A di G ordon . Toward Nationalism’s End

One of the most striking photos illustrating Adi Gordon’s well-written and satisfying biography Toward Nationalism’s End: An Intellectual Biography of Hans Kohn depicts Kohn on the beach, probably in Tel Aviv in the late 1920s, in full suit and tie with dress shoes, bending down to pose with his toddler-age son while appropriately attired beachgoers look on. Kohn appears hot and uncomfortable. The sun beats down on his furrowed brow. He is out of place. The image sets the mood for Gordon’s chapter on Kohn’s break with Zionism, which traces with care Kohn’s despair upon his “[recognition that] this path was wrong” and examines the “political and intellectual crisis” that marked his crucial pivot away from Zionism and toward his development as a groundbreaking scholar of comparative nationalism (144). Kohn is indeed most well known for his field-defining work The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background (1944), in which he introduces his theories on civic (i.e., Western, liberal, Enlightenment, positive) and ethnic (i.e., Eastern, organic, Romantic, negative) nationalism, nationalism’s modernity, and nationalism’s constructed nature. Critiqued by subsequent scholars of nationalism as being Eurocentric, as lacking attention to premodern varieties, as offering too simplistic a dichotomy between civic and ethnic nationalism, and as constrained in his understanding by liberal thought patterns, Kohn’s work was seen as outdated when nationalism studies boomed in the 1990s. For all his importance in laying out the theoretical parameters of the field, Kohn’s work did not, as Gordon puts it, stand the test of time. Gordon offers up the following argument for this state of affairs: “Kohn’s dichotomy could not have been purely academic but rather was ultimately grounded—for better or worse—in a personal political commitment to liberalism” (6). Gordon reveals the broad intersection of Kohn’s life experiences and thought in this biographical study, and he shows how Kohn’s ideological immersions and political engagement both inescapably drew on and built up concepts of nation and nationalism.

Art history · Biography · Enlightenment · Modernity · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Theology · Zionism · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies