in which a whole set of painful cleavages
tend to be superimposed on each other: there are sharp political,
economic and educational inequalities. At the same time, new
culture-congruent polities are emerging. In these conditions, if these
multiple and superimposed inequalities also coincide, more or less,
with ethnic and cultural ones, which are visible, conspicuous and
easily intelligible, they impel the new emerging units to place them­
selves under ethnic banners.
Industrialization inevitably comes to different places and groups
at different times. This ensures that the explosive blend of early
112 T he F uture of N ationalism
industrialism (dislocation, mobility, acute inequality not hallowed by
time and custom) seeks out, as it were, all the available nooks and
crannies of cultural differentiation, wherever they be. Few of those
that can be effectively activated for nationalism, by coinciding how­
ever loosely with the septic inequalities of the time, and defining
viable potential industrial states, fail so to be activated. As the tidal
wave of modernization sweeps the world, it makes sure that almost
everyone, at some time or other, has cause to feel unjustly treated,
and that he can identify the culprits as being of another ‘nation’. If
he can also identify enough of the victims as being of the same
‘nation’ as himself, a nationalism is born. If it succeeds, and not all
of them can, a nation is born.
There is a further element of economic rationality in the political
system of ‘lateral boundaries’ which nationalism engenders in the
modern world. Territorial boundaries are drawn and legally en­
forced, while differences of status are neither marked nor enforced,
but rather camouflaged and disavowed. Notoriously, advanced eco­
nomies can swamp and inhibit newly emerging ones, unless these are
effectively protected by their own state. The nationalist state is not
the protector only of a culture, but also of a new and often initially
fragile economy. (It generally loses interest in protecting a faith.) In
those cases where a modern nation is born of what had previously
been a mere stratum - peasants only, or urban specialists only - the
state’s concerns with making its ethnic group into a balanced nation,
and with developing its economy, become aspects of one and the
same task.
The question now arises whether nationalism will continue to
be a major force or a general political imperative in an age of
advanced, perhaps even in some sense completed industrialism. As
the world is not yet too close to a satiation of the craving for eco­
nomic growth, any answer to this question will inevitably be specu­
lative. The speculation is nevertheless well worth attempting. The
implications of growth for occupational and social mobility were
prominent in our argument. Constant occupational changes, rein­
forced by the concern of most jobs with communication, the mani­
pulation of meaning rather than the manipulation of things, makes
for at least a certain kind of social equality or diminished social dis­
tance, and the need for a standardized, effectively shared medium of
communication. These factors underlie both modern egalitarianism
and nationalism.
 T he F uture of N ationalism 113
But what happens if a satiated industrial society becomes once
again stabilized, un-mobile? The classical imaginative exploration of
this occurs in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. A satiated indus­
trial society is indeed conceivable: though there is no reason to sup­
pose that all possible technological innovations will one day be
exhausted, there is reason to suppose that beyond a certain point
further technical innovations may cease to have any significant fur­
ther impact on social structure and society generally, on the analogy
of a man who, beyond a certain point of wealth, can no longer in any
way alter his life-style in response to further enrichment. This ana­
logy may or may not be valid, and it is difficult to be confident about
the answer to this question. The age of wealth-saturation for man­
kind at large still seems fairly distant, and so the issue does not affect
us too urgently at present.
But it is worth stating that much of our argument did hinge on the
implications of continuing commitment to global economic growth,
and hence to innovation and occupational change; it also pre­
supposed the persistence of a society based on the promise of aff­
luence and on generalized Danegeld. These assumptions, though
valid now, cannot be expected to remain so indefinitely (even if we
exclude the possibility of the termination of this kind of society by
some nuclear or similar disaster). Our culturally homogeneous,
mobile and, in its middle strata, fairly unstructured society may well
not last for ever, even if we disregard the possibility of cataclysms;
and when this kind of society no longer prevails, then what we have
presented as the social bases of nationalism will be profoundly
modified. But that is not something which will be visible in our
lifetimes.
In the shorter run, without looking ahead so far, we can expect
nationalism to become modified. Its acute stage arose, as stated, at
the time of the maximal gap between the industrially incorporated,
politically and educationally enfranchised populations, and those at
the gate of the new world but not yet inside it. As economic develop­
ment proceeded, this gap narrowed (pessimistic assertions to the
contrary notwithstanding). The gap may even continue to increase in
absolute terms, but once both the privileged and the underprivileged
are above a certain level, it is no longer felt and perceived to be so
acute. The difference between starvation and sufficiency is acute;
the difference between sufficiency with more, or with fewer, largely
symbolic, artificial frills, is not nearly so great, especially when, in
114 T he F uture of N ationalism
an at least nominally egalitarian industrial society, those frills are all
made in the same style.
The diminution of the acuteness of nationalist fervour does not
mean, however, that counter-entropic minorities will necessarily fare
well. Their fate in the modern world has often been tragic, and to be
confident that these tragedies will not be repeated would be an
indulgence or facile, unwarranted optimism. A mature industrial
society requires smooth communication and smooth mobility for its
members. Attainment of the former is the condition of maturity; the
latter seems to be more elusive. Obstruction of mobility, where it
occurs, is one of the most serious and intractable problems of indus­
trial society. The gap in prosperity may also increase between
nations, but when a frontier already exists between the haves and
have-nots, the tension between them cannot, as it were, create it
twice over, so from the viewpoint of nationalism this is irrelevant. (I
leave aside for the time being the possibility of some collective hos­
tility by an entire class of ‘proletarian nations’, politically sovereign,
towards the rich nations. If this occurs, it will in any case be some­
thing other than nationalism. It would manifest an international
solidarity of the poor.)
So what happens to later nationalism, if disparities of wealth
between populations diminish with the extension of the industrial
system? The answer to this question is not yet clear, but it does con­
cern us far more closely than the more distant vistas; for a fair
number of countries already at least approach this condition. We can
look both at the implications of our theoretical premisses, and at the
concrete empirical, historical evidence. A fair amount of it is already
available. It all hinges, in effect, on the nature of industrial culture.

Industrial culture - one or many?

There are two possible visions of the future of culture in industrial

societies, and any number of intermediate compromise positions
between the poles which they represent. My own conception of
world history is clear and simple: the three great stages of man, the
hunting-gathering, the agrarian and the industrial, determine our
problems, but not our solution. In other words, Marxism was wrong
twice over, not merely in multiplying the stages beyond the elegant,
economical and canonical three (trinitarians such as Comte, Frazer
 T he F uture of N ationalism 115
or Karl Polanyi were right, whether or not they had correctly identi­
fied the elements of the trinity), but above all in suggesting that the
solution as well as the problem was determined for each stage:
The mode of production of material life determines the general
character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. . . . In
broad outline we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal and
the modern bourgeois modes of production can be indicated as pro­
gressive epochs in the economic formation of society.^

But, in general, the determination of society by the available eco­

nomic base does not seem to hold. Neither hunting nor agrarian
societies are all alike. What is specifically disastrous for the Marxist
philosophy of history is that the crucial superstructural features (the
state and literacy) do not correlate with the appearance of the really
decisive infrastructure change, namely the beginning of food pro­
duction. If James Woodburn is right, a crucial structural change
occurs already loithin the category of hunting societies, which can be
divided into those practising immediate return, and those with de­
layed return hunting and gathering economies. The latter, by ac­
quiring the moral and institutional basis for long-term obligation,
already possess the organizational pre-conditions for developing
agriculture, if and when the pressures in that direction operate and
the technical means become available.^ Division of tasks over time
engenders the habits of thought and action which then make possible
the permanent specialization of roles between individuals involved in
food production. If this is so, then one great socio-structural change
precedes the past great leap to food production; while there is no
doubt but that the other great structural change, state-formation,
follows it, and is not in any immediate or single way linked to it.^

