"The idea of the ultimate sacrifice comes only with an idea of purity, through fatality" (Anderson, 144). What makes people willing to die for their countries? In his book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson explores this question. Anderson believes the answer lays in the idea of nationalism. Nationalism invents nations where they do not exist. Anderson argues that a national community is an "imagined community." Even though the members of even the smallest nation will not know most of their fellow members, in each of their minds there exists an image of communion. Nation-ness as well as nationalism are cultural artifacts. The interplay between fatality, technology, and capitalism is an essential reason an individual becomes willing to die for their own country. This interplay allows the individual to imagine his or her identity. .
Anderson begins by questioning why the nation replaced the monarchy within the sacral ecumene when it eroded. He does not argue by inference from explicit assumptions. Instead he takes two forms of rule and two types of collective consciousness and contrasts them. Anderson uses the modern and traditional types of rule. He describes modern nations as horizontally bounded and persistent through time. They attribute equal citizenship to the members of the nation even though they are very unequal in other things, such as level of education or wealth. Also, the people of the modern nation think of themselves as sharing commonality with other members, even though they have never met them. On the other hand, traditional "dynastic realms" take on the principle of succession in rule and the expansion of territory through the process of marriage. These traditional "dynastic realms" have a central ruler who is above shifting horizontal boundaries of which identity of this ruler is independent. .
The two types of collective consciousness are the traditional communities united by a sacred written language in the forms of Latin and Arabic, and the modern nations united by print languages.