Monday, February 10, 2014

Over-intellectualizing nationalism?

Turning back to the eighteenth century, Kohn looks at philosophers and the influence of classical Greece on German nationalism. The latter of these turns contemporary intellectuals away from any notion of a specific German nationalism and toward something more universal.

At the time, Germany was a collection of regions, each ruled by its own monarch. Thus, some of the intellectuals considered Germany the ideal example for the rest of the world to follow when it came to a single political entity being made of several smaller kingdoms.

However, that's just what the intellectuals were thinking.

This approach to a history of something as broad as "nationalism" bothers me.

Earlier in the book, Kohn dismissed much of the German peasantry as being characterized by an overpowering desire to obey and avoid making waves. So they're discounted.

He's written of the princes of Germany and how they were more concerned with their own power and its continuation than anything like the idea of nationalism.

Now, hearing about people like Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller is fine, but incredibly limited. It wouldn't bother me quite so much if Kohn tried to connect their ideas to events or movements that happened after their deaths (when it's reasonable that anything cutting edge had become mainstream or simply accepted), but he doesn't. In these last few sections, his focus has been almost entirely on individual thinkers and their own ideas of nationalism and where Germany should go in regards to it.

This current chapter, "Stirrings in the Old World: The Folklore of the Past" still has another 38 pages in which Kohn could look at the after effects of these thinkers' ideas. Alternatively, the next chapter "Stirrings in the Old World: Toward the Great Awakening" could be about just that entirely. If either is the case, then Kohn's book stands a good chance of truly being a great work of historical political science.

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