Its borders are finite but elastic and permeable. The imagined community is limited because regardless of size it is never taken to be co-extensive with humanity itself-not even extreme ideologies such as Nazism, with its pretensions to world dominance, imagine this in fact, as Giorgio Agamben has argued such ideologies tend to be premised on a generalization of an exception. But as Anderson is careful to point out (contra Ernest Gellner) imagined is not the same thing as false or fictionalized, it is rather the unselfconscious exercise of abstract thought. It is imagined because the actuality of even the smallest nation exceeds what it is possible for a single person to know-one cannot know every person in a nation, just as one cannot know every aspect of its economy, geography, history, and so forth. In Imagined Communities (1983) Anderson argues that the nation is an imagined political community that is inherently limited in scope and sovereign in nature. Benedict Anderson's definition of nation.
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