Material interests and Enlightenment ideas alone could not shape nationalist imagined communities.

Evidence

By way of provisional conclusion, it may be appropriate to re-emphasize the limited and specific thrust of the argument so far. It is intended less to explain the socio-economic bases of anti-metropolitan resistance in the Western hemisphere between say, 1760 and 1830, than why the resistance was conceived in plural, ‘national’ forms – rather than in others. The economic interests at stake are well-known and obviously of fundamental importance. Liberalism and the Enlightenment clearly had a powerful impact, above all in providing an arsenal of ideological criticisms of imperial and anciens régimes. What I am proposing is that neither economic interest, Liberalism, nor Enlightenment could, or did, create in themselves the kind, or shape, of imagined community to be defended from these regimes’ depredations; to put it another way, none provided the framework of a new consciousness – the scarcely-seen periphery of its vision – as opposed to centre-field objects of its admiration or disgust. In accomplishing this specific task, pilgrim creole functionaries and provincial creole printmen played the decisive historic role. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 241

Categorization

• XREF: Central to the scaffolding: this claim about what ideas can and cannot accomplish prefigures critiques that Islamophobia discourse similarly cannot be explained by material interests alone. — connects to: Geographic isolation limited the imagined simultaneity needed for continent-wide nationalism. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 238; Modernism’s radical promise failed because culture cannot independently transcend its social and economic conditions.; National communities bore no determined relation to existing political borders — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 191 (+3 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The distinction between ‘the framework of a new consciousness — the scarcely-seen periphery of its vision’ versus ‘centre-field objects of admiration or disgust’ is a subtle, reusable analytic tool for how any ideology takes shape.

Related

• Material interests and ideologies cannot by themselves shape imagined communities (similarity 0.91)
• Nationalism emerged from printed shared narratives, not shared acquaintance (similarity 0.84)
• Nationalism must be read against prior cultural systems, not political ideologies (similarity 0.84)
• The local resists globalization from within, with no fixed political content (similarity 0.83)
• National communities bore no determined relation to existing political borders (similarity 0.82)
• Nationalism was invented in colonial Creole societies, not Europe. (similarity 0.82)
• Geographic isolation limited the imagined simultaneity needed for continent-wide nationalism. (similarity 0.81)
• Nationalism arises from print capitalism’s imagined communities, not from class or material grievance alone (similarity 0.80)
• Nationalism originated in the New World colonies, not in Europe’s ethnolinguistic movements (similarity 0.80)
• Print-capitalism made the nation imaginable through production, technology, and linguistic diversity (similarity 0.80)
• Nationalism could be consciously modeled and pirated once visible predecessors existed. (similarity 0.79)
• Marxist theory could not theorize nationalism and so evaded it (similarity 0.79)
• Novels and newspapers supplied the technical means to imagine the nation (similarity 0.79)
• All communities are imagined, differing only in style, not genuineness. (similarity 0.79)
• Print-capitalism, not colonial administration, made nations imaginable (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Modernism’s radical promise failed because culture cannot independently transcend its social and economic conditions. #corroborates (0.85)
• Nationalism must be read against prior cultural systems, not political ideologies #expands (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 58
• National communities bore no determined relation to existing political borders #expands (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 191
• Marxism’s dismissal of culture left it unequipped for nationalism #corroborates (0.80)
• Geographic isolation limited the imagined simultaneity needed for continent-wide nationalism. #expands (0.75) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 238