Anderson, Benedict

Anderson, Benedict 1983 [1991]. Imagined Communities Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London Verso. 

Benedict Anderson (1991 43-5) showed how the development of print in Europe stimulated national consciousness through creating unified fields of exchange , a new fixity which could be made to appear... 

This is true despite the fact, as Benedict Anderson insightfully points out, that the national past is so often fitted with a bogus pedigree. 

This is the way that Benedict Anderson puts it in Imagined Communities, p. 169. 

Gellner, while the rise of print and widespread literacy is important to Benedict Anderson s theory of nationalism. Theorists opposed to the democratic conception of nationhood, Yael Tamir among them, point out that the historical coincidence of the emergence of nationhood and democracy does not mean there was influence or inherent connections between the two. 

Much is made of this idea of an imagined unity, initially proposed by Benedict Anderson (1991 [first published 1983]). It is what transcends the biological determinism of the tribe and its inherent propensity to conflict and, in elevating the notion of the state to a conceptual level, an intellectual construct. 

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