Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

32 THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
designated as nations, but these were perceived as minor changes in entities
regarded as primeval.
Most of these thinkers lived in emerging national cultures, so they tended
to think from within them and were unable to examine them from outside.
Moreover, they wrote in the new national languages, and were thus held
captive by their principal working tool: the past was made to conform closely
to the linguistic and conceptual structures molded in the nineteenth century.
As Marx, seeing the social realities of his time, assumed that history was essentially
a vast supernarrative of class struggles, so most of the others, principally
the historians, imagined the past as the constant rise and fall of eternal nations,
and their mutual conflicts thickly and solemnly packed the history books. The
new nation-states naturally encouraged and generously funded such imagery
and writing, thereby helping to reinforce the contours of the new national
identities.
Reading the works of the British philosopher John Stuart Mill or the
French philosopher Ernest Renan, we encounter some divergent insights,
unusual for their time. As early as 1861, Mill wrote:
A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality, if they are united
among themselves by common sympathies, which do not exist between them
and any others—which make them co-operate with each other more willingly
than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire
that it should be government by themselves or a portion of themselves,
exclusively 12
Renan, on the other hand, declared in 1882:
A nation's existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite, just
as an individual's existence is a perpetual affirmation of life ... The nations
are not something eternal. They had their beginnings and they will end. A
European confederation will very probably replace them. 13
Though both brilliant thinkers were capable of contradictions and hesitations,
their awareness of the democratic core in the formation of a nation showed
that they understood they were dealing with a modern phenomenon. There
was a good reason that these two liberal writers, who viewed mass culture with
12 John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, Chicago: Gateway,
1962, 303. Regarding Mill and the national question, see also Hans Kohn, Prophets and
Peoples: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Nationalism, New York: Macmillan, 1946, 11-42.
13 See "What Is a Nation?" available at www.cooper.edu/humanities/core/hss3/e_renan.html.