Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, proposes that national identity is not possible in a fixed agrarian society, but that it is an outgrowth of an industrial society. (By this, more technically, I think he means an urbanizing and market-oriented society.) He argues that intellectuals of a minority culture, thrown against the high culture of the imperial center, begin (for reasons of status anxiety, it sounds) to formulate a theory of national uniqueness and special identity.

For Gellner, industrialism's transition from an economy of material production to an economy of intellectual production is critical -- could this be a way of introducing more sublety into this notion of an intellectual economy?

Could this be a factor in Mississippian's views of their ability to control the American experience?

For a summary and critique of Gellner's views, see Brendan O'Leary, "On the Nature of Nationalism: An Appraisal of Ernest Gellner's Writings on Nationalism," British Journal of Political Science 27 (April 1997), 191-222. In his footnote on p. 197, O'Leary notes:

Perhaps that explains why. when Gcllner re-expressed the argument in Nations and Nationalism,
nearly two decades later, there were complaints thal he had ignored the writings of North American
scholars - see, for example. Boyd Shafer's "Review of Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism.
Canadian Review of Studies in ,Nationalism, 11 (1984). 141-2. Many surveyors of writings on
nationalism, and many students, appear to see little difference between Gellner's arguments and those
of Karl Deutch's Nationalism and Social Cominunicuiums. 2nd edn (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press.
1966). Yet there is this major difference: whereas Deutsch conveys the notion that the idea of
nationalism is transmitted by newspapers, books, radios (and now television) to previously
non-nationalist peoples. Gellner insists that it is the media themselves, the pervasiveness and
importance of abstract. centralised, standardised, one-to-many communication, which automatically
engenders the core idea of nationalism, quite irrespective of what is being put into the specitic
messages transmitted. 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 political community, and that he who does not and cannot, is excluded Nations and
Nationalism, p. 127),


posted by Lloyd at 4:32 AM