READINGS NATIONAL THOUGHT
Lecture 3: page 25-35; 159-169:
• The history and pre-history of nationalism consists of changes as well as continuities,
none of which are simple or straightforward.
• The nation was not however a rigorously thought-out concept
• A tendency to arrive to the di erent regions and populations a certain set of moral
virtues and vices
• To trace the rise of national rethought in pre-modern Europe, it is useful to look at other
forms of societal grouping and stereotyping. Much more fundamental to the medieval
world order, in terms of social organisation and the regulation of human behaviour, was
the opposition between civilised culture and wild nature.
• From the very beginnings of the English hegemonic presence in Ireland, all the attitudes
were operative
• In fact, Ireland was not a savage wilderness, though that is what these sources
suggest. It had sh monastic life and had been known in previous centuries as ‘island
of saints and scholars’
• England will have to restore the natural order of things by taming Ireland; English
hegemony is a moral imperative
• English policy in Ireland, from the days of Giraldus onwards, was aimed at demarcating
and separating the ares of wildness and civility. The civil portion of Ireland was the part
where royal power was duly acknowledged, where the king’s writ tan.
• As long as Ireland remained a feudal dominion or lordship, the division between, within
and beyond the Pale echoed chivalric patterns
• A crucial transition towards Irish nationalism takes place in the beginning of the 19th
century.
• In the decades following 1800, the peasantry was forged into an e cient mass
movement, and into a powerful political leverage, by the charismatic leader Danielle
O’Connell.
• O’Connell’s camping managed to wrest Catholic emancipation from unwilling British
government. O’Connell’s campaign for economic and legal reforms was overtaken by
an actual nationalist movement. This later movement invoked crucially, the right of the
Irish notion to self-determination.
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, • The recognition of Ireland’s di erent culture, ethnicity and historical consciousness,
legitimising a di erent national status. This national ideology drew together various
source traditions
• The years between O’Connell and Thomas Davis see the emergence of an autonomist
national movement, which as opposed to older forms of anti-English resistance, is
characterised by a number of features aligning it with national movements elsewhere in
Europe. It is propagated by men of letters and often carried by urban activists; it
invokes cultural rather than economic or legal arguments, especially the fact that
Ireland is sep apart form England by its Gaelic language and by the ethnic toots and
historical memories; it spreads by means of urban sociability and print media, by taking
over the public sphere and mobilising public opinion.
• The success of a cultural and philogocial interest in mobilising a national movements
seems crucially to depend on its power to re a public sphere and in a country like
Ireland that public sphere was only just beginning to emerge form and older
downtrodden peasantry
Lecture 4:
• The idea of Renaissance covers a whole hustler of great European transition and
revolution in the 15ht and early 16th centuries
• Renaissance - rebirth, reawakening, and more speci cally a re-asquiantance with the
learning and culture of classical antiquity
• However, the renaissance involved not only a few new ideal of the grandeur that was
Rome, it also brought into fresh circulation the misgivings that Rome had about itself,
and the mixed feeling with which Rome regarded primitive tribes and outside its
frontiers
• Towards the end of the Middle Ages the monarch increasingly becomes the sole focus
of a state’s unity; a position he gains in a power struggle from his feudal nobles
• Once the feudal disparateness of lordships under local noblemen has become
centralised under an e ective kingship with a growing bureaucratic state apparatus, the
realisation also takes hold that the realm is not just the reach of royal power and
charism, but a territorially discrete are cordoned o from its neighbours
• This process takes shape in di erent modes and at di erent times throughout Europe -
the birth of geopolitics
• The new states that emerged cannot be called nation states - they were centred around
the power of the king rather based on the freedom of the people. Europe was a
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