Posted by From Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson:
“The UK was the only country in the world, during the 1960s and 1970s, where high-level work was undertaken,in separate channels, on the nature and origins of nationalism in a general sense, by four influential Jewish intellectuals–the conservative historian Elie Kedourie, the Enlightenment-liberal philosopher and sociologist Ernest Gellner, the then Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, and the traditionalist historian Anthony Smith.”
I’m not sure why it was essential that these thinkers are Jewish in this context, except he puts them in opposition to the “Scottish-Nationalist cum Marxist, Tom Nairn.”
