Material interests and ideologies cannot by themselves shape 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, 242

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The distinction between center-field objects of admiration/disgust and the ‘scarcely-seen periphery of vision’ — the frame of consciousness vs. what’s seen within it — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting formulation of how ideology relates to national form.
• XREF: connects to: Political beliefs cannot be reduced to material interests or formal schemes — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 24

Related

• Material interests and Enlightenment ideas alone could not shape nationalist imagined communities. (similarity 0.91)
• The local resists globalization from within, with no fixed political content (similarity 0.81)
• Imagination is social and intersubjective, constituting collectivities (similarity 0.79)
• Political beliefs cannot be reduced to material interests or formal schemes (similarity 0.79)
• Nationalism arises from print capitalism’s imagined communities, not from class or material grievance alone (similarity 0.79)
• Creole revolutionaries sought to preserve parallelism, not to overthrow the Old World (similarity 0.79)
• National communities bore no determined relation to existing political borders (similarity 0.79)
• Nationalism emerged from printed shared narratives, not shared acquaintance (similarity 0.78)
• Nationalism was invented in colonial Creole societies, not Europe. (similarity 0.78)