From /Nationalism/ by Elie Kedourie <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Nationalism-Elie-Kedourie/dp/0631188851/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Nationalism-Elie-Kedourie/dp/063118885...</a> <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/nationalism/oclc/27812918" rel="nofollow">http://www.worldcat.org/title/nationalism/oclc/27812918</a> :<p>"The writers who invented and elaborated the post-Kantian theory of the state belonged to a caste which was relatively low on the social scale. They were, most of them, the sons of pastors, artisans, or small farmers. They somehow managed to become university students, most often in the faculty of theology, and last out the duration of their course on minute grants, private lessons, and similar makeshifts. When they graduated they found that their knowledge opened no doors, that they were still in the same social class, looked down upon by a nobility which was stupid, unlettered, and which engrossed the public employments they felt themselves so capable of filling. These students and ex-students felt in them the power to do great things, they had culture, knowledge, ability, they yearned for the life of action, its excitements and rewards, and yet there they were, doomed to spend heartbreaking years as indigent curates waiting to be appointed pastors, or as tutors in some noble household, where they were little better than superior domestics, or as famished writers dependent on the goodwill of an editor or a publisher."<p>This group produced colourful people like Karl Sand <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Ludwig_Sand" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Ludwig_Sand</a> , and of course an ideology which was eventually to burn Europe down at least a couple of times. Substitute engineering for theology and you have a pretty accurate description of many of the angry young men of the present-day Middle East too.