How We Imagine A Nation part 2

In part 1 I introduced a theme/thesis for this series of posts:

• ‘Nation’ is both sovereign and transcendent. 
• ‘Nation’ is both a social imaginary and an emergent reality.

Charles Taylor utilizes the term ‘social imaginary’ to refer to god-like capacity described by Anderson.  The term encompasses a threefold meaning:

1. First is the way that ordinary people “imagine” their surroundings both in theory and in images, stories, and legends.
2. Second is the general acceptance and participation in the imaginary by a population and not simply the theories dominated by a small elite.
3. Third is empowerment provided from the imaginary for widely shared practices and a sense of legitimization.[1]

These three aspects, illustrated as legs on a table, provide a stability upon which both national identity and personal belonging rest. Expectations for behavior and vessels of meaning are then hosted within that conception.

One impact of this capacity to conceptualize national identity and belonging is in answer to the question “what would make someone be willing to die for their country?” Anderson proposes a model of historic drift where sovereignty, which had previously been located in either religion or king (or both), has shifted decisively to the Nation in recent centuries. This is a dramatic innovation and recognizing nationality as a valid location for sovereignty has significantly altered matters related to loyalty, sacrifice and belonging.

Anderson proposes a definition of the nation as “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” The distinction of imagined because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them”.

Communities are limited because there must be some distinguishing demarcation outside of which are other communities (nations), which provide both competition and opportunities for cooperation. This distinction provides a vital function as classifications such as all of us are difficult without the contrast inherent within the project of establishing communities. It is difficult to conceptualize amorphous membership in groups such as everyone and all.

Communities are imagined as sovereign “because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm.” [2]  The dissolving social order of caste and class provided more level (if desperately unequal in reality) conception of both membership and participation for the mass of the population. This perceived leveling and opening gave rise to a new capacity for sacrifice on behalf of the imagined entity – an entity that was not solely and externally located in eternity or beyond, but in an ideal which one was associated (belonged) and participated and was thus responsible. To die for a religion (God) or a King was to reinforce that social order which established the hierarchical strata. Locating sovereignty within the conception of Nation – however dispersed and elusive – was a profound change.

In 1922 Carl Schmitt wrote his famous work Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. In this book he makes two extraordinary claims: the first is that sovereign lies with the one who has the power to make the exception, the second is that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”[3]  In 2011 Paul Kahn wrote an engagement of Schmitt’s work with four new chapters on the same subject. Kahn’s work is helpful in understanding this initial shift under consideration.

The capacity for the state to ask for this kind of sacrifices, the power to pardon – which is a remnant of Kingly authority, and the symbolic notion of a flag that needed to be defended are all remnants of a religious notion. The very word sovereign is borrowed from religious vocabulary.  Kahn explains:

Political theology today is best thought of as an effort to describe the social imaginary of the political… (arguing) that secularization, as the displacement of the sacred from the world of experience, never won, even though the church may have lost. The politics of the modern nation-state indeed rejected the church but simultaneously offered a new site of sacred experience.[4]

In this framing, we understand the constitution as the product of a popular sovereign, one to which we belong and participate. The constitution (law) is the result of an extraordinary act (revolution).  Kahn sees this as a deeply theological conception. It is born out of a (extraordinary/divine) moment; it produces a sacred center – the popular sovereign. The constitution is then the remnant that is left behind from that extraordinary moment. 

You can begin to see why the constitution is often thought of and talked about as an inspired document (sacred text) and why those who were responsible for it’s creation (founding fathers) are celebrated at patriarchs.[5]

If Schmitt is right – even partially – then all of these similarities are neither trivial nor inconsequential.