ANTHONY D. SMITH The Crisis of Dual Legitimation

The Crisis of Dual Legitimation
Why has the rediscovery and repossession of one's communal history, the cultural springboard of ethnic nationalism to this day, become so widespread and necessary a feature of the modern political landscape? The short answer is that historicism is a logical outgrowth of the Enlightenment and of all subsequent enlightenments. The longer answer is that such historical concerns spring from the characteristic divisions among secular intellectuals in search of a viable faith. [ ... ]
Central to this transformed position of the secular intellectual was the impact of rationalism and science. The significance of science as an 'effective' mode of cognition lay as much in the social as the intellectual sphere.1 It was not simply that science was a mode of cognition open to inspection and verification of results and capable of rational exposition and training; its wide range of practical applications in all kinds of circumstances, and the innovative spirit which its successes encouraged, nurtured a self-confidence in purely human faculties that most religious thought and traditional wisdom had denigrated. Faith in human powers of observation and reasoning demanded, moreover, complete freedom from any artificial constraints—social, religious or political—as well as from any intellectual dogma which might deflect or impede rational argument and rigorous experiment.
It was therefore of signal importance to the position of secular intellectuals, both in early modem Europe, and later on in Asia, Africa and the Americas, that rationalism and the scientific temper emerged within the matrix of societies still dominated by religious assumptions and traditions, and usually by ecclesiastical authority. This meant that the quest for scientific truths necessarily took on the nature of a crusade on behalf of freedom of enquiry and the superiority of human reason to divine revelation. It also meant that the educators had to count on opposition, and often repression, by traditional authorities who feared this challenge to their social and political position, as well as to their intellectual monopoly. Powerful, therefore, as the position of the secular intellectual might be, it was also precarious. Though rationalism and science had the potential to destroy the hold of faith on public life, and even disestablish the church, the danger which it constituted for the social fabric evoked immediate and deep antagonisms, which were to set their mark on the ethnic revival.
The very challenge which the educators posed also contributed to their political isolation. Kings, aristocrats and bureaucrats feared the attractions which their ideas might have for wider sections of the population, as much as the radical connotations of the ideas themselves. In some cases, 'enlightened' rulers might coops a few of the intellectuals and implement aspects of their programmes of reform; but more shrank from such hazardous paths.2 Nevertheless, even the most reactionary could not remain totally immune to the new ideas or the pervasive influence of the educators. For one thing, few societies enjoyed complete isolation from alien influences; and, in any case, none were free of those social discontents, or political divisions, which allow new ideas to gain access and take root. Nor could rationalism and science be easily divorced from the technological successes which were its fruits in spheres as diverse as armaments and communications or manufacturing industry. Rulers could not easily reject the opportunities for greater effectiveness of control and political action which these technical innovations offered; and, while it was clearly preferable to adopt the techniques without the underlying assumptions, rulers soon found it necessary to compromise with the expertise disseminated by the educators.[…]
Let us return for the moment to the collision between rationalism and religious authority. The social context of this conflict was dominated by the emergence of powerful centralised government in a few key political units, usually under absolute monarchs or colonial bureaucracies representing centralised metropolitan states. The fact that the most advanced of these states were historical neighbours and came to constitute a well-defined diplomatic nexus or system of states in the selfsame early modern period which saw the birth of science and rationalism, meant that the new ideas and techniques, and their propagators, had more chances of adoption and dissemination than under feudal or imperial conditions. By its nature, the absolutist territorial state was a competitive unit; the hold of the ruler over his subjects depended upon his ability to succeed in the contest for wealth and power and prestige played out in European and colonial theatres. The Baroque splendours in which the kings lived were designed to impress their counterparts abroad even more than their subjects; but their success in this interstate rivalry in Europe and the colonies depended increasingly upon their ability to incorporate techniques and norms of efficiency into their political apparatus and social fabric. Interstate competition bred, therefore, not only [a] new 'national' sentiment [ ... ], but also those drives for scientific and technical modernization which became so characteristic of western bureaucratic states3.
How did this interstate competition affect the position of science and the educators in their conflict with established religious authority? On balance, it helped their cause far more than it impeded it. True, most rulers shied away from co-opting the educators into government, and their reform programmes were often timid. In a direct clash, rulers tended to favour the ecclesiastical authorities as part of the established order, which it was unwise to undermine. But, equally, the incorporation of scientific techniques and ideas into the ruler's bureaucratic apparatus—his army, administration and legal system—and the need to encourage secular education among wider circles, in order to produce enough qualified professionals to meet internal and external requirements, consolidated the position of the secular intellectuals and boosted their morale. The rapid growth in the number of such professionals, and the proliferation of educational institutions to train them, served further to entrench the role of the educators. Finally, the spectacular results achieved by the new kind of 'scientific state' with its streamlined and rationalised bureaucracy, confirmed the status of the intellectuals at the cost of religious authority.
At the spiritual level, too, there was a decisive swing towards rationalism and away from revealed authority. The very success of the rationalised bureaucratic state undermined both the negative evaluation of human capacities propounded by traditional religions, and, even more important, the efficacy and legitimacy of divine authority itself.4 Impressed by the effectiveness of collective action centered on the bureaucratic state, educated men and women began increasingly to doubt the religious assumption of God's omnipotence and His ability or desire to intervene in man's daily life or even in collective crises. At this point, the age-old problem of meaning, the philosophical antinomy of worldly evil and divine omnipotence and perfection, took on a new social and practical relevance.5 Doubting the efficacy of God's power to intervene in a mechanistic universe, the enlightened also began to question the justice of His dispensation and the legitimacy of His authority. Unable to accept traditional theodicies, and impressed by the evidence of human suffering and injustice, many secular intellectuals embraced radical ideologies which looked to man's collective efforts and political institutions to redress the world's wrongs.6
At the centre of this intellectual and emotional revolution lay a crisis of authority. The enlightened replaced the authority of religion and its cosmic dramas with that of the scientific state clothed in the garb of intramundane ideologies of progress. This new construct, the 'scientific state' and its centralised administration, was, after all, enormously impressive. It was also entirely man-made, a human and therefore flexible engine of social change. In the hands of a wise legislator, or well-attuned educators, this motor of modernisation, this solvent of backwardness and tradition-bound structures, could set mankind on the road to that rational harmony of his interests and fulfillment of his talents which had so long eluded him, denied as it was by his dependence upon the deities of conservative and pessimistic faiths. Hence, for many intellectuals, the state came to symbolise the opportunity for a breakthrough towards modernity, and out of the trough of dependence on outside forces beyond their control. And the more the absolutist state had become entrenched in an area or community, the greater the faith that secular intellectuals came to repose in its efficacy.7
What this revolution, therefore, entailed was a transposition of the ancient problem of meaning away from the spiritual sphere onto a material and social plane. Injustice and suffering were not divinely ordained instruments of man's spiritual betterment, or inevitable components of earthly imperfection; they were mainly man-made problems with human solutions which men of good faith and intelligence could arrive at and implement for their less fortunate fellow-men. Such a conclusion sapped the vigour of traditional faiths, as it undermined the intellectual edifice of revealed dogma. Above all, it eroded the social and political relevance of religion, and the basis of ecclesiastical authority. Religion became more and more the expression of private convictions, an inspiration or consolation for the inward crises and joys of an individual's life, rather than a matter of public concern or communal action.
Three Routes to Ethnic Historicism
Of course, the actual processes by which faith was sapped and religious authority displaced, in the areas where this occurred, varied greatly in different communities. There was nothing inevitable, either, about the process itself, or about its trajectory. A good many 'modernised' or 'developed' nation-states have powerful ecclesiastical hierarchies, even in communist countries, and a vigorous religious life, private and public.8 Some intellectuals, and educator-statesmen, have found private ways of reconciling some of the premises of religion with a commitment to social progress through science and rationalist education.9 Nevertheless, the basic choice between a social structure dominated by religious authority or by 'rational-legal' authority of the scientific state has remained fundamental, at both the intellectual and the social levels. With the advance of secular education and science, more and more people have come to feel the need for some sort of choice or harmonisation between these two polar principles; and this perception of a fundamental choice has had vital social repercussions in the histories of a great number of communities.
Certainly, the discussions of so-called modernist intellectuals were dominated at the outset by such perceptions. Historically and logically, three main positions on the question emerged out of the welter of speculation; and intellectuals have tended to divide along their lines ever since, with a good deal of interchange and even blurring in individual cases between the three options.
I [...] will [...] confine my remarks to showing how each of them has tended to encourage the growth of an historicist outlook, and to discover in the resuscitation of the ethnic community as an historical subject some sort of resolution of their intellectual and emotional dilemmas.10
The first route, that of neo-traditionalism, tries to accept the technical achievements and some of the methods of western science and rationalism without any of its underlying assumptions. Socially and politically, it utilises modern methods of mobilising people but for traditionalist ends. A traditionalist is, of course, a self-conscious ideologue; he knows perfectly well that he is manipulating scientific techniques in order to defend traditional values and dogma. He also approaches tradition 'from the outside'; he has seen it through the eye of the unbeliever, if only to reject his error, and of the foreigner, if only to be confirmed the more securely in the sense of what is his own. The neo-traditionalist is, moreover, politically self-conscious: he deliberately chooses secular political means for achieving traditional, religious goals. Thus al-Afghani organised a pan-Islamic crusade, agitating through the press and politically, and mobilising thinking Muslims from Egypt to Pakistan to revive and purify Islam and the Islamic umma in the face of western materialism and imperialism." And in India, slightly later, Tilak and Aurobindo were appealing to the masses in an attempt to revive the fortunes of Hinduism at a time when Christianity and westernisation appeared to be eroding traditional faith, and they did so by politicising the tradition and organising the faithful into a modern-style crusade against alien unbelievers.12
It is not difficult to see how this kind of modernised religion and politicised tradition lends itself to ethnic historicism and outright nationalism. To use political means to revive one's religious heritage and faith, and to organise the faithful into a political movement, demands a clear conception of the origins, laws of growth and identity of the unit whose solidarity is being sought, in this case, the community of the faithful. It requires, moreover, a sense of the passage of ethnic time and the vicissitudes of the faithful during the course of the centuries. The faithful must be given a history; they must be endowed with a foundation charter; their identity and destiny must be fixed; and their decline from past grandeur and present misfortunes must be explained. The religious congregation must increasingly be turned into an ethnic community, as has happened to the Jews and the Iranian Shiites. [ ... ]
Neo-traditionalist intellectuals reject, on principle, the rationalist assumptions and critical language which they simultaneously require, if they are to communicate that rejection to their fellow-intellectuals and others. The other two positions, those of the reformists and the assimilationists, accept science and rationalism together with their associated modes of critical reflection, systematic observation and open argument. But, while the assimilationist accepts such rationalism wholeheartedly, his reformist counterpart does so with many reservations. Assimilationists embrace with an almost messianic fervour the rationalist and scientific principles embodied in the modern state, principles in which they not only believe but which also validate their own aspirations for power and prestige. From their ranks have been drawn most of the 'educators', self-styled secular intellectuals bent on regenerating their communities through rationalist education. To these people there was really only one modern, worthwhile civilisation, that of the modern West with its rational discourse and scientific expertise; and they saw their task as that of assimilating themselves and their communities to the norms and lifestyles of that one global civilization. Assimilationists are, therefore, essentially cosmopolitan in aspiration, even if, in practice, they must always assimilate to a particular cultural variant (English, French, German, American, Russian) of 'modern' scientific civilisation. The point is that, to the assimilationist would-be educator, the 'scientific state' is a universal construct whose effect is the potential solution of the problem of meaning on a global scale. By means of this engine of modernisation, all mankind can pool its resources for the common good, thus rendering the old transcendental and cosmic problems essentially social and practical. Through self-help and collective planning, men can hope to solve problems that are really terrestrial and practical, but which till now had been represented by the traditional theodicies as supramundane, divinely ordained elements of the cosmos. The first task of assimilationists was, therefore, critical and destructive: the breaking down of transcendental mysteries into earthly, practical problems, so that men might be taught the scientific temper and techniques required for self-help programmes of collective regeneration.
But, how then could an assimilationists stance contribute to the rise of ethnic historicism? Is not their critical cosmopolitanism, their future-oriented messianism, incompatible with the cultural foundations of the ethnic revival? It is indeed incompatible. And it required a major reorientation of assimilationist aspirations, before they could lend themselves to an historicist resolution.
That change came for many with the disillusion of their cosmopolitan dreams and messianic ideals. Of course, a few assimilationists managed to slip into the advanced western societies, which they felt embodied their aspirations to be world-citizens. But many more were refused entry. Curiously, the process of rejection began in the western heartlands—in that initial contest between the philosopher and the ancien regimen, which was soon replicated in much of Central and Eastern Europe.13 Exclusion was even more overt for the messianic intellectuals of the 'Third World'. If they did not come to sense their rejection in the metropolitan lands which they visited, they were left in no doubt of it on their return home. And yet it was not the insults of junior colonial officials that restored the assimilationist intellectual to his community and its history; it was far more the subtle but pervasive sense of distance which European exposure instilled in him, the gulf between his own traditions and the rational-critical discourse of the West.14
And so the assimilationist-in-retreat from the scientific state in the West poured all his messianic fervour and ardent hopes back onto the community which he had sought to abandon. Painful though this transformation might be, it was made easier by the fact that the ideology of rational progress, which the assimilationist intellectuals had embraced, furnished them with an evolutionary outlook, which in turn could be harmonised with the history of particular ethnic communities. An ideology of progress entails, after all, a commitment to a linear conception of social development, in which some societies, the 'advanced' ones, are blazing the one and only trail for their 'backward' brethren. A global pioneering ideology implies a theory of stages of advancement and rules of improvement. Given also their revolutionary impulses, assimilationist would be predisposed to an interventionist view of the historical process, one in which the educator could speed up the movement of history. It was therefore not so difficult fora disappointed assimilationist to transfer his progressive and revolutionary ideology from the stage of world history to that of his community within that larger framework. In that way, his disillusion and rejection could be rationalised, even justified, by arguing that progress is slower, more piecemeal and fragmented, and requires a more active intervention in each area; in a word, by being more 'realistic'. Besides, the revolution of reason had not really occurred in the advanced states, even if early enthusiasms had misled many into believing it had; might not their own communities succeed where the advanced western nations had failed? And might not the secular educators fashion a more rational, progressive and scientific state in their own backward areas, than any yet seen in the West?
Such reasonings, at any rate, helped to soften the disillusion of the assimilationists and turns them back to their ethnic homelands. A residual messianic cosmopolitanism still lingered in their hearts; but now it came to inspire their efforts to regenerate their respective ethnic communities and restore their past splendours. The arena of emancipation and revolution was no longer the world at large: it had narrowed itself down to the 'scientific state' of particular ethnic communities, and to the history and destiny of those communities. [... ]
It is here that the third position, that of reformists, commends itself. For the reformist, despite his commitment to critical rationalism and science, does not completely reject all religious authority or cosmic theodicies. [... ] [T]he reformist acknowledges the situation of 'dual legitimation', the twin sources of authority in the modern world, that of the divine order and that of the scientific state.15 To a reformist, God makes history; but so does the man-made 'scientific state'. Revelation and intuition show us the divine plan, even while reason and science allow man to become God's co-worker. Power and value are divided today; man, through the scientific state, commands much value and considerable power, but God, in nature and morality, is the repository of power and value beyond man and his comprehension. In his own terrestrial sphere, man can raise himself; he must not wait till death for emancipation. But, in the sphere beyond, on the cosmic plane, God still rules; and furthermore, He works in man's sphere through man's own efforts. Cautiously optimistic, the reformist believes that God works for man through the scientific state; and man must therefore embrace the collective good which the state furthers, so that he can work with God. And only within a reformed religion can man work with God.
The reformist attempt to reconcile opposites, to harmonise an ancient and profoundly ethical religious tradition with modern, secular rationalism, lies at the root of much liberal and even social-democratic thought. Yet it, too, lends itself to an ethnic historicism. But the process of transformation is more complex. Like the assimilationist, the reformist is asked to determine his own destiny, to raise the collectivity through his own efforts. Self-help, rational choice, collective planning, are therefore as much a part of the mental armoury of reformists as of others. But that is only a predisposing factor. It does not explain the rum into historicism or the return to ethnicity.
Once again, it is a failure that provides the impetus to historicism. Reformists, working to reform their religion so as to adapt it to modern rationalism, necessarily run foul of the ecclesiastical authorities and their neo-traditionalist champions. Only a truly reformed religion, which returns to its original inspiration and sweeps away all meaningless accretions and superstition, along with archaic priestly hierarchies, can reconcile the basic ethical revelation with the demands of reason; and this brings reformers into direct conflict with the ecclesiastical authorities.
In the ensuing conflict, which has often been prolonged and violent, reformists have had only limited success (and that often for quite extraneous political or economic reasons). The inherent difficulties in their position have also been mercilessly exposed. After all, if every feature of traditional religion which fails the 'test of reason', which cannot be reconciled with rationalism, is abolished, what is left of the religion? Why not cross over into an assimilationist secularism? Does not a religious community require continuity and stability in the face of the ever-changing 'spirit of the age' and fluctuating social needs?
