1 See, for example, Walzer, Michael, ‘Nation and Universe,’ in Peterson, G.B., ed., The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. xi (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press 1990)Google Scholar; Taylor, Charles, Multiculturalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition,’ Gutmann, Amy, ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1992)Google Scholar; Kymlicka, Will, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995)Google Scholar; Miller, David, On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995)Google Scholar.

2 I will not have much to say about historical and sociological studies of nationalism, but I should note that the reflections that follow have been influenced significantly by some important contemporary accounts - especially Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell 1982)Google Scholar, Hobsbawm, Eric, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990)Google Scholar, and Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London: Verso 1991)Google Scholar.

3 See Freud, Sigmund, The Future of an Illusion (1927) in Strachy, James, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. xxi (London: Hogarth Press 1961)Google Scholar.

4 Since ‘religion’ can legitimately assume a variety of meanings, I should say that it is mainly theism that I have in mind. In this respect, Durkheim's, EmileThe Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: The Free Press 1965)Google Scholar is exemplary. For Durkheim, ‘religion’ designates the cement of society, the mechanism(s) through which societies cohere. As such, it can no more wither away than society itself can. But a key aspect of religion, so conceived, is its system of ‘collective representations.’ In Durkheim's view, collective representations take on a theistic ideational content as human civilization advances beyond its primitive, ‘elementary’ stage. But the further advance of civilization will, in time, cause theistic ideation to give way to a broadly secular and naturalistic worldview. Durkheim surmised that, by his time, theism was already on the wane. In this respect, he shared the fate of many other progressive nineteenth-century thinkers who may well have been right about humanity's prospects but who were woefully wrong in estimating its rate of progress.

5 For an illuminating discussion of this phenomenon, see Veyne, Paul, Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination, Wissing, Paula, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1988)Google Scholar.

6 Emblematic of this state of mind was Pascal's agonized but successful attempt to instill belief in a God whose existence he thought improbable- through ratiocination ('the wager’) and indirection (as in the injunction to ‘practice first’). See Pascal's Pensées, Turnell, Martin, ed. and trans. (New York: Harper & Bros. 1962)Google Scholar.

7 See Kant, Immanuel, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ in Kant's Political Writings, Reiss, Hans, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1970)Google Scholar.

8 See Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ ‘Self-incurred nonage’ was Kant's expression for the antithesis of the Enlightenment ideal.

9 Cited in Dukas, H. and Hoffman, B., Albert Einstein: The Human Side (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1979)Google Scholar and in Miller, David, On Nationality, 5Google Scholar

10 Marx, Karl, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right; Introduction,’ in O'Malley, Joseph, ed., Marx: Early Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Pantheon 1994)Google Scholar

12 See Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1971)Google Scholar and Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press 1993).

13 Cf. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship. Immigrant groups, in Kymlicka's view, do not have similar claims, no matter how large they may be, because immigrants choose to join political communities in which their particular nationalist attachments are alien. However, the distinction is not always clear; thus immigrants can settle or be settled in ways that effectively (re)constitute a national community and thereby acquire the various rights which that status confers.

14 Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, Shields, Currin V., ed. (New York: Bobbs Merrill 1956), 13Google Scholar

15 The mainstream view, at least since Gellner's pioneering work (see note 2), is that nationalism is indispensable for modernization; it supplies a cultural context within which strangers can interact in the ways they must if genuinely national economies are to develop.

16 The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘culture’ as ‘the intellectual side’ of ‘civilization.’ In The Future of an Illusion, 5-6, Freud declared his intention to use ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ synonymously.

17 Martin Thorn argues persuasively that the rejection of republicanism, a reigning doctrine in revolutionary France, and its replacement by the various strains of nationalism that the Romantic movement developed was, in large part, an expression of revulsion towards the more radical phases of the French Revolution, especially the Great Terror. See Republics, Nations and Tribes (London: Verso 1995).

18 I elaborate on the claims advanced in this paragraph in The Politics of Autonomy (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press 1976), The End of the State (London: Verso 1987), and The General Will: Rousseau, Marx, Communism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1993).

19 The Social Contract, Book I, ch. 6

20 In Democracy and Education, Middle Works, vol. 9 (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press 1979), John Dewey argued, for this reason, that American patriotism is justified because Americans live under generally progressive and democratic institutions. Needless to say, this assessment depends on accepting a construal of American history that stresses the democratic aspects of the American experience, while discounting or ignoring, among other things, America's treatment of indigenous peoples, slavery, economic exploitation, imperialism, and so on. But whatever the merits of Dewey's historical assessment, the theoretical principle he assumes is essentially identical to the rationale for republican patriotism.

21 For corroborating evidence, see, among others, the sources cited in note 2.

22 See Renan, Ernst, ‘What is a Nation?’ in Zimmern, Alfred, ed., Modern Political Doctrines (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1939).Google Scholar

23 See Anderson, Imagined Communities.

24 Some case studies are sketched in Gellner, Ernest, Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell.: 1994)Google Scholar, and in the sources cited in note 2.