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Full Idea
People who speak one language and read the same newspapers today call themselves 'nations', and also want much too eagerly to be of common ancestry and history.
Gist of Idea
People feel united as a nation by one language, but then want a common ancestry and history
Source
Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 34[203])
Book Ref
Nietzsche,Friedrich: 'Fragments from 1885-86 (v 16)', ed/tr. Del Caro,Adrian [Stanford 2020], p.60
A Reaction
This sort of nationalism is still with us, as white supremacy, and as history as mythology. But we can't just shake off a sense of which gene pools we come from, and which lines of history are our personal inheritance.
| 23273 | In a good state the goal of the citizens and of the whole state are united [Hegel] |
| 23042 | National spirit only exists in the individuals who embody it [Green,TH, by Muirhead] |
| 23194 | People feel united as a nation by one language, but then want a common ancestry and history [Nietzsche] |
| 23810 | Charity is the only love, and you can feel that for a country (a place with traditions), but not a nation [Weil] |
| 23828 | National prestige consists of behaving as if you could beat the others in a war [Weil] |
| 22816 | Socialists reject nationality as a false source of identity [Miller,D] |
| 21123 | Liberal Nationalism is more communitarian, and Constitutional Patriotism more cosmopolitan [Shorten] |
| 23535 | Western workers turn to nationalism, to avert the effects of globalisation [Berardi] |
| 23130 | Popular imperialism gives the poor the belief that their acts have world historical meaning [Gopnik] |
| 23131 | Patriots love their place, but nationalists have a paranoid ethnic hostility [Gopnik] |
| 22592 | Nationalism pretends that we can only have a single identity [Dunt] |