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Continuities and shifting paradigms: A debate on Caspar Hirschi's 'The origins ofnationalism'

Grosby, S.; Leerssen, J.; Hirschi, C.

Publication date2014Document VersionFinal published versionPublished inStudies on National Movements

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Citation for published version (APA):Grosby, S., Leerssen, J., & Hirschi, C. (2014). Continuities and shifting paradigms: A debateon Caspar Hirschi's 'The origins of nationalism'. Studies on National Movements, 2.http://snm.nise.eu/index.php/studies/article/view/0210ri

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StudiesonNationalMovements,2(2014)|ROUNDTABLES & INTERVIEWS

‘Continuitiesandshiftingparadigms.AdebateonCasparHirschi’sTheoriginsofnationalism’,in:StudiesonNationalMovements,2(2014).

http://snm.nise.eu/index.php/studies/article/view/0210ri

StevenGrosby/JoepLeerssen/CasparHirschi

CONTINUITIESANDSHIFTINGPARADIGMS

ADEBATEONCASPARHIRSCHI'S

THEORIGINSOFNATIONALISM

Caspar Hirschi, The origins of nationalism. An alternative history fromancient Rome to early modern Germany (Cambridge - New York:CambridgeUniversityPress,2012)xiv+241pp.,ISBN9780521764117.

1. Introduction(p.2)

2. StevenGrosby,Nationalityandconstructivism(pp.2-13)

3. Joep Leerssen, The baton and the frame: or, tradition andrecollection(pp.13-23)

4. CasparHirschi,Duckorquack?OnthelackofscholarlysoundnessanddecoruminJoepLeerssen’sreview(pp.24-35)

5. JoepLeerssen,ResponsetoCasparHirschi(pp.35-48)


StevenGrosby/JoepLeerssen/CasparHirschi2

1.Introduction

During the NISE Annual Gathering in 2013, at the Herder-Institut inMarburg, oneof thedebates focusedon apublicationby SwisshistorianCasparHirschilookingforproofinculturalhistoryforthepre-modernityof nations and nationalism. That discussion, following a presentation bythewriterhimself,hasnowspawnedthisroundtablereview.

ThereviewbyJoepLeerssen(UniversityofAmsterdam,Netherlands)andthe subsequent riposte by Caspar Hirschi (University of St. Gallen,Switzerland), as well as the response to that by Leerssen, together boildowntothefundamentalquestionwhetherthetexts,ideasetc.presentedhere, are evidence of a nationalist mindset before modernity or areretrospectivelyinstrumentalisedintoanationalistframeinmoderntimes.

YouwillfindherealsoareviewpublishedearlierbyStevenGrosbyontheReviews in History website from the Institute of Historical Research(UniversityofLondon,UnitedKingdom).

2.Nationalityandconstructivism(StevenGrosby)1

The study of nationality (a term used to designate historically andconstitutively diverse nations) poses a number of acutemethodological,historical, and philosophical problems. One problem, that of moralphilosophy,ishowtocometotermswiththecomplexityofourexistence,specifically,theethicalconsequencesofacknowledgingboththeindividualqua individual as moral agent and the accepted obligations and 1 This reviewwas originally published on theReviews inHistorywebsite of theInstituteofHistoricalResearch(UniversityofLondon).NISEwouldliketothankthejournalanditseditorialboardforgrantingpermissiontoreprintthistext.Seehttp://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1281[lastaccessedinJanuary2016].


StevenGrosby/JoepLeerssen/CasparHirschi 3

preferences of the individual as a member of a nation. Although thisethical problem – long recognised by different analysts, ranging, forexample, fromAdamSmith in Part IV, Chapter II, ofThe theory ofmoralsentiments(seehisdiscussionofapprobationwhich‘involvesinitasenseof propriety quite distinct from the principle of utility’) to Otto vonGierke’s lecture of 1902, Das Wesen der menschlichen Verbände – is ofpressingimportance,itwillnotbeaddressedhereasitisnottakenupatanylengthinCasparHirschi’sbookunderreview.

A second problem is methodological, the principle of methodologicalindividualism. Even though we rightly accept – to use Hans Freyer’sfelicitous characterisation from Theorie des objektiven Geistes: eineEinleitung in der Kulturphilosophie – a ‘natural liberalism’ of the socialsituation,thatis,actionisself-dependentorself-centered,suchthatthereisanaturalsovereigntyof the individualandnota ‘groupmind’,wealsorecognise that human action is often influenced by ideas that are by nomeansuniquetotheindividual.Therecognitionofthisproblemisalsonotnew. It is the problem of how, given the principle of methodologicalindividualism,tounderstandthe‘sharing’ofideasbetweenindividuals;itis theproblemofculture for thehistoricalandsocialsciences;and ithasoften been formulated as the problem of national culture. I remainconvinced that the problem of understanding national culture islegitimate. Thus, theworks ofHerder andWilhelm vonHumboldt oughtnot tobe subjected to facile criticism, as is toooften the fashion; rather,their works deserve not only, of course, a critical but also a generousengagement, as the objects of their concern are also our own. How tounderstand a national culture, given the principle of methodologicalindividualism,isaproblemthatconfrontseveryworkonnationality.

A third problem has to do with temporal depth as a factor in theconstitution of certain social relations. The nation necessarily containsmeaningfulreferencestothepastandyet it isconstitutedinthepresent,that is, ‘under [specific] political and cultural conditions’ such that ‘itbecomespossibletoconceiveandcreate[nations]’(p.24).This,ifyouwill,dominationofthepresent,characterisedbyHirschithroughoutthisbookas ‘constructivism’, shouldnot be lost sight of, as that temporal depth isnotamechanicalreceptionofthepastintothepresent;itisnotthelifeless



hand of the past on the present. On the contrary, all traditions are, invaryingdegrees, subject tomodification in their receptionover time, forexample,thecontinualchangesinRomanlawin,amongothers,theworksof Johann Apel (1486-1536) as a significant factor in the formation of aterritorially uniform law of the land that, as such, undermined theprevious bodies of ‘special law’ – a process underway before theReformation.

The change of tradition in its reception – both its adaptation to, andcontribution to the formation of, the present – has been observed oftenenough, both in the philosophy of history, for example, by MichaelOakeshott, and in works on tradition, for example, by T.S. Eliot andEdward Shils. The change, usually contested, can be radical, even whenthere is a premium placed on preserving tradition, as in religion; forexample, thestrikinglyoddmetaphorof the ‘circumcisionof the foreskinof theheart’ (Deuteronomy10:16, 30:6, Jeremiah4:4)which, becauseofits oddness must be a critical, expansive commentary on thecommandment to circumcise the foreskin of the penis; Paul’swildly andself-admittedly allegorical interpretationof the two covenants (Galatians4: 24-25); and the conception of the ‘new Jerusalem’ (Revelation3:12,21:2),letalone,asiswellknown,thevariouschosenpeoplesoftheirrespectively‘newIsraels’inthelatemedievalandearlymodernhistoryofEuropeandAmerica.2And,inthisregard,weoughttorememberLuther’sdesire toexcise theEpistleof James fromtheBible.OneshouldnotviewthehermeneuticprincipleofsolascripturaofLutherandespeciallyCalvin,whoseinterpretationsoftheBibleearnedhimtheopprobriumofbeinga‘Judaizer’, as biblical literalism.Nevertheless, however opportunistic andtransformative the reception of tradition might be and often is, itpresupposes already existing attachments and conceptions. These latter

2 For recent discussions of the latter, see A.D. Smith, ‘Nation and covenant: thecontributionofancientIsraeltomodernnationalism’,in:ProceedingsoftheBritishAcademy,151(2007)213-55,andS.Grosby,‘Hebraism:thethirdculture’,in:J.A.Jacobs (ed.), Judaic sources andWestern thought. Jerusalem’s enduring presence,(Oxford,2011)73-96.



twoproblemsofthe ‘sharing’suchthatacultureexistsandtraditionanditsreceptionbringustothebookunderreview.

Caspar Hirschi’s The origins of nationalism. An alternative history fromancient Rome to early modern Germany is a worthy contribution to thescholarlyliteratureonnationalismasitsanalysisoftheconstitutionofthenationofGermanyduringthemedievalandearlymodernperiodproperlyandproductivelycomplicatesourunderstandingofwhatHirschiassertsis‘the protean nature of the nation’ (p. 13). The protean nature ofnationality, recognised explicitly as such byHerder in his youthfulAucheine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, raises apredictableparadoxofdifficultiesforthehistorian.

On theonehand,whatFredericMaitland said inhisSidgwickLectureof1903, ‘Moralpersonalityandlegalpersonality’aboutEnglishhistory, ‘Wearenotlogicalenoughtobeelementary’,mayrightlybeexpandedbeyondhis defense of the tradition of common law against the Roman lawdoctrineof corporations toapply to thehistorian’s investigation into thespecific,idiosyncraticprocessesofmostsocialrelations.OneconsequenceofthisrecognitionisHirschi’sjustifiedskepticismof‘themacro-sociologistapproach of most modernist theories’ of nationality (p. 13); and hiscriticismofErnestGellner’s(andforthatmatterBenedictAnderson’s)sovery logical, functionalist, and materialist analysis of nationalism inChapter Two, ‘Themodernist paradigm: strengths andweaknesses’, is atour de force. The manifest weaknesses of the modernist theories ofnationality have been observed often enough, for example, by John A.Armstrong, Anthony Smith, Aviel Roshwald, and others, so that theircriticisms and those byHirschi need not be repeated in any detail here.Suffice it to say that the modernist theories suffer from a theoreticallyantiquated, unequivocal historical distinction between Gemeinschaft andGesellschaft,asHirschialsorightlyobserves(pp.26-27).

However, on the other hand, in dealing with myriad facts specific to aparticular context implied by the use of the description ‘protean’, thehistorian cannot avoid employing analytical categories of generalisation.Herein lies theparadox;andso,despiteHirschi’smisgivingsabout ‘using“objective”criteria,suchaslanguage,customs,etc.’that ‘haveneverbeen



specific enough’ in formulating a definition of the nation (p. 35), heunderstandably can not avoid, in his own definition, as developed inChapter 3, ‘Foundations of a newnationalism theory’, and subsequently,referencetosuchcategories,

Thenationcanbeunderstoodasanabstract community formedby amultipolar and equal relationship to other communities ofthe same category (i.e. other nations), from which it separatesitself by claiming singular qualities, a distinct territory, politicalandculturalindependenceandanexclusivehonor(p.47).

Natiocametomeanapolitical,culturalandlinguisticcommunity,inhabiting a territory of its own and sharing an exclusive honoramongitsmembers(p.88).

Even though, as Anthony Smith and others have repeatedly observed,thereisnosuchthingas‘the’nationbecausethereisonly‘a’nationamongothers, the character of these ‘singular qualities’, for example, often acommonlanguage(evenwithwidevariationindialects)and,inparticular,a distinct territory are of significance if the definition of the nation is tohave heuristic merit. It seems to me that however much Hirschiunderstandablyandrightlywishestoconcentrateontheparticularsofanyhistorical formation, thus how nations are the historically specific‘products and producers of a competitive culture and engage in endlesscontests aboutmaterial and symbolic values’ (p. 47), about which he issurelycorrect,wearestillcompelledtodistinguishbetweennation,city-kingdom or city-state (or in the context of the Holy Roman Empire, thefreecity)andempire.

In fact,Hirschiemploysthesecategorialdistinctionswhenherightlyandrepeatedly observes throughout this engaging book that the imperialistpolitical cultureof theHolyRomanEmpireco-existedwitha fragmentedterritorial structure (the same may be said, mutatis mutandis, of theRomanCatholic Church). Inmaking this observation, I am simplynotingthat inanyanalysisofnationality,thesefragmentedterritoriescannotbetaken for granted for the very category of ‘distinct territory’ or ‘definedterritory’ (p. 14) must be clarified. The existence of a distinct, defined



territory implies a great deal, for example, established boundaries, thejurisdiction of a law code, and a relatively stable self-conception of thecollectivity. (Thestabilityof that self-conceptioncanonlybe relative, forthereasonsmentionedabovehavingtodowiththereceptionoftradition.)It isofcoursethecasethataterritory, incontrasttoanareaof land, isacultural and historical artifact (in Hirschi’s parlance, ‘constructed’);nonetheless,itisalsothesinequanonforthecategoryofnation.Anditishere where one finds Hirschi seemingly sidestepping an importantcomplication in his otherwise rich and welcomed contribution by notconsidering explicitly this question: in what wayswas there andwasn’tthereaGermannationduring theearlymodernperiod? IhavenodoubtwhatsoeverthatonefindssignificantadumbrationsofGermannationalityduring this period; and if any one does have a doubt, this book will orshould convincingly dispel it. (My use of ‘adumbrations’ is because thecomplicated processes involved in the constitution of any nation, asexpressedintheshared,layeredself-conceptionofnumerousindividuals,areobscured–no,more, ignored–throughamisguidedattentiontooneparticulardateto indicatetheexistenceofanation.)However,whenoneturnsone’sattentiontothe‘Germannation’oftheHolyRomanEmpireoftheGermanNation,astheEmpirewascalledat thebeginningof the16thcentury, it is not the relation of theGermannation to the French or theItalian that is need of careful explication, but rather: 1) the problematiceastern border (territorial and symbolic)with Poland; 2) the relation ofPrussiatotheGermannation;and3)thelatter’srelationtoAustria.Thesethree considerations call into question the ‘distinctness’ of the ‘defined’territory, and all that is implied by that distinctness. In taking up thesecomplicated (and, to be sure, contested) processes of the formation anddevelopmentofGermannationalityduring thisperiod, theanalystmightreasonably turn to FriedrichMeinecke’s category ofKulturnation as laidout in Weltbürgertum and Nationalstaat (English translation,Cosmopolitanismandthenationalstate,1970).All thatweaskofsuchananalystisthatheorshedoessoself-consciously.

