If liberalism is the politics of the universal, then nationalism is the politics of the specific. It may be specific culturally or genetically or both. Its object is selected by passion not by reason and just that constitutes its legitimacy.

Thus at the core of romanticism there is a metaphysic of man. It is in headlong confrontation with the rationalism of the Enlightenment. And it fits in very well with the claustrophilia of the partisans of Gemeinschaft against Gesellschaft. They are, after all, the advocates of specificity, of the distinctiveness rather than the universality of culture. They are not saying that Ruritanian culture should be universalised and adopted by everyone. On the contrary, they are irritated when foreigners ape it and try to penetrate it. They dislike such intruders intensely, just as they deplore deserters from the ranks of Ruritanian culture, seduced by the garish attractions of metropolitan civilisation. They do not claim that their own culture is meritorious because it embodies universal values: they love it because it does not, because it incarnates its own values, and displays its own distinctive style, which is not the same as that of others.

And what they hate above all else are just those damned cosmopolitans, who lack roots of their own and wish to impose their rootlessness on others, and try to make it a universal norm in virtue of some grey general humanity. These rootless people are, not surprisingly, engaged in activities such as trade or thought, which lead them to these bloodless values. But that is not for us, say the romantic nationalists: we are rooted to the soil, peasants or warriors or both, we feel, we do not calculate . . . and we spurn those who do . . . and it is we who represent true humanity, and the others are but a parody of man.

So the cult of community and specificity receives reinforcement from the entire romantic tradition and its claim that the best, or even the only, truly human elements are to be found in the non-reasoning aspects of life. Reason is defied twice over: by the love of the specific rather than the universal, and of the passionate rather than the calculating. Love, or passion, as it were, is enlisted in the political arena: political confrontations are presented as the conflict of life with sterility, of vitality with disease, a disease which masquerades as reason and compassion. (It was a romantic English novelist, after all, campaigning happily for sexual rather than nationalist liberation, who actually introduced the expression `anti-life' to characterise cerebral attitudes he did not like.) For the latter-day romantics, the specific and the passionate are to be pursued not only in courtship or on the nature walk or in one's choice of music, but also (perhaps especially) in the council chamber or the chamber of commerce. The new spirit is to pervade the whole of social life and not merely special reserved areas (sex, wilder forms of life); it is to be at the service of the polity, and the polity is to serve it. Politics are to cease being instrumental and become theatrical, ritualised, and expressive.

- E.Gellner, The metaphysics of romanticism