How did revolutions facilitate empires’ transition to nation-states? This article compares the Bolshevik and the Chinese Communist Revolutions. It conceptualizes this Soviet–Sino comparison through three dimensions of nation-building: separating from a universal community, building a national cultural core and overcoming internal ethnopolitics. Both socialist regimes accommodated the nation-state model by fusing centralized control with limited autonomy for ethnic minorities. Yet, whereas the Soviet Union claimed to be a universal union of nation-states, which was supposed to (...) keep accepting new members until it covered the entire globe, the People’s Republic of China resembled a typical nation-state that preserved multiethnicity and enclosed borders under the title of the ‘Chinese Nation’. In analyzing the influence of revolutions, this article probes three relations: inter-revolution, revolution–society and revolution–counterrevolution. Arising after the Bolsheviks as a follower-revolution, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was confined to a national component of the USSR’s global communism project. This shaped the CCP’s enclosed geographical activity space, Han-dominated ethnic composition and the consciousness of national liberation. The CCP’s mobilization covered far wider social strata than the Bolsheviks’ had, which engendered stronger manpower and motivation to transform the traditional culture into a national culture. Being weak at its borderlands, the CCP was cautious about the doctrine of ‘national self-determination’, not daring to make it a geopolitical weapon for revolution export as the Bolsheviks had done in founding the Soviet Union. Owing to each of these differences in revolutionary trajectories, the CCP was more receptive to ‘China’ than the Bolsheviks were to ‘Russia’, and this led to two distinctive ways of reorganizing empires into nation-states. (shrink)

The rise of nationalism parallels that of the state, suggesting that the relationship between the two is symbiotic and that nations are neither natural nor spontaneous but rather are political constructions. Ernest Gellner's economically determinist account of the rise of the nation?state, however, understates the emotive and psychological appeal of nationalist ideology. The Social Identity Theory of Henri Tajfel, by contrast, suggests that nationalism benefits from possibly innate human tendencies to affiliate in social groups and to act (...) in furtherance of these groups, while Serge Moscovici's social psychology of popular belief elucidates the means by which such tendencies can take the shape of nationalism in mass publics. (shrink)

Most philosophical defences of the state’s right to exclude immigrants derive their strength from the normative importance of self-determination. If nation-states are taken to be the political institutions of a people, then the state’s right to exclude is the people’s right to exclude – and a denial of this right constitutes an abridgement of self-determination. In this paper, I argue that this view of self-determination does not cohere with a group-agency view of nation-states. On the group-agency (...) view that I defend, a nation-state is the kind of group-agent that does not supervene on the intentionality of member/citizens. If we think that a nation-state is an intentional group-agent in its own right, then we should think that self-determination resides with the institutions of the state rather than with the citizens. If nation-states do not supervene on the intentionality of citizens, then it is unclear why citizens might have the right to control membership in the state as a feature of self-determination. (shrink)

A starting point for thinking about war and preparations for war is that today the average citizen in Western countries has absolutely no interest in fighting in a war him or herself. The best study of this phenomenon rightly notes that what might be called the “great refusal” of ordinary people to involve themselves in actual war making reflects what might be called the “great disillusionment” with war itself. However, this has not meant the end of war, or of preparations (...) for war, but rather war's transformation from a “nationalized” to a “postnationalized” arrangement. For the United States, this has meant expansion into a new type of empire. As part of the symposium on Ned Dobos'sEthics, Security, and the War-Machine,this essay explores these developments and the challenges they pose. (shrink)

(1996). The Nation‐state, past and present. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 689-695.

Empires and nation-states are not opposed or distinct forms of polity but closely linked forms. Pre-modern empire existed without any contrasting form of polity we might call a nation-state. Rather, they contrasted with non-national state forms such as city-states, small kingdoms and mobile, nomadic polities. These in turn were in constant interaction with any neighbouring empire or empires, perhaps becoming the core of an empire themselves, perhaps taking over all or part of an existing empire, perhaps (...) maintaining some autonomy by virtue of remoteness or lack of attractiveness, perhaps by balancing opposed empires against each other. Empires did not have a national core, and non-empires were not national. By contrast, modern empires have always had a clearly designated nation-state core and a physically separate set of non-national peripheries. This has been crucial to ensuring that when formal empire is ended, both the imperial core and the former colonies are defined as nation-states. But ex-imperial nation-states and ex-colonial nation-states are really two kinds of states. Much contemporary confusion about the prospect for a world order of nation-states revolves round the failure to make that basic distinction. (shrink)

