The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age: Difference between revisions

===On nationalism===

{{quote|“Much the same can be said of nationalism, which became a corollary to mass democracy. States that could employ nationalism found that they could mobilise larger armies at a smaller cost. ''Nationalism was an invention that enabled a state to increase the scale at which it was militarily effective''. Like politics itself, nationalism is mostly a modern invention. As sociologist Joseph Llobera has shown in his richly documented book on the rise of nationalism, the nation is an imagined community that in large measure came into being as a way of mobilising state power during the French Revolution. As he puts it, “In the modern sense of the term, national consciousness has only existed since the French Revolution, since the time when in 1789 the Constituent Assembly equated the people of France with the French nation.” Nationalism made it easier to mobilise power and control large numbers of people. Nation-states formed by underlining and emphasising characteristics that people held in common, particularly spoken language. This facilitated rule without the intervention of intermediaries. It simplified the tasks of bureaucracy. Edicts that need only be promulgated in one language can be dispatched more quickly and with less confusion than those that must be translated into a Babel of tongues.