Zlatko Hadžidedić, Center for Nationalism Studies Where is Nationalism’s Home?
Probably the only theory clearly focused on the conceptual roots of nationalism is that by Elie Kedourie. For Kedourie,
Nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It pretends to supply a criterion for the determination of the unit of population proper to enjoy a government exclusively its own, for the legitimate exercise of power in the state, and for the right organization of a society of states. Briefly, the doctrine holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government.[24]
Kedourie presents nationalism as a doctrine, which was invented within a particular time-space framework and therefore inevitably has a limited relevance and scope of application. However, he immediately concedes that “not the least triumph of this doctrine is that such propositions have become accepted and are thought to be self-evident, that the very word nation has been endowed by nationalism with a meaning and a resonance which until the end of the eighteenth century it was far from having”.[25] Thus the paradox of a universal spread of such a seemingly particularist doctrine immediately opens the question of agents who were capable of both its invention, its application to particular European societies and its further transmission into other parts of the globe.
As for the doctrine’s inventors, Kedourie claims that they were to be found among German post-Enlightenment philosophers, namely Fichte, Schleiermacher and Herder. It was these thinkers who adapted the Kantian doctrine of individual self-determination so as to produce a new collectivist doctrine of national self-determination. Thus, according to Kedourie, “nationalism as a doctrine was articulated in German-speaking lands”, around 1800s. This claim itself might be regarded as strange, given the fact that the first nation-states and their respective nationalisms had emerged well before the 19th century and well outside the German-speaking context (England, the Netherlands, USA, France). Yet, such a curious argument almost turns into a bizarre one when Kedourie goes on to say that “Great Britain and the United States are precisely those areas where nationalism is unknown”.[26]
What, then, is nationalism, if its propositions are so widely spread and accepted as self-evident and, yet, it has somehow remained unknown precisely in those nation-states whose respective and joint impact on the shape of contemporary world has been so immeasurable? Of course, it would be possible to argue that nationalism emerged as a reaction, and was generated in opposition, to the attempts by precisely these two nation-states to shape international order so as to impose their own hegemony.[27] Or, else, it would be possible to argue that these two nation-states were actually shaping international order by imposing a hegemony of the doctrinaire nationalist agenda onto those parts of the world which they attempted to dominate, thus themselves remaining free from its influence. Yet, these two propositions would probably go far beyond – perhaps even be directly opposed to – what Kedourie meant by defining nationalism as a German-invented doctrine.
Certainly, Kedourie’s claim that nationalism pretends to “supply a criterion for the determination of the unit of population proper to enjoy a government exclusively its own” suggests that the author regarded nationalism as some form of false, albeit widely spread, consciousness. In other words, nationalism is to be seen as a form of ideological politics.[28] As such, it attempts to impose certain ideas onto the world, so as to re-create it on its own image, and it is fundamentally opposed to what Kedourie labels as “constitutional politics”, which takes its lead from the world as it is.[30] In the introduction to the fourth edition of Nationalism, Kedourie establishes a clear-cut distinction between these two ways of politics:
In constitutional politics the object in view is to attend to the common concerns of a particular society, to safeguard against foreign assaults, to mediate disagreements and conflicts between various groups through political institutions, through legislation and the administration of justice, and to uphold the law as being above and beyond sectional interests however important and powerful. Ideological politics is very different. Such a politics is concerned to establish a state of affairs in society and state such that everyone, as they say in old-fashioned novels, will live happily ever after. To do so, the ideologist will, to borrow Plato’s analogy in the Republic, look upon state and society as a canvas which has to be wiped clean, so that his vision of justice, virtue and happiness can be painted on this tabula rasa.[31]
It was this distinction that made it possible for Kedourie to claim that constitutional politics – having first emerged in Great Britain and the USA – prevented the ideological politics of nationalism from coming into existence in these parts of the world. However, the idyllic picture of a society dominated by constitutional politics, in which – just like in old-fashioned novels – everyone already lives happily ever since, to some extent blurs Kedourie’s distinction. In this sense, ideological politics, as Kedourie defines it, can be regarded only as a means to an end, a necessary intermediate step towards achievement of the ultimate stage of constitutional politics. And, indeed, it is difficult to overlook the fact that the 19th– and 20th-century doctrinaire nationalists in German-speaking lands (ranging from Fichte to Hitler’s national-socialists) often looked up at the constitutionalist and imperialist nation-states – as already established in England and France – as the ideal they attempted to achieve. As John Breuilly comments,
For Kedourie nationalism begins life as an idea and once it becomes a powerful politics is characterised by a commitment to imposing that idea upon the world rather than seeing politics as a necessary means of allowing the world as it is (“particular society”) to get along with its business (“common concerns”) without intolerable levels of violence, conflict or sectional imposition. It is precisely the detachment of the nationalist idea from the “world” which makes it appropriate to start its study in the field of the history of ideas. By contrast it is very difficult to see how “constitutional” politics can have an intellectual history separate from the practical actions in which it engages.[32]
Thus Kedourie could examine nationalism exclusively within the history of ideas, by defining it as an invented doctrine. Still, such an invention could find its ideological way to the sphere of politics only through a connecting agency. This agency is identified by Kedourie as the “intelligentsia”, a group that develops under specifically modern conditions and promotes its interests through the medium of creation and transmission of ideas.[33] In identifying this agency, Kedourie’s theory does not go beyond the boundaries of the mainstream in the study of nationalism. However, he stands alone in his effort to remain confined to the realm of ideas, stressing their centrality not only to the very existence of the intelligentsia,[34] but to the course of modern historical developments as well. In this way, left without any explanation of how the ideas transmitted by the intelligentsia actually mobilise popular support (and, for nationalism, mobilising popular support is not only the central ideal which guides this “politics in a new style”; it is also the key to the materialisation of the nation), Kedourie’s theory openly rejects what he labels as “sociological temptation”.[35] Yet, ironically, such a deliberate rejection of the effort to provide an account for nationalism’s transcendence of the boundaries demarcated by the history of ideas leads to a similar rejection of the reality’s givens for which Kedourie rightfully denounces ideological politics. Thus Kedourie’s history of ideas, while accusing ideological politics for the imposition of ideas upon the world, itself attempts to impose the concept of history according to which only the power of ideas shapes the reality of historical developments.
