Nations Before the Nation-State : Between City-State and Empire from Antiquity to the Present / Anna Marisa Schon.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schön, Anna Marisa, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Nationalism--History.

Nationalism.

Nation-state.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 222 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, [2024]

Summary:

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

Contents:

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

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 14 Nov 2024).

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781009441230

100944123X

9781009441223

1009441221