The French Ideology? Louis Dumont and the German Conception of the Nation

Abstract

Abstract. This article examines the contribution of Louis Dumont to the study of German national ideology. In a series of essays over a ten‐year period in the 1980s Dumont aimed at providing a selective intellectual history of modern Germany, which in the final resort would account for the emergence of Nazi Germany. By focusing on factors such as the predominance of holism, the idea of universal sovereignty and the introverted individualism of the Reformation, Dumont believes that it is possible to uncover the dynamics of modernity in Germany. This development he contrasted with that of France, in which a non‐cultural definition of the nation prevailed and where holism was non‐dominant. The article concludes with a critique of Dumont's narrow version of intellectual history and with the suggestion that only a proper historical sociology of modern Germany can explain Nazism.

How essentialist beliefs about national groups differ by cultural origin and study abroad experience among Chinese and American college students

“…In this paper, we use the terms "nationality" and "national groups" to refer to people's subjective understanding of nations and national memberships, instead of the legal contents of one's citizenship status as defined by either domestic or international laws. For some, nations are stable communities of people sharing common territory, language, cultural traditions, and economic life (Guibernau, 1996;Llobera, 1996), while others have pointed out that none of those elements as mentioned above constitute a sufficient or necessary component of nationhood (Reicher & Hopkins, 2001). As such, many scholars adopt the idea that nations are imagined communities (Anderson, 1991), the concept of which is largely shaped by common subjective experience.…”