TheparticularlynoteworthyandworthwhileaspectofHirschi’sdefinitionof thenation is its focusonthemultipolarityofnationality incontrast tothebi-polarityofempire, that is, theverycategoryofnationassumesan



ascendant ‘conception of space [that] can be described as multicentric.nations are formed by their relations to other nations’ (p. 39). Thisnational, multicentric relation of equality of existential existence is incontrast to the imperial distinction between civilised and barbarian,‘based on the ancient ideal that the centre of political power had tocoincidewiththecentreofcivilizationandeducation’(p.43).Itseemstomethatthereismerittothis lineofargument;thus, theRomanempire’sinability to transcend this conceptionofbi-polarity is likelyapartof theanswer to the problem posed by Arnaldo Momigliano in ‘Thedisadvantages of monotheism for a universal state’ (reprinted in OnPagans, Jews,andChristians)as towhytheEmpireneverturnedtosomekindoffederalstructure.AccordingtoHirschi,thedecisivedevelopmentsof thisnewdiscourseof themultipolarityofnationality that ‘gaverise toEurope’s unique inner dynamic, both politically and culturally’ (p. 44)were the consolidationof thepreviously fragmented territorial legacyofthe Roman empire into competing, multipolar territorial structuresbeginning with the aftermath of Charlemagne’s reign, subsequentlyabettedby the receptionofRoman lawasavehicle forpatriotism (here,Hirschi, inChapter4, ‘Killinganddyingforlove:thecommonfatherland’,rightly draws upon Kantorowicz’s analysis of the development of theconception of pro patria mori); the realisation or simulation of thatpatriotism at the Council of Constance (1414-18) such that one finds ‘anationalcompetitionorhonour’(p.15,81-88),aspresentedbyHirschiinChapter 5, ‘Competing for honour; the making of nations in medievalEurope’;andthefurtherextensionanddeepeningofthatdiscoursebythehumanistnationalismduringthe15ththrough17thcenturies,oneexampleofwhichwasthediscoveryinthemid-1450sandsubsequentexploitationofTacitus’Germania(pp.168-71).

There is much to commend in this analysis of the emergence of amulticentric discourse of nationality, not least of which is its drawingattentiontofactorslongbeforewhatistoooftenandtoosimplyviewedtobethedecisivemomentinthecreationofnations,thePeaceofWestphalia(1648).Nonetheless,onealreadyfindsrepeatedlyinGenesis10(verses5,20, 31) a classificatory distinction revolving explicitly around language,territory,anddescent;andsurelyamulticentricequalityisimpliedinthe



Septuagint’sDeuteronomy32:8,‘WhentheMostHighdividedthenations(έθνή), when he separated humankind, he fixed the boundaries of thepeoples according to thenumberof thegods’ (literally, ‘according to theangels of God’). Furthermore, although the Vulgate’s translation ofDeuteronomy32:8doesnotfollowtheSeptuagint,itstillimpliesthesame,‘When the Most High divided the nations (gentes), when he separatedhumankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to thenumberof the sonsof Israel.’Thus,while Israel in theVulgate isusuallyreferred to as a gens, it is not quite right to state unequivocally that‘Jerome’s Latin translation of theBible in the late fourth century led thewayto[animperialbi-polarityby]callingallpeoplesoutsidetheJudaeo-Christianworldnationes’ (p. 79); for, in bothDeuteronomy 17:14 and 1Samuel8:5,Israelpleadstobecomeanatioamongnationes.

Ofcourse,Israeliteself-conception,asconveyedintheOldTestament,cannot be put on the same plane as competing with a dominant, imperialdiscourse; but an analysis of nationality outside the context of earlymodern German history would note an apparent, to be sure tamed andpartial, multipolarity of the imperial Persian ‘Cyrus cylinder’: therebuilding of other people’s temples, the implied recognition that theworshipofthegodsofthoseotherpeopleswaslegitimate,andthereturnof exiles to their respective lands. Certainly the Jews understood Cyrus’edictthatway(Ezra1:1-4,Isaiah44:28).

Therelevanceof thereferencetoancient Israelhere isbecause,asmanyhave observed, the reception of its image, as a designation for both aparticularpeopleanditsboundedland,fromtheBiblehasbeenonefactorin the early formation of European nations. And Hirschi notes how theimage of ancient Israel contributed to the self-understanding of, amongothers, the French, Czechs, and Swiss (pp. 66-68, 212-214). Although Iapplaud Hirschi’s insistence on distinguishing nationalism from religionandheissurelycorrectthattherelationbetweennationalismandreligionrequires a nuanced analysis (p. 213), the cultural significance of theretrievaloftheimageofancientIsraeldeservestobepondered.Doingsoissurelyadifficultmatter;butitseemstomethatunderstandingfurtherthe significance of the ‘turn’ to the Old Testament is a pressing task foranalysts of Occidental nationality; for within a monotheistic civilisation



that emphasises, at least doctrinally, the universal brotherhood of theindividual, as the New Testament does, the image of ancient Israel hasbeen the vehicle that conveys, however tension-ridden, a symbolicintertwiningof theparticularandtheuniversal. Incontrast, thetraditionofRome,analysedwellbyHirschi,cannotavoidbeingburdenedbythreeproblems: i) polytheism; ii) imperial ambition (consider, for example,Plutarch’sdescriptionofCato’s ‘bi-polar’, ifyouwill,hatred forall thingsGreek and his demand that Carthage be utterly destroyed), and iii) theRomanChurch’sdogmaticrejectionofthisworld.Nodoubt,recognitionofthisburdenaccountsinlargemeasurefortheturntotheOldTestamentasa way to legitimate, within monotheism, territorial fragmentation,including that of the Church that long predates the conciliarism of theCouncil of Constance. The careful and often subtle analysis of this bookindicates thatHirschi is capable of taking on this task of elucidating thesignificanceofthisturn;theearlierdefactoterritorialdivisionswithintheChurch; and the conceptual groundwork laid for both the conciliarmovement of the Council of Constance and the consolidation of nationalstatesasexemplifiedby thepreviouscontroversies,bearingwithin themtheproblemofclarifyingthe‘self’ofself-government,overtheLexRegiaofthe Corpus Iuris (for example, whether or not the translatio was only aconcessio)and theearly14th centuryworkof individuals suchas JohnofParis(Tractatusderegiapotestateetpapali),notsurprisinglyconcurrentwiththeoutcomeof theconflictbetweenthe ‘royalreligion’ofPhiliptheFairandBonifaceVIII: the formulationof theRexglorie (1311) that ‘likethepeopleofIsrael...thekingdomofFrance,asapeculiarpeoplechosenbyGodtocarryoutdivinemandates,isdistinguishedbymarksofspecialhonorandgrace.’3

Takingonthistaskwillrequireamoreexpansivesurveyofthehumanistintellectuals thanwhat appears inwhat I take to be themost importantchapter and contribution of this book, the lengthy Chapter 7, ‘Humanistnationalism’(pp.119-179).Hirschiisspotontoemphasisethehumanists’retrieval of earlier texts, their subsequent editing, and the humanists’ 3SeeJ.Strayer,TheReignofPhiliptheFair(Princeton,1980).



philological investigations for nationality (pp. 158-159), that is, theelevationoftheimportanceofhistorytounderstand–or,asformulatedbyHirschi, ‘construct’–thepresent,forexample,notonlythediscoveryandediting of Tacitus’ Germania but also the exploitation of its variousaccounts such as that of Arminius to assert a temporal continuity of thepast with the present, another example of which is Beatus Rhenanus’ThreebooksonGermanhistoryof1531(pp.207-209).Therichevidenceofthis excellent chapter serves to substantiate Hirschi’s argument for thecrucial role played by the humanists in formulating a national discoursethat, in turn, contributed decisively to the formation of nationality.Although outside the purview of the book, his argument can rightly beextended to encompass other areas, for example, the establishment anddefenseof theEnglishcommon lawbyCoke,Selden,andHale,hence thearguments over the continuity of the ‘good old law’, all of whichpresupposethetemporaldepthofthehistoricaloutlook(andwhich–notewell–wouldnothavebeenpossiblewithouttheearlierBractonandthatpeculiarinstitutionofEnglishlegaleducation,theInnsofCourt).However,deservingofattentionarethosenumeroushumanists–forexample,CarloSigonio, Joseph Scaliger, Isaac Casaubon, Petrus Cunaeus, JohannesAlthusius,ofcourseHugoGrotiusandJohnSelden,andmanymore–who,in the investigation of the past, looked past Rome to ancient Israel. Ourproblem is to ascertain the significance ofwhy theydid.WhenpursuingthisproblemwewillnotbecontentwithanexplanationthatlimitsitselftotheinfluenceoftheReformation;fordoingsobegsthequestionsthatareimportantintheinvestigationofOccidentalnationality.

Hirschi’sadmirablefocusonthehumanistsandeventsofthe15ththrough17th centuries clearly supports his argument that nationality is notexclusivelymodern.Heisright.Thisfocusalsosupportshisargumentforthedecisiveroleintellectualsplayedinformulatingadiscoursenecessaryfor nationality to emerge; and this is why he describes his analysis ofnationality as ‘constructivist’. There is merit here, too, especially in hisattention to themultipolarity of that discourse; but there is a danger tothis‘constructivist’analysisbecauseofthecapriciousnessorarbitrarinessandanoftenunwarrantedintentionalityimpliedbytheterm.Itisthecasethat all social relations, including face-to-face, involve ‘acts of the



imagination’, that is, some symbolic referent perceived by each of themembers of the relation to be adhering or inhering in each of them.Hirschi is right to observe that this perception can not be taken forgranted;ithasitsownhistoricaldevelopment.However,therecognitionofthis symbolic or imaginative factor, for example, such that a territoryexistsorthatlanguageachievessignificanceasaclassificatorycriterionofthe self and others, does notmean that it is ‘imaginary’, as if the socialrelationwereaunicorn.Take,forexample,speakingacommonlanguage.Now, first, there is thestandardisationof language; in thecontextof thisbook,theinfluenceofLuther’stranslationoftheBible(p.105).Toomanyanalysts begin their investigation with nationality at this point, oftenbecause of their misguided insistence that the decisive factor for theexistenceof thenation canonlybe state-directedpolicies.Of course, thebearing of these policies or the work of intellectuals on thestandardisation of language is not to be denied; but, asHirschi properlynotes, there is a greatdeal of evidence fromas early as the11th centuryand increasingly thereafter forGermansbeingdistinguished fromothersby the language they spoke (pp. 104-108). Behind this distinction is thefactof(needlesstosay)anunevenlinguisticdifferentiationfromoneareaof land to another. However, for language to be a self-differentiatingreferent of a nation, crucial is the attribution of significance to thatdistinction; and Hirschi is, once again, correct to draw our attention tonumerous intellectual and historical factors that contributed to thatattribution. But also crucial is that the ‘construction’ or ‘invention’ oflanguageasasymbolicboundaryofanationwaspossiblebecauseoftheunderlying anthropological fact of the spontaneous order of its arealdifferentiation. Here, I am simply exploiting Hume’s observation in Atreatiseofhumannaturethatwhilemanyofourrelationsareartificial, inthe sense that they are the result of the intervention of our thought orreflection, they are not arbitrary, hence, my earlier distinction between‘theactsoftheimagination’and‘theimaginary’.