One way out of these problems and conflicts is to look to the community itself, its history and culture, for the essential elements of the religion and the criterion of religious reform.16 In the still-meaningful traditions and beliefs of the community, the reformist discerns the 'essence' of a modern faith. Dead and meaningless rituals and superstitions can now be swept away, on the ground that they no longer play a part in the life of the ethnic community. Furthermore, the reformist looks back to those ages and periods of the community in which religion was pure and the community itself was great. He searches in the past for communal dignity inspired by true faith; and seeks to recreate both through a modernised religious education. In this way, the reformist is led back towards a reconsideration of his ethnic past, in order to salvage the true, the underlying, the pure religion of his people. He becomes more conservative, more defensive, more concerned to preserve a sacred island of ethnic values in a profane world. He historicises the religious tradi-tion, and in the end comes to see the religion as an outgrowth, a creation, of the genius of his community. To save the genuine religion, what is required is not merely a religious reformation, but a spiritual purification which will stem the community's present decline and restore it to its former grandeur. Through spiritual self-help, the dejected ethnic community can be raised up anew. Through a cultural ethnic nationalism, the situation of 'dual legitimation' can be overcome, and the ethnic community can regain its former faith and dignity in a rationalist world.17
Each of these three positions—neo-traditionalism, reformism and assimilation—continue to be espoused to this day by intellectuals in many lands; and each in its way continues to lead its devotees, under the pressure of external circumstances, towards an ethnic historicism. For they aconcede the twin premisses of such historicisms, that entities have origins and purposes in time, and possess identities and boundaries in space, in a world composed of analogous entities. The spiritual situation of intellectuals is, therefore, at once open and circumscribed; they operate within a set of assumptions, yet within that circle can choose between alternative interpretations.18
What, then, were the circumstances that precipitated adherents of all three positions toward an historicist resolution? In Europe, a sense of linear time and the quest for origins stemmed, first, from a comparison with the ancients and a growing belief in the possibility of social progress; whereas, outside Europe, this same quest originated from comparisons with former days of communal splendour now brought low by European conquest and cultural influence. Second, within Europe, a new sense of diversity and cultural pluralism arose mainly from interstate rivalries and territorial warfare, followed closely by the discovery of other continents and civilisations and 'exotic' peoples, and the ensuing scramble for colonies; whereas outside Europe, that selfsame sense of diversity emerged more directly from the 'parallel society' created by colonialism, and from the clash of western and indigenous cultures among exposed intellectuals.19
Perhaps even more fundamental for the rise of ethnic historicism across the globe has been the growing influence of the educators themselves. The secular intellectuals, as the vanguard of science and critical rationalism, have relentlessly challenged the claims of absolutism, semi-feudal ties and often ecclesiastical authority. Increasingly a transcultural, cosmopolitan community of humanists and scientists, united by books, travel and a common language of discourse, and freed from personal service to aristocratic and chiefly patrons, these secular educators have found a ready market for their ideas among a public hungry for knowledge and innovation. Even neo-traditionalists, who openly repudiate modernity, must operate within this language of critical discourse and address this new educated public.
(The Ethnic Revival (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1981), 90, 93-8, 99-104.]

JOHN BREUILLY: The Sources of Nationalist Ideology

A major problem in modern political thought concerns the relationship between state and society. Each seemed on its way to becoming a self-contained sphere. The growth of a free-market economy extending beyond individual states gave rise to ideas about society as a 'private', largely self-regulating set of activities. The growth of bureaucratic absolutism gave rise to the idea of an enlightened state detached from society which it ruled according to rational norms.
This is a very different problem from that concerning the relationship between a government and its subjects. Such a relationship is set wholly 'within' the sphere of politics. One conception of the nation—that is, of the nation as the body of citizens—remains inside that wholly political framework, even if some implicit reference to cultural identity is involved.1 But the problem of the relationship between society and state concerns the nature of the connection between politics and non-politics. Obviously state and society are not really separate from one another and they are abstractions employed to make sense of complex human affairs. But they seem unavoidable abstractions in the modern world; they have to be given definition and content, and the nature of their relationship with one another has to be established.
One way of doing this is to subordinate one of the categories, state or society, to the other. The most influential accounts, liberal and Marxist, tended to subordinate state to society. The nature of the state and of political conflict was derived from society through concepts such as the social contract or the class struggle. Others, such as Hobbes, sought to deny that society had any independent structure without political order or, like Hegel, regarded the state as the realm of universal values far beyond the petty and sectional concerns of civil society. But, except in certain utopian visions, the sense of an enduring distinction between the two spheres of state and society, and of the problem of their relationship, could never be set aside.
All these various approaches to the problem accepted the distinction and the difficulties it raised, and tried to provide general, rational answers. But from a conservative position the attempt at a general and rational understanding of human affairs itself came under attack. This attack was taken up in a polemical form by Burke in his objections to the pretensions of the French revolutionaries. He believed that their claims to be able to outline an ideal social and political order on the basis of universal reason and then to act politically in order to realise it were based on a false view of what human beings could understand and do. Burke insisted that each society is particular and highly complicated. Human understanding was limited, and, therefore, deliberate interference in the complex web of human affairs which had built up imperceptibly over a long period of time should also be limited. 'The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature or the quality of his affairs. '2
This set a limit on human reason which went beyond the traditional conservative ideas about man's moral failings. But the advance of 'reason' and the great claims made for rational forces such as the modern state, or the market economy, required an even stronger rebuttal. Burke had simply argued that society was opaque. Far more radical was the argument that each society was unique. From this argument the distinctive features of nationalist ideology were to be derived.
I shall call this idea of uniqueness historicism. A brief review of one German writer, Herder (1744-1803), will supply the principal features of this argument. This is not to suggest that Herder was the first or the only one to advance these ideas, or that he was himself a nationalist. In fact the historicist case had been put earlier and more originally by the Italian writer Vico. Other German thinkers of the late eighteenth century developed historicist ideas. Herder's own political values, such as they were, if anything contradicted his historicist position and cannot be described as nationalist. However, he developed historicist ideas in a particularly striking way and linked them firmly to a particular concept of the nation. Furthermore, his ideas had a direct influence upon those who, during the nineteenth century, began to develop elaborate nationalist ideologies.
Herder grew up in an intellectual environment which was putting increasing emphasis on particularity and variety in human affairs and in which history was developing as a critical discipline. Germany itself was a land of contrast, with many petty states alongside large and powerful ones. But the ideas, and the states, were under pressure, regarded as embodiments of fragmentation and backwardness. Progress and reason suggested an ever greater uniformity and an end to the myriad of small states. Herder reacted strongly against what he regarded as both condescending and threatening, and sought a firm ground from which to defend variety in human affairs.
A good place for seeing what form this defence took is his view of language. His starting point is very simple: only language has made men human.' The notion of `pre-linguistic man' is, for Herder, meaningless. Man is defined by his language capacity. What is more, language can be learnt only in a community. It is synonymous with thought. Every language is different from every other. These points, to which most people today would assent, were not considered beyond debate at the time Herder wrote. Some argued that the origins of human language lay in human invention. Herder rejected this view. But from this position one could go on to make some more far-reaching claims.
If language is thought, and can be learnt only in a community, it follows that each community has its own mode of thought. Furthermore, to go on to argue that languages are unique could lead to the conclusion that each language is not simply a particular way of expressing universal values. Rather, it is the manifestation of unique values and ideas. Understanding of a language comes not by translating it into the terms of 'universal reason' or into another language but by learning it. Language is the property of the community, but it stretches beyond any one generation. It may be modified and adapted according to the needs of the community but it cannot be radically transformed. Moreover, language does not only have continuity through time, but, in its vocabulary, grammar, sounds, etc., has a unity. A language is not an arbitrary collection of utterances. Finally, no language is superior or inferior to any other, as there is no general scale against which all can be measured.
These views are of major significance simply because language is so important in human society. But the arguments can be extended much further if all other human activities are understood as sorts of languages. Dress, architecture, customs, ceremonial, song, law: all these and many other activities can be understood in the same way. Ultimately 'community' is understood as the sum total of these modes of expression. Furthermore, this sum total is itself more than a collection of items and must be grasped as a complex unity. The ambition of the student of any society must be to grasp this unity by learning all the ways of the society in question. Each element in a society only makes sense in terms of the whole, which, in turn, is manifested only through these various elements. Understanding a society is rather like learning a language.
The major form such understanding took was that of history. History has been given a greater or lesser role in the understanding of human affairs from other perspectives, but for historicism history is the only way to understand a society. History is not 'evidence' on which theories could be tested or a charter drawn up from which to justify present decisions. It is not a constraint on the present or a rich profusion of the various forms human nature has assumed. Rather it is the only way to apprehend the spirit of a community; it is the principal way of learning the language of a particular society.
There were various elements within this historical approach. The study of language itself was regarded as particularly important. So also was the study of ordinary people, who were regarded as the core of a society. A concern with folklore which is more than simply antiquarian is largely derived from historicist concerns. Finally, in more modern times an ahistorical approach has been added to these forms of understanding. Certain types of social anthropology insist on the need to understand the whole community, and in its own terms. However, this understanding has little historical dimension. The notion of wholeness tends to be expressed through the idea of every activity having a function within the community.
There are serious problems about the historicist approach. The rejection of universal standards of reason raises problems about the rationality of the terms of analysis that are employed. The need to apprehend the spirit or the 'wholeness' of a society which is central to the historicist position tends to express itself in the form of intuition. It is not relevant to go into these problems or to deal with the major ways in which historicist work has developed. Only in so far as these matters are reflected in the ideology derived from historicism will they be considered.
Translation into Ideology
Strictly speaking it should be impossible for historicism to give rise to political value judgements. At most it could insist that it is wrong to apply one's own judgements to another society. But the intrusion of certain extra ideas into the historicist position could change this.
The most important might be called the idea of authenticity. One can see this idea being introduced in Herder's own writings and used to back up his own rather liberal political values. Herder denied that government could be understood as the product of a social contract or divine agency. Neither has any historical basis. Both seem to involve the notion of a jump from a situation without government to one with government. Both are used, in fact, not as an historical claim but as a way of evaluating government by some universal standard. Herder, instead, insisted that government is a historical development. He argued that society began as a number of families. In this situation no formal system of government was required. But as families joined together to form more extensive societies it became necessary to develop new forms of leadership which took the form of government. The conquest of one society by another also can introduce a separate system of government.
