The Ideology of Modernity

Most books that make it to the top of The New York Times bestselling non-fiction list get there either because they probe the private lives of Madonna or the Royal family, claim to have solved the mystery of the Kennedy assassination or--in the best of cases--wrestle with burning contemporary issues such as feminism, the Gulf War or the economy.

But few Americans are willing to dish out fifty dollars to buy a superior academic book--even when it deals with a burning contemporary issue, takes a peak into the Royal family (o.k., so 17th century gossip is old news) and explores mysteries of its own.

That's too bad, because Liah Greenfeld's Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity is a timely and fascinating study of what the author sees as the defining characteristic of our time. "The old society," Greenfeld writes," was replaced with a new one, based on the principle of nationality."

What we all consider modern times, according to Greenfeld, is a result of nationalism, an ideology which emerged in the 17th century and eventually organized the world into a jigsaw puzzle of nation-states. For Greenfeld, it is not industrialism, capitalism or communism that necessarily made the world as it is, but nationalism which preceeded them and set the stage for their emergence.

Unlike the established literature on nationalism, Greenfeld's Nationalism does not opt for the short compact theses of scholars such as Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities) and Ernest Gellner (Nations and Nationalism) but rather delves into the particulars of five nations in a search for the driving forces behind nationalism. Greenfeld devotes a chapter each to England, France, Russia, Germany and America, and concludes that there is no one nationalism, but that there are "nationalisms."

In fact, Greenfeld jokingly says, "when I typed the word 'nationalisms' my spell checker wouldn't recognize it. My computer tried to tell me that there is only 'nationalism' and 'nationalist,' but that there is no such thing as 'nationalisms.'"

Greenfeld proves her computer wrong through immaculate historical research and theoretical and psychological analysis. She presents an elaborate and quite long (about 500 pages) study of the different sorts of nationalisms that characterize the modern world.

In particular she distinguishes between civic-individual and ethnic nationalism. While either could conceivably give rise to liberal or authoritarian regimes, Greenfeld points out that historically, ethnic nationalism has shown a particular propensity towards collective authoritarian political systems. Greenfeld, in the last chapter of her book, portrays America as closest to the pure idea of a nation; it is a type of the civic-individual nationalism which laid the basis of individual liberty and liberal democracy. Unlike France, Germany and Russia, which are collective nationalities, Greenfeld holds that American nationalism never aspired to homogeneity.

The distinction between the types of nationalism is crucial to Greenfeld. "This is the most important idea of the book--that nationalism is not a uniform phenomenon," she says. "It is the basis of the best in our world... and of the worst." While at first glance such a statement may seem a concession to particularism--that is, an apology that no conclusion can be drawn from the nationalist experience--such an understanding of Greenfeld's reluctance to make sweeping generalizations would be erroneous.

Greenfeld does see a common denominator among the different "nationalisms": their function as status guarantors. "If there is something that unifies [nations], it is this guarantee of dignity," says Greenfeld, "but they can provide dignity in many different ways, which explains the variations between different nationalist experiences."

Indeed, the underlying explanation Greenfeld provides for the ubiquity of national identities is the individual's desire for status. "It would be a strong statement, but no overstatement, to say that the world in which we live was brought into being by vanity," she writes. "The role of vanity--or desire for status--in social transformations has been greatly underestimated.... In all the five cases in this book, however, the emergence of nationalism was related to preoccupation with status."

But humans have always been and arguably always will be innately power-hungry and driven by ambition. A major criticism of the work rests on the fact that much of Greenfeld's theory relies on an immutable human characteristic, leaving little room for explanation of how the end of the age of nationalism will come about. While Greenfeld does not claim nationalism is here to stay, she realizes she cannot provide insight into how such a change can come about.

And Greenfeld does argue that as long as we live in a modern world we will indeed live in a nationalist world. If nationalism disappears, she writes, "the world in which we live will be no more, and another world, as distinct from the one we know as was the society of orders that it replaced, will replace it. This post-national world will be truly post-modern, for nationality is the constitutive principle of modernity."

Stripped of ideology and politics, Nationalism provides a rich and lucid account of a concept that has for too long remained obscure in much academic literature. By providing a clear theoretical basis for her work, which she then applies convincingly in her case studies, Greenfeld provides the tools to tackle the complex issue of nationalism and its consequences.