Customer Rating: Summary: A good starting point for the study of nationalism Comment: Nations and Nationalism is a readable account of the birth and rise of nationalism, but suffers from its mechanistic portrayal of society. Put simply, Gellner sees the rise of cities through industrialisation as creating, ex nihilo, modern nationalsim. The movement away from the agrarian, peasant existance to one of nineteenth-century economism leads Gellner to believe that before industrialisation there was no nationalism, and after it there will be nothing in the future other than nationalism. For an author who chides Marx over his determinist viewpoint, Gellner makes the identical mistake with nationalism as Marx did with materialsim. Read this book because it presents some useful introductory concepts, but be warned that the books I've come across on nationalism (Hobsbawm, Breuilly, Anderson, Gellner, Hastings) all suffer from inadequate explainations. If you seriously want to look for a challenging modern world view, I would suggest starting with either Bourdieu's Logic of Practice or Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Perhaps the latter of the two is best to start with, as the comparison to what is called by most, if not all, contemporary historians as 'nationalsim' compares nicely to what Foucault calls 'surveillance.' Customer Rating: Summary: The Bible for the modernist nationalist student! Comment: A short and fully comprehensive review of the modernist viewpoint on nationalism. It is expressed in a style that is easy to digest and invokes interest within the topic area of nationalism. Exploring Islam and Marxist viewpoints as well as critiquing the primordial approach Gellner succeeds in convincing the reader of the modern birth of the nation, as opposed to its modern day critics. There is a fresh and timeless vibrancy to the text every time a reader picks it up. It is essential reading for any student studying Nationalism.
