Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities Summary

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities In Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Anderson presents the definition of the nation as “it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (Anderson). In doing so, Anderson is presenting us with his main argument in that a nation is not a tangible, real idea, but rather an ideological idea, that in a vacuumed can be seen as an imagined entity. Anderson argues that it is imagined because members of any nation will never under any circumstance meet and genuinely know all other members of a nation. In doing so, Anderson is implying that in order to fully be a nation as England is public perceived to be, each individual member would have to know one another. A nation is also limited because each individual member does not want to see …show more content…
In essence what Anderson is saying is that a nation want’s to remain unique, in that each member can feel like they are a distinguished individual by being a part of this group. If everyone were allowed in, than this uniqueness would disappear, thus making a nation limited. The idea of a nation was also born in a time in which the idea of the revolution and the enlightenment were heavily popularized. At the birth of England as a nation, the surrounding countries and territories were undergoing radical changes due to either religious differences and/or political structure. This led to the idea of a sovereign nation as comforting for those in England. The idea of the nation as a community is also an imagined because of the inequalities that exists between its members. Anderson’s arguments that the idea of a nation is imagined