 | Thisbiography of a living personneeds additionalcitations forverification. Please help by addingreliable sources.Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced orpoorly sourcedmust be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentiallylibelous. Find sources: "John Hutchinson" academic – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(July 2025) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
John Hutchinson (born 1949) is a British academic. He is areader innationalism at theLondon School of Economics (LSE), in the Department of Government.
John Hutchinson | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1949 (age 75–76) |
| Alma mater | University of Edinburgh, London School of Economics |
| Occupation | Academic |
John Hutchinson was born inWarrenpoint,County Down,Northern Ireland. He graduated with anMA in modern history from theUniversity of Edinburgh, Scotland in 1970; and hisPhD in sociology in 1985 from theLondon School of Economics, where he was supervised byAnthony D. Smith.[1][2]
Before joining the LSE in 1999, Hutchinson taught in Australia at the interdisciplinary School of Humanities atGriffith University, from 1974 to 1979, and from 1986 to 1999, where he became associate professor.[citation needed]
He is vice-president of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism and deputy editor ofNations and Nations and Nationalism.[citation needed] In addition, he sits on the advisory boards of the Institute for the Advancement of the Social Sciences]atBoston University and of the Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms at theUniversity of Amsterdam.[citation needed]
Hutchinson is an interdisciplinary scholar who has contributed to theories of nationalism, the study of cultural nationalism, notably in Ireland, warfare and nationalism.[citation needed]
He is a leading scholar of theethnosymbolist school (established by Smith) that highlights the role of embedded historical memories in the formation of modern nations. His firstmonograph wasThe Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism. He is widely cited by scholars as a pioneering contribution to the field of Irish history and cultural nationalism.[3][4][5]
Hutchinson rejected earlier scholarship that tended to conflate nationalism and state-seeking movements. He argued that cultural nationalists should be differentiated from political nationalists, in having as their goal the defence of the nation as a community and its historical distinctiveness rather than on the achievement of a state. He explains how cultural nationalists act as moral innovators, emerging at times of crisis, to form movements that offer new maps of identity based on historical myths, that in turn may inspire programmes of socio-political regeneration. Hutchinson argues such movements operate sometimes as complementary to and sometimes as communitarian alternatives to political nationalism, when statist strategies are defunct. He emphasises the dynamic role of historians and artists, showing how they interact with religious reformists and a discontented modernising intelligentsia to form national identities.
His second book,Modern Nationalism (Fontana 1994) applies this cultural approach to the analysis of contemporary politics, notably, the relationship of nationalism to the collapse of communism, the religious revival and contentions in multicultural polities. More recently, hisNations as Zones of Conflict (Sage 2005) has sought to combine the focus of ethnosymbolists on the historical embeddedness of nations with the stress of postmodernists on the multiplicity of identities by exploring nations as heterogeneous entities, characterised by persisting conflicts that derive from historic divisions (e.g., civil wars). Hutchinson argues that the role of contestation in nation-formation has been neglected. Such conflicts serve to "fill out" national identities and they give rise to alternative cultural and political visions that offer options to populations at times of crisis. This study has provoked praise and controversy.[6]Eric Kaufmann claims "Hutchinson dramatically expands the boundaries of the ethnosymbolist argument to engage not only 'modernist' but postmodernist critiques of the nation."[7] Although critical of what he sees as Hutchinson's idealist approach,Andreas Wimmer states: "(Hutchinson's) analysis of the layered character of nationalist myths, the internal heterogeneity and conflictual nature of nationalist discourse, as well as the episodic nature of nationalist mobilization represents a considerable step forward towards a more differentiated view of the nature of nationalism."[7]
With Smith, Hutchinson co-editedNationalism (Oxford 1994) andEthnicity (Oxford 1996) that have become standard teaching texts for courses on nationalism in the English-speaking world, and his works have been translated into several languages, including Chinese,Norwegian andTurkish.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| People | |
| Other | |
