Having as starting point the boarding that grants to particular attention the transformations of the concept, the author delimits its position. It uses the tender nationalism as basic for the sustenance of the unit national politics and; the nation does not come before the State and of the nationalism, these are that they generate nation; the national question is on to the economic and technological periods of training; it uses a dualidade principle, the high one as the government, the activists of the nationalistic movements, and of the low one, the common people, who are involved in propagandas; finally it follows the division that Hroch makes of the national movements: A stage? purely cultural, b stage? politics, and c stage? sustentation of mass. Hobsbawm uses the concept of nation in the modern direction ' ' basic characteristic of the modern nation and everything what it is on is its modernidade' ' (p 27). Also it leads in consideration that the government, before 1884, was not on to the nation concept, as later it will go to establish itself. Thus the author establishes a landmark, from the Age of the Revolutions (1830) that the concept starts to operate in its speech social politician and. Thus he follows reconstructing a coherent liberal theory of nation, for this uses the liberal authors, as John Stuart Mill Walter Bagehot and breaking of a critical a Adam Smith and its simple concept of nation: a territorial State, arrives the Maxr and Engels with the nation representing a period of training of historical development of the society human being. Beyond the concepts of nation and nationalism, Hobsbawm works with the protonacionalismo concept. Search to answer as ' ' patriotism nacional' ' so distant of the experience of the majority of the men ' ' becomes so fast a force powerful politics? ' ' (p 63). It cites the concept of ' ' community imaginada' ' of Benedict Anderson, forms supply places that go beyond the real spaces as a devotion and bows and vocabularies politicians of select groups: As for example (and Hobsbawm uses many examples in this work) ' ' Up to 1945, where she has vestiges, the ones that said germanic dialects, and the whose elites used the language of the German culture; standardized and writing, was established not in its main regions of the central Europe but also as classrooms controllers and as the city dwellers in the stretches of areas peasants for all the Europe of same the southeastern east and (…) all they saw itself as alemes' ' (p 64).