ISAIAH
BERLIN
353
national self-assertion. The wounds inflicted upon one society by
another, since time immemorial, have not in all cases led to a national
response. For that, something more is needed-namely, a new vision of
life with which the wounded society, or the classes or groups which
have been displaced by political and social change, can identify
themselves, around which they can gather and attempt to restore their
collective life. Thus both the Slavophil and the populist movements in
Russia, like German nationalism, can be understood only if one
realises the traumatic effect of the violent and rapid modernisation
imposed on his people by Peter the Great, and on a smaller scale, by
Frederick the Great in Prussia-that is, the reaction against the effect of
technological revolutions or the development of new markets and the
decay of old ones, the consequent disruption of the lives of entire
classes, the lack of opportunity for the use of their skills by educated
men psychologically unfit to enter the new bureaucracy, and, finally,
in the case of Germany, occupation or colonial rule by a powerful
foreign enemy which destroyed traditional ways of life and left men,
and especially the most sensitive and self-conscious among them–
artists, thinkers, whatever their professions-without an established
position, insecure and bewildered. There is then an effort to create a
new synthesis, a new ideology, both to explain and justify resistance to
the forces working against their convictions and ways of life, and to
point in a new direction and offer them a new centre for self–
identification.
This is a familiar enough phenomenon in our own time, which
has not lacked in social and economic upheavals. Where ethnic ties and
common historical experience are not strong enough to have created a
sense of nationhood, this new focus can
be
a social class, or a political
party, or a church, or, most often, the centre of power and authority–
the state itself, whether or not it is multinational-which raises the
banner under which all those whose traditional modes of life have been
disrupted-landless peasants, ruined landowners or shopkeepers, un–
employed intellectuals, unsuccessful professionals in various spheres–
can gather and regroup themselves. But none of these have, in fact,
proved as potent, whether as a symbol or as a reality, as capable of
acting as a unifying and dynamic force, as the nation; and when the
nation is one with other centres of devotion-race, religion, class-its
appeal is incomparably strong.
.
The first true nationalists-the Germans-are an example of the
combination of wounded cultural pride and a philosophico-historical
vision to stanch the wound and create an inner focus of resistance. First