This article attempts, for the first time, to link some central motives in the thought of Jürgen Habermas with the biographical experiences of the philosopher and social theorist. What are the relations which Habermas himself thematizes in his life story by means of discursive analysis? Three elements are central: the change in significance of the nation state against the backdrop of the process of European integration, the concept of a deliberative democracy, and the timely and controversial issue of (...) the taming of world capitalism. Finally, the article discusses the question of how plausible it is that there is no alternative to capitalism and to what extent democracy can tame capitalism. (shrink)

This paper is about love of one’s neighbour near and far given humanity’s division into nations. The primary dialogue partner is Peter Singer and his preference utilitarian approach to moral reasoning wherein the challenge is to count the welfare of individuals impartially, regardless—or, at least, with far less regard than is often given—of divisions into nation-states. The claim is made that, despite the considerable and proper challenges from Singer and other so-called new cosmopolitans, it remains possible and, indeed, necessary (...) at the present time for Christian people to work with an account of nation and nationhood as permitted within divine providence. This claim is cast in terms of traditional Christian teaching about the order of love (L. ordo amoris). (shrink)

This essay proposes a new reading of Cohen’s polemical text, Germanism and Judaism. It argues that the development of Cohen’s late philosophy reveals him not as a helpless philosopher overwhelmed by the maelstrom of a world war, but as an “engaged” thinker who carries forward what he takes to be philosophy’s duty to struggle against war by going to “war” in the space of theory and culture. Cohen’s text needs to be placed in the context of his other wartime writings (...) which, on the one hand, assigned a new and more radical function to messianic Judaism within his ethics, and simultaneously transplanted his neo-Kantianism into the more “realistic” political philosophies of Plato and of Spinoza, respectively. This essay argues that the thought of the later Cohen does not break with his previous commitments to cosmopolitanism and social democracy, as much as it tries to confront the harsh realities of European nationalist and anti-Semitic politics by articulating the roles of philosophy and of Judaism in modernity no longer through a strictly idealistic and cosmopolitan optic. (shrink)

_A revisionist account of Zionist history, challenging the inevitability of a one-state solution, from a bold, path-breaking young scholar_ The Jewish nation-state has often been thought of as Zionism’s end goal. In this bracing history of the idea of the Jewish state in modern Zionism, from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century until the establishment of the state of Israel, Dmitry Shumsky challenges this deeply rooted assumption. In doing so, he complicates the narrative of (...) the Zionist quest for full sovereignty, provocatively showing how and why the leaders of the prestate Zionist movement imagined, articulated, and promoted theories of self-determination in Palestine either as part of a multinational Ottoman state, or in the framework of multinational democracy. In particular, Shumsky focuses on the writings and policies of five key Zionist leaders from the Habsburg and Russian empires in central and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—Leon Pinsker, Theodor Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and David Ben-Gurion—to offer a very pointed critique of Zionist historiography. (shrink)

