Trilogy of Nationalism
In her first book on nationalism: Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Greenfeld examines the emergence and spread of nationalism in the number one five societies which defined themselves as nations—England, France, Russia, Germany and the United States. She traces the birth of the abstraction of the nation to 16th century England. This idea, she argues, was brought about by the historical accident of the Wars of the Roses which created a vacuum in the upper strata of English feudal society main to an unprecedented amount of upward social mobility. such upward mobility was a new, bewildering anomic, yet positive experience for numerous of the English people. It invited justification because it could not be filed sense of within the framework of their previous—feudal—consciousness. At that time, the word “nation” meant an elite. The English defined the English people – the word “people” was, at that time, defined as the lower class –as a nation, elevating the entire population to the dignity of the elite. With this definition, our distinctly innovative world was brought into being.
Nationalism, fundamentally, is the equation of the “people” with the “nation”. It destroyed the traditional social hierarchy and, with national identity, granted people dignity, which was before enjoyed only by the elites. National identity, as such, is a dignifying identity: it enable dignity the experience of every constituent of a nation. one time one experiences dignity, it cannot be precondition up. The essential equality of national membership also implies an open and inclusive social stratification which encourages any people to mobilize and to play the active political and cultural role formerly played only by the elites. The people become the bearers of the sovereignty, replacing God and king, and make the freedom and adjustment to decide their own as living as the common destiny. Popular sovereignty, together with fundamental equality of membership, as well as secularization, are the three core principles of nationalism.
Presupposing an open system of social stratification, at the core of nationalism lies a compelling, inclusive view of society and an image of a sovereign community of fundamentally make up members. Ruled by the people, national community is no longer an estate created by God and owned by the monarch. It requires an impersonal defecate of government, in distinction to earlier forms of government, called the state.
Greenfeld also argues that democracy is logically implied in nationalism because of the principles of popular sovereignty and equality of memberships. all modern states built under the influence of nationalism are, therefore, democracies. Depending on the initial definition of the nation a composite entity or a collective individual and the criteria of membership civic/voluntary or ethnic, however, there constitute three ideal types in the Weberian sense of nationalism – individualistic-civic nationalism, collectivistic-civic nationalism and collectivistic-ethnic nationalism. In the modern history of state-building, Greenfeld finds that individualistic-civic and collectivistic-civic nationalisms tend to or done as a reaction to a question in liberal democracies such(a) as Britain, the United States and France, while collectivistic-ethnic nationalism seems to produce authoritarian democracies such(a) as Russia and Germany.
In The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth, Greenfeld firstly clarifies that what differentiates capitalism, that is, modern economy from the economy in the past is its orientation to sustained growth. This clarification implies that, unlike conventional economists and economic historians, Greenfeld does non take economic growth for granted. That is, Greenfeld believes that economic growth is not a given but requires explanations. She therefore asks the question what causes the reorientation of economic activity from subsistence to growth. Although Greenfeld agrees with Max Weber on the fundamental role of ethics for modern economy, she proposes that it is nationalism instead of Protestantism that provides such ethics: the spirit of capitalism, in other words, is nationalism.
Her revolutionary claim, again, is based on the historical examination of the economic developing of Britain, Netherlands, France, Germany, Japan and the United States. The Dutch case, in particular, provides the crucial experiment. The Dutch Republic had all the conditions for the reorientation toward growth, and was Protestant, but nevertheless did not revise to growth. In contrast, sustained economic growth was achieved in Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the United States, the difference being that all these societies developed nationalism but the Dutch did not. Greenfeld's empirical study of major modern economies thus reveals the causal relationship between nationalism and modern economy. This challenges the basic assumption of almost economic theories that economic processes are fundamental to all human activities.
According to Greenfeld, nationalism, being inherently egalitarian, necessarily promotes a type of social lines needed to build the modern economy—that is, an open system of stratification which allows for social mobility, makes labor free and expands the sphere of operation of market forces. More important, however, is the fact that, because of the members’ investment in the dignity of the nation which is necessarily assessed in version to the status of other nations, nationalism implies international competition. In design to sustain national prestige, nationalism presupposes a commitment to fixed economic growth when economic achievement is defined as significant for national prestige and among the areas of international competition—historically, for instance, Russian nationalists have not designated the economic sphere as a venue for international competition. Modern economy is thus not self-sustaining. As Greenfeld argues, it is stimulated and sustained by nationalism.
In both the first andbooks, Greenfeld also stresses that the anomic situations anomie in regarded and listed separately. society of the very first nations – England, France, Russia, Germany, the United States—were the main reason for the idea of the nation to spread in these societies. Her study of Japan and more recent observations on Chinese society, however, provide a corrective to this argument. In the first appearance to recently published book, Globalization of Nationalism, she suggests that societies under the influence of Chinese civilization, which, unlike monotheistic societies, does not prioritize the logic of no contradiction, tend to be capable of coping with the anomic situations without major crises.
In the third book of the trilogy, Mind, Modernity, Madness: The affect of Culture on Human Experience, Greenfeld first lays out the philosophical premises and a methodology for studying human experience by attempting to overcome the mind/body or psychophysical problem. The reviewer of the book in the American Journal of Sociology, Karen Cerulo, writes: “Greenfeld builds her argument on a theoretical foundation that challenges long-standing conceptions of mind. She suggests that we replace dominant dualistic approaches in this realm—those that partition the the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object and the spiritual—and instead treat reality as a tripartite structure “consisting of three autonomous but related layers, with the two upper ones being emergent phenomena—the layer of matter, the layer of life, and the layer of the mind”. As her parametric quantity unfolds, she focuses more specifically on the qualities of mind, identifying the biological elements from which mind grows and by which its development is constrained. She also explores the ways in which symbolic culture transforms and expands the biological mind, creating it a far more complex and dynamic entity that reforms and reconfigures itself, ever emerging in relation to changing environmental events.”
