On the evening of October 24, 1995, two men faced each other at the University of Warwick. The older man, Ernest Gellner (1925-1995), had fled Prague as a boy ahead of the Nazis, fought his way back into Europe with the Czech armored brigade, and built a reputation as the most feared polemicist in British social science. The younger man, Anthony D. Smith (1939-2016), had been his doctoral student at the London School of Economics a quarter century before. Smith had grown up in London during the war his teacher fought in. More than eighty members of his extended family died in the Holocaust. Both men had spent their lives on the same question. What is a nation, and where does it come from?
Smith spoke first. His paper carried a modest title, “Nations and their Pasts.” His argument was not modest. The reigning theory of nationalism, the theory his own teacher had built, explained the machinery of nations but not their content. It could tell you how a modern state stamped a common culture onto a population through schools, bureaucracies, and armies. It could not tell you why Serbs died for Kosovo, why Jews prayed toward Jerusalem for two thousand years without a state, or why some national projects caught fire while others, backed by the same machinery, never moved anyone to sacrifice.
Gellner rose to reply. He opened with warmth. He said he took pride in the career of his former student, who had become the leading specialist in the field. Then he reached for one of the strangest analogies in the history of social theory. His paper was titled “Do Nations Have Navels?” Victorian creationists had argued about whether Adam possessed a navel. He had no mother, so he needed none. But a God creating a functioning man might well have supplied one anyway, along with fossils in the rocks and rings in the trees, a fake past built into a new creation. Nations were the same, Gellner argued. Some had ethnic navels and some did not, and either way the navel did no explanatory work. Modernity created nations. The apparent umbilical cords to the ancient past were decoration.
The audience understood what it was watching: a field’s founding argument staged as a family drama, the teacher defending creation, the student defending inheritance. Neither man knew how little time remained. Gellner died less than two weeks later, on November 5, 1995. The Warwick debate became his last public statement on nationalism and the clearest single expression of what Smith had spent his career building against, and out of.
Smith was born in London on September 23, 1939, days after Britain declared war on Germany, into a Jewish family of modest means. His father, a Londoner without formal education, built himself into a businessman. His mother, Harriet, came from a middle-class German Jewish family in Wiesbaden. Both parents had roots in Poland. The discovery, later in life, that more than eighty relatives had been murdered in the Holocaust gave his subject a private weight. For most English academics of his generation, nationality was an administrative fact or a political embarrassment. For Smith it was a matter of survival and annihilation. A people could persist for millennia without a state. A people could also be hunted across a continent because of a name.
Near the end of his life he said that two public events shaped his intellectual course more than any others: the Second World War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The first showed what national and racial ideology could destroy. The second showed what seventy years of official internationalism could not: the loyalties that surfaced intact when the Soviet state fell apart, as if they had been waiting under the ice.
His training was unusual for a sociologist. He read classics and philosophy at Oxford, which left him at ease among Athenians, Israelites, and medieval kingdoms in a discipline whose horizon rarely extended past the industrial revolution. He studied at the College of Europe in Bruges, then came to the LSE for postgraduate work in sociology. His supervisor was Gellner. The dissertation became his first book, Theories of Nationalism, in 1971, a survey and classification of a field that barely knew it was a field.
He taught at York, spent nine years at Reading, and joined the LSE sociology department in 1980, becoming professor in 1988 and later moving through the European Institute to the Department of Government. Along the way he did something almost no established professor does. He took a second doctorate, in art history, completed in 1987, on the revival of patriotic painting and sculpture in eighteenth-century Britain and France. Colleagues might have read it as a hobby. It was a long bet that paid off twenty-five years later.
By the early 1980s Smith had turned against the framework he was trained in. Gellner’s modernism held that industrial society required interchangeable workers, standardized language, and mass literacy, and that the modern state manufactured a common high culture to meet those needs, then dressed the product in ancient costume. In Gellner’s formulation, nationalism created nations, not the reverse. Smith accepted much of this. Nationalism as an ideology and a mass movement was modern. Elites selected, revised, and sometimes invented traditions. What the theory could not do, he came to believe, was explain content. Why this language and not that one. Why this memory and not another. Why populations embraced some identities and shrugged at others that arrived with equal institutional force. Modernism explained the engine and said nothing about the fuel.
His answer became ethnosymbolism, laid out most fully in The Ethnic Origins of Nations in 1986. He offered it as a perspective and a research program rather than a predictive law. Its central concept was the ethnie: a named human population with myths of common ancestry, shared historical memories, elements of common culture, an association with a historic territory, and some measure of solidarity. An ethnie was not a nation. It might lack citizenship, a common economy, standardized law, a public culture. It was the quarry from which nations were cut. Not every ethnie became a nation. Most dissolved, divided, or were absorbed. But when modern nationalists set out to build a nation, they reached for what already lay in the ground.
