By Efraim Karsh, King’s College, London and Bar-Ilan University, Israel

One cannot overstate the scholarly and intellectual loss occasioned by the untimely death of Boston University Professor Liah Greenfeld. Through her prodigious interdisciplinary research, Professor Greenfeld has established herself as one of the foremost social science theorists of our time and a worthy heir to the great first-generation nationalism scholars, in particular Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner, and Anthony Smith.

Best known for her seminal trilogy on nationalism — Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Harvard University Press, 1992); The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (Harvard University Press, 2001); and Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience (Harvard University Press, 2013) — Greenfeld’s studies have spanned the entire range of human social activity, from art, to literature, to science, to religion, to love, to ideological politics, among other dimensions. She has been called “the great historian of nationalism,” “the most iconoclastic” of contemporary sociologists, and “a paradigm changer in the understanding of economic growth.” The eminent social scientist Charles Tilly lauded her for offering the only serious alternative to the mainstream approach in the social sciences, of which he was a foremost proponent.

Already in the trilogy’s first book, Greenfeld turned the conventional understanding of both nationalism and modernity on its head. Rejecting the conventional characterization of nationalism as the cultural byproduct of modern economic development, specifically capitalism, which also brought about the modern state, she defined this phenomenon as the form of consciousness formed around the core idea of social reality by sovereign communities of fundamentally equal members and shared identity, thus showing how this symbolic, cultural phenomenon led to other characteristics of modernity. This in turn made nationalism the cause of modernity rather than its corollary. And by way of proving this revolutionary thesis, Greenfeld traced the advent and evolution of nationalism in the five societies that were historically the first to define and organize themselves as nations (while also being the major players in world politics) — England/Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and the United States.

Unlike Five Roads’ predominantly political focus, the trilogy’s second volume — The Spirit of Capitalism — explores the economic foundations of nationalism in the above countries, with Japan and the Netherlands, which played a longtime key international economic role, substituting for Russia. It shows that a growth-driven modern economic orientation (“the spirit of capitalism,” to use Max Weber’s words) followed the advent of nationalism, and that wherever nationalism failed to emerge (as in the extremely important Dutch counter-case), a growth-oriented capitalist economy failed to develop even when all the conventionally postulated conditions existed. This was due to the necessarily endless competition for national dignity — the standing of one’s nation among others — in which any walk of life (from literature, to science, to the military, to women’s beauty) was a potential arena for international competition; and whenever the economy became such an arena, this led to the economy of growth.

But the story does not end here. While researching the above case studies, Greenfeld realized that Japanese nationalism was far less prone than its Western counterparts (Russia in particular) to profound feelings of inferiority and envy. The only exception to this rule was England/Britain, which, as a pioneer of both nationalism and the economy of growth, was the object of existential envy and hatred, or ressentiment — a concept developed by Greenfeld following Nietzsche and Scheller.1 This observation, in turn, led to the highly ambitious exploration in the trilogy’s final volume of the interrelationship between nationalism, modernity, and culture in general, and of the paradoxical association between liberal democracy’s undeniable fruits and the prevalence of mental illness in Western societies, in particular.

Based on meticulous comparative analysis, Greenfeld concluded that rates of functional mental illness were characteristic of societies rather than individuals, hence owed their causation at the very least to historical and sociological factors. Specifically, in all examined case studies, such major psychiatric diseases as manic depression and schizophrenia became a public health problem in tandem with the advent of nationalism. This was the case in 16^th-century England, followed in the 17^th century by other parts of Britain, including the American colonies, and by continental Europe in the late 18^th-early 19^th centuries.

Greenfeld ascribes this sociohistorical phenomenon to nationalism’s substitution of popular will for God as the source of sovereignty, which in turn has transformed the individual into one’s own maker and has made the formation of personal identity a matter of personal choice and responsibility. The larger the number of proffered options, the more difficult such choice—and, in consequence, the formation of personal identity within nations. Predicated on a democratic, egalitarian, and essentially secular consciousness, nations became anomic, confused, and confusing societies.

Their anomie was the cultural agent of the mental illness whose core symptoms, problematic sense of self and social maladjustment, reflected malformed personal identity. The more choices society offered to a greater number of its members (i.e., the more it insisted on equality and freedom of choice), the higher the rates of functional mental illness in it became as people vied with constant appraisal of their identities, management of their desires, and calibration of their place within society.

There remained one problem: how to account for the marked differences between the psychiatric profiles of Western and South-East Asian nations. In Greenfeld’s concluding words of Mind, Modernity, Madness:

“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?”2

This civilizational divide extends, of course, way beyond different national psychiatric profiles to numerous divergencies in modes of thought, fundamental values and belief systems, political cultures, and psychological dynamics, among others (“East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” Rudyard Kipling famously rhapsodized). One of these, with which Greenfeld had intimate knowledge from a young age, was the millenarian anti-Jewish bigotry in Christian and Muslim societies, or antisemitism as it came to be known in modern times, which was glaringly missing from the two great eastern civilizations — Chinese and Indian.3