The nation was born from the decline of dynastic and religious legitimacy.
Evidence
It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism between each faith’s ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 40
Categorization
- XREF: The ‘allomorphism between each faith’s ontological claims and territorial stretch’ is a scaffold for biopolitics/necropolitics readings on how sovereignty and religion intersect in Islamophobia discourse. — connects to: Nations fabricate biographies backward in time because they lack natural origins. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 747; Sacral monarchy’s legitimacy declined, forcing rulers to adopt standardized national forms — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 79; Dynasts who adopted national identities became vulnerable to charges of betraying their nations — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 346
Related
- The nation is an imagined, limited, sovereign political community (similarity 0.82)
- The nation emerges as a new subject of history distinct from the State (similarity 0.80)
- Nations claim antique dynasties to disguise their modern provenance. (similarity 0.79)
- The nation’s sacred aura lets patriotism capture and tame universalist religions. (similarity 0.79)
- Dynasts who adopted national identities became vulnerable to charges of betraying their nations (similarity 0.79)
- Nationalism must be read against prior cultural systems, not political ideologies (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- Sacral monarchy’s legitimacy declined, forcing rulers to adopt standardized national forms
#expands(0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 79 - Dynasts who adopted national identities became vulnerable to charges of betraying their nations
#exemplifies(0.75) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 346