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Entry: A Response to Dan Larison Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/a_response_to_dan_larison#25348 Post contents: Let me also start with a disclaimer. I am second to none in my respect for Paul Gottfried, historian (and that's been true since about 1975 or so). But may I offer another kind of historical context? Nationalism became a subject of historical study thanks mainly to Carlton J.H. Hayes of Columbia back in the 1920s, and nobody has got it substantially better since then. Hayes made a distinction between the PROCESS by which tribes and empires became national states, which of course presupposes various markers of national identity, and the more modern nationalism as what he called BELIEF. Claes Ryn would call it "ideology," having in mind the definition of that word of which Russell Kirk would approve. Hayes, himself an increasingly self-conscious Catholic historian, also insisted that nationalism had become a form of religion, and that "as a religion represents a reaction against historic Christianity." While one can be morally neutral about the process, one cannot be morally neutral about the newer forms of ideology and religion. It was precisely Hayes's Catholicism that framed his insights; later on nationalism as a field of study slipped into the hands of "social scientists" and other theoretical types who, as usual, promoted only obfuscation. In Hayes's terms, what has been going on in the foreign policy of the "Shining City on a Hill" since about 1898 is indeed a form of ideological nationalism--more or less virulent from time to time, "liberal" and "conservative" from time to time, but rooted firmly in what Hayes called "a proud and boastful habit of mind about one's own nation, accompanied by a supercilious or hostile attitude toward other nations," and suffused with such hubris that every kind of aggression can be justified. Sent at: 2008 10 07