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In rounding off an account of nations and nationalism, the historian E.J. Hobsbawm refers to Hegel's nineteenth-century dictum that the owl of Minerva which brings wisdom, flies out at dusk. This maxim summarises a broader Hegelian observation on the nature of philosophical activity. Philosophy is the 'thought of the world', said the Germanic sage who has earned renown from the deference Karl Marx showed him in later years, though always with the proviso that his perception of reality was decidedly mixed-up. This is not to be confused with the thinking of contingent and mortal beings, but of the world itself. And the remarkable quality of this variety of thought is that it 'does not appear until reality has completed its formative process'.
These mystifying utterances, when read with some rigour, imply that philosophical thinking always falls short of the practical tasks humanity may face. To parse the twelfth of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, philosophers interpret the world in diverse ways but never quite address their true purpose of changing it. In Hegel's imagination, the theoretical knowledge to transform the world is achieved only post facto, well after 'reality' has acquired its final contours. 'Philosophy' then emerges full-blown, as the knowledge that made 'reality' possible.
With the 'owl of Minerva' circling the nation-state, Hobsbawm suggests that nationalism has completed its formative process, exhausted its energy as a historical force.1 It is further implied in Hegel's locutions that scholarship only catches up with phenomena at a time when it is too late to be of relevance, as when nationalism has completed its life-cycle as a force of history. As long as it is a live force, nationalism remains a complex mix of emotions, a tug at the heart, a call to action and an invitation to suspend rational thinking. In all these guises, it eludes an accurate characterisation.
In his foreword to the second edition of a ground-breaking work on the nation as an 'imagined community', Benedict Anderson observes that the years since 1983, when his book first appeared, have witnessed an explosion of theoretical work on nationalism.2 Indeed, the aggregation of all earlier scholarship on nationalism, he says, just does not match the post-1980s literature, in insight and authenticity. The point is incontestable, though with...