Thus far Herder seems to work from within the historicist position. It is when he evaluates this development that he moves beyond it. Conquest is regarded as the disruption of the natural development of a particular society.
Nature produces families; the most natural state therefore is one people (Volk) with a natural character ...
Nothing seems more obviously opposed to the purpose of government than the unnatural enlargement of states, the wild mixing together of different human species and nations under one sceptre.4
Herder particularly objected to large, impersonal 'machine' states such as the Prussia of Frederick the Great, which he saw as the artificial product of war and conquest.
A somewhat similar version of this approach, in more elaborate form, can be found in the work of the Czech historian and nationalist, Palacky. He took over from Herder the idea of the Slays as a peaceful group of peoples subjected to oppression and exploitation by various robber peoples such as the Magyars and Germans. The Czechs, identified as a language group, began with their free, 'natural' societies; clusters of families with an informal, democratic system of government. Palacky goes on to describe the various conquests. Resistances to these conquests are focused upon as high points in the national history. The Hussite movement is interpreted in this way. The various activities of the Czechs are seen as manifestations of their national spirit. Palacky hoped that his history would help restore a keen sense of national identity which was, in turn, a necessary condition for a reassertion of Czech rights.
This distinction thus drawn between what was natural and unnatural in history is paralleled in the other major areas of historicist concern. Fichte, for example, in the field of language went much further than the aesthetic concern with purifying language. For him language mirrored the national soul, and to purge the language of alien impurities was to defend the national soul against subversion by foreign values. The Germans, he argued, unlike other Teutonic groups, possessed a continuous and 'living' language. But its life required constant protection. Fichte regarded Latin as a dead language, and for him 'dead' took on a powerful, literal meaning. He argued that to take abstract, lifeless Latin terms into German would have a deadening effect. The-German language was more concrete. The importation of Latin words would lead Germans to ascribe some of the alien values associated with them to their German 'equivalents'. Gradually the values for which the German words originally stood would be lost. The defence of the living language was simultaneously a defence of the values of the human group using it. 5 In a similar way the racist currents of thought developed in the nineteenth century identified a pure racial group and then sought to protect its purity from outside influences, In both cases defence could also come to take the form of a purge of impure elements in order to return to the pure, 'natural' state of affairs.
In the field of social anthropology similar ends could be reached through the employment of the concept of 'equilibrium'. Changes introduced from outside into a 'tribe' (itself partially a product of historicist intellectual values) could be seen as upsetting the state of equilibrium. Everything in that society could be justified as contributing to the equilibrium. Jomo Kenyatta, having studied in London under the functionalist anthropologist Malinowski, produced an account of the Kikuyu which employed these sorts of ideas." For example, his defence of female circumcision argued that it was arrogant of Europeans to condemn the practice as barbaric. It was not only arrogant, it was mistaken. That condemnation rested on the attempt to apply some universal standard to all social practices. But the practice only had its meaning, its rationality, in the context of a unique community. Within that community this meaning was associated with the way in which the passage from female adolescence to womanhood was marked, and that passage in turn was a major element of the social and sexual structure of Kikuyu society. It was onIy from within that frame of reference that judgements could be made.
One could multiply examples of this sort many times. The basic assumption is that one can identify a particular human unit—the Czech people, the German language, the Aryan race, the Kikuyu tribe—and establish what is natural within it and use that unit, in its natural state, as the source of value judgements. Deviations from that natural state are, of course, unnatural, and what is unnatural is bad. In this way the historicist concern with understanding society as a unique totality can be transformed into a way of making value judgements about historical change in terms of the way unnatural developments undermine a natural state of affairs.
However, the units identified are necessarily more or less arbitrary ones. Groups and languages can be categorised in many other ways. It is difficult to understand why war and conquest, such frequent occurrences, should be regarded as unnatural. It is difficult to see how the historicist can reconcile himself to not being able to understand the many 'unnatural' societies which exist, and how one understands historical change. Finally, of course, the 'return' to the natural situation can be understood only in a very general and vague way, that is, as a return to the spirit of that past. The Czechs Palacky studied did not and could not have produced Palace himself or the complex and changing society of Bohemia which gave rise to Czech nationalism. The 'traditional' Kikuyu whom Kenyatta described were heavily Christianised and many of them opposed female circumcision. These arbitrary judgements, justified by the contrast of natural with unnatural, are an essential ingredient of nationalist ideology.
The notion of a return to the spirit of the past was often accompanied by a historical perspective which read the appropriate trends into events. Figures in the past became instruments of the national destiny or obstacles in its path. Thus Heinrich von Treitschke, the German nationalist historian, could defend the actions of the eighteenth-century Prussian state because it was seen as the vehicle of later unification. On the other hand the Habsburg empire, as a multi-national state, and the smaller German states (particularly the allies of Napoleon) were subjected to a much more critical treatment. Associated with this, von Treitschke came to emphasise the role of Protestantism in the German national spirit and to deny the centrality of the Catholic religion in German society. Again, this is arbitrary and inconsistent with a proper historicist approach. So too is the identification of figures from the 'national' past in terms of current political disputes. In the disputes between supporters and opponents of the internal settlement in Zimbabwe there were rival claims to be the true heirs of the participants in the disturbances of 1896-97 in Southern Rhodesia. The movement led by Sithole used populist language; that led by Mugabe used class language; but in both cases the ideological use of history was the same.7
The final, and most important, ideological ingredient is the way in which the historicist concept of community is linked to political demands. The demand for a nation-state with many of the features of other nation-states seems hard to reconcile with the justification that a unique nation needs its own special form of independence. Some consistent cultural nationalists have indeed resisted the demand for national self-determination on the grounds that it is an imitation of the West.8 But this is exceptional. Usually what happens is that nationalist ideology operates with three notions which are mutually incompatible but, if not properly examined, can seem powerfully persuasive.
First, there is the notion of the unique national community. Second, there is the idea of the nation as a society which should have its own state. But in this understanding the basic distinction between state and society is accepted in a way that contradicts the historicist view of community as a whole. Finally the nation is thought of as the body of citizens—that is, a wholly political conception—and self-determination is justified in terms of universal political principles. Nationalist ideology never makes a rational connection between the cultural and the political concept of the nation because no such connection is possible. Instead, by a sort of sleight of hand dependent upon using the same term, 'nation', in different ways, it appears to demonstrate the proposition that each nation should have its nation-state. In this way it can superficially appear to have provided an answer to the problem of the relationship between state and society.
There are numerous variations upon the basic themes I have outlined. The nation can be defined in a great variety of ways, and this can give rise to conflicting claims about who belongs to which nationality. The values of the nation, its true 'spirit', are matters of even greater dispute in which the he various claims made have in common only the fact that they can be subjected to no rational tests. The manner in which the contrast between natural and unnatural is drawn also varies widely. These variations will depend on a combination of intellectual tradition, inherent plausibility and political need. Thus the initial impulse behind the categorising of many African societies as tribes can be located in European intellectual traditions. They were adapted to social reality in various ways but retained an inherent plausibility because of the small-scale nature of many African societies. They could be sustained both because their advocates had the power virtually to project their own ideas about social identity on to colonial subjects and because it suited elements in indigenous Society to manipulate these categories to their own advantage. Such categories, enshrined in various forms of 'indirect rule', hardened and shaped much political action. In their turn they have shaped territorial nationalist movements—both by forming part of their political material and by forcing nationalists to relate cultural diversity to the claim for territorial rather than 'tribal' independence. The ideology is not, therefore, a gloss upon some preexistent social reality but a constituent of that reality. A similar argument for the way in which the concept of the 'Oriental' has shaped relations between the West and societies of the Middle and Far East has recently been advanced with great force and subtlety by Edward Said.9
Nationalist ideology is neither an expression of national identity (at least, there is no rational way of showing that to be the case) nor the arbitrary invention of nationalists for political purposes. It arises out of the need to make sense of complex social and political arrangements. But that need is itself shaped both by intellectual traditions and the sorts of responses which any intellectual scheme evokes when it is activated in some way or another.
At the highest intellectual level anthropologists or scholars of the Orient or political thinkers carefully work through what they regard as the relevant evidence in order to test their ideas. At a practical level administrators, traders, missionaries and others work with particular assumptions about social arrangements and values in order to achieve their own objectives. In so far as they do achieve them they will tend to take these assumptions as true. The same point can be made about nationalists. They also begin with a fund of intellectual assumptions about what society is and how it is organised. They relate these assumptions to their own political projects. In fact they argue that those political projects are determined by their assump-tions; that they are the spokesmen for the nation. However, their precise political projects and the manner in which these are carried through are the product of certain political situations rather than the expression of national needs. Nevertheless, the proclamation of such needs as the basis of their politics is an essential ingredient of that politics. Precisely because their assumptions about national identity and need are not purely arbitrary they have a more or less plausible connection with existing social arrangements and needs, with actual beliefs and with often widespread political grievances. But of course the ideology is more than a reflection of those things; rather it incorporates them into a broader vision which transforms their significance. The ideology also provides nationalists with a cause in which not only they themselves but many others genuinely believe, often including opponents who have been brought up with similar intellectual assumptions and values. In so far as nationalist objectives appear relevant to the Interests of various political elites and social classes, so far will nationalist ideology be enhanced by the way in which members of these groups can agree that they are part of the nation. In this way nationalist ideology actually brings into being an imitation of its own ideas. In so far as nationalism is successful it appears to be true. That, of course, is its ultimate form of plausibility.