He distinguished lateral from vertical ethnies. Lateral communities were thin and wide: aristocracies, dynasties, higher clergy, whose culture spread across territory but not down through the classes. England, France, Spain, and Sweden grew from lateral cores extended downward through bureaucratic incorporation. Vertical, or demotic, communities ran deep: bound by religion, guarded at the boundaries, solidarity crossing class lines. These awaited intellectuals who standardized the vernacular, recovered the history, and turned sacred tradition into a political program. He borrowed from Ramon d’Abadal the term mythomoteur for the governing myth that gave a community its sense of direction, a story of election, conquest, martyrdom, exile, or promised return. The story did not need to be true by the standards of a history department. It needed to bind past suffering to future purpose.
The working image for his method is archaeology. Modernists cast nationalist intellectuals as novelists or architects, inventing continuity. Smith’s intellectuals dig. They excavate old law codes, sacred texts, ruined kingdoms, folk songs, and battle memories. They select, misdate, and romanticize what they find. But they cannot excavate what was never buried. The strata constrain the story. A nation, in his account, was constructed the way a cathedral is constructed, which does not make it fake. It makes it built, from inherited materials, by people with purposes, on a site that was already there.
He did not build alone. He credited John Armstrong (1922-2010), whose Nations before Nationalism appeared in 1982, as a constant inspiration. Armstrong, drawing on the anthropologist Fredrik Barth (1928-2016), tracked myth-symbol complexes across centuries and stressed the boundaries that groups maintain against outsiders. Smith attended more to what lay inside the boundaries: the names, memories, and sacred attachments. With John Hutchinson he turned the shared position into a school, though he ran the school with an open door.
Jewish history sat at the center of his thinking, usually just beneath the surface, sometimes on it. Jews had lived for nearly two millennia without sovereignty, scattered across states and languages, and had remained a people through law, text, ritual calendar, memories of exile, and attachment to a land most of them never saw. The case broke every theory that made the state or the factory the foundation of durable identity. Smith did not claim Jewish identity was unchanging. He claimed that sacred tradition and collective memory could carry identity across the wreckage of political institutions, a fortress built of texts.
In Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity, published in 2003, he generalized the insight. Nations imagined themselves in forms inherited from religion: covenant, election, mission, collective trial. Fallen soldiers became martyrs. Battlefields became holy ground. National holidays kept the structure of religious festivals after the theology drained away. A revolution served as a creation story, a constitution as a covenant, founders as prophets, war memorials as shrines. Secular nations kept the liturgy and changed the object of worship. He applied the argument to the conflict he could not avoid, between Israelis and Palestinians, two communities whose political claims rested on suffering, sacred history, and one land. He doubted that rational negotiation alone could dissolve such identities. They might be reconciled. They could not be erased, because each formed part of a community’s understanding of itself.
His definitions organized the field even for those who rejected his theory. Nationalism, for Smith, was an ideology and movement holding that humanity divides into nations, that each nation has a distinct character and history, and that nations deserve autonomy, unity, and identity. Autonomy might fall short of statehood: federalism, cultural self-government, control of schools and language. A nation was a territorialized community of shared myths, memories, and symbols, expressed in a public culture of flags, anthems, monuments, laws, and coins, with common rights and duties. He sharpened the old contrast, associated earlier with Hans Kohn (1891-1971), between civic-territorial and ethnic-genealogical nationalism, then spent years warning against its misuse. Real nations mixed both. France and Britain had citizenship and courts; they also had a dominant language, a canonical history, and a favored ethnic core wearing the neutral clothes of the state. The distinction was a tool, not a sorting of virtuous nations from dangerous ones.
He was equally unimpressed by the announcement, fashionable in the 1990s, that globalization was dissolving the nation. In Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era he argued that cosmopolitan identities remained thin. International bodies could commission flags and anthems; they could not commission the dead. He watched the European Union with interest and doubt. It was an elite construction without shared memories or popular participation, and symbols made in committee stayed weak. He did not call a European identity impossible. He called it unearned, so far.
The criticism of his work was serious and he took it that way. Modernists charged that he read modern identities backward, that medieval peasants held local, dynastic, and religious loyalties which only hindsight assembles into national ancestors. Umut Özkırımlı argued that a territory holds many pasts, and the availability of material does not explain which past wins; selection, and the power behind selection, does the work Smith attributed to resonance. Others said he slighted coercion: the schools, censuses, armies, and borders that do not merely spread an identity but impose one and crush the alternatives. And there was a standing danger that his vocabulary of ancestry, ethnic cores, and continuity might be borrowed by nationalists seeking a scholarly seal for claims of eternal nationhood. Smith resisted primordialism all his life and stressed change, selection, and reinterpretation. Critics answered that the line between a qualified ethnic inheritance and a popular faith in ancient essence is hard to hold, and not every reader holds it. His defenders replied that ethnosymbolism answered a question power could not: why some identities survive the collapse of the states that enforced them, and why some official projects, with every instrument of coercion behind them, die unloved.