In this respect, Kedourie’s theory certainly follows the old-fashioned Hegelian idealism. However, notwithstanding the shortcomings of Marxist or Gellnerian historical materialism, it completely fails to address the central question in the study of nationalism, the question of how, actually, nations come into existence. Given the fact that Kedourie certainly did not believe in the primordial nature of nations, such a failure presents a serious problem for a modernist theory of nationalism. True, neither does Gellner’s response to this question, one saying that nationalism “invents nations where they do not exist”, provide an answer to the question of substantiation of nations (Beissinger); however, Kedourie’s proposition, one which says that it is the intelligentsia that invents nationalism where it does not exist, does not even attempt to pose such a question.
Kedourie defines nationalism as “a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century” which “holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government”.[36] The question of the transformation of the Kantian concept of individual self-determination into the collectivist concept of national self-determination occupies the central position in Kedourie’s theory. According to Kedoruie’s account of Kant’s theory, “man is free when he obeys the laws of morality which he finds within himself, and not in the external world”. A man is free “if his will is free; and his will is free when he is acting in accordance with the categorical imperative, as Kant denotes this inward law.”[37] This categorical imperative, “obedience to which makes free, is not a divine command. It is a command which wells up within the soul, freely recognised and freely accepted.”[38] Projected onto the level of politics, says Kedourie, “the freedom of the individual, which is his self-realisation, lies in identifying himself with the whole, belonging to which endows him with reality”. Thus, in the ultimate political terms, “the individual leads a full, free, satisfactory life only if he and state are one”.[39]
This politicisation, according to Kedourie, arose due to the misinterpretation of Kant’s individualism by his disciples, namely Fichte:
On such a view, the categorical imperative, obedience to which remained, according to Kant, the individual’s sole responsibility, to be shared or shifted on to nobody else, itself became possible and conceivable only through society. Society was the essential precondition of all laws of morality.[40]
Yet, in both Anglo-Saxon (Hobbes, Locke) and French (Rousseau) philosophical-political traditions, the very existence of the individual is regarded as possible only within the Commonwealth (and, according to Rousseau, freedom can be achieved only through submission to the General Will). Indeed, the doctrine which claims that “the state equates itself to the will of man”, being “an inwardly accepted standard and rule of conduct”, can also be found elsewhere, namely in the writings of the founder of Fascism, Benito Mussolini.[41] And, it is extremely difficult to distinguish the doctrine of nationalism as defined by Kedourie from Mussolini’s doctrine of Fascism. It is equally difficult to distinguish the implications of both these doctrines for the relationship between society and the individual from the implications of Rousseau’s concept of the people as a law-giving, sovereign, metaphysical entity, not fully embodied in any of the visible organs of the state, and possessing its own, collective, General Will.[42] Moreover, it is difficult to distinguish between Rousseau’s concept of the Sovereign whose will is to be called the General Will and Hobbes’s view that civil society is but an Artificial Man, thus endowed with the attributes of personality, including will.[43] In these traditions, both the Commonwealth and the General Will are regarded as collective individuals, through which the very existence of the individual is made possible due to his “absorption into the universal consciousness”.[44] For that, we do not have to go to the post-Kantians, as proposed by Kedourie:[45] this universal consciousness – conceived as essentially external, political entity – may well be found in Hobbes’s and Locke’s Commonwealth and Rousseau’s General Will. There is no need to travel from Kant’s concept of obedience to the inward moral law (the concept which was itself heavily influenced by Rousseau’s concept of obedience to the General Will) to Fichte’s concept of obedience to the state,[46] when such concepts can easily be found in the pre-Kantian, non-German political thought. Kedourie’s (un)conscious attempt to retrospectively link the excesses of the 20th-century totalitarianism (namely German National Socialism) with the totalitarian implications of the supposedly German-invented doctrine of nationalism (while attempting to totally detach the Anglo-American “constitutionalist politics” from any such implications) only testifies to the author’s teleological prejudice, which makes his theory irrelevant from the cognitive aspect.[47]
[24] Kedourie 1960: 1.
[25] Ibid.: 1.
[26] Kedourie 1960, fourth edition in 1993: 143.
[27] Perhaps this argument might be derived from the logic of the theory of international society, as proposed by James Mayall.
[28] Kedourie saw both pre-modern millenial movements and 20th-century socialism as forms of ideological politics. See his Introduction to the fourth edition of Nationalism, pp. xvi-xviii.
[29] Ibid.: 1.
[30] This distinction is proposed by John Breuilly in the article Nationalism and the History of Ideas (…).
[31] Ibid.: Introduction, p. xii-xiv
[32] Ibid.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Kedourie 1993: 140.
[36] Ibid., p. 1.
[37] Ibid.: 15.
[38] Ibid.: 16.
[39] Ibid.: 31.
[40] Ibid.: 32. According to Fichte, the people “in a higher meaning of the word” is to be defined in both self-referential (Breuilly) and metaphysical terms, as “a totality of men continuing to live in society with each other and continually creating themselves naturally and spiritually out of themselves, a totality that arises together out of the divine under a certain special law that unites this mass in the eternal world, and therefore in the temporal also, to a natural totality permeated by itself.” (Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, in Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay (ed.), The Nationalism Reader, p. 64)
[41] See Mussolini, Fascism, in Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay (ed.), The Nationalism Reader, New York 1999, p. 225
[42] Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, London 1946-2000, p. 671.
[43] Ibid.: 672.
[44]Kedourie: 33.
[45] Ibid.: 33.
[46] Fichte, The Closed Commercial State (1800), cited in Kedourie, 1993.
[47] Perhaps the same could be said about Russell’s claim that “Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill, of Locke”. (Russell, History of Western Philosophy, London 1946-2000, p. 660.) The core of Rousseau’s alleged totalitarianism is thus to be found in his view that it is “essential, if the general will is to be able to express itself, that there should be no partial society within the State, and that each citizen should think only his own thoughts”. Hence, all the subordinate associations within the State should be prohibited, since each of these has its own general will, which may conflict with that of a community as a whole. (Ibid.: 673) Russell goes on to say that such a State would have to prohibit churches (except a State Church), political parties, trade unions, all other organizations of men with similar economic interests (briefly, all that is nowadays labelled as “civil society”), and that the result would be obviously the Corporate or Totalitarian State. (Ibid.) Although Russell concedes that Hobbes’s Leviathan contains similar arguments against subordinate associations, he is nevertheless inclined to see Locke (and therefore Churchill and Roosevelt) as a legitimate outcome of Hobbes, and Hitler as an equally legitimate outcome of Rousseau.
