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acknowledge this. Indeed, he hitches his horses to the idea of the opposition between the two, not 

to mention the suppression – political and intellectual – of the one by the other through the 

deployment of ‘fictions like “Marxists as such are not nationalists” or “nationalism is the 

pathology of modern developmental history”’ (161). Needless to say, Anderson provides no 

references for these pernicious fictions. It is noteworthy that although Anderson wishes to be, 

and is, taken for a major authority on the 

subject of nationalism, and one particularly 

well-informed about left scholarship on the 

subject, he has never acknowledged the 

complexity of the interaction of 

Communism and nationalism in the Soviet 

Union, a theme on which some of the most 

insightful work on nationalism has been 

published in the years since the break-up of 

the Soviet Union (Suny, 1993, 1998; 

Martin, 2001). 

 

IC is not an easy work to locate in any tradition of writing about nationalism, usually 

dominated by historians and scholars of politics. As the work of an area studies specialist, it 

draws, in particular, from the author’s long study of South East Asia, although as much, if not 

more space is devoted to the  countries most familiar to him personally – the UK, his country of 

origin, and the US, where he has lived and worked for decades. Indeed, these latter countries 

form the real basis of IC’s most distinctive theses, as we shall see. Discussions of these specific 

national experiences are inserted into some broader arguments about nationalism more generally. 

While literature on nationalism has certainly become more plentiful after 1983, as Anderson 

points out in the Preface to the second edition (p. xii), it was not meagre before then. In any case, 

Anderson nowhere discusses the literature either before or since 1983 to any extent, nor does he 

point to the specific manner in which it falls short and how IC helps fill the gaps. Indeed, 

Anderson identifies himself as something of an outlier of this field of scholarship, referring to his 

‘idiosyncratic method and preoccupations’ being ‘on the margins of the newer scholarship on 

nationalism’ if only to claim that ‘in that sense at least, [IC is] not fully superseded’ (p. xii).  

 

In fact, IC’s relations to other traditions of scholarship on nationalism are murkier than 

this posture of happy, even productive, idiosyncrasy acknowledges. When Anderson declared 

liberalism and Marxism intellectually bankrupt in the face of nationalism, he did so on the 

strength of two very brief quotations: Hugh Seton-Watson’s conclusion that no scientific 

definition of the nation could be devised and Tom Nairn’s statement that nationalism was 

‘Marxism’s greatest historical failure’. Neither can support the weight. Seton-Watson’s inability 

to find a ‘scientific’ definition was due precisely to the substantial elements of subjectivity in the 

phenomenon (Seton-Watson, 1977: 4–5), elements which Anderson would himself emphasize as 

one of the chief themes of IC. Seton-Watson’s remark should, therefore, have led Anderson to 

explore this kind of scholarship further, and acknowledge its insights, not dismiss it.  As for the 

quotation from Nairn, further investigation reveals that Nairn’s account of Marxism’s ‘failure’ 

was far more complex than Anderson allowed. Not only was Nairn aware that Marxism could lay 

claim to the substantial corpus of theory and reflection on the subject of nationalism mentioned 

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above (not to mention Leninist practice: on this see Mayer, 1964), but Nairn went on to say that 

the failure of his Marxist forebears 

 

was not a simply conceptual or subjective one. No amount of brass-rubbing will 

compensate for that. The fact is, that if they could not put together a tolerable theory 

about nationalism, nobody could, or did. Historical development had not at that time 

produced certain things necessary for such a ‘theory’. The time was not ripe for it, or for 

them. Nor would it be ripe until two further generations of trauma had followed 1914. 

There is nothing in the least discreditable to historical materialism in the fact, although it 

is naturally lethal to ‘Marxism’ in the God’s-eye sense. (Nairn, 1981: 331) 

 

‘“Marxism” in the God’s-eye sense’ was, of course, Stalinism, in contrast with which Nairn 

invoked other Marxist and historical materialist traditions of reflection, theory and practice – in 

particular the Bolshevik idea of ‘uneven and combined development’ – on the strength of which 

he made his own very substantial Marxist contribution to the theory of nationalism. Certainly his 

statement gave no warrant for the loose invocation of oppositions between class and nation, 

between socialism and nationalism, which Anderson resorted to so consistently as a stand-in for 

knowledge of Marxist traditions. 

 

 

Anderson’s Miscarried Agenda 

The aims of IC were both modest and swaggering. On the one hand, Anderson claimed no more 

than to ‘offer some tentative suggestions for a more satisfactory interpretation of nationalism’. 

On the other, he breathtakingly claimed to be bailing out both Marxism and liberalism – 

universalist ideologies, ill-at-ease with nationalism – as their lender of last resort, to be imparting 

the liberal and Marxist study of nationalism, both ‘etiolated in a late Ptolemaic effort to save the 

phenomenon’, an urgently required Copernican spirit (p. 4). Anderson would mount this 

intellectual rescue operation, conjure this ‘Copernican spirit’, by looking for resources where, he 

claimed, neither Marxism nor liberalism had been looking – in culture: 

 

nationality, . . . nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular 

kind. To understand them properly we need to consider carefully how they have come 

into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, 

today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy. (p. 4, emphasis added) 

 

In addition to these originally stated aims, he added in 2006, that he had had three others: first, to 

‘critically, of course,’ support Tom Nairn’s claim that the UK was ‘the decrepit relic of a pre-

national, pre-republican age and thus doomed’ and his indictment of ‘classical Marxism’s 

shallow or evasive treatment of the historical-political importance of nationalism’; second, to 

‘widen the scope of Nairn’s theoretical criticisms’ to include ‘classical liberalism and, at the 

margins, classical conservatism; and third, ‘to de-Europeanize the theoretical study of 

nationalism’, an aim which ‘derived from long immersion in the societies, cultures and 

languages of the then utterly remote Indonesia and Thailand/Siam’ (pp. 208–9).  

 

To deal with the originally-stated aims first, if Marxism and liberalism were not bankrupt 

– and we have seen that Anderson’s claims about their bankruptcy were ill-founded – they were 

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