ABSTRACT
The introduction provides the background for studying Eisenstadt’s sociological analyses of Israeli society and their relation to the Zionist imaginary. It brings to the fore two central perspectives that were heretofore not sufficiently addressed in the assessments of Eisenstadt’s works: The first is the postcolonial perspective, where the state of Israel is understood as the historical product of late 19th-century settler colonialism. The second, following the constructivist approach in the study of nationalism, regards the “Jewish people” – the subject of the Zionist project – as a politically, socially, and historically constructed entity that developed in the 19th century as part of the rise of European Romanticist national movements. The book locates the origins of the Zionist movement’s national ideology and colonization practices within the political culture in which its founders were operating, namely, fin de siècle intellectual circles that emerged in Europe’s imperial sphere. Whereas the book follows the efforts of Israeli sociologists such as Ram and Kimmerling to criticize Eisenstadt’s sociology, it argues that such accounts do not go far enough in addressing the underlying essentialist ideological trajectories and mythic elements in Eisenstadt’s sociology of Israel.
