But the last two times I re-read Imagined Communities, I was struck more by his focus on the idea of what he and others term “simultaneity.” That is idea of what a reader (or generally, a person) conceives of the temporal dimensions of the social world. The standard two-word summary of Imagined Communities is “print capitalism.” This is shorthand for Anderson’s argument that the spread of mass literature in vernacular languages, motivated by the capitalist impulse to sell penny dreadfuls to as many people as possible, created the idea of a community united by a common language. Every time I read it I discover something new, or remark upon a flippant turn of phrase or a spicy footnote that I hadn’t noticed before. I recently assigned Imagined Communities for the N-th time in my own class, and I was struck-once again-by how dense it is. At Om Ben’s memorial service, my colleague Isaac Kramnick called it the “second-most important book ever written by a Cornell faculty member.”* And it’s a standard entry on any syllabus dealing with nationalism and national identity. It was one of only two books that I was assigned to read in multiple classes in college. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism is one of them.

Following the rise and conflict of nations and the decline of empires, Anderson draws on examples from South East Asia, Latin America and Europe’s recent past to show how nationalism shaped the modern world.Some books just stick with you. Later, this sense of belonging was formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, through print, literature, maps and museums. Written with exemplary clarity, this illuminating study traces the emergence of community as an idea to South America, rather than to nineteenth-century Europe. Cited more often than any other single English-language work in the human sciences, it is read around the world in more than thirty translations. Imagined Communities remains the most influential book on the origins of nationalism, filling the vacuum that previously existed in the traditions of Western thought. The full magnitude of Benedict Anderson’s intellectual achievement is still being appreciated and debated. This “sparkling” and world-famous work examines what drives people to live, die, and kill in the name of nations-revealing the surprising origins and development of nationalism ( The Guardian )

Benedict anderson book