Liah Greenfeld’s unique insights have reached scholars, politicians, public intellectuals, and the general public worldwide, and her writings have been translated into a dozen languages. Her studies were driven by “curiosity about empirical reality as it is… moved by the desire to understand it and derive supreme satisfaction from such understanding.”
The overarching goal of Greenfeld’s work—books, articles, lectures, discussions and close collaborations with her students—was to develop what she called the Science of Humanity: “The liberating, empowering, ennobling possibility of reliable and objective knowledge about ourselves, based on logic and empirical evidence, just like physics or biology, and free from the encumbrance of dogma.”
Greenfeld’s research and analysis had a few singular characteristics. First and foremost, definitions. While it is common for scholars to use terms such as “nationalism,” “culture,” and “civilization” in a vague and imprecise manner, Greenfeld always provided a clear definition of what she discussed. In this, she frequently relied on a deep historical understanding of the evolution of specific words and the meanings behind them.
Greenfeld also eschewed the dominant social science methods in favor of pursuing the scientific method as the natural sciences have successfully practiced it: understanding or causally explaining empirical reality by means of the logical formulation of hypotheses and testing them against methodically collected empirical evidence.
Last but not least, in attempting to make sense of the world we live in, Greenfeld insisted on going beyond descriptions, asking why, not just how. Since human societies do not lend themselves to laboratory experiments, she relied on the historical-comparative method as an approximation to experimentation. Comparisons—between artistic styles, political movements, economic arrangements, and societies across continents and over time periods—helped Greenfeld reach a better understanding of underlying causal factors.
Greenfeld’s highly original scholarship, however, made her an outsider in the several disciplines—sociology, political science, international relations, history—with which she has been associated. “Only thanks to the backing and encouragement of certain institutions and individuals,” she wrote, “I could offend against the current notions of academic propriety, climbing over disciplinary fences and disregarding the clear ‘no trespassing’ signs posted all along them, with (relative) impunity.”
Contributing to her outsider status was her specific life trajectory: brought up in the Soviet Union and receiving her undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, she arrived in the United States in 1982 for a post-doc at the University of Chicago. With job opportunities available for her only in the United States, she again became an immigrant. Changing nationality for the second time, she wrote, “made me acutely aware of the constructed nature of national identity and the profound differences, reaching to every sphere of social existence, between nations defined in individualistic and civic terms… and those defined as ethnic collectivities.”
Defining and Understanding Nationalism
Greenfeld’s Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, “an attempt to understand the world in which we live,” was published in 1992 by Harvard University Press. Widely quoted and translated, and generally recognized as a classic, it turned the conventional understanding of both nationalism and modernity upside down. When considered in connection with modernity at all, nationalism has been explained as the cultural by-product of modern economic development, specifically industrialization and capitalism, which also brought about the modern state.
Rather than advancing yet another speculative theory, Greenfeld based her arguments on meticulous historical research. She traced the emergence and character of nationalism in the five societies that were historically the first to define and organize themselves as nations and were also major players in world politics: England/Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and the United States. Organizing themselves as nations meant organizing themselves on the principles of popular sovereignty, fundamental equality of membership, and common identity, cutting across social stratification. Therefore, it meant adopting democracy, which, depending on the specific history of nationalism’s formation in each case, could be either liberal or authoritarian.
Greenfeld then showed that nationalism has been the cause of modernity rather than its effect, leading directly to specific characteristics of modernity. Modern science, for example, emerged in England in the 17th century, supported by the values ascribed to English nationhood and its unique rationalist, skeptical, empirical view of life. Science was appreciated as distinctive of England, bearing testimony to England’s singular qualities, and the foundation of its preeminence in the world. It was this close association with the growing sense of nationality, and with the desire for national pride, that caused many Englishmen who knew very little of the substance of scientific knowledge to stand in reverence before the great figures of English science.
Another symbiotic relationship Greenfeld investigated was that between German nationalism and Romanticism. It formed the basis of major modern political ideologies such as Marxism and National Socialism, and has “informed our notions of art and human creativity, made us clamor for openness and for freedom to develop our creative potentials, and, shaping our views of our personalities, to a large extent shaped our personalities themselves.”
