Prof. Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professors ...

Miroslav Hroch (born 14 June 1932 in

Prague Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate ...

) is a Czech historian and

political theorist A political theorist is someone who engages in constructing or evaluating political theory, including political philosophy. Theorists may be Academia, academics or independent scholars. Here the most notable political theorists are categorized b ...

and a professor at the

Charles University ) , image_name = Carolinum_Logo.svg , image_size = 200px , established = , type = Public, Ancient , budget = 8.9 billion CZK , rector = Milena Králíčková , faculty = 4,057 , administrative_staff = 4,026 , students = 51,438 , under ...

. Hroch earned his PhD at the Charles University in 1962. On May 30, 1997 Hroch received an

honorary doctorate An honorary degree is an academic degree for which a university (or other degree-awarding institution) has waived all of the usual requirements. It is also known by the Latin phrases ''honoris causa'' ("for the sake of the honour") or ''ad hono ...

from the Faculty of Humanities at

Uppsala University Uppsala University ( sv, Uppsala universitet) is a public research university in Uppsala, Sweden. Founded in 1477, it is the oldest university in Sweden and the Nordic countries still in operation. The university rose to significance during ...

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic countries, Nordic c ...

Miroslav Hroch has earned international academic renown for his works about formation and evolution of the national movements of Central and Eastern European nations. He has significantly contributed to the establishment of

comparative history Comparative history is the comparison of different societies which existed during the same time period or shared similar cultural conditions. The comparative history of societies emerged as an important specialty among intellectuals in the Enlight ...

as a research field in East-Central Europe. Hroch defined three chronological stages in the creation of a nation: * Phase A: Activists strive to lay the foundation for a

national identity National identity is a person's identity or sense of belonging to one or more states or to one or more nations. It is the sense of "a nation as a cohesive whole, as represented by distinctive traditions, culture, and language". National identity ...

. They research the cultural, linguistic, social and sometimes historical attributes of a non- dominant group in order to raise awareness of the common traits—but they do this "without pressing specifically national demands to remedy deficits." * Phase B: "A new range of activists emerged, who sought to win over as many of their ethnic group as possible to the project of creating a future nation." * Phase C: The majority of the population forms a mass movement. "In this phase, a full social movement comes into being and movement branches into conservative- clerical, liberal and democratic wings, each with its own program." Hroch's definition of nation: "Now the 'nation is not, of course, an eternal category, but was the product of a long and complicated process of historical development in Europe. For our purposes, let us define it at the outset as ''a large social group integrated not by one but by a combination of several kinds of objective relationships (economic, political, linguistic, cultural, religious, geographical, historical), and their subjective reflection in collective consciousness.'' Many of these ties could be mutually substituable - some playing a particularly important role in one nation-building process, and no more than a subsidiary part in others. But among them, three stand out as irreplaceable: #a 'memory' of some common past, treated as a 'destiny' of the group - or at least of its core constituents; #a density of linguistic or cultural ties enabling a higher degree of social communication within the group than beyond it; #a conception of the equality of all members of the group organized as a civil society."

Books

* ''Social preconditions of national revival in Europe'', 1985, English translation of ''Die Vorkämpfer der nationalen Bewegungen bei den kleinen Völkern Europas,'' Praha, 1968, . * ''In the National Interest. Demands and goals of European national movements of the nineteenth century: a comparative perspective'', 2000. * ''European nations. Explaining their formation'', 2015, English edition of ''Das Europa der Nationen'', 2005.

References

1932 births 20th-century Czech historians Czech political philosophers Academic staff of Charles University Living people Scholars of nationalism 21st-century Czech historians {{europe-philosopher-stub