Abstract
Caspar Hirschi’s The Origins of Nationalism promotes a novel understanding of nations and nationalism as the inevitable but accidental legacy of Roman imperialism in Europe; from this institutional legacy, national identities emerged from the innovations of Renaissance humanists who developed the idea of nationalism through inter-European cultural competition.
It is perhaps not surprising that Hirschi, as a historian, is diametrically opposed to the modernist school of nationalism, which links industrialization and mass communications with the creation of national identities (Anderson, 1983; Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983). Calling it both “theoretically unsound and historically untenable,” he argues modernism is flawed in this way because of a “macro-sociological approach” that takes “the bird’s-eye” view and in the process turns a “blind eye on history” (pp. 1, 29, 33). Although Hirschi acknowledges the modernist model begins more or less in the 18th century (with two revolutions, one industrial and the other French), his objection is not only that this is too late to mark the beginning of the phenomenon but also that it ignores the changing concept of nations and nationalism over time. It is the intellectual history of this conception that Hirschi presents—showing “how nationalists thought and spoke” as far back as the 14th century—as the answer to the question of where nations come from (p. 28).
In his view, the development of the idea of nationalism was possible only in Europe and only as a consequence of Roman imperialism. The preconditions and evolution of nationalism, according to Hirschi, begin with
a vast space inhabited by a single high culture and split into several polities; while the overarching culture enables an intense exchange between the educated elites within the whole space, the political landscape ensures a multiplicity of powers. . . . The discrepancy between the imperialist ideal of single hegemonic power and the reality of many polities launches a competition for political supremacy. . . . Over time, their political competition develops its own dynamics; it expands to a cultural and moral competition, and finally continues independently of its original imperialist impulse—in other words, it transforms into nationalism. (p. 41)
The specifics of the “cultural and moral competition” are detailed in the fashion of a historian, with primary sources—most in Latin but some in German, French, and Italian—serving as the “foundation” of his method and his argument (p. xii). The lion’s share of this book is devoted to the framing of this material around his theoretical picture. This material has an intrinsic value, especially for historians, but it is Hirschi’s dialogue with these premodern authors that is of greatest value to the study of nationalism.
Rather than theocrats or aristocrats, Hirschi focuses on Renaissance humanists—an informal network of aesthetes who modeled themselves on the likes of Cicero and the Roman orator doctus, a version of what we might call a public intellectual (p. 218). But to succeed as meritocratic thinkers recovering the wisdom and glory of the Roman Empire, this meant the social and political structure of the Dark Ages, and the parallel barrier between learning and governing, would have to be “torn down. . . . The goal was to create a new political sphere for scholarship combined with a new political role for scholars” (p. 126).
Emulating the Roman conception of a citizen as a civilized individual in opposition to the savage barbarians (especially Germans) beyond the frontier, Hirschi argues, “Fighting barbarism was a prime duty of every humanist. . . . Barbaries was the exact opposite of humanitas” (p. 142). As it happens, there was a wide range of views on what determined barbarity, but without exception it was ascribed to the other, what social psychologists would call the out-group. However, although the Romans simply differentiated between themselves and the barbarians, the humanists of Italy, France, and (later) Germany soon began to differentiate and compete among themselves. In the course of this competition, the conception of communal honor (and thereby communal shame) ascended as a primary value, further reinforcing the need to challenge and respond to divergent views and, as it happens, different languages. Rather than focusing on the market demand of Bibles printed in mother tongues (as opposed to Latin, which by this time was the mother tongue of nobody), Hirschi argues nascent national pride spurred humanists to endow vernaculars with higher status, not necessarily because they were superior to Latin, but rather because than they were superior to the languages of their neighbors. As Hirschi notes, the support of a vernacular as a high culture language was highlighted around 1300 with the publication of Dante Alighieri’s On the Eloquence of the Vernacular (De vulgari eloquentia), though it was at least another two centuries before this view became more acceptable across Europe (see Hastings, 1997; Waquet, 2001).
Nonetheless, Hirschi acknowledges this competitive streak was not universal, so “every nationalist in the Renaissance was a humanist, but not every humanist was a nationalist” (p. 120). Yet every humanist, by comparing and contrasting the veracity and relevance of different cultural interpretations, contributed to the distinction of one community versus another. This process of distinction is very important, as Hirschi argues nations are defined only in contrast with other nations. (Hirschi credits this observation to the cosmopolitan Erasmus [1466–1536], who lamented that nations divided the kingdom of Christianity.) Therefore, definitions of the nation can be more instructive if they do not, as is the usual practice, focus on its internal construction as a political and cultural community, but instead highlight its external construction . . . [and] how the nation is perceived by and interrelates with foreign communities. (p. 13)
On this front, Hirschi delivers on his promise and provides a rich study of the Italian, French, and especially German development of nationalism. The latter receives special attention, as Hirschi argues Luther actually put the history of nationalism into a retrograde path as the ideocracy of Protestantism challenged the heterogeneous humanists.
Ultimately, of course, the nationalists trumped the fundamentalists and came to dominate not only Europe but also—through colonialism—the entire world. Moreover, following the waves of democracy that washed away empires and autocracies, new states continue to develop new nations in a contest of cultures that mirrors the events of Europe in the 15th century. However, despite Hirschi’s disparaging view of the modernist school, much of his material actually links rather well temporally. Although he begins much sooner than the 18th century, one can triangulate his trajectory of nationalism backward through the empiricism of the Enlightenment to the Renaissance humanism of the 14th century, which is where he begins his story. Thus, Hirschi moves the modernist clock back a few hundred years, and he does so in a novel interpretation of history, one that does not depend on any kind of primordialism or ethnosymbolism (see Guibernau, Hutchinson, & Smith, 2004). Rather than depending on the ethnic echoes of antiquity to determine the teleological development of contemporary authentic nations (in the fashion of Anthony Smith’s, 1986, earlier work), Hirschi’s model follows the history of an idea.
His deconstruction of the modernists is remarkable for two reasons. First, although many scholars have worked to parse the differences separating three of the most influential thinkers on nationalism—Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, and Eric Hobsbawm—Hirschi sees relatively little to detract from what he sees as the defining characteristic of all: They hinge on modernity. Thus, these “three modernist classics from 1983 owe their strong impact on nationalism research to an astonishing amount of accidental conformity between them” (p. 22). Still, would not the fact that three distinct scholars follow different paths to the same point be more than an accident?
Second, and more difficult, is the conundrum presented by an analysis that is at once original but isolated, which is to say his critique of the modernists—which lasts a scant 13 pages—does not engage the enormous amount of work dedicated to the study of these three authors alone (not to mention the corresponding work of nationalism scholars influenced by the modernists). It is as if a researcher took on Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” in 2012, but did not recognize all the earlier debates that began with that article’s publication in 1993.
This does not, however, invalidate Hirschi’s arguments about the organic emergence of nationalism in the late 14th century. There are more than a few original ideas in the book, and for this reason alone it should enter the canon of works that specialize in the study of nations and nationalism.