Reading 3 In an anthropological spirit, I propose the following definition of a nation: it is animagined political community--and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know mostof their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each livesthe image of their communion. In fact, all communities larger than primordial villagesof face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to bedistinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they areima-gined. The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassingperhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond whichlie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The mostmessianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human racewill join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say,Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet. It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in whichEnlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained,hierarchical, dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when eventhe most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted withthe living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism between each faith'sontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God,directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state. Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality andexploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep,horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over thepast two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly todie for such limited imaginings.
【題組】33. What does the author intend to do in this passage?
(A) To debunk the myth of nations being limited and sovereign.
(B) To illustrate the anthropological nature of a nation.
(C) To demonstrate the different ways a nationhood can be imagined.
(D) To explain the concept of a nation as an imagined community.
(E) To specify the defining elements of an imagined community.