Probably the only theory clearly focused on the conceptual roots of nationalism is that by Elie Kedourie. For Kedourie,
Nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It pretends to supply a criterion for the determination of the unit of population proper to enjoy a government exclusively its own, for the legitimate exercise of power in the state, and for the right organization of a society of states. Briefly, the doctrine holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government.[24]
Kedourie presents nationalism as a doctrine, which was invented within a particular time-space framework and therefore inevitably has a limited relevance and scope of application. However, he immediately concedes that “not the least triumph of this doctrine is that such propositions have become accepted and are thought to be self-evident, that the very word nation has been endowed by nationalism with a meaning and a resonance which until the end of the eighteenth century it was far from having”.[25] Thus the paradox of a universal spread of such a seemingly particularist doctrine immediately opens the question of agents who were capable of both its invention, its application to particular European societies and its further transmission into other parts of the globe.
As for the doctrine’s inventors, Kedourie claims that they were to be found among German post-Enlightenment philosophers, namely Fichte, Schleiermacher and Herder. It was these thinkers who adapted the Kantian doctrine of individual self-determination so as to produce a new collectivist doctrine of national self-determination. Thus, according to Kedourie, “nationalism as a doctrine was articulated in German-speaking lands”, around 1800s. This claim itself might be regarded as strange, given the fact that the first nation-states and their respective nationalisms had emerged well before the 19th century and well outside the German-speaking context (England, the Netherlands, USA, France). Yet, such a curious argument almost turns into a bizarre one when Kedourie goes on to say that “Great Britain and the United States are precisely those areas where nationalism is unknown”.[26]
What, then, is nationalism, if its propositions are so widely spread and accepted as self-evident and, yet, it has somehow remained unknown precisely in those nation-states whose respective and joint impact on the shape of contemporary world has been so immeasurable? Of course, it would be possible to argue that nationalism emerged as a reaction, and was generated in opposition, to the attempts by precisely these two nation-states to shape international order so as to impose their own hegemony.[27] Or, else, it would be possible to argue that these two nation-states were actually shaping international order by imposing a hegemony of the doctrinaire nationalist agenda onto those parts of the world which they attempted to dominate, thus themselves remaining free from its influence. Yet, these two propositions would probably go far beyond – perhaps even be directly opposed to – what Kedourie meant by defining nationalism as a German-invented doctrine.
Certainly, Kedourie’s claim that nationalism pretends to “supply a criterion for the determination of the unit of population proper to enjoy a government exclusively its own” suggests that the author regarded nationalism as some form of false, albeit widely spread, consciousness. In other words, nationalism is to be seen as a form of ideological politics.[28] As such, it attempts to impose certain ideas onto the world, so as to re-create it on its own image, and it is fundamentally opposed to what Kedourie labels as “constitutional politics”, which takes its lead from the world as it is.[30] In the introduction to the fourth edition of Nationalism, Kedourie establishes a clear-cut distinction between these two ways of politics:
In constitutional politics the object in view is to attend to the common concerns of a particular society, to safeguard against foreign assaults, to mediate disagreements and conflicts between various groups through political institutions, through legislation and the administration of justice, and to uphold the law as being above and beyond sectional interests however important and powerful. Ideological politics is very different. Such a politics is concerned to establish a state of affairs in society and state such that everyone, as they say in old-fashioned novels, will live happily ever after. To do so, the ideologist will, to borrow Plato’s analogy in the Republic, look upon state and society as a canvas which has to be wiped clean, so that his vision of justice, virtue and happiness can be painted on this tabula rasa.[31]
It was this distinction that made it possible for Kedourie to claim that constitutional politics – having first emerged in Great Britain and the USA – prevented the ideological politics of nationalism from coming into existence in these parts of the world. However, the idyllic picture of a society dominated by constitutional politics, in which – just like in old-fashioned novels – everyone already lives happily ever since, to some extent blurs Kedourie’s distinction. In this sense, ideological politics, as Kedourie defines it, can be regarded only as a means to an end, a necessary intermediate step towards achievement of the ultimate stage of constitutional politics. And, indeed, it is difficult to overlook the fact that the 19th– and 20th-century doctrinaire nationalists in German-speaking lands (ranging from Fichte to Hitler’s national-socialists) often looked up at the constitutionalist and imperialist nation-states – as already established in England and France – as the ideal they attempted to achieve. As John Breuilly comments,
For Kedourie nationalism begins life as an idea and once it becomes a powerful politics is characterised by a commitment to imposing that idea upon the world rather than seeing politics as a necessary means of allowing the world as it is (“particular society”) to get along with its business (“common concerns”) without intolerable levels of violence, conflict or sectional imposition. It is precisely the detachment of the nationalist idea from the “world” which makes it appropriate to start its study in the field of the history of ideas. By contrast it is very difficult to see how “constitutional” politics can have an intellectual history separate from the practical actions in which it engages.[32]
Thus Kedourie could examine nationalism exclusively within the history of ideas, by defining it as an invented doctrine. Still, such an invention could find its ideological way to the sphere of politics only through a connecting agency. This agency is identified by Kedourie as the “intelligentsia”, a group that develops under specifically modern conditions and promotes its interests through the medium of creation and transmission of ideas.[33] In identifying this agency, Kedourie’s theory does not go beyond the boundaries of the mainstream in the study of nationalism. However, he stands alone in his effort to remain confined to the realm of ideas, stressing their centrality not only to the very existence of the intelligentsia,[34] but to the course of modern historical developments as well. In this way, left without any explanation of how the ideas transmitted by the intelligentsia actually mobilise popular support (and, for nationalism, mobilising popular support is not only the central ideal which guides this “politics in a new style”; it is also the key to the materialisation of the nation), Kedourie’s theory openly rejects what he labels as “sociological temptation”.[35] Yet, ironically, such a deliberate rejection of the effort to provide an account for nationalism’s transcendence of the boundaries demarcated by the history of ideas leads to a similar rejection of the reality’s givens for which Kedourie rightfully denounces ideological politics. Thus Kedourie’s history of ideas, while accusing ideological politics for the imposition of ideas upon the world, itself attempts to impose the concept of history according to which only the power of ideas shapes the reality of historical developments.
