Liberty over nationalism

Somehow I feel like I missed something from earlier in The Idea of Nationalism. The penultimate section of Kohn's final chapter was about Russia, and it wasn't until this that I realized that Kohn wasn't working on countries at random but rather sweeping from west to east (unless this is just how nationalism spread chronologically). 

The final chapter wraps everything up and works as a peak from which Kohn proclaims his conclusions. Surprisingly, and spoilers lay ahead, Kohn doesn't consider nationalism as the ultimate thing that humans strive for. Instead, he believes that liberty is the virtue that all people interested in helping humanity strive to reach and spread. Nationalism is just an expression of this drive for independence and self-sufficiency. 

Overall, Kohn's book deserves the high praise it has on its cover. It is a study of incredible breadth and some considerable depth. So much breadth in fact, that there are a few points at which I wish Kohn's project gave him more space to go further in depth. 

This book's also a little dated. I feel like Kohn's work on the ancient and medieval worlds is more evergreen, but his stuff about countries even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is probably a bit frayed. It has been 70 years since this book was first published, after all. 

But that shouldn't keep fans of history books from checking out Hans Kohn's The Idea of Nationalism.