The reference toHume’s distinction andmy adaptation of it as between‘theactsoftheimagination’and‘theimaginary’returnsusagaintothetwoproblemsconfrontingananalysisofnationality:thetemporaldepthofthereceptionoftraditionandthesharingsuchthatacultureexists;butthey



do so now with a set of different concerns that, it seems to me,unavoidably nag historical investigations and the human sciences ingeneral. Not all conceptual creations become traditions, and not alltraditions persist, albeitwith dramatic changes, over time. Furthermore,notalltraditionsbecomeobjectsofwhatisimportanttoHirschi’sanalysisof nationality, honour; and not all arewidely shared such that a cultureexists.Wewould like to knowwhy is it that some conceptual creationspersist as (contested) traditions, are (unevenly) shared, and becomeobjectsofhonour?Theseare,afterall,reasonablequestionstoraise,ifwedonotloosesightofjustwhywearesointerestedinthephenomenonofnationalitysuchthatitisthesubjectofsomanyhistoricalinvestigations.Ithink that key to addressing those problems is the recognition that thenation is one among several collectivities of existential significance.Hirschi implies as much when he refers to the ‘bigger family’ in hisdiscussionofthegoalofpatriotismasconvincingcitizensorsubjects‘thatthereisabiggerfamilywhichtheybelongtoandwhichdeservesanevenstrongerdedicationthan[to]theirown[family]’(p.51),earlierexamplesofwhicharefoundinHerodotus’History(8.144),Plato’sRepublic(V.470c-d), and especially the Platonic dialogue Menexenus (237-244). Torecognise this significance is not to gainsay the necessity of carefulhistoricalanalysisoftheparticularprocessesinvolvedintheformationofthose collectivities, an analysis that ought to include their categorialdifferentiation from one another. If we conclude with the philologicalinvestigations of Hirschi’s humanists, then to postulate the likelihood ofthisexistentialsignificanceisbynomeansanaudaciousclaim;forallthatneedbedoneistoconsidertheetymologyofnatio.

3.Thebatonandtheframe:or,traditionandrecollection(JoepLeerssen)

The 17th-century German language purist Schottelius rhetorically askedhisfellow-Germans:‘Shouldyounot,OGerman,honourthelanguagethat,



together with your mother’s milk, you sucked in with her sweetmurmurings?’ – thereby linking the native tongue, as an instrument ofsocial communication and collective identity, to that most intimate oftransgenerational bonds. The sentiment was to be quoted two hundredyears later by Jacob Grimm, both in an indictment of Danish policy inSchleswig-Holstein (1812) and again half century later in his GermanDictionary.

CasparHirschidoesnotrefertothisparticularinstance,buthereferstoagood many similar ones, and for him they all point to one undeniablehome truth: German nationalism has roots that go all the way back.German humanists and intellectuals of the late-medieval and early-modern period (he mentions Schottelius, and Hütten, and BeatusRhenanus, and the ever-fascinating Conrad Celtis, and a great manyothers) make statements that sound like nationalism, look likenationalism,feellikenationalism.Ifitwalkslikeaduck,andquackslikeaduck,it’sprobablyaduck.

All the interesting and important issues raised in The origins ofnationalismareputintotheserviceofthat‘it’saduck’argument;andthatisapity.Hirschiputshishistoricaleruditionandacumenintheserviceofa mere methodological skirmish against the Modernists in nationalismstudies;andthatmarswhatcouldhavebeenaverygoodbookindeed.

*

Let me begin by praising the breadth and erudition of The origins ofnationalism, which follows on from Hirschi’s Wettkampf der Nationen,slimmed down from its 2005 format and broadenedwith several foraysintootherhistoricalperiodsandthemes.Fromcourtlyprestige-jostles tohumanistculturalreflectionsandtheafterlifeofRomanantiquity,mainlyin the area of the Holy Roman Empire just north of the Alps, the bookmarshalsanimpressiveamountof fascinatinghistoricalmaterial,circlingaround what is surely one of the formative events at the close of theMiddleAges:theCouncilofConstance.Hirschiisrighttozoominonthatcrucial event. Those who look up the term ‘nationalism’ in the old,ultramontanist but always-interestingCatholic Encyclopedia of 1909willnote that thatwork dates the ideology back to, precisely, the Council of



Constanceanditsdecisiontohavebishopsvotein‘blockvotes’,bychurchprovince(‘nation’),ratherthanasasinglecollective.ThisissueappearsinHirschi’sbook,too;Iwillreturntoit.

For the wealth of historical detail from a period and corpus ofdocumentation not easily accessible to most English-language scholars,Hirschi’sbookisagem;andthatpraiseoughttostandunqualifiedbyanybones I intend topick further on. So I repeat: hats off, read this book, itbrings into our purview important and intriguing personalities andauthors,andforitsgraspoftheperioditcommandsourrespect.

*

Thatbeing said, I amdeeplyatoddswith themast thatHirschinailshiscolours to: his insistence that nationalism is a long-term presence inEuropeanaffairs,andthatweseeitsmanifestationsinthislate-medieval,early-moderncontextasclearlyandunmistakablyaswedoinnineteenth-or twentieth-centurysources. It isat thispoint that I takeexception.NotbecauseIamacard-carryingmemberofthatModernist interpretationofnationalismwhichHirschi setsout to controvert. Ihavesome familiaritywiththeearly-modernperiodfrommyownwork,onthereceptionhistoryof Tacitus and on the impact of neo-Aristotelianism on nationalstereotypes; and I have spent much time studying documentation fromthissameperiodinadifferentpartofEurope,Ireland.Thatworkwasdoneatatime(theearly1980s)whenthescholarlycommunityhabituallyreadGaelicsourcesfromtheperiod1540-1690withtheeyesofcontemporaryIrish nationalism. From experience, I know distortive anachronism andretroprojectionwhen I see it; and ithasmademeastickler for trying tosituateandunderstandtherecordinitsown,properepistemicframeandrhetorical setting. As Paul Veyne put it, ‘l’historiographie est une lutteincessantecontrenotretendanceaucontre-sensanachronique.’

*

If Schotteliuswas a nationalist,why not Ramses II?Was Assurbanipal atotalitarian dictator, or Attila the Hun a homophobic misogynist? Suchqualifications are ‘not evenwrong’. They apply contemporary categoriestouncongenialsubjectsoutsidetheirproperframeofreference,andthey



misleadingly claim the power to identify and qualify subjects whomwecan discern and apprehend only very imperfectly from a great distance.Whatfromafarappearstowaddleandquacklikeaduck,mayactuallybeagoose.Resemblances across such enormous cultural distances arenot inthemselves convincing – and even without going to the ad absurdumlengths ofRamses andAssurbanipal, it should giveuspause for thoughtthatthoseMiddleAgeswhichareheresoconfidentlyidentifiedinmodern-daytermsendedmorethanhalfamillenniumago.

Hirschimakeshiscaselargelybymeansofmere,iterativeassertion–theapplication of the epithet ‘national’ or ‘nationalist’ wherever it suits hispurpose. The title, resounding and apodictic as it is, alreadybespeaks, ifwe ponder it more fully, a very questionable finalism – almost as if ahistoryofRenaissanceItalyorFranceshouldbecarrythetitleTheoriginsofthepizza,orTherootsofbistroculture.Notevery16th-centurymarquisquaffingagobletofBurgundyisaforerunnerofSartreatLesDeuxMagots.Timeandagaintheword’nationalism’isappliedtoremotecenturieswithcheerful insoucianceas if thatwerewhollyunproblematic, seasoning thepresentationofthefactsaprioriandpre-emptingtheirinterpretation.Anexample picked at random: French humanists were ‘engaged in thenationalist re-evaluation of theirmother tongue’ (p. 111); their Germancounterpartsdislikeforeignloanwordsas if theseare ‘illegal immigrants’andacertainlinguisticactivistispositionedamidsthis‘fellownationalists’(p.113).Thusloadingthedice,Hirschiattemptstoforeclosethecaseandtoassumewhatheactuallyneedstodemonstrate.

Hirschi is remarkablycavalierwith thehistoricalminutiaeofhowwordshavedifferentmeaningsandevendifferentontologiesatdifferentperiods.He stretches terms like ‘nationalism’ and ‘nation’ at will to suit hispurpose:anysenseofprideinone’sown‘nation’anditshonour,anysenseofplacing itcompetitivelyvis-à-visothernations, isseenas ‘nationalism’byHirschi.But in thatverywidesense, thewordrefers toamereaffect,not an ideology, and the instances of that affect in the lateMiddle Agescannotbethe‘Origins’,asthetitleclaims,ofthemodernpoliticaldoctrine,anymore than a sense of social grievance among dispossessed peasantsconstitutethe‘origins’ofcommunism.



David Lowenthal, Harvard history professor, told me a few years agoabout being interviewedby a journalist; one of the questionswas about‘bussing’–thehotlycontentiouspolicytoachieveanethnicmixininner-cityschoolsbybringinginchildrenfromotherneighbourhoodsbyschool-bus. What, the journalist wondered, would Abraham Lincoln have saidabout bussing? Lowenthal’s reply: ‘Lincoln would have said: “What is abus?”’

Those who apply the word nationalism to periods antedating its actualusage,asifitwerenodifferentfrom‘apple’or‘shoe’,shouldponderthat.And evenwhen it comes towords like ‘nation’ and (more interestingly)‘honour’,weshouldexercisecaution.Hirschidoesnot.Hisdefinitionofthe‘nation’ on p. 47 is all-embracing (‘an abstract community formed by amultipolar and equal relationship to other communities of the samecategory (i.e other nations) from which it separates itself by claimingsingularqualities,adistinct territory,politicalandcultural independenceand an exclusive honour’). In fairness, the notion of multipolarity is asound one, and Hirschi makes an important point in seeing this as adistinguishing feature from imperial self-aggrandisement or tribalantagonisms; but even so, this definition could apply to any almostterritorially-based multi-neighboured human aggregate, like a city or afootballteam;andinthecontext,itamountstolittlemorethanadefinitionof the state. Accordingly, any development toward state-formation, be itancientRome,orbeitfeudalormonarchical,canbeinterpretedbyHirschias ‘nationalism’.Yetatthesametimethematteroftheblock-votesattheCouncilofConstanceisequallygristtohismill,althoughtheusageoftheword‘nation’thereismuchlessamenabletohisdefinition.

Thoseblockvotes(Hirschihimselfdescribesitwell)weremeanttobreakup the episcopal power base of the infamous Pope John XXII, largelyconcentratedintheItalianchurchprovince.Theblockvoteswereacannygerrymander to water down that majority, and the ‘nations’ argument,thoughextremelyintriguingformanyreasons,reflects ifanything[a]thefascination that humanists had with the tribal antecedents of NorthernEurope,takenfromclassicalauthorslikeCaesar,TacitusandJordanes;and[b]thenomenclatureofthedivisionsofthestudentbodiesatuniversitieslike the Sorbonne or Prague – mere Landsmannschaften, more like the



division of Hogwart’s intoHouses like Griffindor and Slytherin than likethe modern use of the term. The apparent superficiality of words andpatterns can be misleading; but although Hirschi himself admits in aconcessiveclausethat‘thenationesofmedievaluniversitieshadnotmuchin commonwith later nations’, he cannot suppress his urge to concludethat ‘they marked an important step towards them’; and in order todemonstratethatwemoveontothenextinstanceorcase-examplewheresimilarities and resemblances are invoked and highlighted so as tooverruledissimilarities,discrepancies,anachronisms.Butthisiswherethenext step led:at the follow-up toConstance, theCouncilofBasel (1436),bishopAlfonsoofBurgosclaimedseniorityinhis‘nation’onthebasisthathe represented a most ancient, Visigothically-founded monarchy. In sodoing,hewasatoddswithasimilarclaimbybishopNilsRagvaldssonofUppsala, who claimed precedence on the basis of Sweden being theaboriginalhomelandoftheGoths.4GothsinSweden,GothsinSpain–itishardtoseetheseeruditetribalismsasstepstowardsmodernnationalism.Iftheywere,theyledalongapathsotortuousandforking,soriddledwithdead-end turns, labyrinthine diversions and twisted signposts, that it isdownrightwrongtopresentthisasastraightforwardlineartrajectory.

At its worst, such a mode of reasoning could be used to show that thestarvingFrench,centuriesbeforeMarie-Antoinettetoldthemto‘eatcake’,were already in the habit of doing so, merely becausewe can trace thepresenceofanegghere,somemilkandevenbutteroverthere,andsugarorflourinyetanotherinstance.InanottoodissimilarprocedureHirschidemonstrates,overawideareaandtimeperiod,thedispersedingredientsof nationalism (state formation, centralised power, tribal appellations,dynasticrivalryandethnocentrism)and,mixingthemtogether,claimstohavedemonstratedtheexistenceofnationalism.

