Nations before the Nation-State Between City-State and Empire from Antiquity to the Present

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.

Part I. Introduction: A Plan for Rethinking the Nation: 1. The nation-state paradigm; 2. A project of conceptual recovery; 3. Political imagination; 4. Liberal multiculturalism and constitutional patriotism; 5. Selection of sources and overview of the book; 6. Some preliminary conclusions; Part II. What Is a Nation? A Brief Historiography of Theories of the Nation: 1. Romantic beginnings; 2. Classical modernism and the state; 3. The modernist bogeyman; 4. Ethno-symbolism and its critics; 5. Getting our history less wrong; Part III. A Tale of Two Fatherlands: Ancient Conceptions of Nationhood: 1. Ancient sources of Hellenicity; 2. Greek patriotism; 3. The bonds of humanity; 4. Roman citizenship and legal pluralism; 5. Nations in the vulgate; 6. Religion, Law, and Peoplehood in Biblical Judaea; Part IV. Post-Roman Transitions: National Identity in the Wake of the Empire: 1. Cassiodorus' imperial propaganda; 2. Ethnonyms and etymologies; 3. Isidore's appropriation of empire; 4. Historiography as political theory; Part V. Medieval Imperialism: National Diversity and Universal Order: 1. World government and its alternatives; 2. Dante imagines the nation; 3. Humanity's intellectual unity; 4. Difference as punishment, difference as pleasure; 5. Consent as the foundation of empire; Part VI. Nationality and the Medieval 'State' in France: 1. Medieval international relations; 2. Dubois' multinational vision for the holy land; 3. A pre-national defense of political particularism; 4. Participatory citizenship in the footsteps of marsiglio of Padua; 5. Love for king and country; Part VII. The Nation at a Crossroads: 1. Absolute and limited government in the thought of John Fortescue; 2. Royal absolutism and the pursuit of uniformity; 3. Nationalizing the state, politicizing the nation; 4. One king, one law, one nation; 5. The myth of antiquity; 6. English exceptionalism revisited; Part VIII. Conclusions: Rekindling Ancient and Medieval Concepts: 1. Lessons from imperialism; 2. The opening and closure of political life; 3. We are bundles of hyphens; 4. New quests for solidarity; Bibliography.

Anna Marisa Schön is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Department of Political Science at Duke University. Her research focuses on medieval political thought, and questions surrounding nationalism, national pluralism, and empire. She has co-translated J. G. Fichte's work on the French Revolution (2021) and her work has appeared in History of Political Thought, British Journal of the History of Philosophy, and Democratic Theory.