Chilean nationalism is the nationalism of Chilean people and Chilean culture. It originated as a strain of political thought between 1904 and 1914 with the rise of the centenary essayists, the birth of the Nationalist Party and the reaappreciation of the authoritarian political discourse of the statesman Diego Portales (1793–1837).

Chilean nationalist ideas arose in the context of the political and economic crisis at the start of the 20th century, when a group of intellectuals tried to find a way out of the crisis by appealing to industrial development, authoritarian policies, ethnonational identity, economic protection and strong opposition to political and economic liberalism.

According to some authors, the first formal theorist of Chilean nationalism was the doctor and veteran Nicolás Palacios, who published his famous book Raza chilena in 1904, in which he proposed the racial superiority of Chileans due to their mix of "warrior Visigoths" and "strong Araucanians." Palacios was, according to historian Erwin Robertson, a self-proclaimed racist as well as a spectator of the social inequalities of the time, “a preferential witness of the Santa María School Massacre in Iquique” and “the defender of the Roto against an oligarchy that he considered the result of negative social selection”. This book contains three principal ideas: that Chilean miscegenation had given rise to a permanent and defined race, composed of both the Mapuche, an American Indian particularly suited to war and the hostility of the climate; as well as by Spanish conquistadors of Germanic descent, whose warrior skills were also highlighted by the author, that Chilean territory, contrary to the reports that were provided, was mostly unusable given its amount of sterile land, so immigration policies had to be even more selective and prevent the entry of "Latin races", in order to favor the entry of Germans and other "Nordic" ethnicities, and that much of the crisis they faced was related to the poor image that the people had of themselves, an issue accentuated by the "dominant oligarchy", which "mercilessly despised" the lower class.

The racial theories of Palacios influenced the prolific historian and philosopher Francisco Antonio Encina, (National Literature Prize, 1951), one of the founding members of the Nationalist Party in 1910. Nationalist sentiment was quite popular until the 1960s, the main ideas expressed in his extensive twenty-volume Historia de Chile desde la Prehistoria hasta 1891 (English: History of Chile from Prehistory to 1891), and in the essays Nuestra inferioridad económica (English: Our inferior economy) and La educación económica y el liceo,(English: Financial education and high school) both published in 1912; many of his racial ideas can be found in La literatura histórica chilena y el concepto actual de la historia (English: Chilean literary history and the current concept of history), published in 1935 and republished in 1997 by Editorial Universitaria. Similarly to Palacios, Encina thought that the Chilean aristocracy had lost its chivalrous spirit for a banal and uncompromising one. For the historian, the decadency of the Chilean elite originated with the triumph of the liberals in the Civil War of 1891 and the implementation of anti-state policies of liberal economist Jean Gustave Courcelle-Seneuil, which consisted of lowering tariffs and allowing the entry of foreign products and companies, resulting in a “decline of the national entrepreneurial spirit and the surrender of the country to large foreign companies”. It promoted policy oriented towards industrial education, since it considered the Chilean "race" incompatible with "humanistic education" (liberal arts) that the elites engaged in. However, the most remarked upon aspect of Encina's writings is their racist content: unlike Palacios, Encina saw racial mixing as a negative as it decreased Spanish blood. He lamented that miscegenation destroyed the prosperity that other European colonies achieved in North America, while Palacios was favorable towards ethnic mixing. Therefore, for Encina, the stratification of creole society and the political power of the aristocracy had a racial explanation: "Chilean society was left with a social makeup, that, in general, coincides with the ethnic makeup: on top, the Chileans with the most Spanish blood, and on the bottom, those with the most Indigenous blood."

Later, the lawyer and academic Alberto Edwards published La fronda aristocrática en Chile (English: The aristocratic frond in Chile), a book that criticized the gentrification of the Chilean aristocracy due to its lack of connection with reality, its lack of ability to react to crisis and its economic attitude. Edwards criticized liberalism in the book, accusing it of uprooting the nation of its traditions and its founding values. This work was strongly influenced by The Decline of the West by German philosopher Oswald Spengler, who he cited and studied; the investigators Renato Cristi and Carlos Ruize define Edwards as a "conservative-revolutionary" thinker. For his part, fellow academic Carlos Keller, student of Spengler and member of the National Socialist Movement of Chile, published La eterna crisis chilena (English: The eternal Chilean crisis), a book of political economy and sociological analysis that showed what Mario Góngora called “the nationalist response to the crisis”.

Between 1940 and 1960, Chilean nationalism incorporated falangist and corporatist concepts. Inspired by the Franco regime, there was a Hispanist shift. Traditionalist professor Jaime Eyzaguirre published the magazine Estudios (1938–1954), of a corporativist, nationalist, and Catholic ideology, with collaborators Mario Góngora and right-wing professor Julio Philippi Izquierdo. The theologician and philosopher Osvaldo Lira published his most important works during this period: Nostalgia de Vázquez de Mella (English: Nostalgia of Vasquez de Mella) (1942), La vida en torno (1948), and Hispanidad y mestizaje, y otros ensayos (1952) (English: Hispanic and Mestizo, and other essays). The nationalist lawyer Jorge Prat founded the magazine Estanquero in 1948, from a strong hispanist and corporatist point of view.

The government of Salvador Allende and the victory of Marxism through democratic means generated a proposal of an "armed revolt" against the democratic government. The warlike literature of these years was gathered mostly in four publications: The magazine Patria y Libertad (1971-1973; organized by Fatherland and Liberty), organized by University of Chile academic Pablo Rodríguez Grez; the magazine Tacna (1970–1974) organized by academic from Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (PUC) Sergio Miranda Carrington and law student Erwin Robertson; Tizona, created by philosophy professor Juan Antonio Widow; and Forja (1969-1979; organized by Movimiento Revolucionario Nacional Sindicalista), property of calculus professor Misael Galleguillos, and in which nationalists like Osvaldo Lira and Guillermo Izquierdo Araya participated. With Augusto Pinochet in power, the main nationalist intellectual production was the Avanzada magazine (which later became a political party of the same name), the Center for National Studies directed by Lucía Pinochet (daughter of the dictator) and the publication of the historical essay on the notion of the State in Chile in the 19th and 20th centuries, a fierce criticism of the turn towards neoliberalism that the military junta had taken in Chile, reaffirming Chilean nationality in the strength of the State. This book was written by Mario Góngora, who died three years after its publication after being run over by a motorcycle in an incident outside the San Joaquín Campus of the PUC . From the 1990s onwards, Chilean nationalism had no high-profile intellectuals and they did not participate in the public debate.

Since the 2010s, academics Daniel Chernilo, Axel Kaiser, Benjamin Ugalde and Felipe Schwember name the existential philosopher Hugo Eduardo Herrero (b. 1974) as the main figure of Chilean nationalism. Herrero prefers to refer to himself as part of the "national-popular tradition", that, according to him, "had its beginning in the brief experiment of the Nationalist Party in 1915, afterwards in the Agrarian-Labor party, the National Party, and currently the RN." Researchers Renato Cristi and Carlos Ruize describe him as "one of the most lucid right-wing intellectuals in the present day", but criticize the extreme authoritarianism of authors like Francisco Antonio Encina and Alberto Edwards, whom Herrero uses as intellectual references. Sociology professor Daniel Chernilo has accused him of fascism.