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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 Hobsbawm
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Interpretation

What this quote means

A nation’s identity and justification are deeply rooted in its history.

This quote emphasizes the significance of a nation's past in shaping its identity and existence. Hobsbawm argues that history is not only a record of events but the foundation upon which nations build their sense of self and justify their uniqueness, highlighting the crucial role of historians in interpreting and conveying this past.

Themes

HistoryIdentityNationPastHistorians

In practice

Example use cases

In a discussion about national identity in a history class.

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Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.
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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.
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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.
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