Nationalism is the social and political consciousness of modern society. It shapes our perception, and therefore our experience, of reality and determines what is important to us as individuals and as a community. “National identity is, fundamentally, a matter of dignity. It gives people reasons to be proud,” Greenfeld concluded. The essentially democratic national identity dignified every individual, making national populations deeply invested in the nation’s dignity as a whole and ever ready to defend it and compete for national prestige, on the battlefield and in the marketplace.
Nationalism Creates the Modern Economy
While the focus of Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity was political, Greenfeld did not lose sight of the economic dimension of modernity, which the conventional theory presumed to be fundamental and self-explanatory. The questions she wanted to answer were what was the direct cause of the emergence of the modern economy (oriented to sustained growth), and what made the economic sphere so central in the modern, and in particular, the American consciousness?
The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth, published by Harvard University Press in 2001, provided her answers to these questions. In this case, too, Greenfeld’s work was based on historical comparative research. As before, she took into account relevant primary sources in several languages, this time tracing developments over five centuries in six different societies. While the countries considered in Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity were the chief powers in world politics during the period the book covered, for The Spirit of Capitalism Greenfeld chose the chief economic players, removing Russia and adding the Netherlands and Japan to her comparison.
Underscoring the difference between the capitalist, modern economy, oriented to growth and characterized by constant development, and premodern subsistence-oriented economies which functioned according to the logic of the Malthusian scissors, Greenfeld first demonstrated that the modern economic orientation, which, like Max Weber, she called “the spirit of capitalism,” would in each observed case appear after the emergence of nationalism. Where nationalism did not emerge (as in the important counter-case of the Netherlands), the capitalist economy oriented to growth failed to develop during the observed historical period, even when all the conventionally postulated conditions were present.
This was related to the competitiveness of national consciousness, the necessarily endless competition for national dignity, and the standing of one’s nation among the others. Any sphere of life (literature, science, the military, the beauty of women) could become the arena for an international competition for dignity; when the economy was chosen as such an arena, it led to an economy of growth.
While working on The Spirit of Capitalism, Greenfeld became aware that Japan differed from all the other cases she considered far more deeply than the already big differences among them. Among other things, though turned highly competitive by nationalism, Japan was much less prone to develop the feelings of ressentiment or existential envy—a concept Greenfeld developed in Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity—towards its competitors than were all these Western competitors (except England/Britain, which, being the creator of both nationalism and modern economy, was rather the object of envy and ressentiment of others). At that time, Greenfeld could not understand the source of the difference between the psychological dynamics in Japan and the Western comparative cases. But she suspected her view of nationalism and, therefore, cultural reality in general, might require a corrective. This suspicion led to her next large project.
Nationalism and Mental Illness
In April 2004, Greenfeld delivered the Tenth Annual Gellner Lecture at the London School of Economics. “The aim of my talk here today,” she said, “was to indicate the direct link between nationalism and our modern men’s mental formation and health. If I am right, a deeper, more accurate understanding of nationalism may be the key to the treatment of ever-spreading mental disorders… the key to the very problem of happiness and unhappiness.”
The idea for the third volume of Greenfeld’s nationalism trilogy was specifically suggested to her by the tragic situation of American youth, which she observed in her classes. Young people in the United States had suffered from mental illness, which at the beginning of the new century had reached epidemic proportions. This became the central subject of Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience, published by Harvard University Press in 2013.
Greenfeld began by exploring systematic surveys on major psychiatric diseases available in the United States since the 1840s. At the time she started her study, major psychiatric diseases were called “depression,” “bipolar disorder,” and “schizophrenia.” Given their consistently growing rates within a population with a fundamentally unchanging genetic profile, a biological account of these diseases (the dominant explanation within the psychiatric research community and the general public) could not be right, as it presupposed that the human genome itself was still—and very rapidly—evolving.