^K. Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,

in numerous editions and translations.
^James Woodburn, ‘Hunters and gathers today and reconstruction of the
past*, in E. Gellner (ed.), Soviet and Western Anthropology, London and
New York, 1980.
^ h e problems, empirical and theoretical, which face the doctrine of a
regular relation between social base and superstructure in Marxism, and
their greater acuteness once a unilineal view of social development is
dropped, do receive some attention in Soviet thought. See for instance Eero
Loone, Sovremennaia Filosofia Istorii (Contemporary Philosophy of His­
tory), Tallin, 1980, especially Part IV.
116 T he F uture of N ationalism
Mankind moved from a hunting-gathering state when all had leisure,
to an agrarian one when only some (the ruling elite) had it, to an
industrial age governed by the work ethic, when none have it. Or
you might say we moved from no delay in gratification to some delay
and finally to eternal delay.
So the idea of the material determination of society would seem to
be out, in general. But is it also out for industrial society, in the long
run? Is the general form of industrial society, at least, uniquely
determined by its productive infrastructure? The answer is not ob­
vious, and certainly not predetermined by the clear evidence to the
contrary for hunting and agrarian societies. It could be that industrial
man will, in the end, have fewer social options than his hunter and
peasant ancestor. It could be that the thesis that all industrial societies
eventually come to resemble each other is correct, or at any rate will
in the long run turn out to be such. With specific reference to culture
and nationalism, what may we expect?
It may be convenient to explore first this convergence thesis.
Suppose it were indeed the case that the industrial mode of pro­
duction uniquely determines the culture of society: the same techno­
logy canalizes people into the same type of activity and the same
kinds of hierarchy, and that the same kind of leisure styles were also
engendered by the existing techniques and by the needs of produc­
tive life. Diverse languages might and probably would, of course,
survive: but the social uses to which they were being put, the mean­
ings available in them, would be much the same in any language
within this wider shared industrial culture.
In such a world, a man moving from one language to another
might indeed need to learn a new vocabulary, new words for familiar
things and contexts, and he might also, at worst, have to learn a new
grammar, in a more or less purely linguistic sense; but this would be
about the limit of the adjustment demanded of him. No new thought
styles would be required of him. He could all in all comport himself
like a tourist with a phrase book, confident that all he needed was to
locate the new phrase for an old and familiar need. The tourist would
move from one area to another, knowing that within each of them
human requirements are bounded by the want of a room, meal,
drink, petrol, tourist office, and a few other things. Likewise, in a
world in which the convergence thesis were wholly valid, inter-
hnguistic adjustment would be a simple matter of exchanging
one verbal currency for another, within a well-run international
 T he F uture of N ationalism 117
conceptual system in which exchange rates were fairly stable, fixed
and reliable.
There is clearly an element of truth in this. Industrial society has a
complex division of labour and interdependence internationally as
well as internally. Notwithstanding the care national states take not
to be too specialized and hence too dependent on others, the amount
of international trade is very great, and so is the accompanying con­
ceptual and institutional convergence. It is deeply significant that
credit cards are valid across Iron Curtains. You can freely use your
credit card in countries where you cannot freely speak your mind.
The dollar is quite legally used as currency in at least one socialist
system. There is notoriously an international, trans-ideological youth
culture.
In the industrial age only high cultures in the end effectively sur­
vive. Folk cultures and little traditions survive only artificially, kept
going by language and folklore preservation societies. Moreover,
the high cultures of industrial societies are a special breed among
high cultures in general, and resemble each other more than do
agrarian high cultures. They are tied to a shared cognitive base and a
consciously global economy. They probably overlap more closely
than did the old high cultures that were once deeply pervaded by
distinctive theologies, by their culturally private, idiosyncratic cog­
nitive systems.
Is this the whole truth? Should one expect that eventually, with
the consummation of effective industrialization, inter-cultural and
inter-linguistic differences will degenerate into merely phonetic
ones, when only the superficial tokens of communication are vari­
able, while the semantic content and the social context of utterances
and actions become universal, non-regional? If that came to be, the
communication gap between diverse ‘languages’ could become neg­
ligibly small, and the corresponding social gap, the counter-entropic,
mobility-inhibiting effect of diverse linguistic and cultural back­
grounds could become correspondingly insignificant. No nationalist
inhibitions would then impede inter-cultural amity and inter­
nationalism.
To some extent and in some areas, something of this kind does in
fact already happen: two equally sophisticated well-trained members
of the upper professional layers of developed industrial countries feel
litde strain and need to adjust when visiting each other’s lands,
irrespective of how competent they are at speaking each other’s
118 T he F uture of N ationalism
language, in the literal sense. They happily co-operate in the multi­
national corporation. They already ‘speak each other’s language’,
even if they do not speak each other’s language. At that level some­
thing like an international labour market and interchangeability
already obtain. But can or will this situation become generalized? It
is ironic that intellectuals, the driving force of initial nationalism, are
now, in a world of nation-states, often the ones who move with the
greatest ease between states, with the least prejudice, as once they
did in the days of an international inter-state clerisy.
If this freedom of international movement became general, natio­
nalism would cease to be a problem; or at any rate, communication
gaps engendered by cultural differences would cease to be significant
and would no longer produce nationalist tensions. Nationalism as a
permanent problem, as a Damocles’ sword hanging over any polity
which dares to defy the nationalist imperative of the congruence of
political and cultural boundaries, would be removed, and cease to be
an ever-present and acute threat. In this hypothetical global con­
tinuum of a basically homogeneous industrial culture, differentiated
by languages which are distinct only phonetically and superficially
but not semantically, the age of nationalism would become a matter
of the past.
I do not believe that this will come to pass. I am inclined to follow
J.-F. Revel on this point.
Les peuples ne sont pas tous les memes. Ils ne I’etaient pas dans la
misere, ils ne le sont pas dans le luxe.^
(Nations are not all alike. They weren’t alike in poverty, and they are
not alike in luxury.)
The shared constraints of industrial production, of a unique back­
ground science, and of a complex international interdependence and
sustained continuous contact and communication, will no doubt
produce a certain measure of global cultural convergence, a fair
amount of which we can see already. This will prevent failure of
communication arising from cultural divergence from being quite
such a major factor in exacerbating tension between the more and
the less privileged. (It will not prevent other counter-entropic traits
from aggravating or provoking tensions.) Within developed coun­
tries, countries within which the great majority of the citizens have

^J.F. Revel, En France^ Paris, 1965.

