Rating: 
Summary: Not a great book
Review: I read this book for a college course and I didn't find anything extremely enlightening about it. His arguments were obvious and others were confusing. There seemed to be a lot of filler material between claims; I guess I don't see the value of the book - it offered no insights into the root of nationalism.
Rating: 
Summary: An awful book
Review: I think the writing style is pretentious, ostentatious, and rambling. Anderson seems to belittle people and communities who are willing to die for their beliefs- who is he to criticize? He takes paragraphs upon paragraphs to get to the point, and uses 15 large words when 1 or 2 simpler words would suffice. Anderson seems very full of himself, and looks down upon people who do not share his beliefs on nationalism. He cares little for his audience or persuading his audience, he simply cares about trying to look as academic and snobbish as he can. Some arguments were obvious, and he tries to dress them up by adding pages of useless information and showy vocabulary. Others make no sense, and he doesn't explain them clearly or adequately. I do not recommend this book to anyone.
Rating: 
Summary: A Must-have for any student of the Social Sciences
Review: I was first introduced to this book in a college course that examined the intellectual history of the 'Western' world from the French Revolution onward. Anderson's book serves as a thorough examination of the forces that shaped the nation, and also makes some unique assertions as to nationalism's origins. Some of his supporting examples are rather specialized (e.g. Indonesia), and Anderson tends to quote rather long passages in foreign languages without the benefit of a translation. However, his fantastic observations of the construction of nationalism as an 'Imagined Community' make this text worth a spot in anyone's library.
Rating: 
Summary: amazing
Review: I was fortunate enough to take a class taught by Ben Anderson (Professor Anderson) at Cornell. And I was introduced to this book in his class. This book really blew me away. Further, other Professors at Cornell spoke very highly of him - I heard more than one professor talk of him - and who seemed truly in awe of his intellect. And how many other professor of mine would utter words like, "Well, when I met U Nu..."
Rating:
Summary: Historiography at its most Captivating
Review: Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson seeks to explain the seeds of what he terms "imagined communities," which are for the most part "nations". It is also a careful chronological account of how these seeds grew into actual policies through the breaking apart of the Latin language, the dissemination of mass-media into new ideas of national history, and ultimately how history and language served to preserve national identity. In the first chapter, "Cultural Roots," Anderson claims that the birth of the imagined community is directly linked to Industrialization and its two byproducts, the novel and the newspaper. The novel and the newspaper first made the public aware of simultaneous experiences that allowed them to conceive of themselves as not alone, but rather an entity that worked together. The concept of time as a linear, progressive notion was another result of Industrialization, and Anderson argues that this "calendrical" way of looking at the past was another important factor in imagined communities as it allows groups of people to think of a historic root in national identity. In the following chapter, "Origins of National Consciousness," Anderson takes his point further by arguing that print-capitalism and capitalism in general sought to benefit from growing literacy among "laypeople." In this way it was self-perpetuating in that it created more of a consuming public that, because of its expansion, began to create and shape a national consciousness of its own. Growing population in general led to the development of new languages from Latin, and the new languages thereby helped shape national consciousness as well. In the fourth chapter, "Creole Pioneers," Anderson explains how colonialism, particularly in respect to the United States of America, also contributed to growing populations who were a mix of the colonized and the colonials. In addition to expanding the public further, these "Creoles" also developed separate understandings of nationalism based on the model those who first came to the colonies. From here, author Benedict Anderson explains how, once established, new colonies such as the Americas "pirated" ideas of modernity and antiquity and used them for their own distinct national purposes. Languages were no longer the basis of national identity, but rather these pirated models gained momentum through administrative and educational institutions. In the chapter "Official Nationalism and Imperialism," Anderson explains how this idea of individual/national antiquity and modernity was adopted as a policy for the first time by various ruling classes: "Such official nationalisms were conservative, not to say reactionary, policies, adapted from the model of the largely spontaneous popular nationalisms that preceded them." (110) In the chapter "The Last Wave," the idea of this centralizing or "Russifying" of schools and administrative facilities is presented as already established within most of the European and colonized nations, and is shown as well underway in the case of Indonesia. This chapter also explores how "Russifying" of nations also led to another unintentional but financially beneficial necessity, bilingualism. Bilingualism was important at this point because it further explained how language was not the sole root of national consciousness, and also because it allowed for the proliferation of more print-capitalism (and at this stage, other new forms of media) which led to a wider understanding of nationality on the part of the reader. At this point, the idea of nationality and the implementation of imagined communities were firmly in place, but policies were necessarily shifted in order to preserve national identity. In "Patriotism and Racism," Benedict Anderson seeks to explain what motivated already-formed imaginary communities was the future. This look toward the future of individual nations in part explains the use of racism in nationalism, because "The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destines, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations." (149) Alongside racism, patriotism was also necessary to ground national consciousness, and only at this point is language instrumental in preserving national identity because it is now the link to the past and is a vehicle for people to understand the history of their nationality. The last three chapters of Imagined Communities explain how nations preserve their histories in different ways. Benedict Anderson shows how the legacies of dead regimes are actual models upon which revolutionary governments take over and continue to use. In "Census, Map, Museum" we are shown how each of these ways of classifying different nationalities in physical terms "illuminate the late colonial state's style of thinking about its domain." (184) And finally, in memory and forgetting, Benedict Anderson explains how staples of the "imaginary community" are further preserved by the illumination and glorification of certain aspects of history, and the deliberate "forgetting" of incriminating remnants of the past (i.e., the Civil War in America.) Imagined Communities is an straightforward account of how ideas of nationality were first born through print-media and language, how they later became policies, and how they ultimately sought self-preservation through different means.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Work in Nailing down Nationalism
Review: In Imagined Communities, Anderson gives a detailed analysis of nation building projects and their relationship to print media. Nationalism has been a difficult concept to define. Some like King Faisal's right hand man, Sati Al-Husri, defined nationalism by language. In contrast, Anderson defines nationalism as a construction created in imagination by print media. "It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members," Anderson explains. Moreover, "It is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings."
