Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences and law, expertly written by the world's leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas.

This original Introduction presents nationalism as the most important social force shaping the ways modern men and women live their lives. It explains the formative influence of nationalism in the public spheres of politics and the economy, as well as in the most private ones of emotional life and mental illness. Along the way, it illuminates widely used but rarely clarified concepts, such as social institution, revolution, ideology, and totalitarianism, and introduces new ones, among them dignity capital and nationalism as the double-helix of modern politics. Basing its conclusions on over twenty-five years of original comparative historical research, this book .