However, I have only considered the intellectual origins of nationalist ideology and its translation into ideological form at a fairly sophisticated level. To work effectively as a popular political ideology it needs simplification, repetition and concreteness. It is because nationalist ideology is particularly adaptive in these ways that it can have great popular appeal. Simplification involves above all the construction of stereotypes. There are stereotypes of the nation in terms of history or racial characteristics or cultural practices as well as stereotypes of enemies. Repetition through speeches, newspaper articles, rallies, songs, etc., is an essential part of the work of a nationalist party. The turning of these simplified and repeated themes into concrete form is achieved primarily through symbolism and ceremonial.
Conclusion
[R]eturning to the problem of the relationship of state and society, the nationalist 'solution to the problem is, on the surface, quite simple. Societies (nations) are unique. Government by alien societies can only do violence to the unique national spirit. Therefore each nation must have its own govenment. That government is the nation-state. This is not merely an abstract ideal. History can be understood only in terms of the achievements and frustrations of the nation. The demand for statehood is rooted in the national spirit, even if inarticulate and repressed, and the nationalist simply speaks for that spirit.
But the identity of the nation is provided in arbitrary ways. The leap from culture to politics is made by portraying the nation at one moment as a cultural community and at another as a political community whilst insisting that in an ideal state the national community will not be 'split' into cultural and political spheres. The nationalist can exploit this perpetual ambiguity. National independence can be portrayed as the freedom of the citizens who make up the (political) nation or as the freedom of the collectivity which makes up the (cultural) nation. Nationalist ideology is a pseudo-solution to the problem of the relationship between state and society, but its plausibility derives from its roots in genuine intellectual responses to that problem.
The appeal of this pseudo-solution is that it enables the nationalist to take a wide variety of practices and sentiments prevailing among the population of a particular territory and to turn them into political justifications. By seeming to abolish the distinctions between culture and politics, society and state, private and public, the nationalist has access to a whole range of sentiments, idioms and practices which would hitherto have been regarded as irrelevant to politics but are now turned into the values underlying political action. It would be wrong to see nationalism as the expression of these values in political form. That view is tantamount to accepting the self-assessment of nationalists. Nationalist ideology works on these values in a new way, and it operates on a great variety of levels. Furthermore, it selects values in ways designed to enhance their political significance. The general point is that this emphasis on cultural distinctiveness and values has particular advantages in a situation where it is possible to mobilise mass support or co-ordinate a wide variety of elites in a bid for territorial independence. It is also of value in an international situation where the claim to state power is regarded as legitimate only if it is couched in the form of national self-determination. Cultural appeals add to that legitimacy and also help provide the basis of support for a nationalist movement which gives its particular claim to state power credibility. The claim to uniqueness is ultimately used to justify the claim to have a state just like any other.
Nationalist ideology has its roots in intellectual responses to the modem problem of the relationship between state and society. This response, above all in the form of historicism, was a serious attempt to deal with the problem and to rebut what it saw as the falsehoods of analysis based on allegedly universal standards of reason. It was turned into ideology by means of notions such as authenticity and teleology. It was also combined in a powerful but illogical way with purely democratic and political values. The net result was to transform certain important ways of understanding human affairs into political ideology which was beyond critical examination. At the same time the historicist concern with history and popular values and practices was turned into various symbolic and ceremonial forms. These had a particularly powerful appeal because of their quality of self-reference and the way they took existing sentiments and actions and transmuted them into political ideology. This appeal in turn was grounded upon the claim to link cultural distinctiveness with the demand for political self-determination. Such claims had to be related to specific interests and only worked in particular sorts of political situations. Furthermore, no particular element within this ideology can be automatically regarded as decisive among supporters. But, with these qualifications, nationalist ideology can still be regarded as a powerful force which was essential in the work of co-ordination, mobilisation and providing legitimacy which was carried out by a nationalist movement.
[Nationalism and the State (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 1982), 335-44,
348--51.1

PIERRE VAN DEN BERGHE: A Socio-Biological Perspective

The most basic question asked by sociobiology as well as sociology is: why are animals social, that is, why do they cooperate? Why are some species more social than others? The answer was long intuitively known: animals are social to the extent that cooperation is mutually beneficial. What sociobiology does is supply the main genetic mechanism for animal sociality, namely kin selection to maximize inclusive fitness. Natural selection operates through differential reproduction. Different alleles of the same gene compete with each other, and the ones that are carried by the more reproductively successful individuals have a greater probability of being replicated in the population's next generation. The successful alleles are the ones which, in a given environment, favor the reproductive success or 'fitness' of their carriers.
The great theoretical contribution of sociobiology has been to extend the concept of fitness to that of 'inclusive fitness'.1 Indeed, an animal can duplicate its genes directly through its own reproduction, or indirectly through the reproduction of relatives with which it shares specific proportions of genes. Animals, therefore, can be expected to behave cooperatively, and thereby enhance each other's fitness to the extent that they are genetically related. This is what is meant by kin selection.2 Animals, in short, are nepotistic, i.e. they prefer kin over non-kin, and close kin over distant kin. This may happen consciously, as in humans, or, more commonly, unconsciously. Kin selection does not presuppose consciousness in order to be operative.
The propensity to be 'altruistic,' i.e. to contribute to alter's fitness at the expense of ego's fitness, is directly proportional not only to the coefficient of relatedness between ego and alter, but also to the benefit/cost ratio of the altruistic act. To use a human example, a post-menopausal mother could be expected to sacrifice her life more readily for a young adult child about to reproduce than a young mother to forego her life for the benefit of her first foetus. The genetic relationship is the same in both cases (namely, one half), but the fitness cost is low in the first case, high in the second. Altruism, then, is directed mostly at kin, especially close kin, and is, in fact, a misnomer. It represents the ultimate form of genetic selfishness. It is but the blind expression of inclusive fitness maximization. In fact, a simple formula leads one to predict that 'altruism' can be expected if the cost/benefit ratio of the transaction is smaller than the coefficient of relatedness between alter and ego.
There is no reason to doubt that kin selection is a powerful cement of sociality in humans as it is in other animals. Yet, it is also clear that kin selection does not explain all of human sociality. There are, in my view, two additional bases of human sociality: reciprocity and coercion. Rudimentary forms of these are also present in many animals, but human forms of reciprocity and coercion greatly over-shadow in complexity and importance anything we know in other species. Not surprisingly, therefore, even the simplest and smallest human societies, though far less 'perfect' than those of the social insects (termites, ants, bees, wasps), are much more complex than those of any other known species. Reciprocity is cooperation for mutual benefit, and with expectation of return, and it can operate between kin or between non-kin. Coercion is the use of force for one-sided benefits, that is, for purposes of infra-specific parasitism or predation. All human societies continue to be organized on the basis of all three principles of sociality: kin selection, reciprocity, and coercion. However, the larger and the more complex a society becomes, the greater the importance of reciprocity, and, with the emergence of the state, coercion becomes in relation to kin selection.
This is the barest sketch of an argument which [ . . . ] seeks to reduce individual behavior, social structure and cultural superstructure to the competition for scarce resources between individual organisms, each one acting, consciously or unconsciously, to maximize its gains or minimize its losses. This view of human affairs is sufficiently at variance with much of contemporary social science to arouse passionate rejection as a return to simplistic instinct theory, biological reductionism, speculative evolutionism, social Darwinism, racism, hereditarianism, and so on. [ ... ] Suffice it to say that sociobiology is indeed reductionist (as all modern science), evolutionist (as all modern biology), and materialist (as much good social science), but that it is emphatically not a return to social Darwinism, instinct theories or racism, and that it does not belittle the importance of environmental factors, the unique characteristics of Homo sapiens, and the significance of human culture. It merely asserts in the most undogmatic fashion that human behavior is the product of a long process of adaptive evolution that involved the complex interplay of genotypical, ecological and cultural factors.
How do these prolegomena relate to race and ethnicity? My central thesis is that both ethnicity and 'race' (in the social sense) are, in fact, extensions of the idiom of kinship, and that, therefore, ethnic and race sentiments are to be understood as an extended and attenuated form of kin selection. Class relations, on the other hand, are in the realm of reciprocity, and are therefore of a fundamentally different nature. In more general form, I am suggesting that there are two broad types of human collectivities: the ones that I shall call Type I tend to be ascriptive, defined by common descent, generally hereditary, and often endogamous, and those of Type II that are joined in the defense of common interests. Type I includes racial, caste and ethnic groups, while Type II encompasses such varied associations as trade unions, political parties, professional bodies, sports clubs, neighborhood groups, parent-teacher associations, and so on. Empirically, of course, a group may have mixed characteristics, as an ethnically-based political party, or a hereditary occupational guild. Nevertheless, in their ideal-typical form, each kind of group has a clearly distinct basis of solidarity: kinship and interest respectively.
