Not a day has gone by in these past several years without nationalism appearing in the headlines. Let us, for the sake of this chapter, limit ourselves to the period since 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics. The event signified Chinese nationalism’s coming of age; it was in no uncertain terms and very publicly presented to the world. The world, unaware that Chinese nationalism existed at all, was caught by surprise, from which it still, over a decade later, cannot quite recover. The rise of nationalism in China was an extremely important development in the history of nationalism in general. It opened a new page: the spread of an essentially Western form of consciousness beyond the limits of its original, monotheistic civilization, or the actual globalization of nationalism.

Hannah Arendt did not like sociology and made no exception for Weber's concept of “ideal type.” She thought it prevented sociologists from focusing on what was especially important about phenomena under scrutiny, substituting for their unique qualities features arrived at through simplifying generalizations. But this was a misunderstanding. The ideal type has little in common with average type, which Arendt presumed it to be. It is a method for identifying productive questions by, first, constructing a concept of the phenomenon one wishes to understand on the basis of its best- known and most obvious characteristics, as it would have been, if these characteristics and these characteristics alone were allowed to develop out of their fundamental principles, unthwarted by historical contingencies, and using this “ideal type” as a measuring rod for the importance of actual historical characteristics. The larger the deviation from the ideal type, the more important it is to focus on it (Weber 1978). Were we to construct the ideal type of the work of Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind would stick out like a sore thumb. The author of The Human Condition, of Eichmann in Jerusalem, of Rahel Varnhagen and certainly of The Origins of Totalitarianism, is unrecognizable in it. The Life of the Mind is in no way representative of Arendt's canon, however varied it may be considered, it seems to contradict the representative works in almost every line; it is completely out of character. Precisely for this reason, it is significant for the understanding of this canon and this character. More than any other, it invites one to transform Arendt's work into an object of sociological study.

The book was composed between 1970 and December 1975, when Arendt died (having finished two of the three planned volumes). Was it her intellectual testament? The fact that the book originated as a prestigious lecture course – the Gifford Lectures – which Arendt was unquestionably invited to give because of her contributions to political theory, and the interpretation of totalitarianism in the first place, but chose to devote to a subject that nobody expected of her, lends credence to this idea. This makes using The Life of the Mind as the complement to the ideal type of Arendt's work of interest to intellectual historians and anyone seeking a key to the interpretation of her entire body of work.

THE STATE OF THE FIELD

The inclusion of a chapter on nationalism in a Handbook of Political Sociology, which introduces subjects fundamental to the profession in these early years of the twenty-first century, reflects the recognition, which has grown steadily in the past twenty-five years, of the political importance of nationalism. There has been considerable academic interest in nationalism before, but this interest wavered and at times seemed to disappear altogether. This faltering interest may be held responsible for the fact that our understanding of the phenomenon did not advance as much as one could have wished from the beginning of World War II, when its violent eruption took American social scientists by surprise, and even from the beginning of the twentieth century.

The work of Hans Kohn is among the most useful early efforts in attempting to come to terms with the development of nationalism in historical perspective. Kohn was particularly notable for constantly stressing that nationalism is fundamentally an idea, rather than a static, structural phenomenon, echoing the argument that the French sociologist Ernest Renan made three-quarters of a century earlier. However, Kohn (as well as Renan) can be criticized for being insufficiently rigorous in defining the idea of the nation. For him, the nation was fundamentally a sovereign community, but he failed to recognize the essentially secular quality of nationalism or the structural implications of national consciousness.

In the system which supports figurative painters the function of the “gatekeepers” is supposed to be fulfilled by the owners of the private galleries. They enable painters to exhibit their works and reach the public, they buy these works themselves and help in selling them to others. In many cases well-established galleries aid a painter to get a show in private galleries and museums abroad and in different ways contribute to his gaining publicity.

Between 1979 and 1980 the Israeli Association of Gallery Owners listed sixty-four galleries. This number represents the result of a very rapid growth in this sector during the preceding twenty years. In the 1940s there were only seven galleries in Israel and they did not exist simultaneously. Fifteen galleries were active in the 1950s, forty-eight in the 1960s and 128 in the 1970s. It is the overall number of the galleries active in a given decade which is taken into account here, not only those which existed simultaneously: some were closed during the period, others opened, still others continued their existence which started in an earlier decade.

