ISAIAH BERLIN
355
succession states after the First World War, and was incorporated in the
constitution of the League of Nations. As for Marxists, although they
regarded nationalism as historically reactionary, even they did not
demand the total abolition of national frontiers; provided that class
exploitation was abolished by the socialist revolution, it was assumed
that free national societies could exist side by side until, and after, the
withering away of the state conceived as an instrument of class domina–
tion.
Neither of these ideologies anticipated the growth of national
sentiment and, more than that, of aggressive nationalism. What, I
think, was ignored was the fact which only, perhaps, Durkheim
perceived clearly, namely, that the destruction of traditional hierar–
chies and orders of social life, in which men's loyalties were deeply
involved, by the centralisation and bureaucratic "rationalisation"
which industrial progress required and generated, deprived great
numbers of men of social and emotional security, produced the
notorious phenomena of alienation, spiritual homelessness and grow–
ing
anomie,
and needed the creation, by deliberate social policy, of
psychological equivalents for the lost cultural, political, religious
bonds which served
to
maintain the older order. The socialists believed
that class solidarity, the fraternity of the exploited, and the prospect of
a just and rational society which the revolution would bring to birth,
would provide this indispensable social cement; and indeed, to a degree
it did so. Moreover, some among the poor, the displaced, the deprived,
emigrated to the New World. But for the majority the vacuum was
filled neither by professional associations, nor political parties, nor the
revolutionary myths which Sorel sought to provide, but by the old,
traditional bonds, language, the soil, historical memories real and
imaginary, and by institutions or leaders which functioned as incarna–
tions of men's conceptions of themselves as a community, a
Gemeinschaft-symbols
and agencies which proved far more powerful
than either socialists or enlightened liberals wished
to
believe. The
idea, sometimes invested with a mystical or messianic fervour, of the
nation as supreme authority, replacing the church or the prince or the
rule of law or other sources of ultimate values, relieved the pain of the
wound to group consciousness, whoever may have inflicted it-a
foreign enemy or native capitalists or imperialist exploiters or an
artificially imposed, heartless bureaucracy.
This sentiment was, no doubt, deliberately exploited by parties
and politicians, but it was there to be exploited, it was not invented by
those who used it for ulterior purposes of their own.
It
was there, and