 T he F uture of N ationalism 119
reasonably good and not very unequal access to the dominant eco­
nomically effective high culture, and where the existing inequalities
cannot be dredged to the surface and activated politically by a cul­
tural or ‘ethnic’ net, a certain amount of secondary cultural plura­
lism and diversity may emerge again, and be politically innocuous.
Given generalized development, and something like equal access to
social perks, then related cultures, or those with a shared history,
will be able to cohabit amicably. The linguistic plurality of the Swiss
canton of the Grisons does not seem to have put the political unity of
that canton under stress. The same cannot be said of canton Bern,
where the inhabitants of the Jura were sufficiently discontented with
the German-speaking unit to effect, not without conflict, a reorgani­
zation of the Swiss Confederacy.
But it remains difficult to imagine two large, politically viable,
independence-worthy cultures cohabiting under a single political
roof, and trusting a single political centre to maintain and service
both cultures with perfect or even adequate impartiality. The degree
of sovereignty which national states will retain in various circum­
stances can be foreseen - the restrictions on sovereignty by bodies
such as the United Nations, regional confederations and alliances
and so forth - is not a subject of this study, nor a topic which abso­
lutely needs to be discussed here; but it would seem overwhelmingly
likely that differences between cultural styles of life and communi­
cation, despite a similar economic base, will remain large enough to
require separate servicing, and hence distinct cultural-political units,
whether or not they will be wholly sovereign.
How about the other extreme possibility? The alternative pole
corresponds to a situation in which distinct cultures would remain
just as incommensurate and incompatible as they are alleged to have
been among pre-industrial cultures, if not more so. This question is
complicated by the fact that it is by no means clear, among anthro­
pologists or others, just how totally incommensurate and self-
sufficient pre-industrial cultures were.
In its extreme form, the (recently quite fashionable) incommen­
surability thesis runs something as follows: each culture or way of
life has its own standards not merely of virtue, but also of reality it­
self, and no culture may ever legitimately be judged, let alone con­
demned, by the standards of another, or by standards pretending to
be universal and above all cultures (for there are no such higher and
external norms). This position is usually urged by romantics, using
120 T he F uture of N ationalism
it as a premiss for defending archaic beliefs and customs from ratio­
nal criticism, and insisting that the idea of extraneous, universally
rational standards is a myth. In this form, such a position would
seem to entail a virulent nationalism, in as far as it clearly entails that
the subjection of one culture to the political management adminis­
tered by members of another must always be iniquitous.
I am deeply sceptical about the applicability of the incommen­
surability thesis even to agrarian societies. I do not believe it can
legitimately be used to deny the possibility of inter-cultural com­
munication, or of the comparative evaluation of agrarian and indus­
trial cultures. The incommensurability thesis owes some of its
plausibility to a tendency to take too seriously the self-absolutizing,
critic-anathematizing official faiths of late agrarian societies, which
indeed are generally so constructed as to be logically invulnerable
from outside and perpetually self-confirming from inside. Despite
these notorious traits, which have now become repellent to men of
liberal inclinations, the adherents of these faiths have, in practice,
known how to transcend their own much advertised blinkers. They
are and were conceptually bilingual, and knew how to switch from
commensurate to incommensurate idioms with ease and alacrity.
Functionaries of nominally exclusive, truth-monopolizing faiths
nonetheless participate amicably in discussions at the World Council
of Churches. The question concerning just how we manage to tran­
scend relativism is interesting and difficult, and certainly will not be
solved here. What is relevant, however, is that we somehow or other
do manage to overcome it, that we are not helplessly imprisoned
within a set of cultural cocoons and their norms, and that for some
very obvious reasons (shared cognitive and productive bases and
greatly increased inter-social communication) we may expect fully
industrial man to be even less enslaved to his local culure than was
his agrarian predecessor.
On this issue the truth seems to me to lie somewhere in the
middle. The shared economic infrastructure of advanced industrial
society and its inescapable implications will continue to ensure that
men are dependent on culture, and that culture requires standardi­
zation over quite wide areas, and needs to be maintained and ser­
viced by centralized agencies. In other words, men will continue to
owe their employability and social acceptability to sustained and
complex training, which cannot be supplied by kin or local group.
This being so, the definition of political units and boundaries will
 T he F uture of N ationalism 121
not be able to ignore with impunity the distribution of cultures. By
and large, ignoring minor and innocuous exceptions, the nationalist
imperative of the congruence of political unit and of culture will con­
tinue to apply. In that sense, one need not expect the age of natio­
nalism to come to an end.
But the sharpness of nationalist conflict may be expected to dimi­
nish. It was the social chasms created by early industrialism, and by
the unevenness of its diffusion, which made it acute. Those social
chasms were probably no worse than those which agrarian society
tolerates without batting an eyelid, but they were no longer softened
or legitimated by longevity and custom, and they occurred in a con­
text which in other ways encouraged hope and the expectation of
equality, and which required mobility. Whenever cultural differ­
ences served to mark off these chasms, then there was trouble
indeed. When they did not, nothing much happened. ‘Nations’,
ethnic groups, were not nationalist when states were formed in fairly
stable agrarian systems. Classes, however oppressed and exploited,
did not overturn the political system when they could not define
themselves ‘ethnically’. Only when a nation became a class, a visible
and unequally distributed category in an otherwise mobile system,
did it become politically conscious and activist. Only when a class
happened to be (more or less) a ‘nation’ did it turn from being a
class-in-itself into a class-for-itself, or a nation-for-itself. Neither
nations nor classes seem to be political catalysts: only nation-classes
or class-nations are such.
An interesting author who attempts to salvage Marxism, or unearth
or invent a new viable form of it, recognizes this fact.^ Late indus­
trial society no longer engenders such deep social abysses, which
could then be activated by ethnicity. (It will continue to encounter
difficulties, sometimes tragic ones, from counter-entropic traits such
as ‘race’ which visibly contradict its overt egalitarianism.) It will
have to respect cultural differences where they survive, provided
that they are superficilal and do not engender genuine barriers
between people, in which case the barriers, not their cultures, con­
stitute a grave problem. Though the old plethora of folk cultures is
unlikely to survive, except in a token and cellophane-packaged form,
an international plurality of sometimes fairly diverse high cul­
tures will no doubt (happily) remain with us. The infrastructural

*Nairn, The Break-up of Britain.

122 T he F uture of N ationalism
investment made in them can be relied on to perpetuate them. Partly
because many boundaries have already adjusted themselves to the
boundaries of these cultures, and partly because the nationalist
imperative is now so widely respected that developed societies sel­
dom defy it brazenly, and try to avoid head-on confrontations with
it: for these various reasons, late industrial society (if mankind is
spared long enough to enjoy it) can be expected to be one in which
nationahsm persists, but in a muted, less virulent form.
Nationalism and Ideology

A conspicuous feature of our treatment of nationalism has been a

lack of interest in the history of nationalist ideas and the contri­
butions and nuances of individual nationalist thinkers. This is in
marked contrast to many other approaches to this subject. This
attitude does not spring from any generalized contempt for the role
of ideas in history. Some ideas and belief systems do make a very
great difference. (It is not necessarily the good ideas which make the
greatest impact. Some ideas are good and some bad, and some make
a great impact and some make none, and there is no systematic rela­
tionship between these two oppositions.) For instance, the belief sys­
tems known as Christianity and Marxism, are both of them contin­
gent: each of them consists of a complex of themes, which indivi­
dually may have been inherent in the situation in which it came into
being, but which, as a particular combination endowed with a name
and a historic existence and continuity, were only forged into some
kind of unity by a set of thinkers or preachers.
This unity in some measure survives the selective use made of
them subsequently. Moreover, once they emerged, they came on
occasion to dominate societies which happened to take their doc­
trines with great seriousness, and applied them (or some of them)
with great determination. This being so, if we are to understand the
fate of these societies, we are sometimes obliged to look carefully at
the words, doctrines and arguments of the thinkers who forged the
faiths that dominate them. For instance, the particular ethnographic
doctrines which happened to influence Marx and Engels in the
1870s, about the survival of the conununal spirit in villages of back­
ward countries and the conditions of its perpetuation, are incor­
porated in a crucial manner in Marxism, and probably had a decisive
and disastrous effect on Soviet agrarian policy.
But this does not seem to me to be the case with nationalism. (This
incidentally may help to explain why nationalism, notwithstanding
its indisputable importance, has received relatively little attention
124 N ationalism and I deology

from academic political philosophers: there was not enough in the

way of good doctrines and texts, which is the kind of material they
used to like, for them to get their teeth into.)^ It is not so much that
the prophets of nationalism were not anywhere near the First Divi­
sion, when it came to the business of thinking: that in itself would
not prevent a thinker from having an enormous, genuine and crucial
influence on history. Numerous examples prove that. It is rather
that these thinkers did not really make much difference. If one of
them had fallen, others would have stepped into his place. (They
liked saying something rather like this themselves, though not quite
in the sense intended here.) No-one was indispensable. The quality
of nationalist thought would hardly have been affected much by such
substitutions.
Their precise doctrines are hardly worth analysing. We seem to be
in the presence of a phenomenon which springs directly and inevi­
tably from basic changes in our shared social condition, from
changes in the overall relation between society, culture and polity.
The precise appearance and local form of this phenomenon no doubt
depends a very great deal on local circumstances which deserve
study; but I doubt whether the nuances of nationalist doctrine played
much part in modifying those circumstances.
Generally speaking, nationalist ideology suffers from pervasive
false consciousness. Its myths invert reality: it claims to defend folk
culture while in fact it is forging a high culture; it claims to protect
an old folk society while in fact helping to build up an anony­
mous mass society. (Pre-nationalist Germany was made up of a
multiplicity of genuine communities, many of them rural. Post­
nationalist united Germany was mainly industrial and a mass society.)

