Samuel Johnson's famous jab at patriotism may have targeted fakes, not the feeling
On the evening of 7 April 1774 Samuel Johnson declared patriotism the final hiding place of scoundrels. James Boswell recorded the line without context. Some argue Johnson meant the self-styled patriots around the Earl of Bute, since that same year he published The Patriot attacking false patriotism and elsewhere praised the genuine kind.
No direct evidence contradicts the more common reading that Johnson was condemning patriotism itself, so the debate stays open. The word has a humbler past than its modern glow suggests. Patriot entered English in the 1590s via Middle French from the Late Latin patriota, a fellow countryman, and ultimately the Greek patris, fatherland. Early on it was applied to barbarians thought to share nothing but a common homeland, and in Europe it originally meant any compatriot regardless of rank.
In the nineteenth century patriotism and nationalism meant much the same thing before drifting apart. George Orwell sharpened the contrast in his Notes on Nationalism, describing patriotism as a defensive devotion to a place and way of life one has no wish to impose on others, and nationalism as bound up with the pursuit of power and prestige. Too much patriotism has its own names: chauvinism and jingoism.
Enlightenment thinkers set love of country against loyalty to the Church. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was among the most influential voices arguing that clergy, whose true homeland was heaven, should not teach in public schools because they could not instil love of the homeland. Critics were blunt too. Voltaire lamented that being a good patriot seemed to require hostility to the rest of humanity, and the Japanese anarchist Kōtoku Shūsui invoked Mencius: anyone would rush to save a child about to fall into a well without first asking whose child it was.
Researchers try to measure the sentiment. Since 1981 the World Values Survey has asked people how proud they are of their nationality on a scale from one to four. The Correlates of War project found some link between patriotism and readiness for war, ranking pre-1914 Germany at or near the top. In 2022 Gallup found the share of American adults extremely proud of their country at an all-time low.
Source: Patriotism