In this respect, Kedourie’s theory certainly follows the old-fashioned Hegelian idealism. However, notwithstanding the shortcomings of Marxist or Gellnerian historical materialism, it completely fails to address the central question in the study of nationalism, the question of how, actually, nations come into existence. Given the fact that Kedourie certainly did not believe in the primordial nature of nations, such a failure presents a serious problem for a modernist theory of nationalism. True, neither does Gellner’s response to this question, one saying that nationalism “invents nations where they do not exist”, provide an answer to the question of substantiation of nations (Beissinger); however, Kedourie’s proposition, one which says that it is the intelligentsia that invents nationalism where it does not exist, does not even attempt to pose such a question.
Kedourie defines nationalism as “a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century” which “holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government”.[36] The question of the transformation of the Kantian concept of individual self-determination into the collectivist concept of national self-determination occupies the central position in Kedourie’s theory. According to Kedoruie’s account of Kant’s theory, “man is free when he obeys the laws of morality which he finds within himself, and not in the external world”. A man is free “if his will is free; and his will is free when he is acting in accordance with the categorical imperative, as Kant denotes this inward law.”[37] This categorical imperative, “obedience to which makes free, is not a divine command. It is a command which wells up within the soul, freely recognised and freely accepted.”[38] Projected onto the level of politics, says Kedourie, “the freedom of the individual, which is his self-realisation, lies in identifying himself with the whole, belonging to which endows him with reality”. Thus, in the ultimate political terms, “the individual leads a full, free, satisfactory life only if he and state are one”.[39]
This politicisation, according to Kedourie, arose due to the misinterpretation of Kant’s individualism by his disciples, namely Fichte:
On such a view, the categorical imperative, obedience to which remained, according to Kant, the individual’s sole responsibility, to be shared or shifted on to nobody else, itself became possible and conceivable only through society. Society was the essential precondition of all laws of morality.[40]
Yet, in both Anglo-Saxon (Hobbes, Locke) and French (Rousseau) philosophical-political traditions, the very existence of the individual is regarded as possible only within the Commonwealth (and, according to Rousseau, freedom can be achieved only through submission to the General Will). Indeed, the doctrine which claims that “the state equates itself to the will of man”, being “an inwardly accepted standard and rule of conduct”, can also be found elsewhere, namely in the writings of the founder of Fascism, Benito Mussolini.[41] And, it is extremely difficult to distinguish the doctrine of nationalism as defined by Kedourie from Mussolini’s doctrine of Fascism. It is equally difficult to distinguish the implications of both these doctrines for the relationship between society and the individual from the implications of Rousseau’s concept of the people as a law-giving, sovereign, metaphysical entity, not fully embodied in any of the visible organs of the state, and possessing its own, collective, General Will.[42] Moreover, it is difficult to distinguish between Rousseau’s concept of the Sovereign whose will is to be called the General Will and Hobbes’s view that civil society is but an Artificial Man, thus endowed with the attributes of personality, including will.[43] In these traditions, both the Commonwealth and the General Will are regarded as collective individuals, through which the very existence of the individual is made possible due to his “absorption into the universal consciousness”.[44] For that, we do not have to go to the post-Kantians, as proposed by Kedourie:[45] this universal consciousness – conceived as essentially external, political entity – may well be found in Hobbes’s and Locke’s Commonwealth and Rousseau’s General Will. There is no need to travel from Kant’s concept of obedience to the inward moral law (the concept which was itself heavily influenced by Rousseau’s concept of obedience to the General Will) to Fichte’s concept of obedience to the state,[46] when such concepts can easily be found in the pre-Kantian, non-German political thought. Kedourie’s (un)conscious attempt to retrospectively link the excesses of the 20th-century totalitarianism (namely German National Socialism) with the totalitarian implications of the supposedly German-invented doctrine of nationalism (while attempting to totally detach the Anglo-American “constitutionalist politics” from any such implications) only testifies to the author’s teleological prejudice, which makes his theory irrelevant from the cognitive aspect.[47]
[24] Kedourie 1960: 1.
[25] Ibid.: 1.
[26] Kedourie 1960, fourth edition in 1993: 143.
[27] Perhaps this argument might be derived from the logic of the theory of international society, as proposed by James Mayall.
[28] Kedourie saw both pre-modern millenial movements and 20th-century socialism as forms of ideological politics. See his Introduction to the fourth edition of Nationalism, pp. xvi-xviii.
[29] Ibid.: 1.
[30] This distinction is proposed by John Breuilly in the article Nationalism and the History of Ideas (…).
[31] Ibid.: Introduction, p. xii-xiv
[32] Ibid.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Kedourie 1993: 140.
[36] Ibid., p. 1.
[37] Ibid.: 15.
[38] Ibid.: 16.
[39] Ibid.: 31.
[40] Ibid.: 32. According to Fichte, the people “in a higher meaning of the word” is to be defined in both self-referential (Breuilly) and metaphysical terms, as “a totality of men continuing to live in society with each other and continually creating themselves naturally and spiritually out of themselves, a totality that arises together out of the divine under a certain special law that unites this mass in the eternal world, and therefore in the temporal also, to a natural totality permeated by itself.” (Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, in Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay (ed.), The Nationalism Reader, p. 64)
[41] See Mussolini, Fascism, in Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay (ed.), The Nationalism Reader, New York 1999, p. 225
[42] Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, London 1946-2000, p. 671.
[43] Ibid.: 672.
[44]Kedourie: 33.
[45] Ibid.: 33.
[46] Fichte, The Closed Commercial State (1800), cited in Kedourie, 1993.
[47] Perhaps the same could be said about Russell’s claim that “Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill, of Locke”. (Russell, History of Western Philosophy, London 1946-2000, p. 660.) The core of Rousseau’s alleged totalitarianism is thus to be found in his view that it is “essential, if the general will is to be able to express itself, that there should be no partial society within the State, and that each citizen should think only his own thoughts”. Hence, all the subordinate associations within the State should be prohibited, since each of these has its own general will, which may conflict with that of a community as a whole. (Ibid.: 673) Russell goes on to say that such a State would have to prohibit churches (except a State Church), political parties, trade unions, all other organizations of men with similar economic interests (briefly, all that is nowadays labelled as “civil society”), and that the result would be obviously the Corporate or Totalitarian State. (Ibid.) Although Russell concedes that Hobbes’s Leviathan contains similar arguments against subordinate associations, he is nevertheless inclined to see Locke (and therefore Churchill and Roosevelt) as a legitimate outcome of Hobbes, and Hitler as an equally legitimate outcome of Rousseau.