Type I groups are generally preferentially or prescriptively endogamous, but internally subdivided into exogamous kin groups: nuclear families, lineages, clans, kindreds. Indeed, until the last few thousand years of human history, Type I groups were synonymous with human societies. They were small in-bred populations of a few hundred individuals, prototypical 'tribes' that regarded themselves as 'the people', sharing common descent, real or putative, and as children of the mythical founder couple or creator god. Members of the tribe, though subdivided into smaller kin groups, saw themselves as a single people, solidary against the outside world, and interlinked by a web of kinship and marriage making the tribe in fact a superfamily. A high rate of inbreeding insured that most spouses were also kinsmen. The cultural inventions of unilineal descent and lineage exogamy permitted the extension of that primordial model of social organization to much larger societies running into the tens of thousands of people, and yet where Type II organizations were almost totally absent (with the exception of age sets).
Ethnic groups, for nearly all of human history, were what geneticists call breeding populations, in-breeding superfamilies, in fact, which not only were much more closely related to each other than to even their closest neighbors, but which, almost without exception, explicitly recognized that fact, and maintained clear territorial and social boundaries with other such ethnic groups. This is, of course, not to deny that migration, conquest, and interbreeding took place with some regularity, and thus that the common ancestry of 'the people' was always partially fictive. But this was also true of smaller kin groups: the pater is not necessarily the progenitor. That the extended kinship of the ethnic group was sometimes putative rather than real was not the important point. Just as in the smaller kin units, the kinship was real often enough to become the basis of these powerful sentiments we call nationalism, tribalism, racism, and ethnocentrism. The ease and speed with which these sentiments can be mobilized even in modern industrial societies where they have to compete with many Type II groups, the blind ferocity of the conflicts to which these sentiments can lead, the imperviousness of such sentiments to rational arguments are but a few indications of their continued vitality and their primordiality.
What I am suggesting is that ethnocentrism evolved during millions, or at least hundreds of thousands of years as an extension of kin selection. Reciprocity was also involved, especially in the exchange of women in marriage, but as spouses were typically also kinsmen there was no sharp distinction between kin selection and reciprocity. As hominids became increasingly formidable competitors and predators to their own and closely related species, there was a strong selective pressure for the formation of larger and more powerful groups. Group size in hunting and gathering societies was, of course, severely constrained by ecological factors, but, still, there was an obvious selective advantage for kin groups to form those solidary superfamilies we call tribes; this, in turn, as Bigelow' so clearly argues, necessarily meant organizing against other competing groups, and therefore maintaining and defending ethnic boundaries.
Of Type II groups, little needs to be said here. With the exception of age sets, they tend to be characteristic of larger, more complex, state-organized societies, and therefore to have arisen much later in human evolution, and to be more exclusively cultural. They are, of course, also important, especially in industrial societies, but they are not primordial, they can be more readily formed and disbanded, they are more amenable to cool, rational calculations of interest, and they do not as readily unleash orgies of passion. Nor, of course, have they stamped out Type I groups. Another fundamental difference between Type I and Type II groups is that the former tend to be mutually exclusive in membership and thus to form the basis of most primary relationships, while the latter are segmental, and non-mutually exclusive. Millions of people in individual societies belong to a multiplicity of Type II groups, few of which involve them very deeply or permanently. Some people are ethnically alienated, marginal or mobile or they are the product of mixed marriages, but most people belong to a single ethnic group or sub-group, and remain there for life. Even allowing for all the complications of the real world, and the existence of mixed-type groups, the categorical distinction remains nevertheless quite striking.
Let us return to Type I groups, our special concern here. I have suggested that they evolved as an extension of kin selection, and thus probably have a partial biological basis, in the same sense as human kinship systems are rooted in biology. This contention is, of course, hotly contested by anthropologists such as Sahlins,4 who counter that human kinship is cultural, not biological. Almost every aspect of human behavior takes a cultural form, from sneezing and defecating to writing poetry and riding a motorcycle. But this is not to say that some of these things do not also have a biological basis. I am definitely not arguing that we have a gene for ethnocentrism, or for recognizing kin; rather I am arguing that those societies that institutionalized norms of nepotism and ethnocentrism had a strong selective advantage over those that did not (assuming that any such ever existed), because kin selection has been the basic blueprint for animal sociality. To explain the universality of ethnocentrism and kinship organization in human societies by invoking culture is completely question begging. Culture is merely a proximate explanation of why people behave ethnocentrically and nepotistically. As every ethnographer knows, when natives are asked why they behave a certain way, they answer: because it is the custom. The anthropologist then translates: because of his culture; the sociologist says: because he has been socialized into the norms of his society; and the psychologist counters: because of his learning experiences. All of them are right as far as they go, but none of them has explained why all human societies practice kin selection and are ethnocentric.
So far, I have stressed ethnicity rather than race or caste in my treatment of Type I groups. Caste is a very special case, limited, even if one adopts a wide definition of the term, to highly differentiated, stratified societies, and may be considered an extreme case of the grafting of the principle of occupational specialization into what is basically a Type I group. Castes are not unique in being occupationally specialized Type I groups. Ethnic and racial groups also tend to become so.' Castes are merely extreme cases of occupational specialization linked with rigid endogamy and hierarchization.
Race is a different matter. First, I should make it clear that, even though I have presented a partially biological argument, I am most emphatically not using the word 'race' in the sense of a sub-species of Homo sapiens. Instead, I mean by 'race' the social definition which it is variously ascribed in different societies. Social race typically seizes on biologically trivial phenotypes, and, equally typically, corresponds only very imperfectly with genetically isolated populations. It thus has no intrinsic biological significance, as indicated by the fact that only a few of the world's societies use primarily morphological phenotypes to define themselves, and to differentiate outsiders.
At first blush, this would seem to invalidate my argument that ethnic and racial sentiments represent an extension of kin selection. If that is the case, why should most human societies seize primarily on such obviously culturally transmitted traits such as language and dialect, religious beliefs, dress, hair styles, manners, scarifications, and the like as badges of group recognition and membership? If the name of the game is to identify kinsmen in order to enhance one's inclusive fitness, then why are not inherited physical characteristics chosen as recognition signals, rather than acquired cultural traits? Sometimes, of course, morphological phenotypes such as skin color, facial features, stature, hair texture, eye color, and so on are used, not only to define group membership, but also, within the group, as tests of ever-questionable paternity. Generally, however, cultural criteria of membership are far more salient than physical ones, if the latter are used at all. Societies that stress physical phenotypes more than cultural traits are exceptional. Why?
The answer must again be sought in our evolutionary history. Until the last few millennia, that is, until the rise of conquest states, sudden, large-scale, human migration was rare, and human breeding populations were small. There was migration and interbreeding, but on an individual scale, and mostly between neighboring groups. The result was that neighboring populations were typically not sharply discontinuous in their genetic composition. The relative proportions of alleles of the same gene often constituted a gradient as one travelled through several breeding populations. Eye color in Europe would be a good example. The further north one goes, from, say, Sicily to Sweden, the higher the proportion of lightly pigmented eyes. Yet, at no point in the journey is there a noticeable discontinuity. Eye color, therefore, is a poor criterion of national membership in Europe. Indeed, it varies much more within national groups, and indeed even within families, than between groups.
Now, Europeans do use some morphological phenotypes to distinguish various ethnic groups. They speak loosely of 'Nordic', 'Mediterranean', 'Jewish', and so on, types. In the absence of any other clue, probabilistic guesses are often made on the basis of physical appearance as to a stranger's ethnic origin. Most groups probably have what Hoetink termed a 'somatic norm image,16 that is, a mental picture of what a model group member looks like. The point, however, is that morphological phenotypes tend to be used either in the absence of more reliable cultural clues (such as language), or when physical appearance is widely discrepant from the somatic norm image (as, for instance, in Europe with Asians or Africans).
A good test of group membership for the purpose of assessing kin relatedness must meet the basic requirement of discriminating more reliably between groups than within groups. That is, the criterion chosen must show more intergroup than intro-group variance. Until recently, cultural criteria met that condition far more reliably than physical ones. The problem was for small groups to distinguish themselves from their immediate neighbors, not with unknown populations thousands of kilometers away. Even the most trivial differences of accent, dialect, vocabulary, body adornment, and so on, could be used far more reliably to assess biological relatedness or unrelatedness than any physical phenotype.' Therefore, whatever test was easiest to apply and correlated best with kin relatedness was used. That the correlation was spurious did not matter. What mattered was that it discriminated accurately.
This theory accounts not only for the general prevalence of cultural diacritica in assessing group membership. It also accounts for the appearance of racism when and where it does occur better than any competing theory. The kin selection argument predicts that physical criteria will be salient to the extent that they do a good and easy job of discriminating kin and non-kin. This obviously occurs in the aftermath of large-scale, long-distance migration, whether through conquest, incursions, slavery, indenture, or voluntary immigration. The colonial expansion of Europe beginning some five centuries ago, and all of the massive population transfers it brought in its wake are, of course, the overwhelmingly important genetic event of our species. Predictably, it brought about a great surge in racism, because all of a sudden, it became possible to make a fairly accurate kin selection judgment from a distance of several hundred meters. The Dutchman at the Cape, the Portuguese in Brazil, the Englishman in Kenya did not have to ask questions and pick up subtle clues of accent to detect kin relatedness. By using a simple test of skin pigmentation he could literally shoot and ask questions later at little risk of killing a kinsman. I... I
We suggested at the outset that there were three main mechanisms of human sociality: kin selection, reciprocity and coercion. Ethnic and racial groups command our unreasoned loyalty because they are in fact, or at least in theory, superfamilies. But ethnic and race relations are not only relations of cooperation and amity with the in-group; they are equally importantly relations of competition and conflict between groups. While infra-group relations are primarily dictated by kin selection, real or putative, intergroup relations are typically antagonistic. Occasionally, ethnic groups may enter a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship based, for instance, on the exploitation of two specialized and noncompetitive niches in the same habitat. Relations between some pastoralist and sedentary groups are of this type. More commonly, there is open competition for, and conflict over scarce resources, and not infrequently the establishment of multi-ethnic states dominated by one ethnic group at the expense of others. Coercion then becomes the basis of interethnic (or inter-racial) relations.