4 O. Mörke, ‘Bataver, Eidgenossen und Goten: Gründungs- undBegründungsmythen in den Niederlanden, der Schweiz, und Schweden in derfrühen Neuzeit’, in:Mythos und Nation. Studien zur Entwicklung des kollektivenBewußtseinsinderNeuzeit,3,ed.H.Berding(Frankfurt,1996)104-132.



Hirschi himself feels that the coalescence of these ingredients is ahistorical fact, not a matter of his own dispositio, and he makes aninterestingcasetosupportit:itrevolvesaroundtheelementofhonourasthe decisive factor in binding the ingredients of nationalism into acoherentideology.IfullyagreewithHirschionthegreatimportanceoftheidea of rivalry and of the repoussoir of an Otherness outside the ‘we’-group; and in highlighting the ethos of honour he makes an importanthistorical point. The realisation that one’s own nation stands in need ofsupport as it faces a wider agonistic-competitive framework: this is anessential prerequisite for the articulation of national feeling. But thatsenseofhonour,itself,isaningredientinthehistoricalmix,oneamongalltheotherotheringredients,notabondingagencyatthemeta-level;it,too,was subject to enormous historical fluctuations in meaning andapplicability. It was ‘honour’ that challenged, for the longest time, themodernstate’s increasingmonopolyon legitimateviolence–witness thetenaciouscultoftheduel.

Indeed, of all operative political Grundbegriffe, terms like ‘honour’ and‘nation’ have probably gone through the most fundamental changesbetween 1500 and 1900. Their semantic vicissitudes faithfully trace theinterveninghistoricalandideologicalparadigmshifts:therisingnotionofdemocratic republicanism, of popular sovereignty, of the Enlightenmentand of counter-Enlightenment historicism and vernacular particularism;and we can see both words, ‘nation’ and ‘honour’, playing problematic,dynamicallyshiftingkeyroles intheturmoilof theAmericanandFrenchRevolutions and the Napoleonic conquests. That turmoil is brilliantlyaddressed in Lucien Febvre’s classic lecture course at the Collège deFrance in1945-1946,entitledHonneuretpatrie (invoking,of course, themottooftheLégiond’Honneur).

Hirschi does not go into any of this, and that is the weakness of his‘quacking duck’ case. There is no serious attempt, despite the well-established methodology of Begriffsgeschichte, to trace the changingmeaningsand functionsof ideas like ‘nation’and ‘honour’. Ihavemyself,inspired partly by Febvre, tried to make the case that the rise ofnationalism in the proper sense of theword (i.e. the sense inwhich theword‘nationalism’cametobeuseditselfbyitsadherentsandopponents,



from themid-19th-centuryonwards)wasmadepossibleprecisely by theconceptualshiftsaround1800,betweenJohannGeorgZimmermann’sVondem Nationalstolze and Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation, when‘honour’ was rejected as the depraved, selfish arrogance of the nobility,and amor patriae became a matter of civic, anti-aristocratic ‘virtue’instead; when the slogans vive le roi and vive la patrie were used bybitterly opposed, aristocratic and democratic, factions. Hirschi willrecognise and appreciate the Ciceronian echoes in that classicalrepublicanism–he is laudablyawareof the long-standing importanceofCicero’s Nachleben in European political philosophy; but by the sametokenhemustadmit,Ithink,thatthearistocratic-chivalriccodeofhonourandtheclassic-republicancodeofcivicvirtueandresponsibleengagementin the body politic cannot be simply lumped together as two relatedmanifestationsofproto-nationalism;as ifeggsresemble flour, sincebothare used in baking cakes. ‘Honour’ and the ‘nation’ as invokedby feudalheralds-at-arms,bychurchprelatesandbyhumanistscholars,overalongandturbulentperiod,mean,quitesimply,totallydifferentthingsfromcasetocase.(Muchasawordlike‘character’canmeantotallydifferentthingswhenusedbyabook-printer,aplaywrightorapsychologist.)AsIthinkIhave shown in National thought in Europe, intense concept-historicalrealignments over six or seven decades (1740-1815) were fundamentalcatalysts in the emergence of that political rhetoric and doctrine callednationalism, and set it off against its longer, older source-traditions ofnationalfeeling;howthencanHirschijustifyseeingstableideologicalandrhetorical continuitiesover almost asmany centuries?Historical linesofcontinuity and discontinuity cannot be demonstrated by mere cherrypicking,highlightingwhatsuitsyourcase,blindsidingwhatdoesnot.

*

Having said that, Imustmake sure not to overbalance into the oppositeerror and fetishise those discontinuities that Hirschi so cavalierlyshrugged off. Schottelius was called, after all, the ‘17th-century Grimm’;Grimm did place himself under Schottelius’s auspices, and it would befoolishtodenythatsuchcontinuitieswereoperativeoverthecenturies.IfHirschihasapointincriticisingModernists,itisthattheyareheedlessofthese diachronic affiliations, and that their fixation on post-1780 events



and infrastructural processes tends to turn their gaze away from oneimportantfact:theactorsconcernedwereallofthemsentientintellectualswith a highly developed historical consciousness. On their trajectorytowards the future they were not mere ballistic projectiles, but carefuldriverswhoregularlycheckedtheirhistoricalrear-viewmirror.

That this stands in need of being pointed out seems tome to be, not somuch a conflict between a modernist and a perennialist view ofnationalism, as, rather, a cleavage between sociopolitical and culturalhistorians; and I feelmyself verymuch at onewithHirschi in the lattercamp. Cultural processes are different from mechanical, statistical orsystematic ones (such as the workings of supply and demand, orproductivity and market forces, or demographic and climatologicalfluctuations,orhowaStrukturwandelheretriggersreactionsoverthere).Thecoreofthatdifferenceliesinthefactthattheactorsofculturalhistoryarepeopleexercisingtheirpowerofself-reflection,rememberingthepastand from that remembrance making judgements, and extrapolating andanticipating scenarios for the future. That essential hermeneutic quality(we can followRicœur in this) centrally involves a diachronic, historicalconsciousness;ateverystepoftheirdeedsandactionsthatconsciousnessinformedwhat they tried toachieve,what they tried toavoid,what theywere thinking they were doing. Those reflections, that culture, must befactored into our analysis of what happened in the past and why itdevelopedasitdid.

Butat the same timeweshould realise that culture, too,went throughamodernisation process. That, I put to Caspar Hirschi, is the vexedquandary in nationalism studies:Modernists think that culture does notmatter, perennialists think that the modernisation process does notmatter. In this symmetrical, complementary one-sidedness, each partymissestheother’spoint.

IwouldhaveprobablyconcurredheartilywitheveryfactandargumentinHirschi’s book if he had narrated it the other way around: not howSchottelius ‘anticipated’Grimm,buthowGrimmrecycledSchottelius;nothow theuseof ‘nations’ atConstancemarkeda step in thedevelopmenttowardsnationalism,buthownationalism,once itdeveloped,couldavail



itselfof this conceptual repertoire.Thedistinctionmayseemnit-picking,but it is fundamental. It reflects Valéry’s dictum that ‘wemarch into thefuturebackwards’–‘nousentronsdansl’aveniràreculons’,blindtowherewe are going, with our eyes fixed on the path already travelled. Thatmeans that it makes perfect sense to see how the past informs laterperiods,anditmakesnosensetosaythatthepastpreparesitorprovidesits‘origins’.

In 1517, Lutherburned apapal bull excommunicatinghim.That gesturewas picked up three hundred years later by students who, in acommemorative feaston theWartburg,burnedbooks criticalof thenewGermanpatriotism.Andthestudents’book-burninggesturewaspickedupin the 1930s by Josef Goebbels. Now, here is a continuity leapfroggingacrossthecenturies.ButwhileGoebbelswasmindfulofthe1817students,andtheyweremindfulofLuther,itmakesnopossiblesensetoclaimthatLuther ‘foreshadowed’ or ‘anticipated’ 1817, or (pace Daniel Goldhagen)that either he or the Wartburg students are part of a German run-uptowardsNationalSocialism.

Historical continuity often works intractably in a counter-chronologicaldirection. Many continuities of history are, if they are in any waymeaningful, retrospective innature.They reside in theway inwhich thepresentinstrumentalisesthepast,drawsuponthepast,knowsthepastthewaythatpastcouldneverknowitsfuture.

Whatsuccessiveperiodspassontoeachotherlooksatfirstsightlikethebaton in a relay race: words, ideas, gestures, institutions, agendas. Thatnotionofhandingonthebatonisdeeplyingrainedinourwayofviewinghistoricalcontinuity;hencethenotionoftradition,whichmeanspreciselythat: ‘handingon’, thewaywebequeathproperty,ornames,orscientificinnovations. And in some cases, itmay actuallywork like that – in verystronginstitutionssuchasamonarchy,orachurch,orfamilyproperty,oran academy. But Hirschi’s book convinces me that this is only half thestory, and that many relay races are run à reculons, facing backwards.Beside that historical continuity which reaches out from the past andwhichiscalled‘tradition’,thereisanother,altogetherdifferentonewhichreaches into the past and which we may call recollection, basing one’s



actions on something recalled, received, recycled, assimilated,appropriated.What the past leaves to its successors is information; andhowthatheirloomshapesandin-formstheheirsisuptothem.

Much as historians know that one should never monocausally explainimportanteventsfromasinglerootcause,sotoothepresentisnotformedorin-formedbyanyspecificsinglelumpinheritedfromthepast.Thepastis a shoppingmall, a Lucky Dip, and offers uswhateverwe find chimeswithourcurrentconcerns(allowingustoignoreother,moreinconvenientelementsinourinheritance).Whatwetakefromthepastisveryoftennota baton but a frame – a way of schematising and cognitively arrangingthings.What Goebbels took from theWartburg, andwhat theWartburgstudents took from Luther, was not a relay baton, but, indeed, a frame,somethingtogivehistoricalmeaningtotheircontemporaryactions.ThatiswhatGrimmrecollectedfromSchottelius.

IfHirschihadwrittenhisbookinthatretrospectivemode,inthemodeofframes of recollection rather than batons of tradition, – how Romans,heralds, humanists and prelates in their words and deeds left behindframeswhichcouldbepickedup,appropriatedandinstrumentalised,andadapted to inform the agendas of later ages – it would all have madeperfect,perfectsense.Andthatwouldraisetheimmenselychallengingandintriguing research perspective, what role is played by ecologicalcontingencyinthatprocess(asintheChristianparableofsuperabundantsupply and partial survival: the sower sowing his seeds, randomlyscatteringthemhereandthere,withonlyasmallportiontakingrootandripening)–andwhatroleisplayedbyvolition,consciousanticipationandthatfamilyresemblancewhichmakessomethingsinthepastappearmorefamiliarthanothers.

Those are, for me, the hugely engrossing reflections and questions thatHirschi’s flawed, fine book leavesmewith, and Iwould love to hear hisreflections,asafellowcultural-historian,onthem.



4.Duckorquack?OnthelackofscholarlysoundnessanddecoruminJoepLeerssen’sreview(CasparHirschi)‘Keep quiet and trust your readers!’ was the answer of an experiencedscholar ten years ago when I had just published my first book andexpressed my bewilderment about a reviewer who seemed to havemisunderstoodmyargumentdeliberately.Iwillalwaysbegratefulforhisadvicebecauseithastaughtmeanimportantlessoninscholarlydecorumandithasalsosparedmemanyunnecessarydisputes.Afterall,itdoesnotmakemuchsensetowritebooksifyoucannottrustyourreaders.

So why reply now to a review of another book of mine? When I wasapproachedbyStudiesonNationalMovementsinthesummerof2013,theidea presented tomewas a round table reviewwith three contributorsstartingthediscussionandmecommentingontheircritiques. Iacceptedwith pleasure. It appeared to me that this was a good opportunity todiscuss key arguments of the book fromvarious angleswithout runningthe risk of a tit for tatwith a single reviewer.The situationnow is a bitdifferent. Instead of three reviews there are only two, one of which,writtenbyStevenGrosby,waspublishedinJuly2012,andhasbeenopenlyaccessible ever since. When it first appeared in Reviews in History Ideclined the offer by the editor to comment because I sawno reason tobreak the proven rule of silence, particularly as Grosby’s piece lookedinteresting enough by itself. It would thus be inconsistent and slightlyunfairtothefirstpublisherifIdidsonow.

SothereremainsthereviewbyJoepLeerssen,whichpromptsallsortsofquestions, though not many that would allow for a productive debateaboutmyarguments.Still,someofthesequestionshaverelevancebeyondthe book, and this is why I decided that, despite the change ofcircumstance,Iwouldkeepmywordandwritearesponse.

