 | |
| Author | Hans Kohn |
|---|---|
| Country | US |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Nationalism |
| Publisher | Macmillan Publishers |
Publication date | 1944 |
| Pages | 735 |
| ISBN | 978-1412804769 |
The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background is a 1944 book written by American philosopher Hans Kohn, one of the first modern writers about nationalism. [1] It is considered a classic text in political science. [2] In 2005, it was republished as a paperback with a foreword by Craig Calhoun. [2]
The Idea of Nationalism has eight chapters, each of which covers an epoch of European history. The evolution of different conceptions of nationalism were explored in Jewish and Greek antiquity, Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and "the age of nationalism". [2] He also establishes what is now known as the "Kohn Dichotomy" of nationalism, distinguishing between Western European civic nationalism and non-Western ethnic nationalism. [2] [1] The five Western states examined by Kohn were the Netherlands, Great Britain, Switzerland, the United States, and France. [1]
Polish-American historian Salo Wittmayer Baron called it a "stupendous achievement" in his 1944 review, [3] and Heinz H. F. Eulau called it Kohn's magnum opus. [4] After its republication in 1966, Athena S. Leoussi noted that it had acquired an "almost mythical" status, and was often cited in anthologies and secondary literature. [2] Kohn's dichotomy of nationalism was widely adopted by subsequent scholars, including Ernest Gellner and Michael Ignatieff. [1]
Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, it presupposes the existence of nations and tends to promote the interests of a particular nation, especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining its sovereignty (self-governance) over its perceived homeland to create a nation-state. It holds that each nation should govern itself, free from outside interference (self-determination), that a nation is a natural and ideal basis for a polity, and that the nation is the only rightful source of political power. It further aims to build and maintain a single national identity, based on a combination of shared social characteristics such as culture, ethnicity, geographic location, language, politics, religion, traditions and belief in a shared singular history, and to promote national unity or solidarity. Nationalism, therefore, seeks to preserve and foster a nation's traditional culture. There are various definitions of a "nation", which leads to different types of nationalism. The two main divergent forms identified by scholars are ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism.
A nation is a large type of social organization where a collective identity has emerged from a combination of shared features across a given population, such as language, history, ethnicity, culture, territory or society. Some nations are constructed around ethnicity while others are bound by political constitutions.
Han nationalism is a form of ethnic nationalism asserting ethnically Han people as the exclusive constituents of the Chinese nation. It is often in dialogue with other conceptions of Chinese nationalism, often mutually-exclusive or otherwise contradictory ones. Han people are the dominant ethnic group in both states claiming to represent the Chinese nation: the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China. Han people also constitute a sizable ethnic minority or plurality group in a number of other countries, such as Malaysia and Singapore. In the modern era, ethnicity's role in the Chinese nation continue to color conceptions of Chinese culture, geopolitics, and history.
Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and the United States. In the two decades from 1975 to 1995, the proportion of professors of history in American universities identifying with social history rose from 31% to 41%, while the proportion of political historians fell from 40% to 30%. In the history departments of British and Irish universities in 2014, of the 3410 faculty members reporting, 878 (26%) identified themselves with social history while political history came next with 841 (25%).
National identity is a person's identity or sense of belonging to one or more states or one or more nations. It is the sense of "a nation as a cohesive whole, as represented by distinctive traditions, culture, and language". National identity may refer to the subjective feeling one shares with a group of people about a nation, regardless of one's legal citizenship status. National identity is viewed in psychological terms as "an awareness of difference", a "feeling and recognition of 'we' and 'they'". National identity also includes the general population and diaspora of multi-ethnic states and societies that have a shared sense of common identity identical to that of a nation while being made up of several component ethnic groups. Hyphenated ethnicities are an example of the confluence of multiple ethnic and national identities within a single person or entity.