Unlike kin selection and reciprocity which require no justification because they contribute to the fitness of all actors in the system, coercion, which leads to asymmetrical parasitism, often does attempt to legitimate itself. Interestingly, there are but two basic ideologies in support of coercion. One seeks to disguise coercion as kin selection, and here we have the many brands of paternalism and familism that have been used to justify nearly all pre-industrial forms of despotism. The other attempts to present coercion as reciprocity and exchange, it is characteristic of the various 'democratic' ideologies of industrial societies in the last two centuries, from liberalism to socialism. Why this ideological shift from paternalism to liberte, egalite, fraternite in justifying tyranny during the last two centuries?
Perhaps this ideological shift reflects in part the increasing incorporation of small nation-states into multi-national states. Paternalism is a peculiarly well suited ideology for the small, ethnically homogeneous nation-state. Not surprisingly, it was independently reinvented in societies as far distant as China, Japan, Inca Peru, Tzarist Russia, Ancient Egypt, Ottoman Turkey, Renaissance Europe and countless African kingdoms. Paternalism works in monoethnic states because the very concept of the nation is an extension of kin selection. For the same reason, it breaks down in multi-ethnic states. It was one thing for the Japanese peasant to look on his emperor as a divine super-father, the living incarnation of Nippon, quite another for the Hindu peasant to regard that polluted beef eater, Queen Victoria, as the living symbol of Mother India. An ideology based on reciprocity, on the other hand, can transcend ethnic boundaries. It is therefore a suitable one for the go per cent of the world's states which are multi-ethnic conglomerates, and, furthermore, being ethnically neutral, it exports remarkably well as revolutionary ideology. It is no accident that France launched into the most imperialistic phase of its history immediately after the Revolution.
The ideas sketched here are still tentative. They do not so much supplant other theories of ethnicity and race as supplement them by putting them in the broader context of evolutionary thinking. They do not purport to explain everything about these phenomena; they do not predict detailed historical occurrences, nor account for subtle cultural differences. They do, however, suggest parsimonious hypotheses to account for features of race and ethnicity which had hitherto remained elusive and problematic. Their plausibility to the reader hinges on whether he accepts the most fundamental paradigm for the evolution of different life forms and societal organization on our planet, Darwinian evolutionary theory, and on whether he is willing to apply that enormously successful model to our own species, or prefers to invoke an act of special creation for mankind.
['Race and Ethnicity: A Sociobiological Perspective', Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1/4 (1978),402-7,409-11.]

BENEDICT ANDERSON: Imagined Communities

Before proceeding to a discussion of the specific origins of nationalism, it may be useful to recapitulate the main propositions put forward thus far. Essentially, I have been arguing that the very possibility of imagining the nation only arose historically when, and where, three fundamental cultural conceptions, all of great antiquity, lost their axiomatic grip on men's minds. The first of these was the idea that a particular script-language offered privileged access to ontological truth, precisely because it was an inseparable part of that truth. It was this idea that called into being the great transcontinental sodalities of Christendom, the Ummah Islam, and the rest. Second was the belief that society was naturally organized around and under high centres—monarchs who were persons apart from other human beings and who ruled by some form of cosmological (divine) dispensation. Human loyalties were necessarily hierarchical and centripetal because the ruler, like the sacred script, was a node of access to being and inherent in it. Third was a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable, the origins of the world and of men essentially identical. Combined, these ideas rooted human lives firmly in the very nature of things, giving certain meaning to the everyday fatalities of existence (above all death, loss, and servitude) and offering, in various ways, redemption from them.
The slow, uneven decline of these interlinked certainties, first in Western Europe, later elsewhere, under the impact of economic change, 'discoveries' (social and scientific), and the development of increasingly rapid communications, drove a harsh wedge between cosmology and history. No surprise then that the search was on, so to speak, for a new way of linking maternity, power and time meaningfully together. Nothing perhaps more precipitated this search, nor made it more fruitful, than print-capitalism, which made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways.
If the development of print-as-commodity is the key to the generation of wholly new ideas of simultaneity, still, we are simply at the point where communities of the type 'horizontal-secular, transverse-time' become possible. Why, within that type, did the nation become so popular? The factors involved are obviously complex and various. But a strong case can be made for the primacy of capitalism.
As already noted, at least 20,000,000 books had already been printed by 15001, signaling the onset of Benjamin's 'age of mechanical reproduction.' If manuscript knowledge was scarce and arcane lore, print knowledge lived by reproducibility and dissemination2. If, as Febvre and Martin believe, possibly as many as 200,000,000 volumes had been manufactured by 1600, it is no wonder that Francis Bacon believed that print had changed 'the appearance and state of the world."
One of the earlier forms of capitalist enterprise, book-publishing felt all of capitalism's restless search for markets. The early printers established branches all over Europe: 'in this way a veritable "international" of publishing houses, which ignored national [sic] frontiers, was created'4. And since the years 1500-1550 were a period of exceptional European prosperity, publishing shared in the general boom. 'More than at any other time' it was 'a great industry under the control of wealthy capitalists." Naturally, 'book-sellers were primarily concerned to make a profit and to sell their products, and consequently they sought out first and foremost those works which were of interest to the largest possible number of their contemporaries.'6
The initial market was literate Europe, a wide but thin stratum of Latin readers. Saturation of this market took about 150 years. The determinative fact about Latin—aside from its sacrality—was that it was a language of bilinguals. Relatively few were born to speak it and even fewer, one imagines, dreamed in it. In the sixteenth century the proportion of bilinguals within the total population of Europe was quite small; very likely no larger than the proportion in the world's population today, and—proletarian internationalism notwithstanding—in the centuries to come. Then and now the vast bulk of mankind is monoglot. The logic of capitalism thus meant that once the elite Latin market was saturated, the potentially huge markets represented by the monoglot masses would beckon. To be sure, the Counter-Reformation encouraged a temporary resurgence of Latin-publishing, but by the mid-seventeenth century the movement was in decay, and fervently Catholic libraries replete. Meantime, a Europe-wide shortage of money made printers think more and more of peddling cheap editions in the vernaculars.7
The revolutionary vernacularizing thrust of capitalism was given further impetus by three extraneous factors, two of which contributed directly to the rise of national consciousness. The first, and ultimately the least important, was a change in the character of Latin itself. Thanks to the labours of the Humanists in reviving the broad literature of pre-Christian antiquity and spreading it through the print-market, a new appreciation of the sophisticated stylistic achievements of the ancients was apparent among the trans-European intelligentsia. The Latin they now aspired to write became more and more Ciceronian, and, by the same token, increasingly removed from ecclesiastical and everyday life. In this way it acquired an esoteric quality quite different from that of Church Latin in mediaeval times. For the older Latin was not arcane because of its subject matter or style, but simply because it was written at all, i.e. because of its status as text. Now it became arcane because of what was written, because of the language-in-itself.
Second was the impact of the Reformation, which, at the same time, owed much of its success to print-capitalism. Before the age of print, Rome easily won every war against heresy in Western Europe because it always had better internal lines of communication than its challengers. But when in 1517 Martin Luther nailed his theses to the chapel-door in Wittenberg, they were printed up in German translation, and 'within 15 days [had been] seen in every part of the country.8 In the two decades 1520-1540 three times as many books were published in German as in the period 1500-1520, an astonishing transformation to which Luther was absolutely central. His works represented no less than one third of all German-language books sold between 1518 and 1525. Between 1522 and 1546, a total of 430 editions (whole or partial) of his Biblical translations appeared. 'We have here for the first time a truly mass readership and a popular literature within everybody's reach.9 In effect, Luther became the first best-selling author so known. Or, to put it another way, the first writer who could 'sell' his new books on the basis of his name.10
Where Luther led, others quickly followed, opening the colossal religious propaganda war that raged across Europe for the next century. In this titanic 'battle for men's minds', Protestantism was always fundamentally on the offensive, precisely because it knew how to make use of the expanding vernacular print-market being created by capitalism, while the Counter-Reformation defended the citadel of Latin. The emblem for this is the Vatican's Index Librorum Prohibitorum—to which there was no Protestant counterpart—a novel catalogue made necessary by the sheer volume of printed subversion. Nothing gives a better sense of this siege mentality than Francois I's panicked 1535 ban on the printing of any books in his realm—on pain of death by hanging! The reason for both the ban and its unenforceability was that by then his realm's eastern borders were ringed with Protestant states and cities producing a massive stream of smugglable print; To take Calvin's Geneva alone: between 1533 and 1540 only 42 editions were published there, but the numbers swelled to 527 between 1550 and 1564, by which latter date no less than 40 separate printing-presses were working overtime.11
The coalition between Protestantism and print-capitalism, exploiting cheap popular editions, quickly created large new reading publics—not least among merchants and women, who typically knew little or no Latin—and simultaneously mobilized them for politico-religious purposes. Inevitably, it was not merely the Church that was shaken to its core. The same earthquake produced Europe's first important non-dynastic, non-city states in the Dutch Republic and the Commonwealth of the Puritans. (Francois I's panic was as much political as religious.)