*

Thefirst issueIwould liketoaddresshas little todowiththecontentofLeerssen’stext,butratheritspre-publicationhistory.Inearly2015Iwasinvitedtogiveakeynoteataconferenceon‘NationalidentityformationinearlymodernEurope’ at theUniversity ofNijmegen.When I arrived the



organiseroftheconferencetoldmethatshehadreceivedanemailwithanalarming review of my book attached. It was sent by Leerssen andinterpretedby theorganiserasasignofdisapprovalatmy invitation.Atthe time, the editors of this journal had already sentmeLeerssen’s text,butIwasstillwaitingfortheotherreviews.Itwasthusabitoddtorealisethatbeforetheplannedroundtablereviewhadeventakenshape,itsfirstandonlycontributionsofarhadalreadystartedtotakeonalifeofitsownin the nationalism research community. A fewmonths later, amazementturned to astonishment when I attended a conference on ‘Nationhoodbefore modernity’ in Oxford and was greeted by a well-known Englishmodernistwiththequestion: ‘WhatdoyousayaboutLeerssen’sreview?’WhenItoldhimthatitwasnotpublishedyet,hementionedthatLeerssenhadsentittohim,too.Apparently,Leerssenpreferredtohavethedebatedecidedbynetworkinghiswaythroughdigitalbackchannelsbeforeotherreviewers, let alone the author himself, had anything to say. Thesimulationofanopendebateservesthepurposeofdrivinganunwelcomeperspective on the history of nationalism out of the field before it canactuallybediscussed.

Asfarasthereviewitselfisconcerned,Leerssenaccusesmeofcommittingthree cardinal sins of historiography: using ‘distortive anachronism’,presenting history as ‘a straightforward linear trajectory’ and explainingimportant events ‘monocausally’. I will start with the motif that runsthrough the review inmultiplevariations, anachronism.LorraineDastononcesaidthathistorians,despitealltheirdifferences,wereunited,amongother things,by ‘ahuge fearofanachronism’.Leerssenplayson this fearbyportrayingmeasaserialsinner.Accordingtohim,mybookcontainsa‘wealth of historical detail’, all presented, however, in amisleadingway.The sources I quote – contracts, missives, legal opinions, chronicles,commentaries, letters, speeches, broadsheets etc. – may look as if theyhavesomethingtodowithnationsandnationalism,butactuallytheyhavenot. This is a heavy charge, and onewould expect it to be supported byevidence based on a critical re-examination of at least some of my keysources. However, Leerssen does not offer a single misinterpreteddocumenttocorroboratehisaccusation.Instead,hereferstofamousmensuch as Ramses II and Assurbanipal, Alfonso of Burgos and Nils



Ragvaldsson of Uppsala, Attila the Hun and Sartre, Goebbels andGoldhagen. Thesemen do not sharemany characteristics, but they haveonethingincommon:theydonotfigureinmybook.EvenSchottelius,whoisgivenmostprominenceinLeerssen’sreview,isonlymentionedonceinmybookand,bytheway,not labelledanationalist.Sowhatareallthesenames dropped for? They serve to entertain through ridicule (Ramses,Attila etcetera), guilt by association (Goldhagen), or mock counter-witnessing (two bishops at the Council of Basle indulging in ‘eruditetribalism’ –whatever thatmaymean – allegedly disprovemy argumentabout the long-term significance of the Council of Constance for theconstruction of nations). Equally entertaining are the forays intoornithology, gastronomy and motorised mobility. However, what mightworkaspolemicdoesnotnecessarilyworkasproof.

*

Let’s have a closer look at Leerssen’s own version of the famous animalproverb.Hesaysthatsomethingmaylooklikeaduck,walklikeaduckandquacklikeaduck,butbeinfactagoose.Whatshouldthissignifyexactly?Is it that something appears to be a duck at first sight, but on closerinspectionturnsintoagooseandthusalsolooks,walksandquackslikeagoose?Or is it that something seems tobeaduckand continues to looklikeaduck,yetcannotbeaduckbecauseduckshaveneverbeensightedintheseareas?AsLeerssenseesnoneedtoexpand,hemustunderstandhisversion in the latter sense.He is absolutely certain that nationalism is auniquelymodernphenomenon,sowhenconfrontedwithanabundanceofsources from pre-modern periods that point to the contrary he mustconcludethatthecontentcannotbewhatitappearstobe.Intheend,thisattitude deems the study of sources irrelevant in the quest for newhistorical knowledge and, at the same time, it reduces the possibility ofaddingnewhistoricalknowledgetoexistingconceptualframeworks.

ThisisexactlywhatLeerssen’saccusationofanachronismamountsto:itisnotabouttheinterpretationofmysources,butaboutmyuseoftheword‘nationalism’.Leerssenstickstoanoldargumentthatisstillusedbymanyhistorians, although it is more suited to time-travel daydreams thanhistoriographical research. He complains that I apply ‘the word



nationalismtoperiodsantedatingitsactualusage’and,evenworse,thatIdo it ‘with cheerful insouciance’. Of course, the idea here is that serioushistorians explain the past in the language of that past and not in thelanguage of the present. As consistent as this may sound, it is neitherpracticallypossiblenortheoreticallydesirable.Leerssen’sownlanguageisa case in point. It would be easy to argue that Leerssen’s accusation ishypocriticalbecausehe isguiltyof thesamesin. InhisbookonNationalthoughtinEuropehespeaks–shallwesay,withcheerfulinsouciance–of‘humanism in the early fifteenth century’ or of ‘Tacitus’s democraticprimitivism’. Evidently, the word ‘humanism’ was not in ‘actual usage’duringtheearlyfifteenthcenturyandneitherweretheRomansofTacitus’time familiar with the term ‘primitivism’. But why take examples fromLeerssen’s book when his review contains similarly frivolousanachronisms? Surely the most ironical of them is the phrase whichLeerssen – not once, but twice – sets againstmy concept of pre-modernnationalism.Thisis‘nationalfeeling’,anexpressionthatis,beitinEnglish,GermanorFrench,alientomedievalandearlymodernsourcesandforanobviousreason:itbelongstothelanguageofRomanticism,whichLeerssenstudies inhisbookand, similar toRomantic authors, re-projectsonpre-modernperiods.

It is not my goal, though, to welcome Leerssen to the club ofhistoriographical cardinal sinners. My point is that his inconsistentreferencetoanachronismisthesymptomofabiggerconceptualflawnotunusual in nationalism studies. He falls victim to the essentialist fallacy.When Leerssen demands that historians should only use vocabularyavailabletothepeopletheystudyhefailstoacknowledgethatevenifwewroteaboutTacitusinthelanguageoftheAnnalsoraboutGoebbelsinthejargon of German Nazis, we would not cut through to the essence ofhistory,but,bythesimpleprocessofselectionandcomposition,buildnewconstructionsoutofoldconstructions–justwithoutadmittingitassuch.WhenhearguesthatspeakingaboutnationalismintheMiddleAgesisthesame as assuming that there were buses in Lincoln’s days, he regards‘nationalism’ as a thing in the world, not a perspective on the world.Equally, when he speaks about ‘primitivism’ in Antiquity, ‘humanism’ in



theRenaissanceand‘republicanism’intheearlymodernperiodhedoessoasiftheywerethingsinthepastandnotprojectionsonthepast.

Why isLeerssenable toaccept certain ‘isms’ashistorically sound,whilerejectingothersas‘distortiveanachronisms’?Whydoesheevencondemna phrase such as ‘illegal immigrants’ for the seventeenth century, whenofficial traveldocumentshadbeen inuse forseveralcenturiesandwhencitiesandprincipalitieshadpoliciesinplacetodetectandexpelstrangerswhohadenteredtheirterritorieswithoutpermission(apracticeGermanauthorsalludedtowhentryingtoexpel ‘foreign’wordsfromtheGermanlanguage)?Theanswer,Ithink, issimpleandcanbederivedfromwhatIsaid above his misapprehension of conceptual frameworks: Leerssenconfounds linguistic conventions within history writing with historicaltruthsperse,andthustreatsconventionsasiftheyweresacred.Speakingof ancient primitivism, Renaissance humanism or early modernrepublicanism has been an established convention for a long time,whereas speaking of pre-modern nationalism has not. Conventionally,historians relate nationalism to modernity. Conventions, however, areproducts of routines rather than of rationality, and while some haveheuristic value, others do notmakemuch sensewhenbeing scrutinised.ThisisexactlythepointImakeaboutnationalisminmybook.

*

Conventionally, terminological distinctions between modern and pre-modern formsofnation formationarederived fromnationalist languageitself.Apopulardistinction,evenacceptedbyadie-hardmodernistsuchasErnestGellner, is theonebetweennationalismandpatriotism. Itenablesvarious binary oppositions with both epistemic and normativedimensions: modern-pre-modern; artificial-natural; extreme-moderate;aggressive-defensive; territorial-local; western-eastern; totalitarian-democraticetc.Mostoftheseoppositionsechotheusesofthetwowordsineverydayspeech,where ‘nationalism’ isoften treatedasanaberrationof ‘patriotism’, resulting in many self-declared ‘patriots’, but hardly any‘nationalists’. I do not see how this normative dichotomy could beadequate to differentiate pre-modern and modern nation formation, allthe more as ‘patriotism’ would ascribe a degree of stability and



homogeneity to pre-modern political culture that does no justice to thetransformations of national discourses in the late medieval and earlymodernperiod.AsIargueinmybook, ‘patriotism’,asananalyticalterm,only makes sense when being attributed to ‘fatherlands’ that are notconstructed as national communities of honour, as are, for instance,ancientcities,medievalkingdomsorearlymodernprincipalities.Withoutthisclearseparation,arelapseintomoraltalesaboutgoodoldpatriotismturning into bad new nationalism is hard to avoid. This, I am afraid, iswhathappens to Leerssenwhenhe contrasts ‘Enlightenmentpatriotism’(understoodas‘republican’and‘democratic’)with‘thenascentideologyofnationalism’ (understood as ‘authoritarian’ and ‘anti-democratic’) in hisbook. Such judgmental language is better suited to amoral philosopherthan a historian, and indeed, Leerssen’s own moral tale is inspired byJürgenHabermas’idealof‘constitutionalpatriotism’,accordingtowhichitis both desirable and feasible to create, in Leerssen’swords, ‘a sense ofsolidarity between taxpaying citizens’ without any ‘sense of culturalidentity involved’. Here, again, we are in the realm of study-roomdaydreams.

More problematic still is the terminology used by Leerssen to rejectmyargumentinhisreview.Asalreadymentionedabove,theassumptionofahistorical development from ‘national feeling’ to ‘national thought’ to‘nationalism’ inevitably invokes the Romantic teleology of a risingconsciousnessofnationalbelongingfromancienttomoderntimes.Ifyouwanttofindanexemplarylineartrajectory,hereitis–ahistoricalupwardmovement from the guts to the brain. ‘National feeling’ proved to be ahandytermtoprojectnationalistnotionsontoheroesofthedistantpasteveniftheyhadneverexpressedanysuchnotionsthemselves.Afterall,iftheywere just ‘feeling’ their sense of national belonging, the logicwent,theycouldnotyet speakabout it.Leerssen, though,doesnot seemtobeguidedby thisshaky logic,asheattributes the term ‘source-traditionsofnational feeling’ topre-modernauthorswhoclearlywroteaboutnations.Sowhatdoeshemeanwith traditionsof feeling– if thiswordingmakesanysenseatall?Didtheseauthorsonlyfeel,butnotthinkwhentheywerewriting about nations? As Leerssen distinguishes them from later



proponents of ‘national thought’, we would have to come to such anabsurdconclusion.

Again,writingahistoryofnationformationthatevolvesfrompre-modern‘feeling’ to modern ‘ideology’ only makes sense when sticking to anessentialist attitude, according to which nations emerged as somethinggenuinebutlaterturnedintosomethingfalse.Similarproblemsarisewithterms such as ‘national identity’ or ‘nationhood’ as pre-modernantecedents tomodern ‘nationalism’.Apart fromessentialistundertones,these terms rather impede an understanding of nations as ‘contestedterrains’, with different groups seeking to enforce their respectiveconstructionsofthenation’s‘truecharacter’.

