"Nations and Exclusions": First-Year Lecture 2003
On Sept. 30, 2003, Professor Anthony W. Marx, president of Amherst College, spoke about "Nations and Exclusions" to first-year students and faculty teaching first-year seminars. Read more about the lecture in Amherst's news release.
Audio Excerpts
MP3 508k "...all of my scholarly work has been focused one way or another on the question of what holds peoples together."
MP3 563k "...where whites had gone to war with each other, and one group had won .... the two sides had to find a way to make peace with each other. And the one thing they had in common, that would become the basis of that peace, was racism."
MP3 536k “The key schools of thought on nationalism .... suggest that actually nationalism is a deeply liberal and inclusive process that binds people together....”
MP3 967k “...as the former protestant converted to Catholicism, he [Henry IV] understands that this way of building nations is crazy.”
MP3 629k “I believe nationalism has been ... based fundamentally on exclusion, and was based on exclusion at its very birth in European history.”
MP3 854k “We—and I mean we the world as a whole, here—too easily and too quickly adopt the temptation of denigrating some other group, to exclude some other group, for purposes of consolidating the group that we adhere to.”