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Entry: What Is Nationalism? Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/what_is_nationalism#29321 Post contents: Defining nationalism in terms of a <i>people</i> is just begging the question. What the hell is a "people", then? There are other, less serious, problems with the definition as well. For instance, some of the canonical examples of nationalism, such as the Armenian, did not really demand a state at all. But the circularity of referring to a vague and undefined concept of "people" makes the definition pretty much useless. It's interesting that writers at a <i>conservative</i> forum are apparently trying to conceptualize nationalism from scratch, ignoring a long <i>tradition</i> of scholarship on the subject. This tradition includes putative definitions (everybody's got one of his own), and also plenty of contention about whose concept is the best. As far as I can tell from very limited reading, the concepts of "nation" and "nationalism" have evolved dialectically over time, even in recent scholarship. Maybe one of the reasons that the writers here have seemed so disoriented, spinning their wheels on this topic for months, is that they're apparently writing without reference to that long tradition of scholarship. Sent at: 2009 01 08