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achievement the more remarkable because he spoke from the experience of
a social class in decline, the Protestant professional class of parsons and busi–
nessmen, and he thought to arouse from their sleep a people mainly Roman
Catholic, a type he always disliked and in his later years feared.
The question of nationalism, its origin, and the conditions of its rise,
is much in debate. I assume that national sentiment is a feeling of kinship
with the other people in one's vicinity rather than with people as such or
human beings in general.
It
is a tendency to think of one's race as analo–
gous to one's family. This does not entail thinking well of them on a
particular occasion; it is enough that the analogy with one's family be
retained even in disappointment. The national sentiment may also provoke
a habit of regarding people outside the circle of kinship as different and
perhaps alien. Julia Kristeva has urged people-French people, to begin
with-to break this habit by reflecting on "the unconscious" in Freud's
description of it. Reflection on the unconscious should instruct us that we
are strangers to ourselves. As such, we should find it possible to appreciate
the strangeness of other people-the foreigners outside us-"instead of
striving to bend them to the norms of our own repression." I suppose, too,
that nationalism contains an aspiration to see one's kinship embodied in a
nation, a territory, and ultimately a state.We are also being urged these days
to think of nationalism in relation to other enabling factors: the printing
press, modernization, Romanticism, and the rejection of Enlightenment
values. Some scholars of nationalism present it as a discursive formation
without any ground in one's actual experience. I find this an implausible
argument. At least in Ireland, the nationalist conviction has not begun or
ended in words; it has been provoked by issues of land, ownership, tenan–
cy, trade, the famine, and apparently continuous humiliation.
Until instructed otherwise, I am willing to be persuaded by Hans Kohn
that the sentiment of nationalism reached its clearest formulation in
Rousseau's
Social Contract
with his concept of the "general will." If nation–
alism is, as Kohn describes it, "the state of mind in which the supreme loyalty
of the individual is felt to be due to the nation-state," it seems reasonable to
posit the "general will" as an essential condition of its thriving: it is not the
sum of individual wills but the common will, released from every merely
accidental desire and turned toward the fellowship of one's kind. In that
sense the United States is the first fellowship of people who thought of
themselves as bringing a nation into existence. But it is necessary, with Irish
Nationalism in view, to add to Rousseau's "general will" Herder's concept
of the
Volksgeist,
if
only to take account of the emphasis-in Davis, Hyde,
Daniel Corkery, and
D.
P Moran, to name four otherwise disparate figures–
on the Irish language and the valued differences between the cultures of
Ireland and England. Herder devoted his work to the idea of nation rather
