Elite volunteer action substitutes for mass popular participation in national history

Evidence

The key to situating ‘official nationalism’ – willed merger of nation and dynastic empire – is to remember that it developed after, and in reaction to, the popular national movements proliferating in Europe since the 1820s. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 348 (#complicates, via linked claim)

This kind of behaviour means, for a civil servant, ‘moral discipline and self-denial in the highest sense’. Through honour, discipline is substituted for moral responsibility. The delegitimation of all but inner-organizational rules as the source and guarantee of propriety, and thus denial of the authority of private conscience, become now the highest moral virtue. The discomfort that the practising of such virtues may cause on occasion, is counterbalanced by the superior’s insistence that he and he alone bears the responsibility for his subordinates’ actions (as long, of course, as they conform to his command). Weber completed his description of the civil servant’s honour by emphasizing strongly the ‘exclusive personal responsibility’ of the leader, ‘a responsibility he cannot and must not reject or transfer’. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 94 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Official nationalism is a reactive response to earlier popular national movements — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 348; Civil-servant honor substitutes discipline for individual moral responsibility — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 94; Volunteering is the hegemonic cultural model of good citizenship in America — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 202

Related

• State prestige can substitute for a class’s missing intellectual and moral authority (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Official nationalism is a reactive response to earlier popular national movements #complicates (0.75) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 348
• Civil-servant honor substitutes discipline for individual moral responsibility #expands (0.72) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 94