Probably the only theory clearly focused on the conceptual roots of nationalism is that by Elie Kedourie. For Kedourie,
Nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It pretends to supply a criterion for the determination of the unit of population proper to enjoy a government exclusively its own, for the legitimate exercise of power in the state, and for the right organization of a society of states. Briefly, the doctrine holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government.[24]
Kedourie presents nationalism as a doctrine, which was invented within a particular time-space framework and therefore inevitably has a limited relevance and scope of application. However, he immediately concedes that “not the least triumph of this doctrine is that such propositions have become accepted and are thought to be self-evident, that the very word nation has been endowed by nationalism with a meaning and a resonance which until the end of the eighteenth century it was far from having”.[25] Thus the paradox of a universal spread of such a seemingly particularist doctrine immediately opens the question of agents who were capable of both its invention, its application to particular European societies and its further transmission into other parts of the globe.
As for the doctrine’s inventors, Kedourie claims that they were to be found among German post-Enlightenment philosophers, namely Fichte, Schleiermacher and Herder. It was these thinkers who adapted the Kantian doctrine of individual self-determination so as to produce a new collectivist doctrine of national self-determination. Thus, according to Kedourie, “nationalism as a doctrine was articulated in German-speaking lands”, around 1800s. This claim itself might be regarded as strange, given the fact that the first nation-states and their respective nationalisms had emerged well before the 19th century and well outside the German-speaking context (England, the Netherlands, USA, France). Yet, such a curious argument almost turns into a bizarre one when Kedourie goes on to say that “Great Britain and the United States are precisely those areas where nationalism is unknown”.[26]
What, then, is nationalism, if its propositions are so widely spread and accepted as self-evident and, yet, it has somehow remained unknown precisely in those nation-states whose respective and joint impact on the shape of contemporary world has been so immeasurable? Of course, it would be possible to argue that nationalism emerged as a reaction, and was generated in opposition, to the attempts by precisely these two nation-states to shape international order so as to impose their own hegemony.[27] Or, else, it would be possible to argue that these two nation-states were actually shaping international order by imposing a hegemony of the doctrinaire nationalist agenda onto those parts of the world which they attempted to dominate, thus themselves remaining free from its influence. Yet, these two propositions would probably go far beyond – perhaps even be directly opposed to – what Kedourie meant by defining nationalism as a German-invented doctrine.
Certainly, Kedourie’s claim that nationalism pretends to “supply a criterion for the determination of the unit of population proper to enjoy a government exclusively its own” suggests that the author regarded nationalism as some form of false, albeit widely spread, consciousness. In other words, nationalism is to be seen as a form of ideological politics.[28] As such, it attempts to impose certain ideas onto the world, so as to re-create it on its own image, and it is fundamentally opposed to what Kedourie labels as “constitutional politics”, which takes its lead from the world as it is.[30] In the introduction to the fourth edition of Nationalism, Kedourie establishes a clear-cut distinction between these two ways of politics:
In constitutional politics the object in view is to attend to the common concerns of a particular society, to safeguard against foreign assaults, to mediate disagreements and conflicts between various groups through political institutions, through legislation and the administration of justice, and to uphold the law as being above and beyond sectional interests however important and powerful. Ideological politics is very different. Such a politics is concerned to establish a state of affairs in society and state such that everyone, as they say in old-fashioned novels, will live happily ever after. To do so, the ideologist will, to borrow Plato’s analogy in the Republic, look upon state and society as a canvas which has to be wiped clean, so that his vision of justice, virtue and happiness can be painted on this tabula rasa.[31]
It was this distinction that made it possible for Kedourie to claim that constitutional politics – having first emerged in Great Britain and the USA – prevented the ideological politics of nationalism from coming into existence in these parts of the world. However, the idyllic picture of a society dominated by constitutional politics, in which – just like in old-fashioned novels – everyone already lives happily ever since, to some extent blurs Kedourie’s distinction. In this sense, ideological politics, as Kedourie defines it, can be regarded only as a means to an end, a necessary intermediate step towards achievement of the ultimate stage of constitutional politics. And, indeed, it is difficult to overlook the fact that the 19th– and 20th-century doctrinaire nationalists in German-speaking lands (ranging from Fichte to Hitler’s national-socialists) often looked up at the constitutionalist and imperialist nation-states – as already established in England and France – as the ideal they attempted to achieve. As John Breuilly comments,
For Kedourie nationalism begins life as an idea and once it becomes a powerful politics is characterised by a commitment to imposing that idea upon the world rather than seeing politics as a necessary means of allowing the world as it is (“particular society”) to get along with its business (“common concerns”) without intolerable levels of violence, conflict or sectional imposition. It is precisely the detachment of the nationalist idea from the “world” which makes it appropriate to start its study in the field of the history of ideas. By contrast it is very difficult to see how “constitutional” politics can have an intellectual history separate from the practical actions in which it engages.[32]
Thus Kedourie could examine nationalism exclusively within the history of ideas, by defining it as an invented doctrine. Still, such an invention could find its ideological way to the sphere of politics only through a connecting agency. This agency is identified by Kedourie as the “intelligentsia”, a group that develops under specifically modern conditions and promotes its interests through the medium of creation and transmission of ideas.[33] In identifying this agency, Kedourie’s theory does not go beyond the boundaries of the mainstream in the study of nationalism. However, he stands alone in his effort to remain confined to the realm of ideas, stressing their centrality not only to the very existence of the intelligentsia,[34] but to the course of modern historical developments as well. In this way, left without any explanation of how the ideas transmitted by the intelligentsia actually mobilise popular support (and, for nationalism, mobilising popular support is not only the central ideal which guides this “politics in a new style”; it is also the key to the materialisation of the nation), Kedourie’s theory openly rejects what he labels as “sociological temptation”.[35] Yet, ironically, such a deliberate rejection of the effort to provide an account for nationalism’s transcendence of the boundaries demarcated by the history of ideas leads to a similar rejection of the reality’s givens for which Kedourie rightfully denounces ideological politics. Thus Kedourie’s history of ideas, while accusing ideological politics for the imposition of ideas upon the world, itself attempts to impose the concept of history according to which only the power of ideas shapes the reality of historical developments.
