Nations and Nationalism | Ernest André Gellner

Nations and Nationalism is an influential 1983 book by the philosopher Ernest Gellner, in which the author expands on his theory of nationalism.

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Ernest André Gellner was a British-Czech philosopher and social anthropologist described by The Daily Telegraph, when he died, as one of the world's most vigorous intellectuals, and by The Independent as a "one-man crusader for critical rationalism"

Gellner's division of human history into three basic social periods (pre-agrarian, agrarian and industrial) meant something revolutionary to me and usable when observing society almost on every occasion. Gellner is an anthropologist, and his methodology as a theorist of nations seemed most attractive to me.

This book is a brief historical and sociological essay with many anecdotal examples; the focus of the examples is on the history of the Habsburg Empire, but they are far from being limited to Central Europe. The author presents interesting facts from all over the world.

I bought this book in my second year of college when the pandemic happened. Although it's thin and under two hundred pages, I started it a few times and never got very far - it turns out I wasn't smart enough to understand what it said. Strange somehow. However, after some delay, I was able to digest Ernest Gellner's incredibly focused and complex writing style and understand how he sees nationalism and what a nation really is.

No, nations do not begin with "patriotism." At one time, people had no idea that they were a part of a whole, that they were related to some other people they had never seen. For many of us, this is a difficult concept to grasp because we have been completely immersed in the national way of thinking since childhood. But this has not always been the case.

From roughly the 17th century onwards, people considered their clan, their village, their city, and their region to be "theirs" and accepted others in them as similar in some way. However, in a society with minimal mobility, slow communications, and low literacy (generally very low connectivity), this link fades quickly as the geographic range expands.

Nationalist ideologies around the world (Mostly in India) argue that the national feeling has always been there in people, and it is awakened by the so-called "revivalists" who write books and remind the people of their past greatness at a time when they are oppressed. Sound familiar? This argument is strikingly the same in many countries and historical periods. But according to Ernest Gellner, it doesn't happen like that, but rather the other way around - there is no "innate" national feeling, and the wakers do not "wake up" its smouldering sparks in people's souls but simply create it.

Indian national movement is one of the best examples of how the national leaders had to work across the country to make a few common links among the people, raising issues against British rule. We have seen how congress sought to develop the national movement, how different social groups participated in the movement, and how nationalism captured the imagination of people, be it the satyagraha against the Rowlatt act or the Hindu-Muslim unity on the Khilafat issue.

Gellner explains that in every society throughout history, there has been a small literate class that felt a connection with its own kind, independent of geography, and it was from it that the ideas of common origin, history, and language arose and essentially created the idea for a nation.

Concluding thoughts

Nations and Nationalism is, let's face it, not much fun to read unless you really want to understand nationalism. Gellner has a distinct writing style. In this book, he explains everything in an academic, dry style, like a textbook packed with information and ideas, in which every sentence means something, and you need to make sense of it; otherwise, you lose the meaning of everything.