U nacrtu ovog projekta raspravlja se o izazovima pred kojim se nalazi nacionalna drzava u dinamicnim procesima globalizacije. Prvo se nastoji odrediti pojam globalizacije kao decentralizovani proces kondenzacije i homogenizacije prostora i vremena a zatim se ukazuje na ambivalentnu strukturu diskursa o globalizaciji - njegovu semanticku i pragmaticku dimenziju. Potom se izlaze neoliberalno glediste o eroziji i slabljenju nacionalne drzave usled premoci globalnog kapitalistickog pogona, kako u pogledu njenih tradicionalnih funkcija tako i u pogledu njenog internog i eksternog suvereniteta. Protiv (...) neoliberalne teze o eroziji nacionalne drzave izneseni su mnogi uglavnom empirijski argumenti. Neki od njih su prezentovani u ovom tekstu. Poenta ove argumentacije sastoji se u generalnom stavu da izmedju erozije nacionalne drzave i procesa globalizacije ne postoji jaka veza. U skladu sa prezentovanom kritickom argumentacijom tvrdi se da u uslovima globalizacionih procesa samo ona drustva iza kojih stoji jaka i stabilna drzava imaju izglede na uspeh. Politika a ne ekonomija i dalje dominira medjunarodnim odnosima. Naglasavanje momenta drzavne politike otvara novu perspektivu u razmatranju procesa globalizacije. Tekuci globalizacioni procesi ne mogu se razumeti nezavisno od geopolitickih interesa i promene balansa svetske moci. Tekst se zavrsava ukazivanjem na ideologicnost neoliberalnog diskursa o globalizaciji propitivanjem druge bazicne i nereflektovane pretpostavke ovog diskursa po kojoj su procesi globalizacije u isto vreme i procesi emancipacije. Osporavanjem nuzne veze izmedju globalizacije i emancipacije gradi se pozicija sa koje je moguca normativna kritika tekucih procesa. (shrink)

Empires and nation-states are generally opposed to each other, as contrasting and antithetical forms. Nationalism is widely held to have been the solvent that dissolved the historic European empires. This paper argues that there are in fact, in practice at least, significant similarities between nation-states and empires. Many nation-states are in effect empires in miniature. Similarly, many empires can be seen as nation-states “writ large.” Moreover, empires were not, as is usually held, superseded by nation-states (...) but continued alongside them. Empires and nation-states may in fact best be thought of as alternative political projects, both of which are available for elites to pursue depending on the circumstances of the moment. Ultimately empires and nation-states do point in different directions, but it is not clear that the future is a future of nation-states. Empires, as large-scale and long-lasting multiethnic and “multicultural” experiments, may have much to teach us in the current historical phase of globalization and increasingly heterogeneous societies. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The contemporary world is politically organised on the assumption that there exists an international community which should be governed by the rule of law under the authority of the United Nations Organisation. This idea may be called cosmopolitan liberalism. It is commonly criticised for ineffectiveness caused by excessive respect for the sovereignty of states. Recently, it has become apparent that cosmopolitan liberalism is inadequate to conceptualise and consequently to solve the practical problems posed by nationalism. David Miller has sought (...) to rehabilitate ‘nationality’in left‐liberal political philosophy. Reasons are presented for believing that his defence of nationality is inadequately articulated with cosmopolitan liberalism and consequently morally dangerous from a liberal point of view. (shrink)

In an interview with Udi Aloni in 2011, Judith Butler stated: “My politics, my life, even my feminism is about calling into question whether those ideas of femininity are necessary, and if I don’t...

Methodological nationalism in sociological theory is unfit for the current globalized era, and should be discarded. In light of this contention, the present article discusses Max Weber’s view of language as a way to relativize the frame of the national society. While a “linguistic turn” in sociology since the 1960s has assumed that the sharing of language—linguistic community—stands as an intersubjective foundation for understanding of meaning, Weber saw linguistic community as constructed. From Weber’s rationalist, subjectivist, individualist viewpoint, linguistic community was (...) a result of social actions, not a prior entity as assumed by German metaphysical organicism (and historicist holism). Indeed, Central Europe in Weber’s era was a battlefield of linguistic nationalism(s); in contrast to the national societies of the Cold War period, national borders were unstable and ultimately the multiethnic empires of the region were dismantled after World War I into ethnolinguistic nation-states. Experience of this contemporary reality brought Weber to the core of the relationship between language and politics: A language community is an imaginary one demarcated not by language itself but by conscious opposition against outsiders, with monolingual contexts within borders created artificially by homogenizing policies like linguistic standardization and national education—the first modernity of language. In this way, Weber felt, language can be a means to domination. (shrink)

The “global success” of nation states is currently brought into play by the new requirements of multicultural differentiation and globalization. After commenting on the common concepts of “state” and “nation” and discussing the formation of nation states, the author explains the particular achievement of the national state and the tension between republicanism and nationalism built into it. The challenges that arise from the multicultural differentiation of civil society and from trends towards globalization throw light on (...) the limitations of this historical type. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation, one important issue is which of the concepts works as a foundation for the others. People, nation, language, state, or education are all possible candidates to take a central place. First, this paper analyzes the problems presented by the notions of “people” and “nation,” such as their ambiguous and even contradictory aspects. Second, we focus on how the concept of education needs a solid ground from which an educational (...) plan can develop. Finally, we show that the fundamental concept of Fichte’s Addresses is the same one as in his Natural Right: the State. According to Fichte, only the rational State can guarantee the realization of education, people, and nation. (shrink)