The galleries, at a glance, can be divided into three categories: galleries with unambivalently figurative preferences, which represent the decisive majority of all private galleries; galleries with unambivalently avant-gardist preferences; and galleries with ambivalent preferences, which can be characterized as semi-avant-gardist. Avant-gardist and semi-avant-gardist galleries are but a small minority in the overall population.

In order to explore the connection between painters' styles and their patterns of success, we must examine in detail the agents in the system, whose judgment determines success – the “gatekeepers”. It must be asked: (1) How do the “gatekeepers” work? What sorts of judgments are made and what are their grounds? (2) In what way does the behavior of the “gatekeepers” affect the artists' patterns of success?

The role of the “gatekeepers” is performed by different groups in the two systems: by gallery owners in the private market and supposedly by critics and curators in the public system.

The group of critics consists of a small number of people (approximately twenty). Most of them started their activity in the 1970s or late 1960s although among them there are critics that embarked on their career in an earlier period. As was already indicated in chapter 1, Israeli art existed at first almost without criticism. Those who wrote on the matters of art in the press were art lovers of European origin, men of general education, lacking in most cases specific training in art itself. The most important critic of plastic art until the middle of the 1950s was Dr. Haim Gamzu, a theater critic by education who later served as director of the Tel-Aviv Museum.

The group of curators consists of museum directors or head curators and of curators of Israeli art. Museum directors or head curators are appointed by boards of directors consisting of different public figures with the participation of Ministry of Education officials and representatives of Municipal Cultural Departments. It is museum directors and head curators who appoint curators of Israeli art, though, this is also done with the approval of boards of directors.

The group includes people who began their career with an occasional appointment in a museum (usually a clerical position) in the period when the first museums in Israel appeared, and advanced to important positions in them, as well as relatively young people. These were appointed to their positions directly, as a result of an announced vacancy, or were personally invited by boards of directors or directors themselves; they filled these positions since the 1970s, when the founding curators had to retire and more general offices were split. The members of the former group in most cases either lack formal education altogether or have some education which is not related to the field of their activity; the latter are graduates of Art History or Museology departments in Israel and abroad, who have some experience as art critics, or as museum curators outside Israel. In any case, the two groups ascended to their positions of influence simultaneously with the rise of Conceptualism.

The discussion of the case so far might have already made clear, that the Israeli public is divided into two parts which correspond to the division of styles into figurative and Abstract and belong to the two subsystems of the Israeli art world. The division of the public is so conspicuous that one actually has to talk about two distinct publics.

According to the interviews, extracts from which will be quoted below, the main characteristic of the figurative art public is its self-confidence. This public has clear and rather well-founded personal preferences. Its members understand what they like and why. They approve or disapprove of paintings according to whether they answer their requirements or not. These requirements protect the public of figurative painting and help its members to explain why they prefer certain works of art or styles to the others. Since its judgment is based upon rational considerations, there is no intolerance towards the existence of those styles which this public does not accept. It does not perceive any threat in the existence of these styles and can allow itself to show patience towards them.

Although among this public there are persons who prefer “not quite Abstract and not quite Realistic” art, “real, but hinted, not finished things,” namely works of Impressionistic or Post-Impressionistic character, they, in any case, demand from the painter a demonstration of technical skill. In accordance with this, even paintings of this kind have to be “with some sense, not mere daubs”.

In order to describe the existing systems of painting, painters must be classified according to their styles. Since the names they used to identify themselves during different periods varied, it was decided to create a uniform terminology for the description of styles. According to this terminology, the painters were divided into seven style-groups; these include all styles that appeared in the course of the history of Israeli art.

The classification was made according to two principles: (1) the visual similarity among the works of art, their stylistic–technical features; and (2) the place of a certain artistic school on the continuum of the individual freedom of an artist vs. the rigidity of professional requirements towards him.

The seven style-groups are:

1. Lyrical and Geometric Abstractionism;

2. Conceptualism;

3. Surrealism;

4. Free Figurative Painting;

5. Naive Painting;

6. Expressionism;

7. Realism.

The style-group of Lyrical and Geometric Abstractionism consists mainly of the Abstract Expressionist painters (approximately 90 per cent of the group) and a few Geometric Abstractionists. The works of Abstract Expressionism (the synonyms are Lyrical Abstractionism, tachisme, action painting, art informel) are characterized by the total independence of color and brushwork from the subject, so that the subject becomes unrecognizable. These works are “color, space and movement, presented without any specific reference to observed nature.” The effect of these works of art is achieved by a free spilling or daubing of paint on the canvas and by the use of “the blot, the stain, the spot or the drip.”