ABSTRACT
The last chapter dealt with the rise of what Smith has calledclassical modernism, the notion that ‘nations and nationalism are intrinsic to the nature of the modern world and to the revolution of modernity’.3 As a result of pioneering work by theorists such as Deutsch, Kedourie and Gellner, by the end of the 1960s a conception of both nations and nationalism was in place which viewed them largely as by-products of modernity. Academics working in the social or political sciences often reacted (consciously or subconsciously) to the earlier ‘perennialism’ of historians who had routinely assumed that national sentiments and consciousness were ‘fundamental elements of historical phenomena and their main explanatory principles’.4 Proponents of the new, ‘modernist’ approach claimed, by contrast, that nations and nationalism were both ‘necessary and functional for industrial modernity’.5 In other words, ‘a particular kind of socio-economic formation required a certain kind of culture and ideology, and vice-versa’.6
