Anthony D. Smith: The Antiquity of Nations. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. Pp. vii, 266. $64.95. $28.95, paper.)

Throughout his sizable and impressive ouvre of books and articles on nationalism, Anthony D. Smith has been largely faithful to the approach to nationalism he first began putting forward over two decades ago. He has clarified and refined his argument, now referred to as "ethno-symbolic" over time, but has preserved the main tenets of his approach fairly intact over the entire period, maintaining its close connection to the contemporary debates he has helped to shape.

The Nation in History and The Antiquity of Nations are both, in a way, aimed at taking stock of this body of work. The first provides a kind of tutorial on Smith's ideas and views, while the second is largely a collection of articles originally published during the 80s and 90s. Some of his more recent investigations are not covered explicitly or in detail, such as his concept of the ethnoscape and his analysis of globalization and nationalism. Nonetheless, in combination, the two books provide a good introduction to Smith's theoretical approach and his views on the nationalism literature.

The Nation in History was prepared for the 1999 Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures. It is an attempt to systematically map out the main debates over the nature and causes of nationalism, summarizing Smith's critique of other authors and presenting the main features of the ethno-symbolic approach. The book is organized along the lines of three "paradigm debates" (p. 2) that have defined the field: organicist vs. voluntarist (on the nature and origins of nations), perennialist vs. modernist (on the antiquity of nations), and social constructionist vs. ethno-symbolic (on the role of nations and nationalism in social change). He also identifies four major competing paradigms: primordialist, perennialist, modernist, and ethno-symbolic. Along the way, he entertains substantial discussions of organicist vs. cultural primordialism, ethnic vs. civic nationalism, continuous vs. recurrent perennialism, and invented traditions and imagined communities, displaying his trademark encyclopedic knowledge of the literature.

The Antiquity of Nations, includes already-published articles that have presented major developments in Smith's ideas. These include chapter 1 on the "Myth of the 'Modern Nation'" (1988), which summarizes his critique of the modernist approach taken by Gellner, Nairn, Anderson, Breuilly, and Hobsbawm and Ranger, among others. In it he summarizes his critique of these theories as myopic in terms of both space and time, over-generalizing from Western cases and ignoring the role of the past in shaping the present. It also contains chapter 7, "The Origins of Nations" (1989), which outlines his own theoretical approach, with its emphasis on both the modernity of nationalism and most nations and the origins of nations in pre-existing ethnie sharing historical myths and cultural traits.

The book is divided into two sections: The first, labeled "Theory", focuses on critiques of modernism, and includes detailed discussions of Gellner, Anderson, Hobsbawm and Ranger, and the classical social theorists. Part II, labeled "History", covers a more diverse range of topics, including war, golden ages, and romanticism. It also includes other previously unpublished essay on question of whether nations existed in antiquity, examining both empirical and definitional issues. The other new piece of writing is the introduction, which provides a walk-through of the four major paradigms, one that is largely consistent with the writing in the earlier book.

This short review is not the place to attempt another general critique of Smith's theory or examiniation of his reading of the literature. Instead, I will focus on the paradigms and paradigmatic debates that are central to the organization of both volumes. One would have liked to see more discussion of how the paradigmatic debates, which are not orthogonal, relate to other another, as well as a concerted attempt to justify the parsing of the literature into four paradigms. At times, the debates seem to blend together, which can be cause for confusion. For instance, his ethno-symbolism approach is presented as the antithesis of social constructionism, which he associates with ideas such as Benedict Anderson's imagined communities and Hobsbawm and Ranger's invention of tradition. Yet, his description of ethno-symbolism, along as his earlier writings on the approach, show it to be a synthesis of perennialism and modernism, which he uses to define a different debate. Smith states that social constructionism incorporates the modernity of nations as one of its tenets, but differs in emphasizing cultural representation and social engineering (p. 13). But this leads to reader to expect a comparison between social constructionism and "non-constructionist" modernism, not with ethno-symbolism.

This confusion is not helped by his unclear characterization of the debate itself, which is defined at one point as a being about "the role of nations and nationalism in historical and especially recent social change" (p. 2) at another as "the relationship of the past and present in the formation and future of nations" (p. 3). In chapter 7 of Antiquity of Nations, however, he describes the three paradigmatic debates somewhat differently, with the third debate being over whether nations are primarily political or sociocultural units (p. 182).

Somewhat different issues characterize his analysis of the organicism and voluntarism debate, which he defines by citing Kohl's distinction based upon whether nationhood is a matter of birth or choice. However, while Smith provides a thorough survey of authors from Rousseau to Geertz who have advocated various degrees of organicism, the voluntarist position is notable in the chapter mostly by its absence. A distinction is made between organic and cultural primordialism, but the latter comes across as being, if anything, closer to organicism than voluntarism. He notes in Antiquity that both perennialists and modernists reject primordialism. He also states that there is a background of instrumentalism in modernism, which suggests that modernism implies voluntarism, at least of a weak kind, but these points are not taken up in detail.

The specification of the paradigms also raises the question of how one would go about determining the relative explanatory power of each. They differ both in terms of the empirical hypotheses that they generate, as well as the the definitions that they use for key terms, including nationalism itself (Antiquity, pp. 15, 133.). Smith does not attempt to "translate" their hypotheses into propositions that can be directly tested against each other, since the dependent variable, is defined differently.

Moreover, the specification of paradigms is multifaceted . . .

Sun-Ki Chai
University of Hawai`i