Euro-American powers, Nader invites us to take our inspiration from the earlyMiddle Eastern travellers who came to the West and wrote from within ‘a traditionof explicit and forthright comparison’ (p. 213), offering descriptions of ‘others’ inwhich possibilities of coexistence were explored. Drawing from an eclectic sampleof literature dealing with the global connections between the Middle East and theWest, the author achieves a much needed – and very timely – intellectual ‘check-up’ and warns us against cultural framings that serve to side-line serious explora-tions of the roots and nature of human suffering. It is crucial for all those of us whoare genuinely concerned with peace to liberate our imaginations from the mythsand stereotypes that work to divide us.

Julie BillaudMax Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Germany)

J.A. del Real AlcaláNacionalismo e Identidades colectivas: la disputa de los intelectuales(1762–1936)Madrid: Dykinson, 2008, 455 pp.€39.33 pbk

Real Alcalá’s Nacionalismo e Identidades colectivas is a fascinating and highlyaccessible study of some of the most important theories on the concept of nationthat flourished in western Europe between 1762 and 1936. The time span rangesfrom the publication of Rousseau’s Contrat Social, when the problem of definingthe nature of nations became a political concern, to the works of FriedrichMeinecke and his famous distinction between Kulturnation and Staatsnation.

Real Alcalá carries out his study by analysing three fundamental debates. Thefirst, which took place between the end of the eighteenth and the first half of thetwentieth century, was centred on the relationship of nations with their own pastand the legitimacy of political claims based on their history. Through the writingsof authors as different as Voltaire, Thierry, and Ranke, Real Alcalá examines theissue of the social function of a shared collective memory and describes the waysin which this was created or contested. The second debate, connected to thedevelopment of social sciences in the mid-nineteenth century, centred around thenature of the bond tying men to one another, and the conceptual relationshipbetween nation and society. Referring to the writings of Pasquale Mancini, LordActon, Renan, and Tönnies, the book highlights the limits of the ‘liberal’ vision ofnationhood developed during those years and examines some of the conceptualambiguities of the civic/ethnic dichotomy set forth by these authors. The third andfinal quarrel, which played out during the first half of the twentieth century,focused instead on the institutionalization of the nation, and on the difficulty ofrelating that to the idea of the ‘state’– a central concern for the likes of Jellinek andMeinecke. By studying and dissecting these debates, argues Real Alcalá, it ispossible to identify a ‘historical’, a ‘social’, and a ‘state paradigm’, each, in three

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distinct and subsequent stages, deeply influencing the ways the nation conceiveditself and its own past.

While a study of ideas about the nation through the writings of Europe’s mostprominent intellectuals helps to fill an existing void in current literature, RealAlcalá’s book does suffer from some shortcomings – as any work addressing suchan issue in those terms inevitably would. The first is that not much is said about lateeighteenth-century authors in spite of the fact that Real Alcalá’s study declaredlystarts with Rousseau’s Contrat Social – largely ignored because it is not a‘complete’ theory of the nation (p. 31). From this angle, one might well receive theimpression that the time span chosen has been unduly stretched merely to create aneat separation between the first and the second phase and to distinguish moreclearly the ‘historical’ from the ‘social’ paradigm.

A second more relevant limitation is that the chronological layout of the threeparadigms ignores the fact that discussions on the relationship of nation andsociety, as well as historical debates on the legitimacy of political claims, con-tinued to occur, and were often central for many intellectuals, well into thetwentieth century. The chronological division is too sharp and leads the reader tooverlook that such paradigms were not incompatible with one another; on thecontrary, historical discourses often intertwined with legal, political, and socialarguments in ways more complex than Real Alcalá implies. Furthermore, evenaccepting the claim that any one of such discourses became dominant at a giventime, this still remains to be proven. Given the scope of his claim, Real Alcalámight better have supported his arguments with a thorough historical analysis ofthe changes taking place within the overall intellectual climate, then relating themto the many discourses about the nation that took place between the end of theeighteenth and the mid-twentieth century – rather than by studying a relativelysmall number of authors, as important as those might have been.

Notwithstanding these limitations, Real Alcalá’s book stands as an importantcontribution, as it once again brings to the fore of nationalism studies the impor-tance of the role played by intellectuals not only in understanding the idea of nationbut also in shaping the way it was imagined and, by such a token and going beyondthe narrow circles of cultural elites, on the way in which it actually worked.

Matthew D’AuriaUniversity of Salerno

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