Analysis: A Macat Analysis of Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
3 months free
Analysis: A Macat Analysis of Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism
Buy Now for £6.99
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Macat
-
By:
-
Macat
About this listen
In his 1983 book Nations and Nationalism, British-Czech intellectual Ernest Gellner put forward a theory of nationalism, explaining that the concept of nation is not in fact an ancient notion, as we might first imagine. Rather, it is a modern idea born out of the seismic social and cultural shifts that industrialization brought to the Western world.
Industrial society needed an educated workforce sharing the same culture and the same language - something much less important in the agricultural age. Gellner shows how the concept of nationalism - a political concept in which state and cultural boundaries match - follows from this new idea of nation. Gellner was well aware that "the idea of a man without a nation seems to impose a...strain on the modern imagination." But having witnessed firsthand the catastrophic effects of excessive nationalism - Gellner was a Jew who escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1939, after Hitler invaded - he was only too aware of the dangers of believing nationalism was something all human beings should embrace.
©2016 Macat Inc (P)2016 Macat Inc