In his 1983 book Nations and Nationalism British Czech intellectual Ernest Gellner puts forward a theory of nationalism, explaining that the concept of nation is not, in fact, an ancient notion as we might first imagine. Rather, it is a modern idea born out of the seismic social and cultural shifts that industrialization brought to the Western world. Industrial society needed an educated workforce sharing the same culture and the same languageâsomething much less important in the agricultural age. Gellner shows how the concept of nationalismâa political concept in which state and cultural boundaries matchâfollows from this new idea of nation. Gellner was well aware that âthe idea of a man without a nation seems to impose a ⌠strain on the modern imagination.â But having witnessed firsthand the catastrophic effects of excessive nationalismâGellner was a Jew who escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1939 after Hitler invadedâhe was only too aware of the dangers of believing nationalism was something all human beings should embrace.