Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Nueva York,Verso, 2016).

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson traces the historical, economic, and cultural processes that led to the invention of the nation and nation-ness—and, once invented and imagined, how emerging political bodies modeled, adapted, and implemented them as policies. The book draws from a wide range of sources that include novels, poems, histories, and anthropological as well as cultural studies, Anderson first portrays how the rise of print-capitalism, shifting notions of time, and the demise of sacred languages, cosmologies, forms of power, set the stage for recognizing others as part of the same thing: a bounded community of strangers, tied by something larger than proximity. He then attempts to explain how the different, but intertwined, political processes of the 19th and 20th centuries prompted the invention of secular communities, nations, to exercise independent control of diverse populations, and the further making of individuals willing to die for those inventions.

The lexicographic revolution in Europe, however, created, and gradually spread, the conviction that languages (in Europe at least) were, so to speak, the personal property of quite specific groups—their daily speakers and readers—and moreover that these groups, imagined as communities, were entitled to their autonomous place in a fraternity of equals.

The politics of language and printing thus play a central role in his argument. 

Yet the author cautions against an essentialist interpretation of the invention of nations as categories based on common (mainly European) languages. In fact, Anderson traces the origins of nation and nation-ness to the creole pioneers—descendants of Europeans with administrative control in colonial regimes—in the Americas. The material conditions and circumstances of administrative territorial units triggered the imagination of horizontal, sovereign communities, that later served as stepping stones toward state-building policies and as models for political order in other places: the making of nation-states. Yet the book shows signs of its time. It remains unclear how did these inventions became ahistorical, “traveling” concepts that first worked as concrete solutions, but then crystalized into fixed, bounded political units. The main insights and interdisciplinary approach of Imagined Communities nevertheless prevail as the founding cornerstones of any serious study of nationalism—a necessary book.