Imagined Communities

Just finished reading Benedict Anderson’s impressive study of nationalism. A lot of critical distance in his book. A study thoroughly conducted from astonishing heights of intelligence. A truly impressive piece of scholarly research.
An expert on Southeast Asia, Anderson refutes the hypothesis of a purely European origin of nationalism. According to him, “nation-ness [nation, nationality, nationalism] is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time”. It is the result of the destruction of the old communities by the new conceptions of space and time that appeared during the era that Hungarian political economist Karl Polanyi called the “Great Transformation”, from the late 18th century. From the ashes of the old world-system, the nation was born, i.e an “imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”. The emergence of capitalism, the spread of printing, colonialism and the new states of the Third World provide many elements of explanation and reflection, whose role is insightfully analyzed in this brilliant, erudite, sometimes ironic, comparative study, which reads from cover to cover with an irresistible feeling of intellectual pleasure.

Have yet to finish Race, Nation, Classe by E. Balibar et Wallerstein.

First poem of the cycle almost finished.