Today's “ism from 15th century to the present

Nationalism

Nationalism built on natural feelings of humans but also required historical interventions, like the Humanists' purification of Latin which distanced the universal literary language from vernaculars, which in turn became the important literary languages of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the invention of printing, which “served to stereotype the common spoken languages, to fix for each a norm of literary usage, and to render possible the dissemination of national literature among the masses” . Literary differentiation led to political differentiation and the erection of sovereign national states. These new states promoted national consciousness, created national units of economic life, and fragmented the universal church into national churches. (Cohen: 120) By the 17th century Western Europe already contained a number of national states, among them Sweden, Denmark, Holland, France, Spain, Portugal, and England. But it was the French and industrial revolutions that contributed to national consciousness by adding the “dogma of national democracy” and further strengthening national economies. Finally, the Age of Romanticism provided nationalism with “a purposeful doctrine” that extolled emotion and an idealized past, and promoted revival of folk traditions and appeals to history, soil, language, and the people. (LaFeber: 205)

Much of Kohn's work involved a reconstruction of the roots and origins of modern nationalism, which he traced back to national character and the “spiritual creative energy” of a people that endured through centuries. The ancient Hebrews and Greeks were the source of nationalism; the people as a whole were its bearers. From the Hebrews came “the idea of the chosen people, the emphasis on a common stock of memory of the past and hopes for the future, and finally national messianism” (Mahoney: 413). Though centuries of universalism intervened from the time of ancient Israel and the Greek polis, linguistic and religious pluralism reemerged in early modern times. “Against the universalism of the past, the new nationalism glorified the peculiar and the parochial, national differences and national individualities” (15). Kohn dates modern nationalism from the late 18th century with its emergence in northwestern Europe and North America. From then on nationalism became inextricably linked with ideas of popular sovereignty. Unthinkable before the emergence of the modern state in the 16th to 18th centuries, eventually nationalism demanded the nation-state and each strengthened the other. (Graebner: 163)

Typologizing nationalisms into Western and Eastern, the one rational and emancipatory, and the other emotional and authoritarian, Kohn traced their historical evolution from their Western Europe origins to their spread eastward in a wave-like motion, leaving older, more religious and traditional ideologies in their wake. The thrust of the argument is that nationalism, once formulated, spread and diffused by imitation and importation. But as it moved to the east, and as it moved through time, nationalism lost its original rational and civic qualities and became ever more irrational and organistic. Though he may not have been the first to distinguish Western and Eastern forms of nationalism, Kohn was certainly responsible for their normativization and this Manichaen dichotomy's widespread ...