In this respect, Kedourie’s theory certainly follows the old-fashioned Hegelian idealism. However, notwithstanding the shortcomings of Marxist or Gellnerian historical materialism, it completely fails to address the central question in the study of nationalism, the question of how, actually, nations come into existence. Given the fact that Kedourie certainly did not believe in the primordial nature of nations, such a failure presents a serious problem for a modernist theory of nationalism. True, neither does Gellner’s response to this question, one saying that nationalism “invents nations where they do not exist”, provide an answer to the question of substantiation of nations (Beissinger); however, Kedourie’s proposition, one which says that it is the intelligentsia that invents nationalism where it does not exist, does not even attempt to pose such a question.
Kedourie defines nationalism as “a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century” which “holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government”.[36] The question of the transformation of the Kantian concept of individual self-determination into the collectivist concept of national self-determination occupies the central position in Kedourie’s theory. According to Kedoruie’s account of Kant’s theory, “man is free when he obeys the laws of morality which he finds within himself, and not in the external world”. A man is free “if his will is free; and his will is free when he is acting in accordance with the categorical imperative, as Kant denotes this inward law.”[37] This categorical imperative, “obedience to which makes free, is not a divine command. It is a command which wells up within the soul, freely recognised and freely accepted.”[38] Projected onto the level of politics, says Kedourie, “the freedom of the individual, which is his self-realisation, lies in identifying himself with the whole, belonging to which endows him with reality”. Thus, in the ultimate political terms, “the individual leads a full, free, satisfactory life only if he and state are one”.[39]
This politicisation, according to Kedourie, arose due to the misinterpretation of Kant’s individualism by his disciples, namely Fichte:
On such a view, the categorical imperative, obedience to which remained, according to Kant, the individual’s sole responsibility, to be shared or shifted on to nobody else, itself became possible and conceivable only through society. Society was the essential precondition of all laws of morality.[40]
Yet, in both Anglo-Saxon (Hobbes, Locke) and French (Rousseau) philosophical-political traditions, the very existence of the individual is regarded as possible only within the Commonwealth (and, according to Rousseau, freedom can be achieved only through submission to the General Will). Indeed, the doctrine which claims that “the state equates itself to the will of man”, being “an inwardly accepted standard and rule of conduct”, can also be found elsewhere, namely in the writings of the founder of Fascism, Benito Mussolini.[41] And, it is extremely difficult to distinguish the doctrine of nationalism as defined by Kedourie from Mussolini’s doctrine of Fascism. It is equally difficult to distinguish the implications of both these doctrines for the relationship between society and the individual from the implications of Rousseau’s concept of the people as a law-giving, sovereign, metaphysical entity, not fully embodied in any of the visible organs of the state, and possessing its own, collective, General Will.[42] Moreover, it is difficult to distinguish between Rousseau’s concept of the Sovereign whose will is to be called the General Will and Hobbes’s view that civil society is but an Artificial Man, thus endowed with the attributes of personality, including will.[43] In these traditions, both the Commonwealth and the General Will are regarded as collective individuals, through which the very existence of the individual is made possible due to his “absorption into the universal consciousness”.[44] For that, we do not have to go to the post-Kantians, as proposed by Kedourie:[45] this universal consciousness – conceived as essentially external, political entity – may well be found in Hobbes’s and Locke’s Commonwealth and Rousseau’s General Will. There is no need to travel from Kant’s concept of obedience to the inward moral law (the concept which was itself heavily influenced by Rousseau’s concept of obedience to the General Will) to Fichte’s concept of obedience to the state,[46] when such concepts can easily be found in the pre-Kantian, non-German political thought. Kedourie’s (un)conscious attempt to retrospectively link the excesses of the 20th-century totalitarianism (namely German National Socialism) with the totalitarian implications of the supposedly German-invented doctrine of nationalism (while attempting to totally detach the Anglo-American “constitutionalist politics” from any such implications) only testifies to the author’s teleological prejudice, which makes his theory irrelevant from the cognitive aspect.[47]
[24] Kedourie 1960: 1.
[25] Ibid.: 1.
[26] Kedourie 1960, fourth edition in 1993: 143.
[27] Perhaps this argument might be derived from the logic of the theory of international society, as proposed by James Mayall.
[28] Kedourie saw both pre-modern millenial movements and 20th-century socialism as forms of ideological politics. See his Introduction to the fourth edition of Nationalism, pp. xvi-xviii.
[29] Ibid.: 1.
[30] This distinction is proposed by John Breuilly in the article Nationalism and the History of Ideas (…).
[31] Ibid.: Introduction, p. xii-xiv
[32] Ibid.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Kedourie 1993: 140.
[36] Ibid., p. 1.
[37] Ibid.: 15.
[38] Ibid.: 16.
[39] Ibid.: 31.
[40] Ibid.: 32. According to Fichte, the people “in a higher meaning of the word” is to be defined in both self-referential (Breuilly) and metaphysical terms, as “a totality of men continuing to live in society with each other and continually creating themselves naturally and spiritually out of themselves, a totality that arises together out of the divine under a certain special law that unites this mass in the eternal world, and therefore in the temporal also, to a natural totality permeated by itself.” (Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, in Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay (ed.), The Nationalism Reader, p. 64)
[41] See Mussolini, Fascism, in Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay (ed.), The Nationalism Reader, New York 1999, p. 225
[42] Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, London 1946-2000, p. 671.
[43] Ibid.: 672.
[44]Kedourie: 33.
[45] Ibid.: 33.
[46] Fichte, The Closed Commercial State (1800), cited in Kedourie, 1993.
[47] Perhaps the same could be said about Russell’s claim that “Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill, of Locke”. (Russell, History of Western Philosophy, London 1946-2000, p. 660.) The core of Rousseau’s alleged totalitarianism is thus to be found in his view that it is “essential, if the general will is to be able to express itself, that there should be no partial society within the State, and that each citizen should think only his own thoughts”. Hence, all the subordinate associations within the State should be prohibited, since each of these has its own general will, which may conflict with that of a community as a whole. (Ibid.: 673) Russell goes on to say that such a State would have to prohibit churches (except a State Church), political parties, trade unions, all other organizations of men with similar economic interests (briefly, all that is nowadays labelled as “civil society”), and that the result would be obviously the Corporate or Totalitarian State. (Ibid.) Although Russell concedes that Hobbes’s Leviathan contains similar arguments against subordinate associations, he is nevertheless inclined to see Locke (and therefore Churchill and Roosevelt) as a legitimate outcome of Hobbes, and Hitler as an equally legitimate outcome of Rousseau.
