Mapping the Nation

In nearly two decades since Samuel P. Huntington proposed his influential and troubling 'clash of civilizations' thesis, nationalism has only continued to puzzle and frustrate commentators, policy analysts and political theorists. No consensus exists concerning its identity, genesis or future. Are we reverting to the petty nationalisms of the nineteenth century or evolving into a globalized, supranational world? Has the nation-state outlived its usefulness and exhausted its progressive and emancipatory role?
Opening with powerful statements by Lord Acton and Otto Bauer - the classic liberal and socialist positions, respectively - Mapping the Nation presents a wealth of thought on this issue: the debate between Ernest Gellner and Miroslav Hroch; Gopal Balakrishnan's critique of Benedict Anderson's seminal Imagined Communities; Partha Chatterjee on the limitations of the Enlightenment approach to nationhood; and contributions from Michael Mann, Eric Hobsbawm, Tom Nairn, and Jürgen Habermas.

Gopal Balakrishnan is the author of The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, and editor of Debating "Empire" and (with Benedict Anderson) Mapping the Nation. A member of the New Left Review editorial board, he teaches Contemporary Theory at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Benedict Anderson (1936-2015) was Aaron L. Binenkorp Professor of International Studies Emeritus at Cornell University. He was Editor of the journal Indonesia and author of Java in a Time of Revolution; The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World; The Age of Globalization: Anarchists and the Anticolonial Imagination; and Imagined Communities. Jürgen Habermas was born in 1929, and grew up in Gummersbach, Germany. He was educated at the Universities of Gottingen, Bonn, and Zurich, after which he worked for a while as a freelance journalist. In 1956 he became Adorno's assistant at the University of Frankfurt. From 1961 to 1964 he taught philosophy in Heidelberg, and from 1964 to 1971, philosophy and sociology in Frankfurt. From 1971 to 1983 he was Director of the Max Planck Institute for Research into the Life Conditions of the Scientific-Technical World, in Sternberg. Among his influential publications in English are: Knowledge and Human Interests (1971), Theory and Practice (1973), The Theory of Communicative Action (1984/1987), and Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1990). A Fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Eric Hobsbawm is the author of more than twenty books of history, including The Age of Revolution and The Age of Extremes. He lives in London. Miroslav Hroch is an Emeritus Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the Charles University in Prague. He has written several books on modern nationalism and nation formation, including Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe and In the National Interest: Demands and Goals of European National Movements of the Nineteenth Century: A Comparative Perspective. Michael Mann is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His major works include the prizewinning series The Sources of Social Power, Volume I: A History of Power from the Beginning to 1760 AD, and Volume II: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760-1914. Tom Nairn (1932-2023) was one of the UK''s most gifted left-wing thinkers and a towering radical imagination. His books included The Break-Up of Britain, The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy and The Left Against Europe?