*The disproportion between the importance of nationalism and the amount

of thought given to it is noted by Professor Eric Hobsbawm in his ‘Some
Reflections on Nationalism’, in Imagination and Precision in the Social
Sciences^ Essays in Memory of Peter N ettf T.J. Nossiter, A.H. Hanson
and Stein Rokkan, et al. (eds.), Adantic Heights, NJ, 1972. He quotes
from D. Mack Smith’s II Risorgimento (1968), some truly bizarre views
of Mazzini on the proper nationalist organization of Europe, which would
have included Slovenia in a kind of Greater Switzerland, and joined up
Magyars, Rumanians and Czechs with, for some reason, Herzegovina.
All in all Mazzini, outside Italy, seemed to have more sense of the polidcal
economies of scale and of territorial compacmess than of cultural sensibili-
des.
 N ationalism and I deology 125
Nationalism tends to treat itself as a manifest and self-evident
principle, accessible as such to all men, and violated only through
some perverse blindness, when in fact it owes its plausibility and
compelling nature only to a very special set of circumstances, which
do indeed obtain now, but which were alien to most of humanity
and history. It preaches and defends continuity, but owes everything
to a decisive and unutterably profound break in human history.
It preaches and defends cultural diversity, when in fact it imposes
homogeneity both inside and, to a lesser degree, between political
units. Its self-image and its true nature are inversely related, with
an ironic neatness seldom equalled even by other successful ideo­
logies. Hence it seems to me that, generally speaking, we shall not
learn too much about nationalism from the study of its own
prophets.
Shall we learn more from studying its enemies? A little more, but
we need to be cautious. Their main merit seems to me that they
teach us not to take nationalism at its own valuation, on its own
terms, and as something self-evident. The temptation to do so is so
deeply built into the modern condition, where men simply assume
that culturally homogeneous units, with culturally similar rulers and
ruled, are a norm whose violation is inherently scandalous. To be
shocked out of this pervasive assumption is indeed something for
which one must be grateful. It is a genuine illumination.
But it would be just as disastrous to follow a declared enemy of
nationalism such as Elie Kedourie all the way, and treat nationalism
as a contingent, avoidable aberration, accidentally spawned by
European thinkers. Nationalism - the principle of homogenous cul­
tural units as the foundations of political life, and of the obligatory
cultural unity of rules and ruled - is indeed inscribed neither in the
nature of things, nor in the hearts of men, nor in the pre-conditions
of social life in general, and the contention that it is so inscribed is a
falsehood which nationalist doctrine has succeeded in presenting as
self-evident. But nationalism as a phenomenon, not as a doctrine
presented by nationalists, is inherent in a certain set of social con­
ditions; and those conditions, it so happens, are the conditions of our
time.
To deny this is at least as great a mistake as to accept nationalism
on its own terms. There is something bizarre in the suggestion that a
force so widespread and pervasive, a flame that springs up so strongly
and spontaneously in so many disconnected places, and which needs
126 N ationalism and I deology

so very little fanning to become a devouring forest blaze, should

spring from nothing more than some extremely abstruse lucubra­
tions of philosophers. For better or for worse, our ideas seldom have
quite such power.
In an age of cheap paper, print, and widespread literacy and easy
communication, any number of ideologies are spawned and compete
for our favour; and they are often formulated and propagated by
men with greater literary and propagandist gifts than those which
nature chose to bestow on the prophets of nationalism. Yet these
other forms of nonsense have never had a remotely comparable
impact on mankind. This was not due to lesser literary merit on their
part. Nor can it be a matter of luck; the experiment has been re­
peated in so many parts of the globe that, if chance were the king
here, one might confidently expect a far more motley overall pattern,
with one kind of doctrine prevailing in one place and quite another
kind somewhere else. But it is not so: the trend of events points
much the same way in most places. And as we can trace a clear and
manifest connection between the general social conditions of our age
and this overwhelmingly predominant trend, then surely we are
justified in invoking that link, rather than the accidental appeal of an
arbitrary idea, thrown up by the play of European intellectual fancy
at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries!
In the case of nationalism (though the same is not always true of
other movements), the actual formulation of the idea or ideas, the
question concerning who said or wrote precisely what, doesn’t
matter much. The key idea is in any case so very simple and easy that
anyone can make it up almost at any time, which is partly why natio­
nalism can claim that nationalism is always natural. What matters is
whether the conditions of life are such as to make the idea seem
compelling, rather than, as it is in most other situations, absurd.
In this connection it is worth saying something about the role of
communication in the dissemination of the nationalist idea. This
term plays a crucial part in the analysis of nationalism of at least one
noted author. ^ But the usual formulation of the connection between
nationalism and the facility of modern communications is somewhat
misleading. It gives the impression that a given idea (nationalism)
happens to be there, and then the printed word and the transistor
and other media help this notion to reach audiences in distant valleys

‘K.W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication, New York, 1966.

 N ationalism and I deology 127
and self-contained villages and encampments, audiences which in an
age not blessed with mass media would have remained untouched by
it.
That is altogether the wrong way to see it. The media do not
transmit an idea which happens to have been fed into them. It
matters precious little what has been fed into them: it is the media
themselves, the pervasiveness and importance of abstract, centra­
lized, standardized, one to many communication, which itself auto­
matically engenders the core idea of nationalism, quite irrespective of
what in particular is being put into the specific messages trans­
mitted. The most important and persistent message is generated by
the medium itself, by the role which such media have acquired in
modern life. That core message is that the language and style of the
transmissions is important, that only he who can understand them,
or can acquire such comprehension, is included in a moral and eco­
nomic community, and that he who does not and cannot, is ex­
cluded. All this is crystal clear, and follows from the pervasiveness
and crucial role of mass communication in this kind of society. What
is actually said matters little.
The manner in which conditions have changed, turning an idea
which was once bizarre into one which is compelling and seemingly
self-evident, can perhaps best be conveyed by invoking Kedourie’s
own concluding and crucial words:
The only criterion capable of public defence is whether the new rulers
are less corrupt and grasping, or more just and merciful, or whether
there is no change at all, but the corruption, the greed, and the
tyranny merely find victims other than those of the departed rulers.
(E. Kedourie, Nationalism^ p. 140)

The question which Professor Kedourie asks with such eloquence

is indeed one which a typical burgher in an agrarian society would
ask himself, if one morning he just heard that the local Pasha had
been overthrown and replaced by an altogether new one. If, at that
point, his wife dared ask the burgher what language the new Pasha
spoke in the intimacy of his home life - was it Arabic, Turkish,
Persian, French or English? - the hapless burgher would give her a
sharp look, and wonder how he would cope will all the new diffi­
culties when, at the same time, his wife had gone quite mad. Prob­
ably he would send her to a shrine that specialized in acute mental
aberration.
128 N ationalism and I deology

The question commended by Kedourie did indeed make sense in

societies in which government on the one hand, and economy and
society on the other, were distinct, where cultural continuity be­
tween the two was an irrelevancy, and where, as the quotation
clearly implies, one may hope at best for merciful and just govern­
ment, but not for an accountable, participatory and representative
one. (Are these totally illusory aspirations among us, then?) But
something other than the dissemination of the words of obscure
European scribblers must have happened to make the wife’s query,
once so manifestly mad, become the question which is now upper­
most in almost everyone’s mind. And something has indeed hap­
pened. The economy is now such as to require sustained and precise
communication between all those who take part in it, and between
them and government, and the maintenance of the educational and
cultural infrastructure has become one of the central tasks of govern­
ment. Hence the home idiom of the new Pasha, once so irrelevant, is
now the crucial sign as to whom the new power will favour and
whom it will exclude.
In a later book. Nationalism in Asia and Africa (1970), Kedourie
does indeed ask questions about the European colonial domination
of the world which are, quite rightly, totally and significantly dif­
ferent from the question recommended at the end of Nationalism, He
comments at length on the failure of the European conquerors to
accept as equals those members of the conquered populations who
had acquired the necessary qualifications and skills, and he evidently
considers this exclusiveness to be at least part of the explanation of
why European rule produced the nationalist reaction which in fact it
elicited. It is not entirely clear whether this is a criticism or merely a
neutral diagnosis, though it is difficult not to feel that the former
element is present; and if so, it would seem that a question is now
being asked about rulers which is not only about their mercy and
rapacity!
The new question is whether the rulers are willing and able to run
a mobile society, one in which rulers and ruled can merge and form a
cultural continuum. This, on my argument, is indeed the crucial
question which under modern conditions is bound to be asked of all
rulers, and to complement and largely overshadow the older ques­
tion. But without these special modern conditions, why should their
exclusiveness have been a demerit or a weakness? Some past rulers
(Romans and Greeks) may at times have been open and receptive
 N ationalism and I deology 129
(though the Romans did not exactly rush about offering free Roman
citizenship to any newly conquered area); but many others were not,
without necessarily suffering for it. On the contrary, under tradi­
tional conditions, easy identifiability and seclusion of rulers must
often have been a great asset, conducive to stability. The Mamluks
did not benefit, as a class, when they intermarried with the market.
Why should exclusiveness suddenly have become so disastrous and
why should it have provoked such a virulent, widespread and shared
reaction?
Kedourie himself provides the answer:
There is no gainsaying the fact that Europe has been the origin and
centre of a deep radical disturbance spreading over the world in ever-
widening ripples and bringing unsettlement and violence to the tradi­
tional societies of Asia and Africa, whether these societies did or did
not experience direct European rule . . . This pulverization of tradi­
tional societies, this bursting open of self-sufficient economies . . .

