Between Autonomy and Community Shimon Dubnow, Benedict Anderson and Anthony Smith on Nationalism
Keywords:
Shimon Dubnow, Benedict Anderson, Anthony Smith, Theoretical Concepts of Nationalism, Imagined CommunitiesAbstract
The article is trying to compare three theoretical concepts of nationalism: that of the famous historian and thinker Shimon Dubnow, the leading political scientist Anthony Smith, and the popular sociologist-anthropologist Benedict Anderson.
The comparison between them is made despite the hundred year old historical and cultural gap between Dubnow on one hand, and Smith and Anderson on the other. The article finds a resemblance between Dubnow’s and Smith’s primordial concept of nationalism and its perennial process. As for Dubnow and Anderson, they both express sympathy towards cultural modern nationalism; and, paradoxically, Dubnow expressed the idea of Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ in the modern era in spite of principal theoretical differences between them.
It should be mentioned that the common denominator of the three of them is that nationalism as a spiritual feeling, culture, and ideology is a product of a historical process. The part that they cannot agree on is when the process began.
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