ABSTRACT
Although historical, cultural, intellectual and religious relations of 'nation' and 'word' have so far been my main focus, clearly these cannot satisfactorily be separated from political and social factors. The increasing specialisms and critial approaches of twentieth-century scholarship, despite (or because of) the detail and depth which they have achieved, have too often tended towards hermetically sealed perspectives on the fact and idea of nationhood and nationalism. However, at the end of the century it is possible to detect a disenchantment with the local, the fragmentary, the disconnected and deconstructed. If the search for unity and coherence is admitted to be a predisposition of European intellectuals in the early nineteenth century, western intellectual experience of the late twentieth century has made it less easy to dismiss this search as simply futile and self-deceiving.