If one supplements this account, with which one could hardly

disagree, with the question of what kind of new re-organizaion is
feasible, given modern productive methods and the society which
they imply, then, I contend, one comes out with an answer which
makes modern nationalism more than either an ideological accident
or the fruit of mere resentment, and which shows it, in its general
forms if not in its details, to be a necessity.
It may be worth giving a short, no doubt incomplete, list of false
theories of nationalism:
1 It is natural and self-evident and self generating. If absent, this
must be due to forceful repression.
2 It is an artificial consequence of ideas which did not need ever
to be formulated, and appeared by a regrettable accident. Political
life even in industrial societies could do without it.
3 The Wrong Address Theory favoured by Marxism: Just as
extreme Shi’ite Muslims hold that Archangel Gabriel made a mis­
take, delivering the Message to Mohamed when it was intended for
Ali, so Marxists basically like to think that the spirit of history or
human consciousness made a terrible boob. The awakening message
was intended for classes^ but by some terrible postal error was deli­
vered to nations. It is now necessary for revolutionary activists to
persuade the wrongful recipient to hand over the message, and the
zeal it engenders, to the rightful and intended recipient. The
130 N ationalism and I deology

unwillingness of both the rightful and the usurping recipient to fall

in with this requirement causes the activist great irritation.
4 Dark Gods: Nationalism is the re-emergence of the atavistic
forces of blood or territory. This is the view shared often by both
lovers and haters of nationalism. The former think of these dark
forces as life-enhancing, the latter as barbarous. In fact, man of the
age of nationalism is neither nicer nor nastier than men of other ages.
There is some slight evidence that he may be nicer. His crimes are
equalled by those of other ages. They are more conspicuous only
because, precisely, they have become more shocking, and because
they are executed with more powerful technological means.
Not one of these theories is remotely tenable.

Who is for Nuremberg?

An author committed to the view that the ideological or doctrinal

history of nationalism is largely irrelevant to the understanding of it
should not perhaps indulge in debates about its intellectual ancestry.
If it has no doctrinal ancestry worth discussing, why should we argue
about who does and who does not figure in its genealogy? Neverthe­
less, some remarks seem called for by Kedourie’s influential account
of its ideal origins.
Leaving aside the strange implicit exculpation of Hegel, what
seems both perplexing and unfair is the inculpation of Kant. Cer­
tainly the notion of self-determination is absolutely central to Kant’s
thought. Kant’s main problem was the validation {and circumscrip­
tion) of both our scientific and our moral knowledge. The main
philosophic device he employs for the attainment of this end is the
contention that our guiding cognitive and moral principles are self­
generated, and inescapably so. As there is no final authority or vali­
dation to be found outside, it must be inside.
That is the core of his thought. The authority of the principles we
live by resides in the fact that our minds necessarily have a certain
structure, which inescapably engenders them. This gives us, among
other things, an ethic of impartiality, and also the justified hope of
finding exceptionless regularities in nature. An orderly ethic and an
orderly science are thus, both of them, underwritten. The fact that
the structure of our minds is given and rigid frees us from the fear
that these bases of science and morality might be at the mercy of
 N ationalism and I deology 131
caprice, that they might turn out to be quicksands. Though they are
based on us only, yet, on this view, we can be trusted, and provide a
reliable base. The fact that it is we, or rather, each single one of us
individually (though mutually respectful of each other) who assumes
responsibility for these principles, frees Kant from the fear of a re>
gression which was repellent both to the logician and to the protes-
tant within him: if the authority and the justification were outside
us, (however elevated it might be), how could that authority in turn
be justified?
The authority of the self, unsusceptible to caprice, final and
absolute, terminates the regression. It avoids the scandal, intolerably
repugnant both to the logician and the moralist in Kant, of accepting
some outside authority, however elevated: the scandal of hetero-
nomy, as he himself called it, which is the antithesis of self-
determination. At the same time, the fortunate rigidity of the self
makes its authority reliable and usable.
That is the essence of Kant’s philosophy, the picture contained in
his notion of ‘self-determination’. What connection, other than a
purely verbal one, does it have with the self-determination of nations,
which so concerns the nationalists? None. It is individual human
nature which is really sovereign for Kant - the transference of
sovereignty to it constituted his Copernican revolution - and it is
universal and identical in all men. It is the universal in man which he
revered, not the specific, and certainly not the culturally specific.
In such a philosophy, there is no place for the mystique of the
idiosyncratic culture. There is in fact hardly any room for culture
in the anthropological sense at all. A person’s identity and dignity
is for Kant rooted in his universal humanity, or, more broadly,
his rationality, and not in his cultural or ethnic specificity. It is
hard to think of a writer whose ideas provide less comfort for the
nationalist.
On the contrary: Kant’s identification of man with that which is
rational and universal in him, his fastidious and persistent, highly
characteristic distaste for basing anything of importance on that
which is merely contingent, historical or specific, makes Kant a very
model for that allegedly bloodless, cosmopolitan, emaciated ethic of
the Enlightenment, which romantic nationalists spurned and detes­
ted so much, and which they so joyously repudiated in favour of a
more earthy, shamelessly specific and partial conunitment to kin or
territory or culture.
132 N ationalism and I deology

This point is of some general interest. Kant is the very last person
whose vision could be credited with having contributed to natio­
nalism. Nevertheless, this accusation is not simply an error, but
springs from something deeper which deserves note. What is true is
that Kant felt an acute need to base our central values on ideas, on
something less fragile, less contingent, less world-bound than the
mere tradition which happens to prevail in this land or that. His
whole philosophical strategy reflects this need and the acuteness
with which he felt it. He thought he could satisfy it by invoking the
universal structure of the human mind.
From the viewpoint of a crypto-romantic traditionalism which
spurns such pursuit of external, ‘rational’ bases for the practices of
life, which wishes to teach men to stay content within the limits of
concrete praxis^ to accept the contingency of history, and to refrain
from seeking the illusory comfort and support of extraneous and
abstract ideas, Kant is certainly a deeply misguided figure. He was
most certainly a ‘rationalist’ in the sense in which Professor Michael
Oakeshott pejoratively uses the term, and Nationalism in Asia and
Africa seems to be argued within this general framework. In other
words, Kant most certainly does belong to the Promethean strand in
European thought, which perhaps reached its apogee in the eighteenth
century, which strives to steal the divine fire and will not be content
with the makeshift accidental compromises contained in specific
traditions. Kant makes his deep contempt for such attitudes, for
allowing oneself to be satisfied with merely contingent, historic
foundations, utterly plain.
Kant’s insistence on individual self-determination as the only
genuinely valid morality was neither wilful nor romantic. It was, on
the contrary, a despairing attempt to preserve a genuine, objective,
binding, universal ethic (and knowledge). Kant accepted Hume’s
argument that necessity and universality simply were not there to be
found in the empirical data; hence, he reasoned, they could only be
rooted in the ineluctably imposed structure of the individual mind.
Admittedly, this faute de mieux solution also fitted in neatly with a
kind of protestant individualist pride, which scorns to find authority
outside. But the main reason why authority had to be inside the
individual was because it simply could not be found anywhere else.
Nationalists, when they invoke the abstract principle of nationa­
lism against the traditional local institutions which had once
worked tolerably well, are indeed fellow-Prometheans. In fact.
 N ationalism and I deology 133
nationalism has a Janus-like quality. It is Promethean in its con­
tempt for political compromise which ignores the nationalist impera­
tive. But it is also anti-Promethean, when it sees the nation and its
cultural development as something which, just because it is concrete
and historically specific, rightly overrides the abstract morality of
the internationalists and humanists.
In this very, very generic, and above all negative sense, Kant and
the nationalists can perhaps be classed together. Neither of them are,
in the required sense, respecters of tradition. (Or rather, nationalism
is opportunistically selective in the respect which it accords to tradi­
tion.) Both are, in this wide sense, ‘rationalists’, seeking the bases of
legitimacy in something beyond that which merely is.
Nationalists, in fact, might well acclaim conservative traditiona­
lists as brothers, as fellow-repudiators of the abstract rationalism of
the Enlightenment, and very often do so. Both of them wish to
respect or revere the concrete realities of history, and refuse to
subject them to the verdict of a bloodless abstract pan-human reason.
Far from revelling in the defiant individual will, nationalists delight
in feelings of submission or incorporation in a continuous entity
greater, more persistent and more legitimate than the isolated self.
In a curious way, Kedourie not only credits nationalism with a
theory of wilful self-determination, but also (erroneously in my
view) concedes the historical success of such a nationalism. A theory
sprang from the heads of certain philosophers, and those who
became converted to it succeeded, by sheer will, in imposing the
theory on hapless humanity! This stark version of his view, which
initially makes few concessions to the social circumstances which
favoured nationalism, would make its success seem a veritable tri­
umph of the will.
It just so happens, it seems to me, that nationalists or conser­
vatives select different parts of the concrete for their reference: in the
one case, continuous institutions, and in the other, allegedly con­
tinuous communities or speech, race, or other notion. But is that not
a disagreement on detail rather than principle? This affinity of
underlying attitude does not, of course, prove either of these posi­
tions to be necessarily in error. I only invoke it to show that one
man’s sense of concrete historical reality is another man’s trahison des
clercs. How are we to choose our realists?
So not all those who spurn a given position (traditionalism) there­
fore necessarily resemble each other in any other way. This mistaken
134 N ationalism and I deology

