Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.
Eric HobsbawmRead
It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they're not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques the idea of patriotism that differentiates between 'right' and 'wrong' Americans based on exclusionary criteria.
Eric Hobsbawm's quote highlights a troubling aspect of American patriotism, suggesting that it often defines itself in opposition to a group deemed 'outcasts' or 'wrong Americans.' This divisive mentality fosters a national identity based not on inclusivity but on exclusion, where the 'right Americans' feel justified in their patriotism by distinguishing themselves from those they perceive as unworthy. Patriotism, in this context, becomes a tool for social separation rather than a unifying force.
Themes
PatriotismIdentityExclusionAmericaNationalism
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on identity politics, this quote could highlight the dangers of exclusive definitions of patriotism.
More from Eric Hobsbawm
All quotes βIt is one of the ironies of this strange century that the most lasting results of the October revolution, whose object was the global overthrow of capitalism, was to save its antagonist, both in war and in peace - that is to say, by providing it with the incentive, fear, to reform itself after the Second World War, and, by establishing the popularity of economic planning, furnishing it with some of the procedures for its reform
Eric HobsbawmRead
Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left.
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As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.
Eric HobsbawmRead
Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.
Eric HobsbawmRead
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