Probably the only theory clearly focused on the conceptual roots of nationalism is that by Elie Kedourie. For Kedourie,
Nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It pretends to supply a criterion for the determination of the unit of population proper to enjoy a government exclusively its own, for the legitimate exercise of power in the state, and for the right organization of a society of states. Briefly, the doctrine holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government.[24]
Kedourie presents nationalism as a doctrine, which was invented within a particular time-space framework and therefore inevitably has a limited relevance and scope of application. However, he immediately concedes that “not the least triumph of this doctrine is that such propositions have become accepted and are thought to be self-evident, that the very word nation has been endowed by nationalism with a meaning and a resonance which until the end of the eighteenth century it was far from having”.[25] Thus the paradox of a universal spread of such a seemingly particularist doctrine immediately opens the question of agents who were capable of both its invention, its application to particular European societies and its further transmission into other parts of the globe.
As for the doctrine’s inventors, Kedourie claims that they were to be found among German post-Enlightenment philosophers, namely Fichte, Schleiermacher and Herder. It was these thinkers who adapted the Kantian doctrine of individual self-determination so as to produce a new collectivist doctrine of national self-determination. Thus, according to Kedourie, “nationalism as a doctrine was articulated in German-speaking lands”, around 1800s. This claim itself might be regarded as strange, given the fact that the first nation-states and their respective nationalisms had emerged well before the 19th century and well outside the German-speaking context (England, the Netherlands, USA, France). Yet, such a curious argument almost turns into a bizarre one when Kedourie goes on to say that “Great Britain and the United States are precisely those areas where nationalism is unknown”.[26]
What, then, is nationalism, if its propositions are so widely spread and accepted as self-evident and, yet, it has somehow remained unknown precisely in those nation-states whose respective and joint impact on the shape of contemporary world has been so immeasurable? Of course, it would be possible to argue that nationalism emerged as a reaction, and was generated in opposition, to the attempts by precisely these two nation-states to shape international order so as to impose their own hegemony.[27] Or, else, it would be possible to argue that these two nation-states were actually shaping international order by imposing a hegemony of the doctrinaire nationalist agenda onto those parts of the world which they attempted to dominate, thus themselves remaining free from its influence. Yet, these two propositions would probably go far beyond – perhaps even be directly opposed to – what Kedourie meant by defining nationalism as a German-invented doctrine.
Certainly, Kedourie’s claim that nationalism pretends to “supply a criterion for the determination of the unit of population proper to enjoy a government exclusively its own” suggests that the author regarded nationalism as some form of false, albeit widely spread, consciousness. In other words, nationalism is to be seen as a form of ideological politics.[28] As such, it attempts to impose certain ideas onto the world, so as to re-create it on its own image, and it is fundamentally opposed to what Kedourie labels as “constitutional politics”, which takes its lead from the world as it is.[30] In the introduction to the fourth edition of Nationalism, Kedourie establishes a clear-cut distinction between these two ways of politics:
In constitutional politics the object in view is to attend to the common concerns of a particular society, to safeguard against foreign assaults, to mediate disagreements and conflicts between various groups through political institutions, through legislation and the administration of justice, and to uphold the law as being above and beyond sectional interests however important and powerful. Ideological politics is very different. Such a politics is concerned to establish a state of affairs in society and state such that everyone, as they say in old-fashioned novels, will live happily ever after. To do so, the ideologist will, to borrow Plato’s analogy in the Republic, look upon state and society as a canvas which has to be wiped clean, so that his vision of justice, virtue and happiness can be painted on this tabula rasa.[31]
It was this distinction that made it possible for Kedourie to claim that constitutional politics – having first emerged in Great Britain and the USA – prevented the ideological politics of nationalism from coming into existence in these parts of the world. However, the idyllic picture of a society dominated by constitutional politics, in which – just like in old-fashioned novels – everyone already lives happily ever since, to some extent blurs Kedourie’s distinction. In this sense, ideological politics, as Kedourie defines it, can be regarded only as a means to an end, a necessary intermediate step towards achievement of the ultimate stage of constitutional politics. And, indeed, it is difficult to overlook the fact that the 19th– and 20th-century doctrinaire nationalists in German-speaking lands (ranging from Fichte to Hitler’s national-socialists) often looked up at the constitutionalist and imperialist nation-states – as already established in England and France – as the ideal they attempted to achieve. As John Breuilly comments,
For Kedourie nationalism begins life as an idea and once it becomes a powerful politics is characterised by a commitment to imposing that idea upon the world rather than seeing politics as a necessary means of allowing the world as it is (“particular society”) to get along with its business (“common concerns”) without intolerable levels of violence, conflict or sectional imposition. It is precisely the detachment of the nationalist idea from the “world” which makes it appropriate to start its study in the field of the history of ideas. By contrast it is very difficult to see how “constitutional” politics can have an intellectual history separate from the practical actions in which it engages.[32]
Thus Kedourie could examine nationalism exclusively within the history of ideas, by defining it as an invented doctrine. Still, such an invention could find its ideological way to the sphere of politics only through a connecting agency. This agency is identified by Kedourie as the “intelligentsia”, a group that develops under specifically modern conditions and promotes its interests through the medium of creation and transmission of ideas.[33] In identifying this agency, Kedourie’s theory does not go beyond the boundaries of the mainstream in the study of nationalism. However, he stands alone in his effort to remain confined to the realm of ideas, stressing their centrality not only to the very existence of the intelligentsia,[34] but to the course of modern historical developments as well. In this way, left without any explanation of how the ideas transmitted by the intelligentsia actually mobilise popular support (and, for nationalism, mobilising popular support is not only the central ideal which guides this “politics in a new style”; it is also the key to the materialisation of the nation), Kedourie’s theory openly rejects what he labels as “sociological temptation”.[35] Yet, ironically, such a deliberate rejection of the effort to provide an account for nationalism’s transcendence of the boundaries demarcated by the history of ideas leads to a similar rejection of the reality’s givens for which Kedourie rightfully denounces ideological politics. Thus Kedourie’s history of ideas, while accusing ideological politics for the imposition of ideas upon the world, itself attempts to impose the concept of history according to which only the power of ideas shapes the reality of historical developments.
