[1] Modernization theory stands in contrast to primordialism, which hold that nations are biological, innate phenomena, and ethnosymbolism, which emphasizes their pre-modern roots.
Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.
[8] Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism [incongruence, divide] between each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so.
Unlike in Europe, however, Anderson states language development did not play an important role in their formation, and these movements were led by creole elites and not by the intelligentsia.
It means the general diffusion of a school-mediated, academy supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of a reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication.
It is the establishment of an anonymous impersonal society, with mutually sustainable atomised individuals, held together above all by a shared culture of this kind, in place of the previous complex structure of local groups, sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and idiosyncratically by the micro-groups themselves.
That is, they are "a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past".
[17] Despite being modern inventions, Hobsbawm observes how nations claim continuity with history and use this as a legitimator of action and cement group cohesion.
This continuity, however, is largely factitious and was a strategy adopted by the ruling elites to counter the threat posed by mass democracy.
In turn, Hastings responded that Anderson does not explain why the first wave of nation-making was the American nor why "the growth in books did not have in the sixteenth century the effect he postulates for the late eighteenth".
[29] Daniele Conversi believes Gellner ignores the role of war and the military in fostering cultural homogenization and nationalism, as well as the relationship between militarism and compulsory education.