*

So if the conventional language to distinguish pre-modern frommodernforms of nation formation is of little heuristic value, what betteralternativesareavailable?Theanswergiveninmybookisnot,asLeersseninsinuates, thatwe should treat anything and everything as nationalism.First, I argue for a strictly constructivist approach that analyses nationsfirst and foremost as products of specific forms of speech, which are inreturn understood as products of specific political and culturalcircumstances. Secondly, I introduce ‘national discourse’ as an umbrellaterm that covers ‘all forms of speaking about nations’ including, forinstance, anti-nationalist cosmopolitanism or academic nationalismstudies;thereasonwhyitisimportanttoconsidertheseforms,too,isthatthey also play a role in the construction of nations. Thirdly, I treatnationalismasaformofnationaldiscourse‘thatcreatesandpreservesthenation as an autonomous value, ‘autonomous’ meaning not subordinate(but neither necessarily superior) to any other community’ (p. 47). Thisdefinition is directed against two widespread misconceptions ofnationalism: a) that it claims the highest rank within a ‘hierarchy ofloyalties’ and b) that it forms a ‘doctrine’ similar to the dogmas of acodified religion or even an ‘ideology’ such as communism. My point isthatnationalismisbestunderstoodaslessfixedandmoremalleablethandoctrines or ideologies. So when Leerssen writes that I see nationalismboundtoa‘coherentideology’followingtheCouncilofConstanceandthen



criticises me for seeing ‘stable ideological continuities’ over manycenturies,he imposeshisownmisconceptionofnationalismonmybookand then blames me for prolonging it into the pre-modern past. It is aperfect strawman. Equally, if he had read my definition of nationalismclosely,therewouldhavebeennoneedtoaskwhyRamsesIIisnottobeconsideredanationalist.

The only definition in my book that Leerssen discusses is that of the‘nation’. He even cites it to demonstrate how ‘all-embracing’ and thususeless it is. Inorder tomakehis casehegives twoexamplesof ‘humanaggregate’ that would also be covered by my definition: a city and afootball team.Really?Let’s re-read thedefinition. It startswith the term‘abstract community’, which, for the sake of careless readers, is evenspecifiedinthesameparagraphas‘withmostofitsmembersnotknowingandneverseeingeachother’.Doesafootballteamfallunderthiscategory?It would, to put it mildly, be interesting to imagine a game of footballbetween two teamswhose players ‘never see’most of their teammates.Howaboutcities?Arethey‘formedbyamultipolarandequalrelationshiptoothercommunitiesof thesamecategory’ (i.e.othercities)?Youwouldonlyneedtotakealookatamodernormedievalmaptoseethenonsenseof such a proposition. Towns and cities are – historically, legally,geographicallyetc.–setagainstthecountryside.Inotherwords,theyforma bipolar and unequal relationship to the world surrounding them.Although some citieswere stuck in long-lasting competitionswith othercities, itwouldbeoddtoarguethatthecity,asaspecifictypeofabstractcommunity,wasformedbysuchcompetitions.

Basedonthedefinitionsofnation,nationalismandnationaldiscourse,mybook contains three main lines of argument as to why it is historicallyjustifiedandanalyticallyusefultospeakofnationalismbeforemodernity.First, it presents a great variety of sources – textual and visual, politicalandlegal,scholarlyandpopular–whoselanguageandcontentcorrespondtowhat isdefinedasnationalism in thebook,and towhat, Iguess,mostreaders would regard as expressions of nationalist attitudes (thusLeerssen’s refuge in a parody of the duck dictum). Furthermore, itdevelopsalong-termperspectivetodemonstratethatmodernnationalism‘could only become such a mobilising force because of its presence in



politics,scholarshipandartof longago’.Thisperspectiveisbasedontheideathatnationalismisnottobeunderstoodasamodern‘invention’,butasapre-modernproductof‘bricolage’–assembledby‘pullingexistingbitsand pieces out of diverse contexts and putting them together in a formunknownbefore’.Nationalismisthusdescribedasadiscoursewhichcouldeasilyberebuiltandtherebyadaptedtochangingcircumstances.Inotherwords,my long-termperspective is quite the contrary ofwhat Leerssencalls–inyetanotherdisplayofastrawman–a‘batonoftradition’handeddownthroughthecenturies.Thethirdlineofargumentisthattheconceptofmodernnationalismneedstoberecalibrated,too,inconsequenceofmyre-evaluation of pre-modern nationalism as a discourse dominated byscholarlyelites.Toquotefromthebookagain:

Most modernist theories understand nationalism as a massphenomenonandareprincipallydevotedtothequestionofhowitcouldhavebecomewidespread.As legitimateas this is, I donotthink the criterion of nationalism’s mass appeal is particularlyhelpful to understand the historical development of nations. Itmightbemoreinstructivetousenationalists’proximitytopoweras a leading benchmark. My point is that nationalists alwaysspokeandactedinthenameofthepeoplebutoftendidnotneedpopular support to reach their goals. Even those nationalistmovementswhich led to the foundation of nation states both inEuropeandonothercontinentswerepredominantlycarriedoutby elite minorities, who sometimes comprised a very smallnumberofpeople.(pp.15-16)

Sowhilemassappealcanbeausefulcriteriontodistinguishmodernfrompre-modernnationalism,itmaybemoreimportantstilltoemphasisethatwhilepre-modernnationalistshad limitedaccesstopowerandonlyrareopportunities to influence politics according to their desires, modernnationalists managed – often after long and fierce battles – to establishthemselvesinthecentresofpowerpermanently.

*

Havingdiscussedthe issueofanachronismatgreat length, thetwoothercardinalsinsIamallegedlyguiltyofcanbedealtwithmoreswiftly.Asto



the ‘straightforward linear trajectory’, Leerssen is satisfiedwith a singlesentencefrommybooktomakehispoint:

Even if the nationes at medieval universities had not much incommon with later nations, they marked an important steptowardsthem.(pp.80)

This sentence is indeed typical of a book such as mine, but for otherreasons thanLeerssenclaims. If abookcoversa timespanofmore than1500 years, it needs an overarching narrative to hold the historicalanalysisofdifferentperiodsandplacestogether.Inmycasethisnarrativeisconcernedwiththelong-termprocessthatmadethenationpossible.Sowhentreatingaparticularmomentofhistoricalchangewithinthisprocessone always has to do two things: analyse the particular reasons for thischange and integrate the results into the bigger picture. Otherwise, thebookcouldnotbemorethanthesumofitsparts.Thisisthepurposeofthesentence quoted by Leerssen. If he still thinks that speaking of ‘animportantstep towards’ something isproofenoughofa ‘straightforwardlinear trajectory’ thenheshouldberemindedthatonecanalways takeastep back or to the side or detour completely. In fact,my book containsseveral such non-linearmovements, and even a glance at a chapter titlesuchas‘Fromearthtoheavenandback:theMiddleAges’wouldsufficetorecognize this. To give another example from the conclusion, this timewithreferencetotheearlymodernperiod:

Inthepreviouschapter,Idescribedthesixteenthandseventeenthcenturies as a time largely dominated by religiousfundamentalism. My argument was that after Renaissancehumanists had introduced the concept of autonomous nationsengaged in a multipolar competition between equals, theReformationquicklyre-establishedabipolarandunequalsystem,which separatedbelievers from infidels, saved fromdamned. (p.213)

Given such passages, Leerssen’s accusation of a ‘straightforward lineartrajectory’lookslikeanattempttothrowmudatthewallinthehopethatsomeofitwillstick.



ThesamecanbesaidabouthisaccusationthatIexplainimportantevents‘monocausally’.Here,itisnotevenclearwhatheisreferringto.IsuspectitstemsfrommyanalysisoftheCouncilofConstance,whichLeerssentreatsas the centrepiece of my book, even though it represents just oneimportant transformation amongmany. The leading argument about theCouncil is thatduring itspowerstruggleswecanobservehow ‘nationes’turnedfrom‘concretecorporations’into‘abstractcommunities’ofhonourfor the first time. This is not exactly a causal, let alone a monocausalargument.IneversuggestthattheCouncilwasthecauseofnationsasweknow them,andneitherdo I claim that thenewunderstandingof ‘natio’replaced or even eradicated older ones. The question guiding myargumentis,ifyouwill,aKantianone:whatwastheconditionallowingforthepossibilityofnationsasabstractcommunitiesofhonour?Thequestionactually helps to avoid simple cause-and-effect arguments, and theanswersgivenareformulatedaccordingly:

Thismatchofwords[i.e. ‘natio inclita’or ‘honornationum’]onlybecame possible through the medieval labelling of certaincorporations as nationes. And with the new understanding ofnationes as representative bodies and the subsequent blend ofnationes principales andparticulares at Constance, the collectivehonour of a corporation was able to flow into an abstractcommunitythattranscendedthebarriersofthemedievalsocietyoforders.(p.87)

Youneedalotofimaginationtoreadamonocausalexplanationintothis.Expressions such as ‘became possible’ and ‘was able to’ are clearly notmadeforstatementsofcauseandeffect.

*

LookingatLeerssen’sreview in total, Icannothelpbutdeploreamissedopportunityforagooddebate.Atthesametime,Ithinkitwasimportantto respond to his sweeping charges and his pre-print, back-channelpropaganda.Itisonethingacceptingcriticism,butitisadifferentmatterwhen serious academic debate is undermined to preclude unwelcomecompetition. The purpose of my refutation is to encourage all those



nationalismscholarswhoarenotyetfamiliarwithmybooktoreaditandform an opinion of their own. The book clearlywants to provoke, but Ibelieve it merits a higher level of debate than the one launched byLeerssen.

ItseemsparticularlyironictomethatLeerssenfashionshiscriticismasadefence of serious historical scholarship but violates basic scholarlystandards in several regards. He makes heavy accusations withoutproducingsolidproof, isguiltyofchargesheraisesagainstme,speaksatlengthaboutmenwhodonotappearinmybook,whilefailingtospelloneof its prominent figures, Hutten, correctly, and he misreads a simpledefinitionjusttoscoreacheappoint.

In the end, the duck-dictum rebounds on Joep Leerssen, but in a moresolidandsophisticatedversionthantheonehe invents.A fewyearsago,the historian of science Steven Shapin ended a review about a book onpseudo-sciencewiththefollowingobservation:‘Aruleofthumbforsoundinferencehasalwaysbeenthatifitlookslikeaduck,swimslikeaduckandquackslikeaduck,thenitprobablyisaduck.Butthere’sacorollary:if itstruts around the barnyard loudly protesting that it’s a duck, that itpossessestheveryessenceofduckness,thatit’smoreauthenticallyaduckthan all those other orange-billed, web-footed, swimming fowl, thenyou’ve got a right to be suspicious: this duck may be a quack.’ Nobodydoubts that Joep Leerssen is a serious historian, given his impressivepublicationrecord.Ifwehadjustthisonereview,though,wecouldnotbesosure.

5.ResponsetoCasparHirschi(JoepLeerssen)

MyreviewseemstohaveannoyedCasparHirschiforagreatmanyreasons–theindiscretionsofthird-party-readers(apparentlyengineeredbymeas‘back-channel propaganda’, no less); clumsy metaphors and flippantanalogies;andafundamentalfailuretoproperlyappreciateorunderstandhisbook,eitherasaresultofwilfulprejudiceorofplainobtusenessonmy



part.Inhiswrathheseemstohaveoverlookedordismissedthesincerely-felt appreciation that was also expressed, repeatedly, in that review –indeed,ifIhadfoundhisbookasdisagreeableasheappearstothinkIdo,Iwouldnothavebotheredreviewingit.

WhileIcannotbeexpectedtoapologiseforanythingandeverythingthathappenstoannoyHirschi–mostofallthefactthathefailstoconvinceme–, letme at the outset unreservedly statemy regret at any phraseologythat may have galled him. My analogies and metaphors were meant toidentify, with short-hand brevity and while avoiding ponderousabstractions,ageneralandabstractproblematic;nottomockhisbookorsnipeatit.Iwouldbegratefulifwecouldenterintoameasureddebateonthe substance, rather than a heated polemic on the style, of ourdisagreement.Iamsurethathewill,byandby,ofhisownaccord,cometoregrethisvehemence.

Thatbeingsaid,I findthatmymainobjectionstohisbookstillstandasIput them in my review, notwithstanding Hirschi’s response, which wasmainlyinthemodeofangrycounter-accusation.Soletmerecapitulateandexplainmyself. I will avoidmetaphors or analogies this time, since thatappearstoprovokeHirschi’stemper.

*

Caspar Hirschi makes his anti-modernist case, throughout the book, bydint of insistent, anachronistic labeling. Ticking me off for not being soperfectmyselfinavoidinganachronisticterminologydoesnotmakethatgoaway;at least Idonotrearentire1500-yearsurveysontheprinciple.(If I apply the idea of democratic primitivism to the discourse of theTacitusreception,IdosowithanythingbutthecheerfulinsouciancethatIhad accused Hirschi of, and which he now seeks to turn back on me.5) 5Fortherecord,IreliedformyuseofthoseconceptsontheclassicstudybyA.O.Lovejoy and Franz Boas,Primitivism and related ideas in antiquity (which I canheartily recommend to Hirschi) and had argued its applicability to the early-moderncontextina1995articleintheJournaloftheHistoryofIdeas(‘Wildness,wildernessandIreland:Patternsintheearly-moderndemarcationofcivility’).



