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ROMANTIC NATIONALISM: HISTORY AND ILLUSION IN IRELAND*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2015

DAVID DWAN*
Affiliation:
Hertford College, University of Oxford E-mail: David.dwan@ell.ox.ac.uk

Abstract

Intellectual historians often invoke “romanticism” to account for the origins and conceptual shape of nationalism. In an Irish context, however, this approach has yielded false genealogies of influence and an impaired political understanding. Cast through a “romantic” prism, nationalism is divorced from its conditions of intelligibility, becoming unhelpfully isolated from questions about sovereignty, democratic legitimacy and the nature of modern citizenship. Thus all too often the irrationality that is made part of the definition of “romantic nationalism” is a function of the way that it is interpreted.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Roy Foster, Chris Insole, Duncan Kelly and the anonymous reviewers for their careful scrutiny of this article.

References

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177 O’Brien, Conor Cruise, Herod: Reflections on Political Violence (London, 1978), 47 Google Scholar, original emphasis. Ironically, in O’Brien's autobiography—produced in London—a similar misprint occurs: Lecky is judged to have written a history of “nationalism,” not “rationalism.” O’Brien, Conor Cruise, Memoir: My Life and Themes (London, 1998), 7 Google Scholar.

178 See McNally, Mark, “Conor Cruise O’Brien's Conservative Anti-nationalism,” European Journal of Political History, 7/3 (2008), 308–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bourke, Richard, “Languages of Conflict and the Northern Ireland TroublesJournal of Modern History, 83/3 (2011), 544–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Whelan, Conor Cruise O’Brien, 152–72.

179 According to Skinner's “golden rule,” the historian must begin by making historical beliefs appear “as rational as possible.” Skinner, Regarding Method, 54.