inference, reinforced by the homonym ‘self-determination’, seems to

be at the base of the accusation of Kant. Kant did indeed speak of
self-determination (autonomy). But then, he also spoke a great deal
about the synthetic a priori status of our categories. It is well-
established history that no bombs have been ever thrown on behalf
of Kant’s doctrine of the a priori status of categories. But the
same is just as true of his views on self-determination. If a connec­
tion exists between Kant and nationalism at all, then nationalism is a
reaction against him, and not his offspring.

One nation, one state

Nationalist sentiment is deeply offended by violations of the nationa­

list principle of congruence of state and nation; but it is not equally
offended by all the various kinds of violation of it. It is most acutely
offended by ethnic divergence between rulers and ruled. As Lord
Acton put it
Then began a time when the text simply was, that nations would not
be governed by foreigners. Power legitimately attained, and exercised
with moderation, was declared invalid.^

Note that Acton shows that this time began, whereas nationalists
pretend it was ever present in a latent, suppressed form. But when it
comes to the arithmetical non-correspondence between nation and
state, it is more offended if, so to speak, the state is too few, than if it
is too many. A culturally homogeneous population which has no
state at all to call its own is deeply aggrieved. (Its members are ob­
liged to hve in a state, or in states, run by other and alien cultural
groups.) A group which, on the other hand, has more than one state
associated with its culture, though it is also technically violating the
national principle, yet has less grievance, except perhaps in special
circumstances. What are they?
Most New Zealanders and most citizens of the United Kingdom
are so continuous culturally that without any shadow of doubt the
two units would never have separated, had they been contiguous
geographically. Distance made the effective sovereignty of New

‘Quoted in Nationalism, Its Meaning and History, by Hans Kohn, Princeton,

1955, pp. 122-3.
 N ationalism and I deology 135
Zealand convenient and mandatory, and the separation does not
provoke resentment in anyone’s breast, notwithstanding the tech­
nical violation of the national principle. Why not? There are Arabs
who deplore the failure of the Arabs to unite, though Arabs of dif­
ferent countries differ culturally far more than Englishmen and New
Zealanders. The obvious answer seems to be that the international
standing and general position of the English and of the New Zealan­
ders does not suffer significantly from their failure to present them­
selves to the world as one unit. In fact, their standing does not suffer
from this fact at all, and the inconveniences of the alternative
arrangement would be very considerable. By contrast, it is arguable
that the political strength of Arabs, Latin Americans,^ and pre­
unification nineteenth-century Italians and Germans did suffer from
the fragmentation of their political roofs.
Nevertheless, this particular violation of the national principle,
the one nation-many states case, is clearly the least septic, the least
irritant of all the possible violations. The obstacles lying in the way
of its correction are obvious and powerful. If a given nation is
blessed with n states, it follows rigorously that the glorious unifica­
tion of the nation will mean the diminution of the number of its
prime ministers, chiefs of staff, presidents of the academy, managers
and skippers of its football team, and so on, by a factor of n. For
every person occupying a post of this kind after unification, there
will be n—\ who will have lost it. In anticipation, all those n—\
stand to lose by unification, even if the nation as a whole benefits.
Admittedly the one fortunate enough to have retained or acquired
the post in question is now laureate, director of the national theatre,
and so on, of something bigger, more glorious, and associated with
far greater resources than before. All the same, there can be little
doubt that while it is better to be head of a big ’un than a little ’un,
the difference is not so drastic as that between being a head, never
mind of how much, and not being a head at all. Even allowing for the
effect of the illusion which may have encouraged a lot more than one
of the little ’uns to expect that they will be the big ’un when the day
comes, the fact remains that on balance, the rational opposition to
unification must be considerable. Unification succeeds, neverthe­
less, only in those cases where the external disadvantages of
*The continued complaisance of Latin Americans in the face of this situation
is cogently invoked against our theory by Jose Merquior in ‘Politics of
Transition’, Government and Opposition, XVI (1981), No. 2, p. 230.
136 N ationalism and I deology

fragmentation are very great and visible, and those who suffer from
them can make their interests felt against those who will lose out in
the n-fold diminution of political jobs, and when the new leaders of
the larger unity somehow succeed in imposing themselves on the
others, by force or by political glamour.
10

Conclusion

A book like this, which argues a simple and sharply defined case,
nevertheless (or perhaps all the more) risks being misunderstood and
misrepresented. Attempts to present earlier and simpler versions of
this argument on previous occasions have convinced me of the reality
of this danger. On the one hand, the very simplicity and starkness of
the position may lead readers to add to it their own associations,
which were not intended by the author. On the other hand, any new
position (which is what I fondly believe this one to be) can be articu­
lated only if the frame for asserting it is first set up, however quietly.
No original assertion can be made, I think, by simply drawing on the
cards already available in the language pack that is in use. The pack
has been dealt too often, and all simple statements in it have been
made many times before. Hence a new contribution to a topic is
possible only by re-designing a pack so as to make a new statement
possible in it. To do this very visibly is intolerably pedantic and
tedious. The overt erection of a new scaffolding is tolerable in
mathematics, but not in ordinary prose. Good presentation consists
in fairly unobtrusively loosening the habitual associations, setting up
new ones on principles which become evident from the context, until
at last the context has been set up in which an assertion can be made
which is simple, and yet not a trite repetition of the old wisdom.

What is not being said

Only others can judge whether I have succeeded in this endeavour.

But experience has taught me that one is seldom if ever wholly
successful in this. Hence I wish to list a few assertions which have
neither been asserted nor are in any way required for the views which
have been propounded.
It is no part of my purpose to deny that mankind has at all times
hved in groups. On the contrary, men have always lived in groups.
138 Conclusion
Usually these groups persisted over time. One important factor in
their persistence was the loyalty men felt for these groups, and the
fact that they identified with them. This element in human life did
not need to wait for some distinctive kind of economy. This was, of
course, not the only factor helping to perpetuate these groups, but it
was one among others. If one calls this factor, generically, ‘patri­
otism’, then it is no part of my intention to deny that some measure
of such patriotism is indeed a perennial part of human life. (How
strong it was in relation to other forces is something we need not try
to decide here.)
What is being claimed is that nationalism is a very distinctive
species of patriotism, and one which becomes pervasive and domi­
nant only under certain social conditions, which in fact prevail in the
modem world, and nowhere else. Nationalism is a species of patri­
otism distinguished by a few very important features: the units
which this kind of patriotism, namely nationalism, favours with its
loyalty, are culturally homogeneous, based on a culture striving to be
a high (literate) culture; they are large enough to sustain the hope of
supporting the educational system which can keep a literate culture
going; they are poorly endowed with rigid internal sub-groupings;
their populations are anonymous, fluid and mobile, and they are un­
mediated; the individual belongs to them directly, in virtue of his
cultural style, and not in virtue of membership of nested sub-groups.
Homogeneity, literacy, anonymity are the key traits.
It is not claimed that cultural chauvinism was generally absent
from the pre-industrial world, but only that it did not have its
modem political clout or aspirations. It is not denied that the
agrarian world occasionally threw up units which may have re­
sembled a modem national state; only that the agrarian world could
occasionally do so, whilst the modem world is bound to do so in most
cases.
It is not claimed that, even in the modern world, nationalism is the
only force operating, or an irresistible one. It is not. It is occasionally
defeated by some other force or interest, or by inertia.
It is not denied that one may on occasion have an overlay of pre­
industrial stmctures and national sentiment. A tribal nation may
for a time be tribal internally and national externally. It is in fact easy
to think of one or two marked cases of this kind (for example,
Somalis and Kurds). But a man may now claim to belong to one of
these national units simply in virtue of his culture, and he need not
 Conclusion 139
disclose (and eventually, need not even have) a mediating sub-group
membership. It is not claimed that the present argument can explain
why some nationalisms, notably those of the Hitler and Mussolini
period, should have become so specially virulent. It only claims to
explain why nationalism has emerged and become pervasive.
All these disclaimers are not an insurance against counter­
examples, which would at the same time covertly reduce the content
of the central thesis to something approaching naught. They are only
the recognition that in a complex world, at the macro-level of insti­
tutions and groupings, exceptionless generalizations are seldom if
ever available. This does not prevent overall trends, such as nationa­
lism, from being conspicuous - or being sociologically explicable.

