Elie Kedourie

Kedourie resisted the common intellectual-historical move of blaming Hegel for nationalism's dangerous ideas. Instead, he located one crucial source in Kant's doctrine of self-determination—the idea that political authority derives from the autonomous will of a collective people. This Kantian inheritance, Kedourie argued, fused with the decline of traditional dynastic and religious orders to produce a doctrine that made the nation the sole legitimate unit of political life. His willingness to indict Kant rather than the usual Hegelian suspect distinguished his account from other intellectual histories of nationalism .

For Kedourie, nationalism was not an organic sentiment or a natural human attachment to one's homeland. It was a specific, identifiable body of ideas—a doctrine—with traceable philosophical foundations and a discernible historical moment of emergence around the turn of the nineteenth century. This framing allowed him to treat nationalism as an object of intellectual history rather than a permanent feature of human psychology. It also grounded his critique: if nationalism is a doctrine rather than a primordial instinct, its destructive consequences are not inevitable but stem from the specific content of the doctrine itself .

Kedourie viewed nationalism as a homogenizing and destabilizing force that dismantled the multi-ethnic empires—Ottoman, Habsburg, British—he believed had allowed diverse peoples to coexist under a single political order. Nationalism's demand for cultural and political homogeneity, he argued, produced brutality and often totalitarian aspirations where imperial arrangements had maintained a workable pluralism. This put him at odds with much post-colonial scholarship that viewed national self-determination as liberation. His critique was not conservative nostalgia but a liberal argument about the conditions for peaceful coexistence .

Kedourie was born in Baghdad to a Jewish family and witnessed firsthand the rise of Arab nationalism and its consequences for minorities like his own community. His scholarship on British and French imperial policy in the Middle East—particularly The Anglo-Arab Labyrinth (1976)—argued that Western officials misunderstood local political dynamics and facilitated the emergence of despotisms by treating nationalism as an authentic expression of popular will. His personal experience of antisemitism in Iraq and his later academic work on Arab politics informed his skepticism toward nationalist claims and his insistence on analyzing them as ideological constructs .

In 1953, Kedourie withdrew his doctoral thesis after his Oxford examiner, Sir Hamilton Gibb, objected to its content. The thesis was later published as England and the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire, 1914-1921 (1956). Kedourie remained publicly contemptuous of what he saw as the examiner's standards of historical scholarship, and he recounted the episode in a 1978 introduction to the book's second edition. The event marked the beginning of his reputation as a fiercely independent scholar willing to reject academic compromise—and it led him back to the London School of Economics, where he spent the rest of his career .

Both Kedourie and Gellner rejected the idea that nationalism is ancient or natural, but their mechanisms diverge sharply. Gellner located nationalism's source in industrial society's structural need for cultural homogeneity—a functionalist explanation. Kedourie focused on intellectual history and political philosophy, tracing nationalism to Kantian self-determination and the erosion of traditional authority. Gellner treated nationalism as a response to material conditions; Kedourie treated it as a doctrine with identifiable philosophical roots. Their shared modernism masks a fundamental disagreement about whether nationalism is a product of social structure or of ideas .

Kedourie's Nationalism, first published in 1960, is now recognized as one of the foundational texts of the modernist paradigm in nationalism studies. Isaiah Berlin called its account of nationalist ideas 'exemplary: clear, learned and just' . The book has remained in print through multiple editions, with a fourth expanded edition appearing in 1993, after Kedourie's death . While subsequent theorists like Gellner, Anderson, and Hobsbawm developed more sociological and cultural approaches, Kedourie's intellectual-historical method and his critical stance toward nationalism's consequences remain distinctive contributions to the field.