This conclusion was next confirmed by comparing American epidemiological findings with those of England/Britain, France, Germany, and Russia. In all other observed cases, the rates and the starting point in time, as well as the increasing pace of mental diseases, differed. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) also found in its three major landmark cross-national studies the virtual immunity to these functional mental illnesses across South and East Asia.
Taking a similar approach that led Emile Durkheim to consider suicide a sociological problem, Greenfeld argued that rates of functional mental illness characterized societies, not individuals. Thus, at the very least, the explanation for the exceptionally high rate of mental illness in the United States had to include historical and sociological causation.
Knowing that South Asian East and East Asian societies might differ dramatically on this front, Greenfeld considered the explosion in the rates of major psychiatric diseases was a “Western” problem. Her research was therefore focused on the broadly defined “West.” Based on the comparative study of changing vocabularies, Greenfeld demonstrated that in all the cases she examined the diseases in question came to public attention (i.e., became a public health problem) simultaneously with the emergence of nationalism in them—in the 16th century in England, 17th century in other parts of Britain, including the American colonies, and the late 18th to the early 19th centuries on the European continent.
Based on these findings, her central argument was that, by presupposing the fundamental equality of all members of the nation and the community rather than God as the sovereign, nationalism made the individual one’s own maker and the formation of personal identity a matter of personal choice and responsibility. The more options there were, the more difficult such a choice became. Organized on the basis of a democratic, egalitarian, and essentially secular consciousness, nations were, by definition, confused and confusing societies. Anomie or the breakdown of social rules and guidance was the cultural agent of mental illness, the core symptoms of which were a problematic sense of self and social maladjustment. Within a society where more choices were offered to more of its members—that is, the more a society insisted on equality and freedom of choice, the rates of functional mental illness became relatively higher.
Mind, Culture, Humanity
It was not enough, however, to offer a logical explanation by demonstrating the strict historical correspondence between the arrival of nationalism in a society and the first spurt in the increase of such rates, and between the increase in the number of choices (thus levels of anomie) and the spread of depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. It was necessary, first, to convince the public, lay and professional, who firmly believed that only material factors could cause disease, that such a cultural explanation of severe, life-threatening disorders with undeniable biological expressions made sense.
This required developing a systematic, comprehensive, and never-before-attempted understanding of cultural reality, which, while irreducible to biology, was autonomous and deserving of attention in its own right. As Greenfeld articulated the concept of culture, she arrived at a new, logically and empirically supported, view of humanity.
Greenfeld proposed that we abandon the dominant dualistic view of reality and escape the mind/body or psychophysical problem that has restrained the development of all social sciences. This dualistic view could be replaced by a tripartite layer model of reality, consisting of three autonomous yet related layers: the layer of matter, the layer of life, and the layer of humanity. In this model, the bottom layers constitute boundary conditions—thus, bases—for the upper layers.
As already implied about life in Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection, the two upper layers are emergent phenomena. An emergent phenomenon is more than the sum of the elements—i.e., the boundary conditions—within which it exists. While obviously impossible without these elements, it is irreducible to them and subject to a new, independent causality that gives rise to the emergent layer.
When biology shifted its focus from the material elements of life onto organic processes, it was able to transform itself from a natural history, cataloging life forms, into the dynamic progressive science we know today. Conceiving humanity as an emergent phenomenon, Greenfeld surmised, could have a similar effect on advancing the human sciences.
What are the qualities that distinguish humanity categorically from its biological substratum? Greenfeld argued in Mind, Modernity, Madness that while all other animals transmit their ways of life primarily genetically, humans transmit their ways of life primarily symbolically, through traditions of various kinds and, above all, through language. It is the symbolic transmission of human ways of life to which the term “culture” implicitly refers. Culture in this sense qualitatively—and radically—separates human beings from the rest of the biological animal kingdom.
This unique manner of transmitting human ways of life, which is responsible, among other things, for their extreme variability, cannot be explained biologically. There is a break in the causal continuity between the laws of biological evolution and the appearance of this symbolic transmission process. It is an historical add-on to evolution, an emergent phenomenon in the boundary conditions of the fully evolved homo sapiens species, and an expression of a new autonomous reality, a symbolic reality.