Summary

In this matter as in some others, once we describe the phenomenon

we are interested in with precision, we come close to explaining it
correctly. (Perhaps we can only describe things well when we have
already understood them.) But consider the history of the national
principle; or consider two ethnographic maps, one drawn up before
the age of nationalism, and the other after the principle of nationa­
lism had done much of its work.
The first map resembles a painting by Kokoschka. The riot of
diverse points of colour is such that no clear pattern can be discerned
in any detail, though the picture as a whole does have one. A great
diversity and plurality and complexity characterizes all distinct parts
of the whole: the minute social groups, which are the atoms of which
the picture is composed, have complex and ambiguous and multiple
relations to many cultures; some through speech, others through
their dominant faith, another still through a variant faith or set of
practices, a fourth through administrative loyalty, and so forth.
When it comes to painting the political system, the complexity is not
less great than in the sphere of culture. Obedience for one purpose
and in one context is not necessarily the same as obedience for some
other end or in some other season.
Look now instead at the ethnographic and political map of an area
of the modern world. It resembles not Kokoschka, but, say, Modig­
liani. There is very little shading; neat flat surfaces are clearly
separated from each other, it is generally plain where one begins and
140 Conclusion
another ends, and there is little if any ambiguity or overlap. Shifting
from the map to the reality mapped, we see that an overwhelming
part of political authority has been concentrated in the hands of one
kind of institution, a reasonably large and well-centralized state. In
general, each such state presides over, maintains, and is identified
with, one kind of culture, one style of communication, which pre­
vails within its borders and is dependent for its perpetuation on a
centralized educational system supervised by and often actually run
by the state in question, which monopolizes legitimate culture
almost as much as it does legitimate violence, or perhaps more so.
And when we look at the society controlled by this kind of state,
we also see why all this must be so. Its economy depends on mobility
and communication between individuals, at a level which can only
be achieved if those individuals have been socialized into a high cul­
ture, and indeed into the same high culture, at a standard which
cannot be ensured by the old ways of turning out human beings, as it
were on the job, as part of the ordinary business of living, by the
local sub-communities. It can only be achieved by a fairly monolithic
educational system. Also, the economic tasks set these individuals do
not allow them to be both soldiers and citizens of local petty com­
munities; they need to delegate such activities so as to be able to do
their jobs.
So the economy needs both the new type of central culture and the
central state; the culture needs the state; and the state probably
needs the homogeneous cultural branding of its flock, in a situation
in which it cannot rely on largely eroded sub-groups either to police
its citizens, or to inspire them with that minimum of moral zeal and
social identification without which social life becomes very difficult.
Culture not community provides the inner sanctions, such as they
are. In brief, the mutual relationship of a modern culture and state is
something quite new, and springs, inevitably, from the require­
ments of a modern economy.
What has been asserted is very simple. Food-producing society
was above all a society which allowed some men not to be food-
producers, but (excepting parasitic communities) nevertheless ob-
hged the majority of men to remain such. It is Industrial society has
succeeded in dispensing with this need.
It has pushed the division of labour to a new and unprecedented
level, but, more important still, it has engendered a new kind of
division of labour: one requiring the men taking part in it to be ready
 Conclusion 141
to move from one occupational position to another, even within a
single life-span, and certainly between generations. They need a
shared culture, and a literate sophisticated high culture at that. It
obliges them to be able to communicate contextlessly and with pre­
cision with all comers, in face-to-face ephemeral contacts, but also
through abstract means of communication. All this - mobility,
communication, size due to refinement of specialization - imposed
on the industrial order by its thirst for affluence and growth, obliges
its social units to be large and yet culturally homogeneous. The
maintenance of this kind of inescapably high (because literate) cul­
ture requires protection by a state, a centralized order-enforcing
agency or rather group of agencies, capable of garnering and de­
ploying the resources which are needed both to sustain a high cul­
ture, and to ensure its diffusion through an entire population, an
achievement inconceivable and not attempted in the pre-industrial
world.
The high cultures of the industrial age differ from those of the
agrarian order in a number of important and conspicuous ways.
Agrarian high cultures were a minority accomplishment carried by
privileged specialists, and distinguished from the fragmented, un­
codified majority folk cultures over which they presided and which
they strove to dominate. They defined a clerkly stratum seldom tied
to a single political unit or linguistically delimited folk catchment
area. On the contrary, they tended and strove to be trans-ethnic and
trans-political. They frequently employed a dead or archaic idiom,
and had no interest whatever in ensuring continuity between it and
the idiom of daily and economic life. Their numerical minority and
their political dominance were of their essence; and it is probably of
the essence of agrarian society that its majority is constituted by
food-producers excluded both from power and from the high cul­
ture. They were tied to a faith and church rather than to a state and
pervasive culture. In China a high culture linked more to an ethic
and a state bureaucracy than to a faith and church was perhaps
untypical, and in that way, but that way only, anticipated the
modem linkage of state and culture. There the high literate culture
co-existed, and continues to co-exist, with a diversity of spoken
languages.
By contrast, an industrial high culture is no longer linked -
whatever its history - to a faith and a church. Its maintenance seems
to require the resources of a state co-extensive with society, rather
142 Conclusion
than merely those of a church superimposed on it. A growth-bound
economy dependent on cognitive renovation cannot seriously link its
cultural machinery (which it needs unconditionally) to some doc­
trinal faith which rapidly becomes obsolete, and often ridiculous.
So the culture needs to be sustained as a culture, and not as the
carrier or scarcely noticed accompaniment of a faith. Society can and
does worship itself or its own culture directly and not, as Durkheim
taught, through the opaque medium of religion. The transition from
one kind of high culture to the other is visible outwardly as the
coming of nationalism. But, whatever the truth about this complex
and crucial issue, the emergence of the industrial world was some­
how intimately linked to a Protestantism which happened to possess
some of the important traits that were to characterize the newly
emerging world, and which also engender nationalism. The stress on
literacy and scripturalism, the priestless unitarianism which abo­
lished the monopoly of the sacred, and the individualism which
makes each man his own priest and conscience and not dependent on
the ritual services of others: all foreshadowed an anonymous, indivi­
dualistic, fairly unstructured mass society, in which relatively equal
access to a shared culture prevails, and the culture has its norms
publicly accessible in writing, rather than in the keeping of a privi­
leged specialist. Equal access to a scripturalist God paved the way to
equal access to high culture. Literacy is no longer a specialism, but a
pre-condition of all the specialisms, in a society in which everyone is
a specialist. In such a society, one’s prime loyalty is to the medium of
our literacy, and to its political protector. The equal access of
believers to God eventually becomes equal access of unbelievers to
education and culture.
Such is the world of modern state-sustained, pervasive and homo­
geneous high cultures, within which there is relatively little ascrip­
tion of status and a good deal of mobility, presupposing a well-
diffused mastery of a shared sophisticated high culture. There is a
profound irony in Max Weber’s celebrated account of the origins of
this world: it was engendered because certain men took their voca­
tion so very seriously, and it produced a world in which rigidly
ascribed vocations have gone, where specialisms abound but remain
temporary and optional, involving no final commitment, and where
the important, identity-conferring part of one’s education or for­
mation is not the special skill, but the shared generic skills, de­
pendent on a shared high culture which defines a ‘nation’. Such a
 Conclusion 143
nation/culture then and then only becomes the natural social unit,
and cannot normally survive without its own political shell, the state.
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Index

