Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08947_Field_TCGG T712.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 963b | 16 lines

first among the “intellectual” classes and to have received
decisive impetus from the support of the middle classes. In
England, where physical environment and political and religious
circumstances were peculiarly favorable, a strong national
consciousness developed considerably before the eighteenth
century, and it may be that English nationalism did spring more
or less spontaneously out of mass feeling and sentiment. Even
here, the matter is debatable, though it is not within the scope
of the present work to indicate the pros and cons in any detail.

     Outside of England, however, there can be little question
that in the first half of the eighteenth century the masses of
Europe, as well as of Asia and America, whilst possessing some
consciousness of nationality, thought of themselves chiefly as
belonging to a province or town or an empire, rather than to a
national state, and made no serious or effective protest