FROM ENLIGHTENMENT UNIVERSALISM TO ROMANTIC NATIONALISM
FROM ENLIGHTENMENT UNIVERSALISM TO ROMANTIC NATIONALISM

Summary/Abstract: As Benedict Anderson argues, a community can be called imagined if its members have a sense of belonging together even though they have no direct, personal knowledge of each other.5 This characterization applies to religious communities, the citizens of states, social classes, and nations. All of these are of historical nature. Except in states in which ruling dynasties play a role, in most imagined communities canonized texts and "great narratives" guarantee continuity. For Christians the Bible, for Moslems the Koran is the sacred book, for socialists the works of Marx and his disciples may constitute the core of the cultural canon. Most nations were defined in texts. The self-image of the Hungarians was at least partly created by Ferenc Kölcsey (1790-1838), the author of Hymn (1823), the text that became the national anthem after it was set to music by Ferenc Erkel in 1844.

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