True, the author concedes (to give an example) that ‘there were nonationalistswalkingthestreetsofRome’(p.50),butinthethirteenpagesthat follow (on ancient Rome and Cicero), thewords ‘patriot’, ‘patriotic’and ‘patriotism’ (all of them of late-medieval or later vintage) are flungaroundwithrecklessabandon–nolessthansixty-eighttimes(Imayhavemissedoneortwo).Hisownterminologicaldefinitionofthattermanditsattendantdiscourseiselastic;attimespatriotismseemstomeannomorethanthehigh-mindedintegrityofpatriarchically-mindedstateofficials(inwhichcaseitmightbeappliedasmuchtoConfuciusastoCicero);atothertimes it is linked to an attachment to the patria – which, instead ofexplaining his use of the word ‘patriot’, leads us from one semanticquagmireintoanother:patriashiftsfromthepolityintowhichoneisbornto a cosyHeimatgefühl.All that is collapsed into the latter-day ‘patriotic’lexeme,usedinsistentlysoastoinurethereadertoitsinappropriateness,andappliedto‘something’forwhichtheRomansthemselvesusedawidevariety of quite differentwords. To be sure, Hirschi is perfectly right inarguing that the Ciceronian virtue of self-abnegating devotion to civicdutieswas,inearly-modernandEnlightenmenttimes,anhonourableidealfor‘ClassicalRepublicans’andCommonwealthmen.Indeed,itwasaspartof theearly-modernCiceronian revival (andnoearlier) thatpost-Romantermslike‘patriot’anditsderivativesgainedtheirpoliticalmeaning.ZeraFinkmade the case in a 1962 classic book, as did (for the 18th century)Caroline Robbins, Franco Venturi and Maurizio Viroli.6 To identify thisrepublican,Enlightenmentusagewasanecessaryhistoricalenterprise,notjust a modernist ploy to play off ‘good’ patriotism against ‘bad’nationalism, as Dr Hirschi suspects; it was a necessary historicalenterprise because that is what historians do: describing how, and 6 I have addressed the issue at greater length inmy twobooks on Irish history(Mere irish and Fíor-Ghael and Remembrance and Imagination), where thetransition frompatriotism tonationalism ishistorically analysedwith referencetoFink,Robbins,Viroli,Venturiandothers,andalargecorpusofIrishandBritishsourcesinEnglishandGaelic.Thereaderwill findthat,contrarytowhatHirschiseesfittoimpute,thedistinctionbetweenthetwoideologiesisbynomeansmadeformerelymoralisticreasons.



analysingwhy,periodsdiffer fromone century toanother.For the samereason, the entire historiography on the history of patriotism andEnlightenmentrepublicanism(whichwascarriedandbrought to fruitionby historiansmiles removed from the entireModernismdebate) startedfrom the fundamental caveat that the meaning of the word changeddrasticallybetween its classical references, itshistoricaldeploymentandits current usage nowadays. Indeed, the entire specialism ofBegriffsgeschichte arose from such concerns, and Begriffsgeschichte wasfirstandforemostappliedtothehistoryofpoliticalconceptslikeFreedom,CitizenandFatherland.No lexicalhomophonycould linktheethosof theRoman pater patriae to that of George W. Bush’s ‘Patriot Act’. Yet DrHirschi displays utter insouciance for such pitfalls, and indeed activelycourtsanachronism.Witnessastatementlikethis:‘Fashioningthemselvesas defending patriots, the Romans conquered the whole Mediterraneanarea and most of Western Europe, and, to give just the most recentexample,theAmericasandBritishhaveinvadedIraq’(p.61).

AswithRoman ‘patriotism’, so toowith late-medieval and early-modern‘nationalism’,or‘humanistnationalism’(astheentirechapter7iscalled).Let us get this straight: our starting point in the understanding ofnationalismmustbewhatthatwordmeant,andmeans,tothosewhohaveactually used it; and it was not used by anyone before 1800, let alonebefore1600.Initsown,properusage,whichispartandparcelofhowtheword has reached all of us and has made itself available to us, it ispredicatedonacombinationofthreethings(whichIhereallowmyselftosummarise in latter-day analytical terms, without anachronism, becausenationalism,thewordandthething,isstillwithus).Theyare:1)popularsovereignty, 2) the modular territorialisation of culture (meaning thatnation-states are mutually demarcated by the geographical faultlines ofculturaldifferentiation,andinternallybondedbyasinglesharedculture),and 3) the historicism that traces the nation-state’s citizenry from ashareddescent,heldtogethertransgenerationallybyasharedculture.LetDr Hirschi take note that nothing in this definition is contentious, orinspiredbymoralisticdisapprovalofanallegedModernist.Indeed,thisisalsohowDrHirschihimselfusestheword.Hedoesnotapplyitrandomly,but to a very specific set of discourses exhibiting some resemblance to



theseintrinsiccharacteristics,aslistedabove,ofthe19th-centuryideologythatprovidedthename.

Even so, Dr Hirschi claims the right to use the word nationalism (likepatriotism) loosely and a-historically, and is somewhat impatient withthose of uswho prefer to keep our terminology specific (for all thatwemayoccasionallystumbleintheattempt).Whathecalls‘nationalism’isinfact ‘whatever happens to remind him of nationalism’. The word, thushijackedfromitsoriginalcontextandemptiedofitsconcretesignification,is used as a lens for a variable bandwidth of political assumptions anddiscourses,what he calls an ongoing ‘bricolage’ of bits andpieceswhichwereassembledandreassembled insuccessiveperiods. IndeedI like theideaoftheongoingprocess,andofthebricolage;DrHirschiandIarenotsofarremovedfromeachotherinthatview.Butpresentingthatbricolageaprioribythespecificnameofthepoliticaldoctrinethatitmorphedintoafter 1800, is not just anachronistic. More than that, it is finalistic(studyinghistoryonlyintermsofwhatitgaveriseto).Morethanthat,itisa massive petitio principii, an exercise in circular reasoning. Dr Hirschireducestherealthing,the19th-centurypoliticaldoctrinewhichisactually,properly called nationalism, sensu stricto, to a mere continuation of thebricolage enterprise lato senso.Thus, under the header proclaiming ‘Thelimited originality of Romantic nationalism’ Leibniz, Herder, Fichte andGrimmare all name-checkedasmerevariationsonanongoing theme injusttwopages(116-117);onp.159,weleapfrogwithinadozenlinesfromEinhard,Hrotsvitha,ConradCeltisandTrithemiustoGörresandFriedrichSchlegel. So 19th-century nationalism, minus its ideological substance,furnishes itsmerenameasan floatingsignifier towhateverhappenedtoresemble it centuries earlier, and this is then supposed to offer ‘a newunderstanding of the historical origins of nationalism’ (as the openingsentence proclaims). Time and again, this procedure is applied. A fairnumber of admittedly intriguing examples is presented, which areassertedtobecharacteristicof the ‘nationalistically’-mindeddiscourseofan entire century or country; and then some analogous latter-dayexamplesaresketchilyinvokedtoprovetheoperativepersistenceofthatmind-setbeyond1800.Butonecannotbuthelpwonderingiftheoriginalexamples were not selected because of their amenable resemblance to



later, nationalistic analogies. Confirmation bias is not something thatseems to worry Dr Hirschi; and he is not averse to foreclosing his ownargument by presenting his older historicalmaterials from the outset inphraseologicalconstructionssuchas‘humanistnationalism’.

DrHirschiconcedes(p.119)thatthecombinationhumanism/nationalismmaystrikesomeofusasanoxymoron,as indeed itdoes.Notbecauseofthemoralconnotationsofhumanismwhichhethenpursues,irrelevantly,butbecauseitjuxtaposescurrentsanchoredinwidelydifferentcenturies.Iwarrant that even Dr Hirschi would not dream of calling 19th-centuryfigures like Fichte or Treitschke ‘humanists’;why then is he so eager tocommit the anachronism in the opposite direction? To claim thathumanists were nationalists bespeaks a belief (stated explicitly in DrHirschi’srebuttal)thatthenationalistideologypre-existedthemomentofits articulation, and is therefore exempt from the risk of anachronism;whichmeans that, rather than viewing the ideologyhistorically, onehasboughtintotheideology’sownviewofhistory.Nationalismitself,centrallyanchored as it is in historicism and the transgenerational persistence ofthe nation, by definition believes the nation to be categorical andontologically autonomous; not a by-product of history, but atranshistorical informingpresence.Refusing to admit thepossibility thatsuch a belief is in itself a historically generated phenomenon is what Imeanby‘buyingintotheideology’sviewofhistory’.Andthatisnotjustarigid adherence to ‘linguistic conventions within history writing’ on mypart, but a serious shortcoming of Dr Hirschi’s scholarship, and for tworeasons.(Quiteapartfromthefactthatittendstomakeusheedlessofthecontradictions that the past consists of,within a given period aswell asbetweenperiods.)

To beginwith, the argument of occasional resemblance is specious. Theideologyidentified,andself-identifying,asnationalismwasmorethanjusttheco-presenceofthecharacteristicelementssummedupabove(popularsovereignty, territorialisation of culture, ethnocultural historicism) –indeed, any of those elements could by itself also form part of widelydifferent ideologies, such as communism or racism. What identifiesnationalismassuchisthestructuralcombinationofthoseelementsintoasystem of thought. That is what makes nationalism more than just an



attitude,makesitanideology(anexplanationoftheworld,avalue-system,andamobilisingprogrammeforpoliticalaction).Thehistoricalpresenceor even co-presence of the separate elements before 1800 is nottantamount to proving the fact that theywere alreadymeshed into thatideologicalcombination.Inthebricolage,thesamematerialsarerecycledoverandoveragain.Butwecannotcallthatentireprocessbythenameofthe assemblage intowhich thematerials happened to get constructed inthe19thcentury.Youcannotbefinalisticaboutbricolage.

Theothershortcomingisthatbuyingintotheideologywestudymakesuspartial, and partisan. How that partiality colours Dr Hirschi’s historicalargument, I will indicate further down; for now letme point out that itseduces him into a failure to engage properly with the work of anyonewhomhehappens todisagreewith. I am flattered to seemyownname,‘quack’thoughIapparentlyam,lumpedtogetherwithothervictimsofDrHirschi’siratedismissal:ErnestGellnerandJürgenHabermas.I,andthey,and‘modernists’ingeneral,seem(soheimputes)tobedrivenexclusivelyby a moralistic disapproval of nationalism, arguing their case with‘judgmentallanguage’(amusing,that,comingfromhim),anddelivering,intheend,‘moraltales’from‘study-roomdaydreams’.‘Whyshouldahistoryof nations and nationalism written by a nationalist be a more partisanenterprise than one by an internationalist?’, Dr Hirschi asks in hisintroductiontohisbook(p.17);aswellhemight.Icanthinkofareasonortwo. Identifying with the ideology one studies might seduce one intomistaking agreement for truth, disagreement for falsity, temporalphenomena for timeless conditions. It might even render one short-tempered with dissenting opinions. Be that as it may, Dr Hirschi’santagonism opens up an intriguing perspective beyond his polemic: theingrained opposition between primordialists and modernists probablycorrelatesstronglywiththosesympathetictonationalismorcriticalof it.Anti-nationalistsmaybepredisposedtoarguethemodernistcasefromaneed to debunk the ideology,while the primordialist casemay bemorecongenial to those who feel the attractive power of nationalism’sinvocationofthenation’slong-standingtraditionsandethniccontinuities.

Where,soDrHirschichallengesme,canIdemonstratethathisanalysisofthe sources is actually vitiated by what I denounce as an anachronistic



framingof them? Ihavealreadymentioned thephraseological loadingofthe dice, and the fact that he conflates the ideological system with itsconstituent ingredients. But the question stands, and deserves a seriousresponse. I wish to state at the outset that I have no quarrel with thevariousdataanddocumentswhichDrHirschipresents.Itistheframingofthesources,notthesourcesthemselves,thatistheproblem:notthedots,butthewayhechoosestoconnectthem.

