SOURCE: "What Nations Are for," in London Review of Books, Vol. 16, No. 17, September 8, 1994, pp. 7-8.

In the following review, Narin relates the dual themes of dispossession and nationalism of The Politics of Dispossession and Representations of the Intellectual to Said's politics and personal philosophy.

The politics of dispossession is nationalism—an overgeneralisation which at once calls for precise qualification. It is quite true that not all nationalists are dispossessed: possessors have their own (often strident) variations on the theme. It is also true that nationality politics did not originate among the crushed and uprooted: indeed its primary source was the nouveaux riches or upwardly mobile of Early Modern times, in Holland, England and France.

However, their national-state politics only became nationalism later on, when these entrepreneurial societies inflicted their success on the rest of the world in the 19th century.

This infliction was Progress, which caused the un-progressed...