Nationalism - Softcover

In addition to other matter this volume contains Sir Rabindranath's famous lecture, 'Nationalism,' the lecture which of all those delivered by him through his tours of the United States provoked the most discussion and comment.

"Gives vision of that time when nationalities shall be wiped out and men shall live as citizens of the world." -Publishers Weekly

"Sir Rabindranath Tagore is a Chrysostom, and his book, which is chiefly concerned with political theory, is a prose poem. Especially beautiful are the passages describing this secular life of India under her rulers and conquerors....His book is an arraignment of the Western state organized for power....The aspect of any one of the western states organized for power is anathema to him, driving as it does it tentacles of machinery deep into the soil; and to him therefore what he calls nationalism is 'a crude epidemic of evil.' Like Ruskin, he passes judgment upon our commercialism, with its barbarity of ugly ornament, and the standards of value of the western industrial state and its mechanical progress in which 'the civilization of humanity has lost its path in the Wilderness of Machinery.' 'The nation has thriven long upon mutilated humanity. Suddenly, all its mechanism going mad, it has begun the dance of the Furies, shattering its own limbs, scattering them into dust. It is the fifth act of the tragedy of the unreal.' He hopes, it would seem, for a Utopia such as Samuel Butler's where men have destroyed the machine they had made." -The International Journal of Ethics

"Students of history and theory of government cannot fail to find this arraignment of western political ideals full of food for thought - and even of action." -History Teacher's Magazine

"Sir Rabindranath Tagore assails with a vivid Oriental rhetoric that rises at times to real eloquence the monstrous fetish of mechanical efficiency which, coalescing with the idea of the nation, is now driving the whole Occident to its ruin. The blame for the present situation is not with this or that particular nation, but with the underlying conception of nationality itself. The nation thus conceived 'may grow on to an unimaginable corpulence, not of a living body, but of steel and steam and office buildings, till its deformity can contain no longer its ugly voluminousness - till it begins to crack and gape, breathe gas and fire in gasps, and its death-rattles sound in cannon roars....We are to be redeemed if at all 'not by methods of analytical knowledge, but by sympathy.' We must put a soul into the nation- a soul of love." -The Nation

CONTENTS

Nationalism in the West

Nationalism in Japan

Nationalism in India

The Sunset of the Century