He states that, “It is an imagined community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” 1.

This essay will attempt to explain the underlying philosophies that exist within the post-primordial and anti-essentialist school of liberal thought and chart the contributions made to the constructivist perception of the nation by focusing on Anderson, Gellner, Winichakul, and Hobsbawm as well as provide appropriate historical background to place these views of the nation in social and intellectual context.īenedict Anderson, one of the foremost proponents of the constructivist view of nationalism, defines the nation as a fabrication, a bond between people that did not actually exist prior to its own recognition. The conception of the nation has shifted dramatically, from the proto-jingoist conservatism of the ‘primordial nation’ of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Johann Gottfried Herder and the German nationalist school of thought they represent to the constructivist ‘imagined community’ of Benedict Anderson and the ‘congruence principle’ of Ernest Gellner to the militant anti-nationalism of Thongchai Winichakul’s notion of the artificed ‘geo-body’ and the Marxist ‘bottom-up’ nation of Eric Hobsbawm. A clear and definitive change in the conception of the ‘realness’ of the nation can be seen throughout the historiographical study of nationalism. In the immense field of scholarly work regarding defining nationhood, a raging debate exists between the conservative view of the nation and the constructivist view.

Rhinocéros by Eugène Ionesco