After 1987 the art history surfaced. The Nation Made Real: Art and National Identity in Western Europe, 1600-1850, published in 2013, asked how a community of millions of strangers, spread across generations, becomes visible. Painters and sculptors did it: landscapes, history scenes, allegories, the dying hero, Britannia on the coin. He refused to reduce this to state propaganda. Artists, patrons, academies, and audiences were engaged in a common search for authenticity, and Neoclassicism and Romanticism supplied the visual grammar of golden ages and noble ancestors. The nation was not only argued in books. It was seen in paint, heard in music, walked past in bronze. His last project, with the music historian Matthew Riley, followed the argument into sound. Nation and Classical Music: From Handel to Copland asked how folk melodies, hymns, and evocations of landscape let listeners feel a nation without a single word of argument.
What he built institutionally may outlast the theory. With his doctoral students he founded the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism and served as its first president. He founded and edited the journal Nations and Nationalism. Walker Connor (1926-2017) called the LSE under Smith the Mecca of nationalism studies, and Smith’s students took chairs across Europe and North America. He ran the association and the journal as forums, not as organs of his school; modernists published there, attacked him there, and were welcome there. In the late 1980s, during the Thatcher-era fights over British higher education, he founded the Council for Academic Autonomy to resist political control of research. The scholarship and the committee work expressed one conviction. Traditions, intellectual or national, need institutions to carry them, and institutions need defending.
He gave younger scholars advice that doubled as self-description: learn the major debates, connect your archive to the large questions, and try to understand the nationalism of other peoples from inside. A scholar who can feel only the absurdity of another community’s flag will never understand why men die for it. This was not indulgence. He knew what nationalism had done to his own family, and he rejected the claim that nationalism as such produces genocide. Most nationalist movements kill no one. War, state power, and racial ideology have to arrive before the category of the authentic people becomes a list of people to remove.
He retired in 2004 and then the hospitals began. For a decade illness kept him in and out of wards, and through it he edited the journal, supervised projects, supported his successor John Breuilly (b. 1946), and finished books. He was married to Diane and had a son; students remembered the hospitality of the house and the attention he paid them. He died in London on July 19, 2016, at seventy-six. The music book appeared four months later, so that his last published word concerned how people come to feel a community they can never see whole or personally know.
His lasting lesson resists both camps. Proving that a nation was constructed settles nothing, because every durable institution is constructed. The questions that count concern the materials, the limits the builders faced, and the reason some constructions become objects of loyalty and sacrifice while others stand empty. Gellner asked whether nations have navels and answered that it made no difference. Smith spent forty years showing where the difference lay: in the memories a people cannot choose, the dead they cannot replace, and the land they cannot argue themselves out of wanting. The field he organized still runs on the disagreement between teacher and student, staged one October evening at Warwick, twelve days before it became permanent.
Notes
The Warwick debate texts, Smith‘s “Nations and their Pasts” and Gellner‘s “Do Nations Have Navels?”, were delivered October 24, 1995, and published in Nations and Nationalism 2 (3), 1996. A course page confirms the pairing and an archived LSE link: University of Warwick course page. A summary of Gellner’s reply, including his stated pride in Smith and the Adam’s navel analogy, is here: Scribd. Smith’s own reflection, “Memory and Modernity,” is at Wiley Online Library.
Biographical details, birth September 23, 1939, London; lower-middle-class Jewish family; father a self-made businessman; mother from Wiesbaden; Polish roots; more than eighty relatives lost in the Holocaust; death July 19, 2016, after roughly ten years of illness; the completed music manuscript, are confirmed in Siniša Malešević‘s memorial: “In Memoriam: Anthony D. Smith, 1939-2016”.
The ASEN memorial confirms the Connor “Mecca” remark, the founding of ASEN and Nations and Nationalism, the Gellner lecture series, his retirement from the Government department in 2004, his support of Breuilly, and that he left a wife and young son. John Hutchinson’s obituary in Nations and Nationalism 22 (4). The LSE condolence page.
Career sequence, Oxford classics, College of Europe, LSE under Gellner, York, Reading, LSE 1980, professor 1988, European Institute 1996, Government 2002, retirement 2004: Wikipedia, Anthony D. Smith.
Two items are reasonable extrapolations rather than sourced facts. First, Gellner’s wartime biography, flight from Prague, Czech armored brigade, is standard in accounts of his life. Second, the attribution of “mythomoteur” to Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals, which Smith credits in The Ethnic Origins of Nations. The scene-setting at Warwick, what the audience understood, neither man knowing the time remaining, is dramatization built on the documented facts of the debate and the death dates.
