Review of Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity by Liah Greenfeld

*Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity* by Liah Greenfeld (1992). Published by Harvard University Press.

It feels wild to write and admit that I am now in my third semester of graduate school and am about to get out of here with a master’s degree, but here we are. I’ve almost done it. Just have to write the thesis next semester (at the time of writing this) and then walk across that stage, finding a career path where we can make more good in the world.

In the meantime, I’m taking a nationalism course this semester and the content we’re talking about is so relevant in the world and society we live in today. I’m quite glad to have taken this class and have a space for such discussions.

The second book we read in the class was Greenfeld’s Nationalism: The Five Roads to Modernity. We went chapter by chapter each week, skipping certain ones for the sake of time.

But because I was really interested in this book and what Greenfeld had to say, I ended up just keep reading through and ploughing through the chapters we didn’t get through while in class.

Greenfeld is such a brilliant mind, and while this content is now outdated as well (she published this in 1992), there’s certainly quite a bit to learn from it.

Let’s get into the review, shall we?

Five case studies on the rise of nationalism in the Western world.

There’s something really interesting that Greenfeld does to lay down the foundation of her argument: while this book isn’t completely in chronological order, she starts with England because Greenfeld is known to argue that nationalism began in Tudor England. That is the first chapter and section oft his book, as Greenfeld tracks the changes in the British monarchy after the War of the Roses.

There’s a lot of fascinating discussions on how the Parliament was slowly shifting the kinds of language they were using in legal documents, as well as the general changing trends in the population at the time.

The second chapter is on France, which follows a similar but different formula than English method. Like the English, they believed they were the most god-given kingdom and because of that their kings had a divine right to rule, but that language, too, began to shift with time.

The more obvious ending for this one is the shifting of power from the elites to new elites, which they obviously did not like, setting the grounds for the French revolution.

The remaining three chapters are on Russia, Germany, and the United States. If you’re American like I am, a lot of this information isn’t going to be knew if you’ve bothered to go in-depth with our history, as Greenfeld touches on topics like the Puritan work ethic and what it took to survive in a place that was essentially seen as a mini England—except the English did not see them in that way.

I think one of my biggest critiques, and this is something my professor also brought up during our discussion in class, was that Greenfeld doesn’t acknowledge the plight of Native Americans in the United States.

Her argument completely ignores the fact the United States committed cultural genocide against the people who were living there to begin with, which I think could make her argument so much stronger when it comes to nationalism and the form of civic nationalism arising in the country at this time.

Germany and Russia are different cases, though. Germany shows us the example of the literati and the role of artists in shaping what nationalism looks like in the country, and in both cases of Russia and Germany, it lead to horrible events with the revolution in 1918, the rise of the Bolsheviks, and the ethnonationalism that came out of Germany with the Nazi party.

I honestly found these two chapters the most dense of them all.

Overall Thoughts

As my concluding thought in the previous section stated, I think that this was a very dense book, but necessary if you’re wanting to dig deeper into political science and the implications of nationalism on certain societies and cultures.

Granted, I had to read this for class, but it began the journey of figuring out the connections between my own research, and we were reading these texts when the new Israeli conflict rose with Hamas.

That said, it really helped me connect the dots and begin to understand everything going on through a deeper level.

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