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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 May 2006
In 1953, Karl W. Deutsch published one of the most powerful works in the history of the study of nations and nationalism. The book was entitled Nationalism and Social Communication, and it hypothesized that a nation was not the expression of the essence of a people, as nationalists had argued, but of networks of communication. These networks ran along the rails and with the postal service, and were the “steel sinews,” as Bismarck once maintained, of a community that shared and exchanged a common culture. The cultural turn in the study of nationalism, most prominently represented by Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, did not so much refute Deutsch as shift the analytical terrain from an analysis of the infrastructure of commonality to an interpretation of the style in which nations were imagined. Many of Deutsch's insights remained the unspoken assumptions of the historiography of nations.