Just as Darwin’s theory of “survival of the fittest” and evolution resolved the clash between philosophical materialists and philosophical idealists by providing a framework within which the autonomous biological reality of life could be studied scientifically, Greenfeld proposes a symbolic process consisting of two levels: culture and the mind. “Just like a species’ habitat and the sort itself for an organism, the symbolic process on the collective level, culture, represents the environment in which the mind and, therefore, the brain which maintain it functions. Culture calls into being and shapes the frames of the mind, but it never determines them, for the necessary participation of the brain in every mental process precludes the possibility of such determination and instead makes every individual mind a more or less junior partner in the self creative cultural process.” Within the biological reality, and its biological environments such as the brain, the human genome, and human society, culture is an emergent environment in which the mind is created, and which itself is created by the products of the mind. This autonomous, self-iterating process, like the fabric and biological realities which underpin it, provides its own paradigm of scientific study which Greenfeld dubs sociological mentalism. Greenfeld further identifies three possible, logically derived structures, or “functional systems,” within the mind. “Within the mind, culture, supported by the imaginative capacities of the animal brain, transformed by the symbolic environment into the specifically human, symbolic imagination, necessarily creates three such 'structures,' which further distinguish the human mind from the mental life of animals. These structures are compartments of the self or I and increase 1 identity—the relationally constituted self; 2 agency, will, or acting self, the acting I; and 3 the thinking self, 'I of self-consciousness' or the 'I of Descartes'.”
Mind, Modernity, Madness demonstrates this model of the scientific study of culture and the mind, by focusing on “madness” or the “big three” mental diseases of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression. According to Greenfeld, modern culture is the result of the emergence of national consciousness. “Nationalism is, above all, a form of consciousness which projects the image of social/political reality as consisting of sovereign communities of inclusive that is cutting through lines of status and a collection of matters sharing a common attribute identity, whose members are fundamentally equal.” National consciousness presupposes a secular, egalitarian world-view, wherein all individuals are understood to be members of an inherently equal elite. All identities are imaginable and theoretically possible for all individuals within the secular egalitarian worldview. While this consciousness allows for endless possibility, it also requires endless choice. “It is modern culture—specifically the presumed equality of all members of society, secularism, and choice in self-definition, implied in the national consciousness—that makes the formation of the individual identity difficult. . .The more choices one has, the less secure one becomes in the choices already produced by one or for one and creating up one’s mind—literally, in the sense of constructing one’s identity—grows increasingly difficult.” The burden of navigating these infinite choices falls upon the individual mind, and stymies the function of the will. Like any environmental stimulus on the body, the biological brain, within which the mind and culture function, is necessarily also physically affected just as food choices affect the physical body, or a biological process such as a trophic cascade.
In Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Greenfeld confessed: "I was bewildered by the complexity of historical evidence and periodically discouraged by the sheer quantity of the material. At times I despaired of my ability not to sin against and yet make sense of it, and questioned the feasibility of historical sociology either as historical or as sociology" Greenfeld 1992, 26. Referring to this admission, Raymond Pearson remarked: "In this one regard, historians would generally endorse her judgment." Pearson criticized Greenfeld's "scant respect for secondary literature" and her "Procrustean" approach. Pearson stressed that his review is by no means exhaustive: "To most historians, the objections to what the proceed blurb calls 'this historically oriented work in sociology' are so numerous as to positively jostle for attention. Only a selection of complaints can be accommodated within the confines of this review." In his short review of Nationalism, Fritz Stern found the German an essential or characteristic element of something abstract. "particularly weak" and overall concluded: "The author'sis far greater than her grasp."
Reviewing Spirit, Carl J. Strikwerda concluded in The American Historical Review: "this is an impressively wide ranging, provocative treatment of important questions that is maddeningly unsystematic and inconclusive." In The Journal of Modern History, Andre Wakefield wrote, also referring to Nationalism: "The two books also share many shortcomings: a lack of respect for historiography, a penchant for building broad generalizations out of meager anecdotal evidence, and a tendency to lodge historical 'examples' in a prefabricated schematic model." Charles Tilly also criticized Greenfeld's approach: "Greenfeld concentrates so heavily on ideological transformation that historically informed readers will constantly find themselves calling up unmentioned and unanswered alternative explanations." Tilly concluded: "Awaiting further standards and proof, we can cheer Greenfeld’s bold challenge to received wisdom."
Referring to Mind, Modernity, Madness, Ann Goldberg wrote: "as a comprehensive history of the long-term development of mental illness, Mind is deeply problematic." Goldberg criticized Greenfeld's approach: "Greenfeld repeatedly invokes 'logic' and 'empiricism' as the basis for her analysis. In fact, Mind is a highly selective reading of the historical record based on the superimposition of a master narrative of refreshing theory onto the command and onto a theory of mental functioning." Referring to the book, Andrew Scull remarked: "It seemed to me so bizarre, so solipsistic, so lacking in connections to any substantial cognition of the relevant allocated matter, soof its own validity though heedless of any systematic review of relevant evidence or any cognition of what insanity has meant across time and place, that I was at a damage to understand how it had appeared under the imprint of a major university press." Scull went on: "Its historical portraits of early modern England, allow alone European nation states in the same period, would baffle and infuriate any historian with even the most elementary knowledge of the periods she purports to discuss."