ENG ELC 220 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Ernest Gellner, Intellectual, Stateless Society
13 Oct 2020
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Nationalism = political principle, telling that the political and national unit should be congruent. Ac- cording to this theory, ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones, and ethnic boundaries within a given state should not separate the power-holders from the rest. Problem: the number of potential nations is much larger than the possible viable states, so not all nationalisms can be satisfied at any rate at the same time. A lot of nations don"t live alone in com- pact political units, so theoretically, the only way for such a unit to become ethnically homogenous is to erase all non-nationals. To make the nationalistic principle easier applicable, small numbers of resident foreigners don"t violate that principle. Definition of tht state by max weber: agency within society which possesses the monopoly of legiti- mate violence, executed by a central political authority. Division of labour is according to him a pre- condition for a functioning state.
