These tools were all built to target and define a mass audience in the public sphere through dominant images, ideologies, and language. Anderson analyzes the written word, a tool used by churches, authors, and media companies (notably books, newspapers, and magazines), as well as governmental tools such as the map, the census, and the museum. : 6–7Īnderson focuses on the way media creates imagined communities, especially the power of print media in shaping an individual's social psyche. Anderson depicts a nation as a socially-constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of a group.

For the book, see Imagined Communities.Īn imagined community is a concept developed by Benedict Anderson in his 1983 book Imagined Communities to analyze nationalism. However, this translation would not have had the same diffusion and impact without the previous invention of the printing press.'Imagined communities' redirects here. In turn, the shared language functioned as a denominator of a shared identity, which, according to Anderson, is the basis for the construction of an Imagined Community, i.e. This was crucial for the birth of the German language since more people started reading one version of the language and, consequently, speaking it. Martin Luther translated the Bible into German in 1522. Printing-press capitalismįurthermore, Anderson recognises the printing press as the technological revolution that, together with the above historical factors, has participated in the construction of nations. This process helped to unify German as a language.Īll of the above events have one thing in common: they drove the construction of some shared ideational factors, such as languages in the case of the Reformation or republican symbols, in the case of the fall of monarchies. This was a crucial event because it was accompanied by the first translations of the Bible, from Latin to German. the split of the Western Christian Church into Roman Catholics and Protestants. The beginning of the Industrial Revolution completely transformed the Northern and Central European socio-economic tissue from feudal to capitalist.Secularity signifies the division between the state and the Church. The diffusion of secularity as the organising principle of the state.In general, the demise of divine right monarchies was crucial for the birth of nations. The fall of monarchies, such as the fall of the French Monarchy during the French Revolution.This diffusion happened alongside the fall of Latin as the administrative and religious language.

The end of the Middle Ages and the weakening of religion as the base of the community.

International Climate Change Agreements.

Slavery and the Constitutional Convention.

Philosophy of the Declaration of Independence.

Benedict anderson definition of nation