Third was the slow, geographically uneven, spread of particular vernaculars as instruments of administrative centralization by certain well-positioned would-be absolutist monarchs. Here it is useful to remember that the universality of Latin in mediaeval Western Europe never corresponded to a universal political system. The contrast with Imperial China, where the reach of the mandarin bureaucracy and of painted characters largely coincided, is instructive. In effect, the political fragmentation of Western Europe after the collapse of the Western Empire meant that no sovereign could monopolize Latin and make it his-and-only-his language-of-state, and thus Latin's religious authority never had a true political analogue.
The birth of administrative vernaculars predated both print and the religious upheaval of the sixteenth century, and must therefore be regarded (at least initially) as an independent factor in the erosion of the sacred imagined community. At the same time, nothing suggests that any deep-seated ideological, let alone proto-national, impulses underlay this vernacularization where it occurred. The case of 'England'—on the northwestern periphery of Latin Europe—is here especially enlightening. Prior to the Norman Conquest, the language of the court, literary and administrative, was Anglo-Saxon. For the next century and a half virtually all royal documents were composed in Latin. Between about 1200 and 1350 this state-Latin was superseded by Norman French. In the meantime, a slow fusion between this language of a foreign ruling class and the Anglo-Saxon of the subject population produced Early English. The fusion made it possible for the new language to take its turn, after 1362, as the language of the courts—and for the opening of Parliament. Wycliffe's vernacular manuscript Bible followed in 1382.12 It is essential to bear in mind that this sequence was a series of 'state,' not 'national,' languages; and that the state concerned covered at various times not only today's England and Wales, but also portions of Ireland, Scotland and France. Obviously, huge elements of the subject populations knew little or nothing of Latin, Norman French, or Early English.13 Not till almost a century after Early English's political enthronement was London's power swept out of 'France'.
On the Seine, a similar movement took place, if at a slower pace. As Bloch verily puts it, 'French, that is to say a language which, since it was regarded as merely a corrupt form of Latin, took several centuries to raise itself to literary dignity',14 only became the official language of the courts of justice in 1539, when Francois I issued the Edict of Villers-Cotterets.15 In other dynastic realms Latin survived much longer—under the Habsburgs well into the nineteenth century. In still others, 'foreign' vernaculars took over: in the eighteenth century the languages of the Romanov court were French and German.16
In every instance, the 'choice' of language appears as a gradual, unselfconscious, pragmatic, not to say haphazard development. As such, it was utterly different from the self-conscious language policies pursued by nineteenth-century dynasts confronted with the rise of hostile popular linguistic-nationalisms. [ ... ] One clear sign of the difference is that the old administrative languages were just that: languages used by and for officialdoms for their own inner convenience. There was no idea of systematically imposing the language on the dynasts' various subject populations.17 Nonetheless, the elevation of these vernaculars to the status of languages-of-power, where, in one sense, they were competitors with Latin (French in Paris, [Early] English in London), made its own contribution to the decline of the imagined community of Christendom.
At bottom, it is likely that the esotericization of Latin, the Reformation, and the haphazard development of administrative vernaculars are significant, in the present context, primarily in a negative sense—in their contributions to the dethronement of Latin and the erosion of the sacred community of Christendom. It is quite possible to conceive of the emergence of the new imagined national communities without any one, perhaps all, of them being present. What, in a positive sense, made the new communities imaginable was a half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity.18
The element of fatality is essential. For whatever superhuman feats capitalism was capable of, it ibund in death and languages two tenacious adversaries.19 Particular languages can die or be wiped out, but there was and is no possibility of man's general linguistic unification. Yet this mutual incomprehensibility was historically of only slight importance until capitalism and print created monoglot mass reading publics.
While it is essential to keep in mind an idea of fatality, in the sense of a general condition of irremediable linguistic diversity, it would be a mistake to equate this fatality with that common element in nationalist ideologies which stresses the primordial fatality of particular languages and their association with particular territorial units. The essential thing is the interplay between fatality, technology, and capitalism. In pre-print Europe, and, of course, elsewhere in the world, the diversity of spoken languages, those languages that for their speakers were (and are) the warp and woof of their lives, was immense; so immense, indeed, that had print-capitalism sought to exploit each potential oral vernacular market, it would have remained a capitalism of petty proportions. But these varied idiolects were capable of being assembled, within definite limits, into print-languages far fewer in number. The very arbitrariness of any system of signs for sounds facilitated the assembling process.20 (At the same time, the more ideographic the signs, the vaster the potential assembling zone. One can detect a sort of descending hierarchy here from algebra through Chinese and English, to the regular syllabaries of French or Indonesian.) Nothing served to 'assemble' related vernaculars more than capitalism, which, within the limits imposed by grammars and syntaxes, created mechanically-reproduced print-languages, capable of dissemination through the market.21
These print-languages laid the bases for national consciousnesses in three distinct ways. First and foremost, they created unified fields of exchange and communications below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars. Speakers of the huge variety of Frenches, Englishes, or Spanishes, who might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one another in conversation, became capable of comprehending one another via print and paper. In the process, they gradually became aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language-field, and at the same time that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged. These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally-imagined community.
Second, print-capitalism gave a new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation. As Febvre and Martin remind us, the printed book kept a permanent form, capable of virtually infinite reproduction, temporally and spatially. It was no longer subject to the individualizing and 'unconsciously modernizing' habits of monastic scribes. Thus, while twelfth-century French differed markedly from that written by Villon in the fifteenth, the rate of change slowed decisively in the sixteenth. 'By the 17th century languages in Europe had generally assumed their modern forms.22 To put it another way, for now three centuries these stabilized print-languages have been gathering a darkening varnish; the words of our seventeenth-century forebears are accessible to us in a way that his twelfth-century ancestors were not to Villon.
Third, print-capitalism created languages-of-power of a kind different from the older administrative vernaculars. Certain dialects inevitably were 'closer' to each print-language and dominated their final forms. Their disadvantaged cousins, still assimilable to the emerging print-language, lost caste, above all because they were unsuccessful (or only relatively successful) in insisting on their own print-form. 'Northwestern German' became Platt Deutsch, a largely spoken, thus sub-standard German, because it was assimilable to print-German in a way that Bohemian spoken-Czech was not. High German, the King's English, and, later, Central Thai, were correspondingly elevated to a new politico-cultural eminence. (Hence the struggles in late-twentieth-century Europe for certain 'sub-'nationalities to change their subordinate status by breaking firmly into print—and radio.)
It remains only to emphasize that in their origins, the fixing of print-languages and the differentiation of status between them were largely unselfconscious processes resulting from the explosive interaction between capitalism, technology and human linguistic diversity. But as with so much else in the history of nationalism, once 'there,' they could become formal models to be imitated, and, where expedient, consciously exploited in a Machiavellian spirit. Today, the Thai government actively discourages attempts by foreign missionaries to provide its hill-tribe minorities with their own transcription-systems and to develop publications in their own languages: the same government is largely indifferent to what these minorities speak. The fate of the Turkic-speaking peoples in the zones incorporated into today's Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and the USSR is especially exemplary. A family of spoken languages, once everywhere assemblable, thus comprehensible, within an Arabic orthography, has lost that unity as a result of conscious manipulations. To heighten Turkish-Turkey's national consciousness at the expense of any wider Islamic identification, Atattirk imposed compulsory communications.23 The Soviet authorities followed suit, first with an anti-Islamic, anti-Persian compulsory romanization, then, in Stalin's 1930s, with a Russifying compulsory Cyrillicization.24
We can summarize the conclusions to be drawn from the argument [ ... ] by saying that the convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modem nation. The potential stretch of these communities was inherently limited, and, at the same time, bore none but the most fortuitous relationship to existing political boundaries (which were, on the whole, the highwater marks of dynastic expansionisms).
Yet. it is obvious that while today almost all modern self-conceived nations—and also nation-states—have 'national print-languages,' many of them have these languages in common, and in others only a tiny fraction of the population 'uses' the national language in conversation or on paper. The nation-states of Spanish America or those of the 'Anglo-Saxon family' are conspicuous examples of the first outcome; many ex-colonial states, particularly in Africa, of the second. In other words, the concrete formation of contemporary nation-states is by no means isomorphic with the determinate reach of particular print-languages. To account for the discontinuity-in-connectedness between print-languages, national consciousness, and nation-states, it is necessary to turn to the large cluster of new political entities that sprang up in the Western hemisphere between 1776 and 1838, all of which self-consciously defined themselves as nations, and, with the interesting exception of Brazil, as (non-dynastic) republics. For not only were they historically the first such states to emerge on the world stage, and therefore inevitably provided the first real models of what such states should 'look like,' but their numbers and contemporary births offer fruitful ground for comparative enquiry.

[Imagined Communities (Verso: London, 1991), 36-46.1