Another Question Raised by Benedict Anderson: What Makes an Idea Exciting for You?
What makes Benedict Anderson a scholar of such surpassing stature is that he transcends the challenges to his ideas. His ideas are so much a part of the mental furniture of the age—like “banality of evil,” “imagined communities” is now part of a larger lingua franca—that they lie beyond right and wrong. Confronted with his work, we move into a different sphere of engagement with him. Where the question is less whether his ideas are correct than whether and how they grab you. For many people, it’s clear that Anderson’s ideas have and continue to have a hold on them. I’ve never felt that way. On a Facebook thread related to my earlier post, I commented that it was the work of Benedict Anderson’s brother Perry Anderson that had a gravitational pull on me. The question for me that’s raised by someone like Benedict Anderson is: Why does an idea stick to you, why does it grab you? When I read Imagined Communities, I thought: I get it, makes sense, I see its innovations in context. But that was about it for me; the insight felt somehow small. It didn’t and doesn’t excite me in the same way as other ideas do. I realize how odd this is: entire generations of scholars have had the opposite reaction. Obviously some part—perhaps a good part—of this is personal and biographical. There are a lot of people who read my endless series of posts on Hannah Arendt and think, God, what is he on about? (I know, they’ve told me.) But when you’re dealing with such a mass phenomenon as Imagined Communities, the question of its devotees and—well, not exactly its detractors; more like its non-enthusiasts, and not because we think it’s wrong, but because it doesn’t move us—ceases to be merely biographical or personal. It raises fascinating issues (to me, at least) of how ideas seize people’s minds, capture their attention, and never let go. Or don’t. And, again, not because of their rightness or wrongness, but because of…what?