Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

By Benedict Anderson

This world-famous work on the origins and development of nationalism examines what drives people to live, die, and kill in the name of nations.

“One of the greatest.” —London Review of Books
“Anderson transformed the study of nationalism.” —The New York Times
“Boldly original.” —Guardian

The full magnitude of Benedict Anderson’s intellectual achievement is still being appreciated and debated. Imagined Communities remains the most influential book on the origins of nationalism, filling the vacuum that previously existed in the traditions of Western thought. Cited more often than any other single English-language work in the human sciences, it is read around the world in more than thirty translations.

Written with exemplary clarity, this illuminating study traces the emergence of community as an idea to South America, rather than to nineteenth-century Europe. Later, this sense of belonging was formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, through print, literature, maps and museums. Following the rise and conflict of nations and the decline of empires, Anderson draws on examples from South East Asia, Latin America and Europe’s recent past to show how nationalism shaped the modern world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Nov 17, 2006
• ISBN: 9781844674848

Reviews for Imagined Communities

[gregdehler · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Nationalism and the nation-state are fairly recent phenomena, dating to the 1500s. How did they come together and how has the idea of nationalism been perpetuated in the modern era? Anderson sees the nation as an imagined political community bound together by such diverse things as common cultural roots, maps, museums, censuses, religion, and political dynasties. The printing press is hence a very critical component to the development of nations. Capitalism and the emergence of imperialism were other important factors that created uniformity through exchange rates, language, education, and a sense of national purpose. Since the end of World War II, all revolutions have been, Anderson argues, national revolutions.

[heggiep · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I didn't anticipate the book to be so 'academic'. Took me back to university days (why, I even read the footnotes). As with any college assigned reading, it introduced important ideas and concepts - and pointed to further reading. Anderson presents the many means and ways by which nationalisms are 'imagined' (not imaginary). Interesting but it didn't grab me the way a good popular narrative history or historical novel does. So, my rating indicates its relative reading pleasure for me - but make no mistake, this is an important book, especially for our Putin/Ukraine war time.

[bdtrump · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

An essential read in comparative and global politics, yet deeply flawed due to significant disregard for the importance of ethnicity and culture without strong evidence to do so.

[aitastaes · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.

[sotirfan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Although Anderson's theory is far from perfect, and on the whole I think it's been improved upon, this gets five stars for originality.

[davecullen_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Extraordinary book on nationalism, and how we create these images of who we are.(I took a graduate course in Cultural Anthropology on ethnicity and nationalism, where we read a tremendous amount of the current academic thinking on related topics, and I found nearly all of it appallingly bad: in a world all their own, little touch with reality, and also a ridiculous fog index in the writing. There were a few gems in there, though, and this was the standout, by far. And more than a decade later, it has held up. This book has stuck with me.)

[ndkchk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Coming from the perspective of someone who'd read post-Anderson stuff before this book, I still understood why it was groundbreaking, I think, but it didn't absolutely knock my socks off.Anderson is a great treatment of nationalism and I agreed with a lot of what he had to say; sometimes he was a little vague in ways that helped his arguments, but overall it's very much worth reading. Of course, if you're at all interested in nationalism, you've probably either already read this book or are going to read it regardless of what this review says.

[scapegoats · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A thorough attempt to understand the rise of nationalism. He attributes the primary causes to be the decline of religion and the rise of capitalism. Decline of religion caused a different conception of time, moving from a sense of divine plan to an unplanned, almost random sense of time. And nationalism provided a place to put loyalties and sense of identity that was lost to religion. Not a particularly convincing thesis and he doesn't develop it much. He is more convincing on factors that allowed nationalism to flourish, including printing capitalism, colonialism (which created and cemented certain nations), and a decline of dynastic legitimacy. Of course, his big idea of nations being constructed is the most important concept and the big worth of the book. Anyone reading about nationalism needs to read this book, if only because all other books on the subject reference it.

[waitingtoderail · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An intriguing look at how the sense of "nationality" came to be - it's more recent than you might think, since the advent of the printed page. Anderson uses examples from Southeast Asia, his area of speciality, to illustrate his points.

[daleducatte · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wonderful book, one of my favorites. Provides a framework for studying and understanding how cultures change over time, and how people and institutions (including business enterprises and government) react to those changes. The book also shows how critical print and publishing industries were to the massive societal changes that have occurred over the past few centuries. And it shows how traditional institutions (such as European aristocracies, and later governments) reacted to change and attempted to solidify their institutional control. Especially interesting to me were Anderson’s discussions of the use of state-controlled education and propaganda in the colonies populated by European expansion, to influence native residents or, in some cases, to create a line of segregation between European colonizers and a region’s original inhabitants.I strongly recommend this book to anyone studying history, societies, or cultural change. It is not always an easy read, but once you grasp what Anderson is trying to say, you’ll see elements of his work (or at least, his essential themes) in anything else on society or culture that you read.