Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson

In such a conception of time there is no possibility of a ‘meanwhile’, or uneventful event, that is a mode of time that is empty of meaning rather than full of portent. Because everything that occurs is ordained by God, the event is simultaneously something that has always been and something that was meant to be. In sacred time, present and future are simultaneous. It is the product of a profound change in the apprehension of the world, which Anderson specifies as a shift from sacred time to ‘homogeneous empty time’, a notion he borrows from Walter Benjamin. The nation as imagined community came into being after the dawning of the age of Enlightenment as both a response to and a consequence of secularization. According to Anderson, the crucial defining feature of this type of comradeship is the willingness on the part of its adherents to die for this community. The nation can be considered a community because it implies a deep horizontal comradeship which knits together all citizens irrespective of their class, colour, or race. The imagined community is sovereign because its legitimacy is not derived from divinity as kingship is-the nation is its own authority, it is founded in its own name, and it invents its own people which it deems citizens. Its borders are finite but elastic and permeable. The imagined community is limited because regardless of size it is never taken to be co-extensive with humanity itself-not even extreme ideologies such as Nazism, with its pretensions to world dominance, imagine this in fact, as Giorgio Agamben has argued such ideologies tend to be premised on a generalization of an exception. But as Anderson is careful to point out (contra Ernest Gellner) imagined is not the same thing as false or fictionalized, it is rather the unselfconscious exercise of abstract thought.

It is imagined because the actuality of even the smallest nation exceeds what it is possible for a single person to know-one cannot know every person in a nation, just as one cannot know every aspect of its economy, geography, history, and so forth. In Imagined Communities (1983) Anderson argues that the nation is an imagined political community that is inherently limited in scope and sovereign in nature. Benedict Anderson's definition of nation.

Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson