Herder and the Idea of a Nation

Abstract

The modern concept of ‘nation’ to describe the whole of a particular society was first used by the German philosopher and scholar Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). Herder insisted that his idea of the nation was not at all political – though it became so later. Herder’s unpolitical perspective originated in his living under a dynastic-aristocratic regime which ruled Prussia where he spent his formative years. Bourgeois scholar-intellectuals like him did not have access to politics in German states. The dynastic-aristocratic establishment ruled exclusively by itself. In Herder’s time it was still too powerful and too much taken-for-granted to oppose it openly. Herder’s pioneering effort therefore had to be explicitly unpolitical – for political reasons. But Herder’s criteria for speaking of a nation – language and cultural properties – later justified claims to be a specific nation, whether in the form of states or of parts of states aspiring to become states. Before Herder’s perspective, the concept ‘nation’ had a more limited meaning. Latin ‘nationes’, for example, designated groups of university students from a particular region.