Nations before the nation-state
between city-state and empire from antiquity to the present
- ISBN: 9781009441254
- Editorial: Cambridge University Press
- Fecha de la edición: 2025
- Lugar de la edición: Cambridge . Reino Unido
- Encuadernación: Rústica
- Medidas: 24 cm
- Nº Pág.: 236
- Idiomas: Inglés
Throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages, thinkers understood nations as communities defined by common language, culture, and descent, and sharing strong bonds of belonging and solidarity. Even so, they did not assume that nations would also be appropriate units of government. The recovery of this historical understanding, in turn, yields valuable insights for contemporary political dilemmas. Nations Before the Nation-State offers the first extended study of the idea of the nation in ancient and medieval political thought. It recovers a pre-modern conception of the nation as a cultural and linguistic community, rather than a political association, and examines better means for thinking about nationhood. Offering a historic perspective from which to address challenges of nationalism, this book engages with debates on multiculturalism, liberal nationalism, and constitutional patriotism and argues that contemporary political dilemmas can be resolved more organically by recovering modes of thinking that have resolved similar tensions for centuries.
The nation-state paradigm
A project of conceptual recovery
Political imagination
Liberal multiculturalism and constitutional patriotism
Selection of sources and overview of the book
Some preliminary conclusions
What is a nation? A brief historiography of theories of the nation
Romantic beginnings
Classical modernism and the state
The modernist bogeyman
Ethno-symbolism and its critics
Getting our history less wrong
A tale of two fatherlands: Ancient conceptions of nationhood
Ancient sources of Hellenicity
Greek patriotism
The bonds of humanity
Roman citizenship and legal pluralism
Nations in the vulgate
Religion, law, and people-hood in biblical Judaea
Post-Roman transitions: National identity in the wake of the empire
Cassiodorus' imperial propaganda
Ethnonyms and etymologies
Isidore's appropriation of empire
Historiography as political theory
Medieval imperialism: National diversity and universal order
World government and its alternatives
Dante imagines the nation
Humanity's intellectual unity
Difference as punishment, difference as pleasure
Consent as the foundation of empire
Nationality and the medieval "state" in France
Medieval international relations
Dubois' .multinational vision for the Holy Land
A pre-national defense of political particularism
Participatory citizenship in the footsteps of Marsiglio of Padua
Love for king and country
The nation at a crossroads
Absolute and limited government in the thought of John Fortescue
Royal absolutism and the pursuit of uniformity
Nationalizing the state, politicizing the nation
One king, one law, one nation
The myth of antiquity
English exceptionalism revisited
