LECTURE 1 NOTES...

POLITICAL CULTURE in 1700    versus    1800

Europe is Absolutist                           Europe is Nationalist

DIPLOMACY in 1700           versus  1800

Kings Rule Empires                                      Balance of Power                 

TENSION BETWEEN MONARCHS AND LIBERALS:

What would be easier to rule, a kingdom or a republic?

 

SOCIAL STATUS in 1700                versus              1800

Highly Divided—no fluidity                              Highly Divided—slightly more fluidity

JUST ONE EXAMPLE: FRANCE

Monarchy(100s)

   Clergy (100,000)

     Nobles (400,000)

       Commoners (24.5 million)

                        (greatest variety within the “commoners”)

ONE WAY TO ENVISION THE 19^TH CENTURY 

…IMAGINED COMMUNITIES

…imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.

"The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet.”

"It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism between each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state.”

"Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”

"These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices? I believe that the beginnings of an answer lie in the cultural roots of nationalism."