Ernest Gellner suggests that the modern state and the modern industry require what he calls “modular man”. The term “modular” is taken from the idea of modular furniture in which components can be fitted together in different ways, while maintaining a harmonious whole. Modular man has certain basic skills, including a shared language, and can adapt himself to a variety of positions in modern society. Modular man is capable of performing highly diverse tasks in the same general cultural idiom, if necessary reading up manuals of specific jobs in the general standard style of the culture in question. Nationalism, the principle that the cultural and political unit is congruent, is a collective ideology, ideally suited to the construction of the modular man, making possible a political authority that creates the conditions for everyday encounters with the state and the modern industry.
Mary Caldor, Human security
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