Abstract

I. The Naturalization of the Nation-State In her 1946 review of Joseph T. Delos's La Nation, Hannah Arendt describes the appearance of the early modern nation-state in terms of the new shape of civilization in the modern period: One of the main phenomena of the modern world is that civilization has renounced its old claim to universality and presents itself in the form of a particular, a national civilization. Another aspect of modern civilization is its reconstitution of the state (after the period of feudalism), reconstitution however, which does not solve the fundamental problem of the state: the origin and…