Acton, Lord 134 Ceylon 108n

Adam 84, 105 Chamisso 6
Africa 42, 81, 82, 83, 84, 98, 128, Chekhov, Anton 72
129, 132 China 15, 16, 97, 105, 109n, 141
Albania 71 Christ, Christian 10, 15, 51, 83, 84,
Algeria 66n, 71, 73, 76, 81, 83n, 123
108n Colonna, Fanny 66n
Ali 129 Comte, Auguste 114
America 42 Confucius 80
Amhara 84, 85 Conquerors and Slaves 15
Andreski, S. 13 Contribution to the Critique of
Anti-Semitism 93, 94 Political Economy, A 115n
Arabia, Arab 41, 44, 79, 80, 83, Copernicus 131
127, 135 Croat 71, 72
Armenia, Armenians 105, 108 Czech 109n, 124n
Asia 42, 65, 107, 115, 128, 129, 132
Atlantic 40
Damocles 118
Austria 98, 99
Danegeld 22, 113
Azande 82
Decembrists 94
Descartes, Rene 21, 78
Babel 42
Deutsch, K.W. 126n
Balkans 99
Diagnoses of our Time 92n
Berbers 47, 83
Diaspora 94, 101, 107
Bern 119
Dionysus 41
Bohemia 108n, 109n
Diploma Disease, The 28n, 29
Bosnia 71, 72
Doctorat d’etat 34
Brahmins 15, 16, 51
Dore, Ronald P. 28, 41n
Brave New World 113
Durkheim, Emile 27, 56, 57, 58,
Break-up of Britain, The 96n, 12 In
Britain, British 3, 30 142
Bromley, Yu. V. 57n
Budapest 57 En France 118n
Buddhist 51 Engels, F. 90, 123
Bure, Emile 53n England, English 41, 42, 44, 91n,
Byzantium 106 99, 127, 135
Enlightenment 78, 131
Cameron of Lochiel 23 Ethiopia 84, 85, 85n
Catholic Church 14, 28, 72, 78 Etonians 71
148 I ndex
Europe 15, 16, 17, 19, 38, 40, 42, Hong Kong 108n, 109n
43, 56, 65, 78,81, 82, 83, 100, Hopkins, Keith 15n
106, 107, 108, 124n, 125, 126, Horn of Africa 84, 85, 85n
128, 129 Hume, David 20, 21, 22, 23, 132
Eve 84, 105 Hungary, Magyars 124n
Everest, Mount 49 Huxley, Aldous 113

Ferhat Abbas 73 Ibn Khaldun 76n

France, French 6, 71, 99, 108n, Iboland 70, 105
118n, 127 Imagination and Precision in the
Franco, General 78 Social Sciencesy Essays in
Frazer, Sir James 114 memory of Peter Nettl 124n
Fulani 82 India 91, 105, 108n, 109n
Instituteurs Algmens 1883-1939 66n
Gabriel, Archangel 129 Iran, Persia 77, 127
Galla 84 Iraq 3
Gellner, E. 75n, 115n Ireland, Irish 44
Genghis Khan 65 Islam, Muslim 15, 16, 17, 41, 65,
Germany, German 6, 47, 56, 72, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80,
98, 99, 100, 109n, 119, 124, 81, 83, 84, 108, 129
135 Israel 77, 106, 107, 108n
Geschlossener Handelstaat 107 Italy 47, 98, 99, 100, 124n, 135
God 8, 41, 48, 56, 57, 72, 73, 77,
79, 130, 142 Janissary 16, 18
Goody, Jack 28n Janus 79, 80, 133
Government and Opposition 83n, Japan, Japanese 41, 92
135n Jerusalem 107
Great Tradition 78 Jewish and Other Nationalism 107n
Greece, Greek, Hellas, Hellenes 14, Jews, Jewish 17, 105, 107
41, 72, 105, 106, 108, 128 Jihad 17
Grisons 119
K., Ruritanian social bandit 59
Habsburg 94, 97, 99 Kabylia, Kabyl 71, 83n
Hall, John A. 92n Kafka, F. 6
Hanson, A.H. 124n Kamenka, E. 99n
Hegel, G.W.F. 5, 8, 48, 48n, 130 Kant, Immanuel 2, 20, 21, 22, 130,
Heiberg, Marianne 83n 131, 132, 133
Hellas, Hellenes, see Greece Keddie, N. 75n
Herzegovina 124n Kedourie, Elie 39, 39n, 108n,
Highlands (Scottish) 47 109n, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130,
Himalaya 12 133
Hinduism 16, 109n Khalifate 15, 75
Hirschman, Albert O. 91n Kibbutz 107
Hider, A. 139 Kohn, Hans 139
Hobsbawm, Eric 124n Kokoschka 139
Holmes, Justice Oliver Wendell 72 Kosovo 71
Holmes, Sherlock 43 Kultur 92
Holocaust 107 Kurds 85
 Index 149
L.j Ruritanian national composer Nkrumah 82
58 No Orchids for Miss Blandish 51
Latin 72, 79 Nossiter, T J . 124n
Latin America 43, 135, 135n Nuremberg 56, 130
Lebanon 89
Lewis, loan (Lewis, LM.) 85n Oakeshott, Michael 132
Libya 80 Oceania 42
Literacy in Traditional Societies 28n Organization Man 88
Loone, Eero 115n Origins of English Individualism, The
91n
Macedonia 14 Oromo 84, 85
Macfarlane, Alan 9 In Orthodox Church 71, 72
Mack Smith, D. 124n Ottoman 30, 45, 106, 108
Mafia 88 Oxford 99
Malaya, Malays 76, 108n
Mamluk 16, 18, 36, 37, 129
Palestine, Palestinian 73
Marx, Marxism 5, 12, 29, 71, 75,
Pariah 102
90, 93, 94, 96, 96n, 114, 115,
Parsees 105
115n, 121, 123, 129
Mediterranean 80
Passions and Interests, The 9 In
Persians, see Iran
Megalomania 58, 59, 60, 61, 69
Merquior, Jose 135n Plamenatz, John 99, 99n, 100, 101
Modigliani 139 Plato 15, 18
Polanyi, Karl 115
Montenegro 99
Morocco 47 Prometheus 132, 133
Muqaddimah, The 76n Prophet Mohamed 65, 72, 129
Muslim, see Islam Protestant 41, 42, 78, 142
Muslim society 75n
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Mussolini, Benito 2, 139 Capitalism, The 19

Nairn, Tom 96n, 121n Quaker 41

Napoleon 6 Quebec 70
Narod 57
Nationalism 39n, 127, 128 Reformation 40, 78, 79, 100
Nationalism and Social Reformism 41
Communication 126n Renaissance 100
Nationalism in Asia and Africa Renan, Ernest 53
108n, 128, 132 Revel, J.-F. 118, 118n
Nationalism, its Meaning and History Risorgimento 99, 124n
134 Risorgimento, II 124n
Nationalism, the Nature and Roberts, Hugh 83n
Evolution of an Idea 99n Rokkan, Stein 124n
Nazi 56 Romance (languages, etc.) 44, 47,
Nepal 13 79
Nettl, Peter 124n Romans 128, 129
New Zealand 134, 135 Rosenthal, F. 76
Nigeria 70, 80, 82, 105 Ruanda 70
Nisbet, H.B. 48n Rumania 106, 124n
150 Index
Ruriiania 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 69, 70, Tunisia 11
98, 106, 108 Tuzenbach, Baron 72
Russia M ^11 Turkey, Turks, Turkish 10, 45,
127
Sahara 17, 81
Saudi Arabia 80 Ukraine 47
Scholars, Saints and Sufis 75n Ulama 15, 16, 75, 80
Scotland, Scots, Scottish 44, 47 Ulster 71
Serb 71, 72 United Kingdom 47
Sheikh Hussein of Bale 85n United Nations 119
Shi’ism 129 USA 108n, 109n
Shinto 41 USSR 57, 57n, 123
Slansky 93
Slav, Slavonic 44, 71, 72, 79 Veblen, Thorsten 36
Smith, Adam 23, 24 Volk 57
Soviet and Western Anthropology
115n
Sovremennaia Filosofia Istorii 115n WSLF (Western Somah Liberation
Sovremennye Etnicheskie Protsessy v Front) 85n
SSSR 57n Weber, Max 3, 19, 20, 40, 91, 103,
Somalia, Somahs 76, 84, 85, 86 142
South Yemen 80, 81 Woodburn, James 115, 115n
Spain 78 World Council of Churches 120
Wotan 56
Teutonic 44, 47, 72
Three Sisters 72 Yugoslavia 71, 72
Tocqueville, Alexis de 93
Trahison des Clercs 133 Z., Ruritanian national artist 59
Trevor-Roper, Hugh 107, 107n Zawiya 51
Tubiana, J. 85n Zionism 107