Did Kohn Believe in the “Kohn Dichotomy”? Reconsidering Kohn’s Journey from The Political Idea of Judaism to the Idea of Nationalism

Leo Beack Institute Yearbook (2010) 55(1): 295-311

The recent reprinting of Hans Kohn’s classic 1944 study The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background (2005) reflects renewed interest among scholars of nationalism in the man regarded as one of the founders of the field. In his introduction to this re-publication, sociologist Craig Calhoun explains Kohn’s enduring import as the “most influential source of both the opposition of civic and ethnic nationalism and of its association with a parallel opposition between Western and Eastern varieties of modernity”. 2 This dichotomy distinguishes two typologies of nationalism: one grounded in familial, natural and territorial ties and the second based on shared commitment to rational, humanistic and liberal principles. The two paths in modern nationalism reflect mutually exclusive choices in constructing collective identity—descent versus consent, cultural ties versus political citizenship, and group recognition versus individual equality.

Reviving the ‘Kohn dichotomy’ speaks to a pressing need today. Following the end of the Cold War, ethnic nationalisms are often perceived as posing a tremendous threat to individual rights and humanistic principles. Racial identity, religious commitments and national chauvinism increasingly challenge the hegemony of civic and universal principles of citizenship and democracy. By theorizing a ‘liberal nationalism’ Kohn shifted the meaning, function and teleology of nationalism from an emphasis on particular, cultural and even racial concerns to a force engendering greater degrees of human integration and co-existence. 3 Kohn’s theoretical opposition between ethnic and civic typologies thus offers a non-exclusivist, pluralistic and rational counter-narrative of national identity. Western nationalism, the implied telos of Kohn’s historical trajectory, reconciles nationalism and liberalism by neutralizing the particularism of ethnic ties and instead defining nationalism as the historical carrier of liberal ideals.

There is one problem, however, with rehabilitating Kohn’s work to reinforce the binary distinction between competing typologies of nationalism. Kohn, I argue in

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