Sublime

limited and specific thrust of the argument so far. It is intended less to explain the socio-economic bases of anti-metropolitan resistance in the Western hemisphere between say, 1760 and 1830, than why the resistance was conceived in plural, ‘national’ forms – rather than in others.

speak from a position of collective identity, to forge an alliance with a community of others in defense of tastes which, as a

Increasingly, we are choosing another path, one predicated on the power of networks. Not digital networks, necessarily, but instead the more general sense of the word: webs of human collaboration and exchange.

‘each of the new South American republics had been an administrative unit from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.’22 In this respect they foreshadowed the new states of Africa and parts of Asia in the mid twentieth century, and form a sharp contrast to the new European states of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

Hegel predicted that the basic unit of modern society would be the state, Marx that it would be the commune, Lenin and Hitler that it would be the political party. Before that, a succession of saints and sages claimed the same for the parish church, the feudal manor, and the monarchy. The big contention of this small book is that they have all been

the linkage between them is imagined. This imagined linkage derives from two obliquely related sources. The first is simply calendrical coincidence.

Meaning is created when many people weave together a common network of stories.

In every instance, the ‘choice’ of language appears as a gradual, unselfconscious, pragmatic, not to say haphazard development. As such, it was utterly different from the selfconscious language policies pursued by nineteenth-century dynasts confronted with the rise of hostile popular linguistic-nationalisms.

But the gift of the Web wasn’t only informational: by its very existence it gave us new tools to identify and understand networks themselves.