The Idea Of Nationalism: A Study In Its Origins And BackgroundIn this sixtieth anniversary edition of The Idea of Nationalism, Craig Calhoun probes the work of Hans Kohn and the world that first brought prominence to this unparalleled defense of the national ideal in the modern West. At its publication, Saturday Review called it "an enduring and definitive treatise.... [Kohn] has written a book which is less a history of nationalism than it is a history of Western civilization from the standpoint of the national idea." This edition includes an extensive new introduction by Craig Calhoun, which in itself is a substantial contribution to the history of ideas. The Idea of Nationalism comprehensively analyzes the rise of nationalism, the idea's content, and its worldwide implications from the days of Hebrew and Greek antiquity to the eve of the French Revolution. As Calhoun explains, Kohn was particularly qualified to undertake this study. He grew up in Prague, the vigorous heart of Czech nationalism, participated in the Zionist student movement, studied the question of nationality in multinational cultures, spent the World War One years in Asian Russia, and later traveled extensively in the Near East studying the nationalist movements of western and southern Asia. The work itself is the product of Kohn's later years at Harvard University. In The Idea of Nationalism, Kohn presents the single most influential articulation of the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism. This has shaped nearly all ensuing research and public discussion and deeply informed parallel oppositions of early and late, Western and Eastern varieties of nationalism. Kohn also argues that the age of nationalism represents the first period of universal history. Civilizations and continents are brought into ever closer contact; popular participation in politics is enormously increased; and the secular state is ever more significant. The Idea of Nationalism is important both in itself and because it so deeply shaped all the work that followed it. After sixty years his interpretations and analyses remain acute and instructive. |
From inside the book
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... Idea of Na- tionalism , summing up its message : From Hebrew and Greek ideas the age of nationalism drew many of its initial and fundamental inspirations , but from Jerusalem and Athens shine also the eternal guiding stars which lift ...
... idea " of nationalism . On the one hand his concern is for how " nationalism , " as an idea , developed in history . On the other hand , he is concerned for how each nationalism— that is , each cultural movement of nation forming ...
... idea , an idea to which everyone could be assimilated for the very reason that it was a universal idea . ( p . 309 ) We see in this important features of liberal nationalism generally which Kohn had initially expressed in his accounts ...
... idea of itself could repeatedly be clarified in the contrast . " Each national idea gains its emphasis by contrasting itself with and differentiat- ing itself from another concept ; in the case of America , this concept was Europe " ( p ...
... idea " or the labor of intellectuals ( though The Idea of Nationalism is mainly an intellectual history ) . Partly because nationalism is so importantly about INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION xxvii what ordinary people think xxvi ...