Within the historical survey, there is a problematic conflation of state-formation, nation-formation and the growth of nationalism as processesthatallhappenedconjointly.(‘Thisbookoffersanewunderstandingofthehistorical origins of nationalism, combined with an explanation of theinitial formation of European nations’, p. 1). I can go along with anexplanationofstateformationfromthelate-medieval‘[chronicfailureof]would-beempires stuck inabattle tokeepeachotheratbay’ (p.2);butfolded into that agenda is a claim that the discourses involved in stateformationinthesameprocessalsoformednations,andthatismuch,muchmore problematic – not just for lexical reasons. Many ‘national’ self-definitions were not formed until well after 1600 or even 1800 (mostrecently:Bulgarian,Estonian,Latvian,Belgian,Walloon),andmanyofthe‘nations’thatwereformedbetween1400and1600werehistoricaldead-ends, later subsumed into larger states and/or wholly different self-definingnationalentities.Yes,languagewasusedasanargumentininter-state rivalry and the denunciation of wicked foreigners; but we hearnothingfromDrHirschiabouttheaccommodationoflinguisticdifferencesinbi-ormultilingualregimes(WalesundertheTudors;theBasquefueros;Hungary;Burgundy7).Bricolageornobricolage: things thatdonot fitDr

7 Each of these is the subject of a respectable body of historical analysis. AsregardsthecaseoftheBurgundianDuchyofBrabant,Imentionmyown‘Medievalheteronomy, modern nationalism: Language assertion between Liège andMaastricht,14th-20thcentury’,in:Revuebelged’histoirecontemporaine,34(2004)581–593.Hirschi had access to it: it is recapitulated as an appendix inNationalthought in Europe, the book which in his response he chides for endorsingsomethingasfeeble-mindedascivicpatriotism.



Hirschi’s case do notmake it into his book; as he presents them, state-formationandnation-formationarebothstraightforward,concurrentandinterlinkedprocesses.Historianswhohaveargueddifferentlyare,afterawholesale denunciation of ‘the Modernists’ in the introduction, simplyignored.Thebook isback-handed insuggesting,yetnotproviding,acut-offdate:thesubtitleleadsustoearlymodernGermany,butthestatedaimto disprove the Modernists means that time and again shortcuts areindicatedtolatercenturies.Shiftingmeaningsofkeyconceptslike‘nation’,‘honour’ and ‘freedom’ are registered only in passing, if at all. Theturbulencesofpost-1600historyhardlyseemtomatter:socialshiftsfroman aristocratic to a bourgeois ethos and the rise of a public sphere andprint media; intellectual shifts such as the decline of the Biblicalexplanation of the antiquity of nations, the rise of historicism, a newphilosophy of language, the ‘vernacular turn’ in the human sciences andthe state-organised overhaul of cultural institutions. None of this isallowed to have seriously affected the post-medieval, convergentdevelopmental trajectory towards that nationalism-in-general whose‘historical origins’ are being presented. History between 1600 and 1800simplydoesnotmatter.Justmorebricolage.

But it cannot be my role to explain the importance of entire bodies ofrelevanthistoriography(ArnoBorst,PatrickGeary,WalterPohl,IanWood,theKoselleckof theGeschichtlicheGrundbegriffe and theSattelzeit) toDrHirschiatthispoint,muchashisworkmightprofitfromactuallyengagingwith it.8 Imerelyneeded to restate these stricturesbecauseDrHirschi’srebuttal did not address them. That being done, letme now try and re-bootthediscussion.IwantfirsttopointoutwhereIbelieveDrHirschiandIsharecommonground.

* 8Hirschiiscertainlyawareoftheworkoftheseprominentexperts;buttheyareallomittedfromhisbibliography,whichbyhisownadmissionselectsonly‘titlesupon which I based an argument, relied on for information or commented onexplicitly’(xii).Anon-mentiondoesthereforenot indicateignorance,but itdoesindicatealackofengagement.



Dr Hirschi and I both would wish to see the history of nationalismliberated from the constraints of a modernist approach whichdiscountenancesanydevelopmentantedatingtheDemocraticRevolutionsandtheinventionofthesteamengine.Chronologically,suchmodernismisan artificial truncation of our historical field of vision; thematically, ittendstoreducetheriseofnationalismtoamereideologicalby-productofsocio-economicchanges,writingintellectualandculturaltraditionsoutofthe analysis. Like Dr Hirschi, I believe that nationalism cannot beunderstoodwithout taking into account the tradition of intellectual anddiscursivereflectionwhichinformedit.Early-modernanti-absolutismandEnlightenment patriotism cannot be understood without the abidinginfluence of Ciceronian thought; the belief in nations’ characterologicalindividualities cannot be understood without a long, medievally-rootedtradition of self/other-stereotyping; the German invocation of Arminius,or the Dutch one of Civilis, or even the British one of Caractacus andBoudicca, cannot be understoodwithout the 15th-century rediscovery ofTacitus. I arguedasmuch inmybookNational thought inEurope,whichindeedDrHirschi seems to have picked some cherries from (thoughhissource references are inconclusive and he misspells my name in thebibliography).

Moreover, city cultures and the aristocratic honour code both provideremarkableanticipationsofwhatlaterwouldbecomenationalism;Ihavenohesitation inendorsingDrHirschi’sanalysisonthatscore.Asregardstheformer:thecitycultsofhominesillustri,thetendencyforcitiestoadoptan ‘SPQR’ idealofcivicgovernance,canbetracedbacktothelateMiddleAges,indeedtoHumanism;citiesalsocherishedan‘institutionalmemory’and a historical self-cultivation (e.g. in the form of city academies, orfestivals fromtheSiennesePalio to theFloralGamesofToulouse)whichwouldprovidemodelsforthenineteenth-centurynation-state.Asregardsthelatter:thededicationtomaintainingone’sstatusamidstothersequallyintent onmaintaining their status provides a powerful linkage betweentheidealsofindependenceandhonour.Instateformation,theemergenceofamonarchclaimingaviolence-monopolyamidsthisfeudalnobles(andcities)isanimportantelementinstateformationandtheconsolidationofagreed frontiers. The restored monarchies of post-Napoleonic Europe



would fall back on this heritage in the form of an intense dynastichistoricism.(Disaffectedethnicminoritieswould,conversely, fallbackonthedemocraticmessageof1789;whilein‘reducedformerrealms’suchasCatalonia,Scotland,Poland,BohemiaandHungary,bothelementscouldbecombined: Romantic/chivalric historicism and modern popularsovereignty.)

Nationalism studies has much to learn from work like Dr Hirschi’s,mappingthepre-1800sourcetraditionswhichnationalismwouldlaterfallbackon.ButinthuspresentingthecommongroundwhichIbelievetobesharedbyhimandmyself(thegroundcoveredbyHirschiinhisexcellentWettkampfderNationen,nowsopitifullypressedintotheserviceofanti-Modernism),Ihave,asthereadermayhavenoted,avoidedpresentingtheolder cultural traditions as the ‘origin’ of their later nationalistinstrumentalisation.The continuity is there, andneeds tobe factored in;butnot,Ibelieve,inthewaythatDrHirschiisproneto.

Here,Ithink,liesthecoreofourdisagreement,suchasitis.Onthebasisofthecommongroundoutlinedabove,Iwouldhopethatasustaineddebateon thatpointmayyet inspirenew insights; itmayalso (ifwemanage tokeep our temper) bring us beyond the entrenchment of theanti/Modernismdebate.Weshallprobablyneveragreeontheterminusaquoofsomethingwecanmeaningfullycallnationalism.ButIlookforwardtoDrHirschi’sresponsetowhatfollows.

*

Whatmy reviewwas trying to get at is a principlewhich underlies andinformsDrHirschi’sbook–andindeedagreatdealofhistoriography:thedefault assumption that traditions and causal continuities movedownstream on the river of time, from the past towards the present,rather than upstream. Causes explain effects, not the otherway around;right? Thus, when we wonder what ‘caused’ important historicalphenomenaorevents,weconstruethosefromtheoutsetasan‘effect’,andoutcomeofsomerun-uporother,whichwecanexplainbyretracingthatrun-up:itscausalantecedents.Rerumcognoscerecausas.



But that single straightforward line of from then (causa) towards later(res), is by nomeans thewhole story.Many other lines of developmentfanned out from the 14-16th century; many other lines converged fromdifferentpartsofthepasttocreatemodernnationalismandtomakethatideology popular. Much as historians ought never to be monocausal intheirexplanationofevents,sotootheyoughtnevertobe‘mono-effectual’,to trace the afterlives of a given phenomenon in one preconceiveddirection only. Singling out the simple then-to-later analogy reduces theintervening changes, contradictions, dead-ends and happenstanceemergencesofhistoryintotheblithe,anthropologicalassertion‘that’sjusthowithasalwaysbeen’,fromCarthagetoIraq.

Letme give a neutral, non-Hirschi example. Dutch nationalism intenselyidentifies with the early-modern revolt against Spanish rule, underWilliam ‘the Silent’ of Orange, pater patriae. Rebel songs of late-16th-centuryvintagedenouncingtheforeigntyrantandassertingthereadinessof theNetherlands to defend their liberty in armswere sung in the 19thand 20th centuries with a sense of unreserved identification; they wereeven sung as a sign of resistance against the Nazi occupation (and, DrHirschi, I am prouder of that than you would allow me to be). But thehistorianoughttotakealonger,harderlookthanthepatriot.Whatsuchapatriotic re-singing of Dutch songs like O Nederland, let op Uw saeckmarginalises is the overwhelming rhetorical prominence of religiousargument:theseareProtestantsongs,aboutProtestantliberties,asmuchastheyaresongsintheDutchlanguageaboutpoliticallibertiesintheLowCountries. Also, such political fellow-feeling as the song expresses is notnecessarily a national one in the sense that the term has nowadays:politicallibertiesatthetimewereprimarilyvestedincitiesandprovinces–forwhichtheterm‘Nederland’intheparlanceofthosetimeswasamerecontainerterm.TheLowCountrieswhicharevindicatedagainstaforeigntyrannywere an open-boundaried agglomerationof cities andprovincesresisting taxations and the Inquisition imposedby the Spanishmonarch.Some of these were successful in their religious-cum-fiscal resistance,others (likeAntwerp,Breda,BrusselsandGent)not.Thesuccessfulonesbecame, ultimately and after many constitutional and territorialvicissitudes, theKingdomof theNetherlands,where, afterNapoleonand



the onset of modernity, a state-driven nation-building process wasimplemented,amongapopulationconsistingfor40%ofRomanCatholics.In other words, the line from the 16th-century song to modern Dutchnationalism,fromitsanti-Inquisitiontoitsanti-Nazifunctionality,isthere,but it is wobbly, hatched and crisscrossed by other lines and(dis)continuities.And itstrikesmethat thewobbles, thevicissitudesandshiftsinmeaningandfunction,shouldbethehistorian’sproperchallenge;somethingthatisillservedbyblanketstatementstotheeffectthat‘itwasever thus’.Tobe contentwithhighlighting the analogies and similaritiesbetweenthethenandthenowmeanstoblockthecomplexitiesofhistoryfrom our view; to trace ‘the’ origins of Dutch nationalism to the 16thcentury Low Countrieswould prevent us from registering the impact ofHerder,Rousseau,Napoleon,RomanticismandGermannationalism.

What does this amount to? It is not to disprove the idea of pre-1800originsofnationalismonceandforall;thatwouldbetoproveanegativeanyway.Whatitdoesmeanisthat,asIseeit,DrHirschicoulddoeitheroftwo things. One is to face a much heavier burden of proof than he hasadmitted so far, showing that the intellectual similarities and discursiveself-perpetuationsoftheperiod1500-1850indeedadduptoacontinuityand outweigh the massive discontinuities of those centuries. He wouldalsohavetoconvincereaderslikemethattheearlypresenceofthelaterideology’s elements was not singulatim but already in a structural andideological linkage, and related to the country rather than to a city or aclass.

Alternatively (and this iswhere I said before that the bookwouldmakeperfectsensetoallreaders,includingme)DrHirschicouldreconsidertheterms in which he presents historical causality, and take seriously hisnotion of bricolage – as a truly open-ended, not a teleological process.Merely asserting that there are typological similarities between early-modernandpost-1800typesofdiscourseisnotenoughtoprovethecasethat the former generated the latter. Would we not be on much firmergroundifwearguedthattheearlierdiscoursesprovidedlaternationalistbricoleurswitharepertoire?Idonotsuggestthisasamerereiterationofthe tired and unjustly dismissive ‘invention of tradition’ formula, butrather with Paul Valéry’s dictum in mind that ‘we walk into the future



backwards’,movingtoanunseenfuturewithoureyesonthepast.Wouldit not make much more sense to trace retrospective continuities –humanists and Classical Republicans making use of Cicero and Tacitus,RomanticsmakinguseofthatearlierusageandoftheMiddleAges?Thatwould indeed address the open-ended process of bricolage which DrHirschi claims to be his concern. I am unconvinced that the ‘origins’surveyed by Dr Hirschi generated ‘nationalism’. But we may profitenormously from his book it were offered to the reader, not as a caseagainst modernism, but as an analysis of the cumulative memory-repertoireofnationalists.

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