ABSTRACT
The idea of national character—at least, of distinctive group differences—is as old as the first traveler who ever encountered another society, and lived to tell about it on returning to his own. The modern conception of national character has its roots largely in the nineteenth century, when the efforts of nationalities to gain independence, and of imperialist powers to justify their right of rule over others, were fused with racial theory. If one also seeks to maintain the idea of the nation as a meaningful unit of a sociocultural pattern, then one cannot eschew the examination of the national creed, imagoes, style, and consciousness as components of the cultural pattern. It is in this effort, perhaps, by searching out the interplay between personality and the components that the author seeks to specify, that we might yet be able to find some viable meaning in the ambiguous phrase “national character.”.