Symbols are arbitrary signs and vehicles of meanings. In distinction to signs which are not arbitrary, their meaning is not immanently related to what they signify, but determined by context, which is constantly changing. The attribution of meanings to symbols – i.e., their interpretation – is a constantly changing process, an essentially temporal phenomenon, in which the past shapes the present and the present shapes the future. In other words, culture and humanity are historical phenomena.
The interpretation of symbols occurs by means of the brain. Symbols, however, are introduced into the brain by the cultural environment, just as food is introduced from the environment into the stomach. The processing of symbolic stimuli from the environment in the brain is the mind (similar to the process of digestion). Greenfeld called the mind “culture in the brain” or “individualized culture.”
Living in a symbolic, cultural context, a human being has a mind constantly processing symbolic, cultural stimuli in the brain. It is the symbolic context and the mental process that make a human not just the biological species to which one belongs as an animal.
This genetically underdetermined character of the cultural environment allows us to distinguish within the process of the mind three functionally necessary systems. These are, in Greenfeld’s terminology, the identity or relationally-constituted self; will or acting self; and “the I of Descartes” or thinking self.
The first two guarantee the survival of an individual, while the third one – the process of cultural transmission – ensures the survival of a human group. The psychiatric diseases of depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, reflecting several degrees of the disintegration of the mind, empirically test Greenfeld’s analysis of the mind’s anatomy.
First, Greenfeld argued that all three clinically presented with a disorder of identity: depression with self-loathing, bipolar syndrome with self-loathing alternating with megalomania, and full-fledged schizophrenia with a complete dissolution of the sense of self. Second, this leads to the malfunction of the will: in depression, it is expressed in the lack of all motivation, and inability to act; in bipolar disorder, also in the inability to control one’s actions (including speech); in schizophrenia it reaches complete atrophy, with the deindividualized “I of Descartes,” experienced by the patient as somebody else and representing untethered culture in the brain, assuming the functions of the will and dictating to the affected person both thoughts and actions.
This understanding of culture and the mind, permitted Greenfeld not only to connect increasing rates of functional mental illness to nationalism and explain them causally, but also to provide a comprehensive, logically consistent interpretation of these diseases, accounting for their heterogeneous clinical expressions, which was lacking in psychology and psychiatry.
However, there remained one problem: how to account for the differences between the psychiatric profiles of Western and South-East Asian nations. The very last words in Mind, Modernity, Madness were “Why don’t the orienting principles of nationalism disorient the Orient? Would monotheism and logic have anything to do with this? Could the root of the problem (not its cause, perhaps, but a necessary condition) lie deeper than nationalism, reaching to the very foundation of our civilization? Even a most tentative answer to this question would be premature at present. But it is clear where I am led by the great forces that form our projects: to a comparative study of civilizations.”
Civilizational Analysis Framework
Between 2011 and 2016, Greenfeld taught month-long seminars in Hong Kong each year and traveled throughout mainland China. What she observed there helped her understand what puzzled her so much during her study of Japan. While very different – as different as, for example, the United States and Russia – Japan and China nevertheless belonged together, within the same family of societies.
Her experience in China led Greenfeld to a rigorous, logical, and empirical definition of civilization: “A distinct, self-enclosed, self-sufficient, and self-generating variant of cultural reality, that independently of other such variants with which it may coexist has developed over multiple generations, multiplying in the process its interlacing traditions.”
Civilizations are “supra-national” cultural unities characterized by codified first principles, i.e., binding values and modes of thought embodied in written language. This conceptualization, in turn, makes it possible to recognize and distinguish three civilizations in the world today: the monotheistic (erroneously called “Western”), the Sinic (centered on China), and the Indic (centered on India).
In distinction to all other levels of the cultural process – e.g., mind, specific traditions, or specific geo-politically bounded cultures – which, though autonomous, are mutually interdependent, civilizations are independent from other civilizations with which they may coexist. Thus, they constitute the fundamental level of the collective cultural process, causally significant on every level below it. This understanding of “civilization” represents a significant advancement over the conventional usage of the word “civilization,” where it simply refers to a larger specific culture, thus adding a synonym to the existing vocabulary that is conceptually meaningless and possesses no explanatory power.