Anderson looks at the early communities, which he says were mostly constructed around religious ideologies and were linked by the publication of books on those religious concepts. These original "communities" did not necessarily confine themselves to a given geo-political unit. However, newspapers made it possible for people in a geographically vast region to discuss the same topic at the local coffee shop, coffer or workshop. This, says Anderson, had a powerful impact on the creation of an imagined community, called a nation. Anderson then begins to look at conglomerate pioneers as a contrast to nation-state building projects. In this area, he discusses market-zones, similar to, but preceding organizations like the European Union. Who would die for such a construction? asks Anderson. He makes a distinction between this kind of imagined community and the imagined community of the nation-state.
Anderson's historical examination of the construction of nationalism seems to have merits. However, he leaves open the idea that it is an ongoing and dynamic process. This text lays the foundation for future examinations of "imagined communities" in new forms. Media appears to be a critical social component in Anderson's argument. If that is the case, there is another question that follows. What happens when the forms of media change? What happens when media, that was, at one time, limited to a geographical location becomes global? What happens when media forms that were at one time, linguistically limited, expand to bilingual or possibly even multilingual components? Anderson's book provides a great framework from which to do future scholarship.
Rating:
Summary: A masterful essay critiques central issue of modern age
Review: Mr. Anderson does not promise or provide answers. If you're looking for a quick answer to the hard questions your professors are asking, you're in the wrong place - and perhaps the wrong class. What IS presented is a remarkable and thoughtful examination of the rise of nationalism - and more importantly, of the consciousness of nations as constituted in individuals and in communitites. Mr. Anderson examines some of the necessary preconditions to modern conceptualizations of "nation" in a manner that is at once accessible and deeply provocative. An essential read for any student of world politics and for anyone who would aspire to be an informed citizen in the coming decades.
Rating:
Summary: Important book
Review: This is an excellent book for understanding the present "state" (no pun intended) of the world. Why is the globe chopped up into these seemingly arbitrary political units?, is Anderson's question. How can one make sense of nationalism and its development throughout the world in the last few hundred years?Anderson's reliance on "print capitalism" and the literate class (elite and educated bourgeois) as the predominant community to imagine itself seems limited to me. The politically dominant group's use of nationalism as a reinforcement of power structures, or in order to re-form power structures in the case of revolution and resistance, in Anderson's argument, developed through a widespread choice of language and access to information within that language group. Religious affiliations, and ethnic communities shaped not only through spoken/written languages in the pre-capitalist period were gradually replaced by nationalistic groups developed through colonialist projects. If you read this book, you will open your eyes to the present reality of nationalism, which is now being contradicted by the rise of super-national constituencies based on religious affiliation. Almost a step backward to feudalism, and I await Anderson's next book and some illuminating theory on recent world conflicts.
Rating:
Summary: An awful book
Review: This is an excellent book for understanding the present "state" (no pun intended) of the world. Why is the globe chopped up into these seemingly arbitrary political units?, is Anderson's question. How can one make sense of nationalism and its development throughout the world in the last few hundred years? Anderson's reliance on "print capitalism" and the literate class (elite and educated bourgeois) as the predominant community to imagine itself seems limited to me. The politically dominant group's use of nationalism as a reinforcement of power structures, or in order to re-form power structures in the case of revolution and resistance, in Anderson's argument, developed through a widespread choice of language and access to information within that language group. Religious affiliations, and ethnic communities shaped not only through spoken/written languages in the pre-capitalist period were gradually replaced by nationalistic groups developed through colonialist projects. If you read this book, you will open your eyes to the present reality of nationalism, which is now being contradicted by the rise of super-national constituencies based on religious affiliation. Almost a step backward to feudalism, and I await Anderson's next book and some illuminating theory on recent world conflicts.
Rating:
Summary: Important book
Review: This is an excellent book for understanding the present "state" (no pun intended) of the world. Why is the globe chopped up into these seemingly arbitrary political units?, is Anderson's question. How can one make sense of nationalism and its development throughout the world in the last few hundred years? Anderson's reliance on "print capitalism" and the literate class (elite and educated bourgeois) as the predominant community to imagine itself seems limited to me. The politically dominant group's use of nationalism as a reinforcement of power structures, or in order to re-form power structures in the case of revolution and resistance, in Anderson's argument, developed through a widespread choice of language and access to information within that language group. Religious affiliations, and ethnic communities shaped not only through spoken/written languages in the pre-capitalist period were gradually replaced by nationalistic groups developed through colonialist projects. If you read this book, you will open your eyes to the present reality of nationalism, which is now being contradicted by the rise of super-national constituencies based on religious affiliation. Almost a step backward to feudalism, and I await Anderson's next book and some illuminating theory on recent world conflicts.
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