ABSTRACT
If, as I have suggested in chapter 4, Giddens’s efforts to confront emotion and culture on a private and intimate level-through reading Freud and taking up feminism with the aim of constructing a modernist conceptualization of reflexive self-identity-seem brittle and frankly chauvinist, his efforts to confront emotion on a more collective level, through nationalism, are equally stiff and frankly authoritarian. If he tries to replace traditional emotion with modernist conviction regarding personal intimacy, he attempts to replace the concept of nationalism with the modernist notion of the nation-state. Consistent with his tendencies to amputate history and tradition from the present, he simply cannot fathom connections between the sentiments that animate the nation-state and traditional patriotism. And for all his tedious efforts to present the nation-state as an entity with clearly demarcated borders and surveillance, in the end, his thought comes across as obsolete. For example, the information revolution in general and the Internet in particular have made state borders seem old-fashioned: electronically mediated information travels across such borders as if they did not exist. But the underside of the modern nation-state is that old-fashioned nationalism has grown more, not less, powerful in contemporary times, such that nationalists around the world-who are better informed than our ancestors could have imagined, precisely because of the information revolution-no longer hold state borders as sacrosanct. Finally, the general drive toward national emancipation is constantly at loggerheads with the modernist desire to enshrine permanent state borders. These are among the tensions that characterize political life in contemporary times, which Giddens’s modernist thought cannot grasp.
