nationalism is the result of modern industrialization,Explain?
Answers
Gellner defined nationalism as "primarily a political principle that holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent"[3] and as
the general imposition of a high culture on society, where previously low cultures had taken up the lives of the majority, and in some cases the totality, of the population. It means the general diffusion of a school-mediated, academy supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of a reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication. It is the establishment of an anonymous impersonal society, with mutually sustainable atomised individuals, held together above all by a shared culture of this kind, in place of the previous complex structure of local groups, sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and idiosyncratically by the micro-groups themselves.[4]
Gellner analyzed nationalism by a historical perspective.[5] He saw the history of humanity culminating in the discovery of modernity, nationalism being a key functional element.[5]Modernity, by changes in political and economical system, is tied to the popularization of education, which, in turn, is tied to the unification of language.[5] However, as modernization spread around the world, it did so slowly, and in numerous places, cultural elites were able to resist cultural assimilation and defend their own culture and language successfully.[5]
For Gellner, nationalism was a sociological condition[5] and a likely but not guaranteed (he noted exceptions in multilingual states like Switzerland, Belgium and Canada[2]) result of modernisation, the transition from agrarian to industrial society.[1][2] His theory focused on the political and cultural aspects of that transition.[1] In particular, he focused on the unifying and culturally homogenising roles of the educational systems, national labour markets and improved communication and mobility in the context of urbanisation.[1] He thus argued that nationalism was highly compatible with industrialisation and served the purpose of replacing the ideological void left by both the disappearance of the prior agrarian society culture and the political and economical system of feudalism, which it legitimised