In this respect, Kedourie’s theory certainly follows the old-fashioned Hegelian idealism. However, notwithstanding the shortcomings of Marxist or Gellnerian historical materialism, it completely fails to address the central question in the study of nationalism, the question of how, actually, nations come into existence. Given the fact that Kedourie certainly did not believe in the primordial nature of nations, such a failure presents a serious problem for a modernist theory of nationalism. True, neither does Gellner’s response to this question, one saying that nationalism “invents nations where they do not exist”, provide an answer to the question of substantiation of nations (Beissinger); however, Kedourie’s proposition, one which says that it is the intelligentsia that invents nationalism where it does not exist, does not even attempt to pose such a question.
Kedourie defines nationalism as “a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century” which “holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government”.[36] The question of the transformation of the Kantian concept of individual self-determination into the collectivist concept of national self-determination occupies the central position in Kedourie’s theory. According to Kedoruie’s account of Kant’s theory, “man is free when he obeys the laws of morality which he finds within himself, and not in the external world”. A man is free “if his will is free; and his will is free when he is acting in accordance with the categorical imperative, as Kant denotes this inward law.”[37] This categorical imperative, “obedience to which makes free, is not a divine command. It is a command which wells up within the soul, freely recognised and freely accepted.”[38] Projected onto the level of politics, says Kedourie, “the freedom of the individual, which is his self-realisation, lies in identifying himself with the whole, belonging to which endows him with reality”. Thus, in the ultimate political terms, “the individual leads a full, free, satisfactory life only if he and state are one”.[39]
This politicisation, according to Kedourie, arose due to the misinterpretation of Kant’s individualism by his disciples, namely Fichte:
On such a view, the categorical imperative, obedience to which remained, according to Kant, the individual’s sole responsibility, to be shared or shifted on to nobody else, itself became possible and conceivable only through society. Society was the essential precondition of all laws of morality.[40]
Yet, in both Anglo-Saxon (Hobbes, Locke) and French (Rousseau) philosophical-political traditions, the very existence of the individual is regarded as possible only within the Commonwealth (and, according to Rousseau, freedom can be achieved only through submission to the General Will). Indeed, the doctrine which claims that “the state equates itself to the will of man”, being “an inwardly accepted standard and rule of conduct”, can also be found elsewhere, namely in the writings of the founder of Fascism, Benito Mussolini.[41] And, it is extremely difficult to distinguish the doctrine of nationalism as defined by Kedourie from Mussolini’s doctrine of Fascism. It is equally difficult to distinguish the implications of both these doctrines for the relationship between society and the individual from the implications of Rousseau’s concept of the people as a law-giving, sovereign, metaphysical entity, not fully embodied in any of the visible organs of the state, and possessing its own, collective, General Will.[42] Moreover, it is difficult to distinguish between Rousseau’s concept of the Sovereign whose will is to be called the General Will and Hobbes’s view that civil society is but an Artificial Man, thus endowed with the attributes of personality, including will.[43] In these traditions, both the Commonwealth and the General Will are regarded as collective individuals, through which the very existence of the individual is made possible due to his “absorption into the universal consciousness”.[44] For that, we do not have to go to the post-Kantians, as proposed by Kedourie:[45] this universal consciousness – conceived as essentially external, political entity – may well be found in Hobbes’s and Locke’s Commonwealth and Rousseau’s General Will. There is no need to travel from Kant’s concept of obedience to the inward moral law (the concept which was itself heavily influenced by Rousseau’s concept of obedience to the General Will) to Fichte’s concept of obedience to the state,[46] when such concepts can easily be found in the pre-Kantian, non-German political thought. Kedourie’s (un)conscious attempt to retrospectively link the excesses of the 20th-century totalitarianism (namely German National Socialism) with the totalitarian implications of the supposedly German-invented doctrine of nationalism (while attempting to totally detach the Anglo-American “constitutionalist politics” from any such implications) only testifies to the author’s teleological prejudice, which makes his theory irrelevant from the cognitive aspect.[47]
[24] Kedourie 1960: 1.
[25] Ibid.: 1.
[26] Kedourie 1960, fourth edition in 1993: 143.
[27] Perhaps this argument might be derived from the logic of the theory of international society, as proposed by James Mayall.
[28] Kedourie saw both pre-modern millenial movements and 20th-century socialism as forms of ideological politics. See his Introduction to the fourth edition of Nationalism, pp. xvi-xviii.
[29] Ibid.: 1.
[30] This distinction is proposed by John Breuilly in the article Nationalism and the History of Ideas (…).
[31] Ibid.: Introduction, p. xii-xiv
[32] Ibid.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Kedourie 1993: 140.
[36] Ibid., p. 1.
[37] Ibid.: 15.
[38] Ibid.: 16.
[39] Ibid.: 31.
[40] Ibid.: 32. According to Fichte, the people “in a higher meaning of the word” is to be defined in both self-referential (Breuilly) and metaphysical terms, as “a totality of men continuing to live in society with each other and continually creating themselves naturally and spiritually out of themselves, a totality that arises together out of the divine under a certain special law that unites this mass in the eternal world, and therefore in the temporal also, to a natural totality permeated by itself.” (Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, in Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay (ed.), The Nationalism Reader, p. 64)
[41] See Mussolini, Fascism, in Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay (ed.), The Nationalism Reader, New York 1999, p. 225
[42] Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, London 1946-2000, p. 671.
[43] Ibid.: 672.
[44]Kedourie: 33.
[45] Ibid.: 33.
[46] Fichte, The Closed Commercial State (1800), cited in Kedourie, 1993.
[47] Perhaps the same could be said about Russell’s claim that “Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill, of Locke”. (Russell, History of Western Philosophy, London 1946-2000, p. 660.) The core of Rousseau’s alleged totalitarianism is thus to be found in his view that it is “essential, if the general will is to be able to express itself, that there should be no partial society within the State, and that each citizen should think only his own thoughts”. Hence, all the subordinate associations within the State should be prohibited, since each of these has its own general will, which may conflict with that of a community as a whole. (Ibid.: 673) Russell goes on to say that such a State would have to prohibit churches (except a State Church), political parties, trade unions, all other organizations of men with similar economic interests (briefly, all that is nowadays labelled as “civil society”), and that the result would be obviously the Corporate or Totalitarian State. (Ibid.) Although Russell concedes that Hobbes’s Leviathan contains similar arguments against subordinate associations, he is nevertheless inclined to see Locke (and therefore Churchill and Roosevelt) as a legitimate outcome of Hobbes, and Hitler as an equally legitimate outcome of Rousseau.