Greenfeld further examined the codified first principles of the monotheistic civilization. She found them in the Hebrew Bible and argued that the monotheistic civilization privileges a binary mode of logic, leading to intolerance of contradictions and a unique preoccupation with truth and justice. She also used her framework of cross-civilizational analysis and understanding of the monotheistic civilization to explain the roots of long-standing antisemitism in parts of the world dominated and influenced by Christian and Islamic traditions.
Compared with the monotheistic civilization, Greenfeld hypothesized, the Sinic and Indic civilizations do not privilege binary logic in the same way, resulting in different psychological dynamics and ways of thinking. Scholars in China, Japan, and India have been applying Greenfeld’s civilizational analysis framework to specific case studies of their respective civilizations.
Poetry and Identity
Growing up in Russia, Liah Greenfeld thought of herself as a poet and anticipated a career immersed in Soviet/Russian art and culture. She played violin on TV when she was 7, and won a prize in a regional poetry competition at sixteen. A selection of her poems was published later in Komsomolskaya Pravda with a glowing introduction by Boris Slutsky, a distinguished Russian poet.
Immigrating to Israel with her dissident parents (and siblings) in 1972, she enrolled at the Hebrew University, where she walked into a summer school class in Sociology, given in Russian. Greenfeld fell in love and later wrote: “I realized that humanity could be a subject of science, studied objectively, just as organic and material reality. This held an immense appeal to someone like me, emerging from the world permeated by ideology, in which anything human could be accessed only through art. Social science replaced poetry as my calling.”
Greenfeld’s new calling led to her explorations of modernity, nations and civilizations, the nature of the mind, humanity, and mental illness. In Mind, Modernity, Madness, she suggested that the best, possibly the only, way to arrest the increase in the rates of mental illness and prevent its development is education: “The disease is essentially cultural; it is society itself that must be cured, and what is required…is nothing less than revamping of the entire system of education, from kindergarten through college… From a very early age, children should be taught about the nature of modern society, its positive features and its negative features… Preparing young people to cope with the systematic demands of modern society, and most specifically with the responsibility for the formation of one’s identity, should be the focus of general education, and general education should be the focus of the educational system.”
In 2023, Greenfeld published five books for children. These were prose stories adapted from the rhymed tales in Russian by Korney Chukovsky. In “a letter to parents and teachers of little kids,” she appended to each story, she wrote:
“It is difficult to find books that can help little children to choose what they want to be when they grow up. With so many grownups around them struggling with their identities, with so many choices, and so little knowledge, preschoolers today need such help. To develop their selves and decide who they are, they need simple, non-confrontational ideals. That’s why, after decades of study and writing about our complex society, which makes identity-formation so problematic, I decided to create a series of books for very young children.
Chukovsky’s goal in writing was to teach a child how to be a good person, above all else, to cultivate in the child kindness and empathy… There are wonderful role models for children in Chukovsky’s stories: from a dashing, brave mosquito, who saves a hapless fly from the clutches of a cruel spider, to a selfless veterinarian Dr. Hurtz, who crosses the world to cure little animals in a far-off corner from numerous childhood diseases. The child learns that anyone can be a good person, no matter whether one has six legs, four legs, two legs, or no legs at all. And there are also models of what one should not be: cowardly animals, believing rumors about and hiding from a giant cockroach, who turns on inspection to be a regular insect on skinny legs and, as such, eaten by a sparrow; insects, thinking only about their own safety and abandoning Miss Buzzz, whose friends they pretended to be in good times, in her hour of need; silly kittens who decide on a whim to oink like piglets and set the blue sea on fire, or selfish folk, who would not move a claw or a hoof to save the sun from the Crocodile who stole it, but expect the old grandfather Bear to do this for them.
All the stories have a happy ending, because good persons always win and are celebrated by the multitude.”