Jewish Autonomism, not connected to the contemporary political movement autonomism, was a non-Zionist political movement and ideology that emerged in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, before spreading throughout all of Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century. In the late 19th century, Jewish Autonomism was seen "together with Zionism [as] the most important political expression of the Jewish people in the modern era." One of its first and major proponents was the historian and activist Simon Dubnow. Jewish Autonomism is often referred to as "Dubnovism" or "folkism".
Hans Kohn was an American philosopher and historian. He pioneered the academic study of nationalism, and is considered an authority on the subject.
Civic nationalism, also known as democratic nationalism and liberal nationalism, is a form of nationalism that adheres to traditional liberal values of freedom, tolerance, equality, individual rights and is not based on ethnocentrism. Civic nationalists often defend the value of national identity by saying that individuals need it as a partial shared aspect of their identity in order to lead meaningful, autonomous lives and that democratic polities need a national identity to function properly.
Nations and Nationalism is a peer-reviewed academic journal that covers research on nationalism and related issues. It is published quarterly on behalf of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism by Wiley-Blackwell. Anthony D. Smith was the founding editor and the editor until his death in 2016.
Gabriel Abraham Almond was an American political scientist best known for his pioneering work on comparative politics, political development, and political culture.
An ethnoreligious group is a grouping of people who are unified by a common religious and ethnic background.
The Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN) is an international, interdisciplinary association for academics, researchers, students, journalists and others directly concerned with advancing the study of ethnicity and nationalism. It was founded by research students and academics in 1990 at the London School of Economics, where the headquarters of the Association are based. The objectives of the Association are to establish an international and interdisciplinary network of scholars interested in ethnicity and nationalism; stimulate debate on ethnicity and nationalism through the organisation of seminars, workshops, lectures and conferences; disseminate information on scholarly activities concerning ethnicity and nationalism; and publish research on ethnicity and nationalism in its journals Nations and Nationalism and Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism.
Nationalism studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to the study of nationalism and related issues. While nationalism has been the subject of scholarly discussion since at least the late eighteenth century, it is only since the early 1990s that it has received enough attention for a distinct field to emerge.
Among scholars of nationalism, a number of types of nationalism have been presented. Nationalism may manifest itself as part of official state ideology or as a popular non-state movement and may be expressed along civic, ethnic, cultural, language, religious or ideological lines. These self-definitions of the nation are used to classify types of nationalism, but such categories are not mutually exclusive and many nationalist movements combine some or all of these elements to varying degrees. Nationalist movements can also be classified by other criteria, such as scale and location.
Ethnic nationalism, also known as ethnonationalism, is a form of nationalism wherein the nation and nationality are defined in terms of ethnicity, with emphasis on an ethnocentric approach to various political issues related to national affirmation of a particular ethnic group.
Waldemar Gurian was a Russian-born German-American political scientist, author, and professor at the University of Notre Dame. He is regarded particularly as a theorist of totalitarianism. He wrote widely on political Catholicism.
Gellner's theory of nationalism was developed by Ernest Gellner over a number of publications from around the early 1960s to his 1995 death. Gellner discussed nationalism in a number of works, starting with Thought and Change (1964), and he most notably developed it in Nations and Nationalism (1983). His theory is modernist.
Several scholars of nationalism support the existence of nationalism in the Middle Ages. This school of thought differs from modernism, which suggests that nationalism developed predominantly after the late 18th century and the French Revolution. Theories on the existence of nationalism in the Middle Ages may belong to the general paradigms of ethnosymbolism and primordialism (perennialism).
Eastern European identity is the objective or subjective state of perceiving oneself as an Eastern European person and as relating to being Eastern European.
Han chauvinism is a political ideology that speaks out for the ethnic Han Chinese people and its uniqueness throughout human history. Han chauvinists believe that the current influence from the West has downgraded the development of China's own cultural customs, and in response, it has become instrumental in leading the increasingly traditionalist movement, which was launched in 2001. Participants come together both online and in person in cities across China to revitalize their vision of the authentic “Great Han” and corresponding “real China” through traditional ethnic dress and Confucian ritual.
| Authority control databases: National |
|---|
