Content provided in partnership with

Race, culture, nation: Edith Wharton and Ernest Renan - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2003 by Carol J. Singley

<< Page 1 Continued from page 2. Previous | Next

This essay, widely credited with laying the foundation of modernist notions of nationhood, enters into a "central historical and philosophical debate" dating from the nineteenth century and continuing in contemporary scholarship. The debate asks whether the nation is an "inherent, natural, eternal, and necessary part of human development" or "a contingent event, a function of historical vicissitudes of power, will, desire, and institutions" (Pecora 22). Work at one end of the spectrum in this debate is represented by Johann Gottfried von Herder, Alexander von Humboldt, Friedrich Hegel, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte; work at the other end is represented by Renan and modernists such as Elie Kedourie and Ernest Gellner. The former view assumes that nations are eternal in spirit and organic in nature. As German philosopher Fichte argues in Foundations of Natural Law (1796), the state is "not something which is primary and which exists for its own sake, but is merely the means for the higher purpose of the ... continuous development of what is purely human in this nation" (qtd. in Pecora 22). The state is finally subordinate to the nation. Or as Lord Acton writes in "Nationality" in 1909, the nation is "a soul, as it were, wandering in search of a body in which to begin life over again" (qtd. in Pecora 23).The latter view, which Renan advocates in "What Is a Nation?" is that race, language, religion, and geography, while useful descriptors, do not determine nationhood. Renan rejects the notion, circulating in Germany under Bismarck and later exploited by Hitler, that a nation requires expansion into territories thought to be racially or anthropologically related to it. "The truth is that there is no pure race.... Is Germany an exception to this rule?" (169), asks Renan, protesting the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. He answers the question with a clear no. (6)

Most Popular Articles in Arts: Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism; Free-standing cardboard sculpture; What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...; Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...; Tino Sehgal at the ICA; More »

Renan called into question an organic view of nation and state. There were no nations in antiquity, he argued, only loosely held aggregates. For him, nations are historically circumscribed political forms dating from the Teutonic invasions of the fifth through tenth centuries, born out of bloody violence and conquest rather than peaceful evolution. Nations, he argued, must not be confounded with either biological or linguistic races, and one should not attribute to linguistic groups the status of nation-states. In questioning the romantic model that sees race, language, religion, economy, and geography as grounds for national identity, Renan resembles to some extent John Stuart Mill, who held a similarly liberal view of nationhood (Pecora 21). Nations derive from and depend on the collective memory of past glories and past sacrifices made on the nation's behalf; they thrive on the strength of a present will, desire, and need to continue together. The nation is still "a spiritual principle" (Renan, "What Is a Nation" 174) as well as the actual land that comprises it, but nations are not eternal. Renan defines nation not as a group's genealogy but as its common legacy of memories and a commitment to go on together. His view prefigures that of many contemporary scholars who insist that the meaning of nation be restricted to the achieved nation-state; it presages, in particular, Benedict Anderson's argument that nations are "imagined communities," discursively created.

Race, culture, nation: Edith Wharton and Ernest Renan - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2003 by Carol J. Singley

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Reference

Most Popular Articles in Arts

Most Popular Publications in Arts