There is a long history to the debate of nationalism. The Indian nationalism has emerged after a long people’s movement the truth to which is often denied by a range of forces who have ideological leanings towards the ideology of Hindutwa. This paper is an attempt to revisit the historical context in which Indian nationalism has emerged and evaluate it in reference to the contemporary time. It emphasizes on the relation between the nation and the state with special (...) reference to its impact on the universities. Further, the paper suggests that in order to uphold the idea of university and nation, an inclusive and secular idea of nation has to be espoused. Lastly, it suggests that a university needs to foster a non sectarian approach and broaden its vision for an internationalist outlook. (shrink)

This article aims to discuss the discourses and debates on Khilafah system in Muslim countries and how it transforms into a nation-state system, specifically in Indonesia. These dicourses and debates include the contestation and trends in the connection between Islam as a religion and Indonesia as a nation-state, which reemerged after the ban of Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI) in 2017 and The Front of Islamic Defenders (Front Pembela Islam/FPI) in 2020 accordingly under President Jokowi’s administration. This (...) article employs descriptive qualitative analysis to investigate the historical sequences of the discourses and debates on the genealogy, contestation, and relation between the Khilafah system and the nation-state system in Indonesia to uncover the fundamental ideology which underlines the conflicting interests in the debate. It operates the historical-sociological approaches to examine the data collected from books, articles, journals, and newspapers which contain the opinions of the prominent Muslim scholars gearing the dynamic discourses and debates on the nation-state system and Khilafah system. This article, therefore, attempts to demonstrate how Khilafah system idea emerged after the death of the prophet Muhammad and how this idea was contested by Muslim scholars and leaders today. This article suggests that in the struggle of ideology, thought, and movement inside the Muslim countries including Indonesia, the Khilafah system and the system of nation-state came into conflict. Further, the two forms of engagement between Islam and the nation-state are driven by nationalism. (shrink)

The principle of national self-determination has usually been justified by extending to national groups an entitlement that individuals are regarded as having, namely, to the conditions necessary for their self development. In order to extend the concept of self-determination to nations in this way, an argument that it is important for nations to exist within their own political communities must be given. In this essay, I describe and criticize one type of argument for such a principle of national self-determination – (...) what I will call the communitarian argument.Contemporary communitarians (such as Michael Walzer and David Miller) usually contend that determining who rightfully has membership in a political community must precede the allocation of rights and responsibilities between members. Community is understood to mean a national community; membership in communities therefore results from the ascription of national identities to individuals and to the consequent sorting out of loyalties that follows from this ascription. A right of self-determination for nations is required, on this view, in order to ensure that political communities are legitimately formed in accordance with national identities. (shrink)

In this article we try to show how revolutionary the idea of sovereignty was and is in the Islamic world, preceding all nationalism. Sovereignty marks the very transition from empire to the central state that the nation state presupposes.Sovereignty made its entrance in the nineteenth century in the Ottoman Empire. It functioned in the centralization policy of the sultan, who needed this central position to realize a top down process of modernization. This policy took apart the Empire’s (...) traditional system of checks and balances. Thus, the nation state does not conserve traditional culture, but is the result and producer of cultural change, in fact, of a process of modernization that involves language and religion .This does not imply that all nation states are homogenized by a globalizing process of modernization. A civil society based on individual freedom and the application of human rights and democracy makes a real difference in the world of nation states. Those ideas prevent the return of empire in the disguise of globalization. In Europe, these liberal ideas mark the limits of sovereignty and preceed the emergence of nationalism; in the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic world, sovereignty and nationalism are used for a top-down process of modernization sometimes at odds with those liberal ideas. The implementation of these ideas in an specific cultural context is necessary and is at the same time a guarantee against cultural isomorphism. (shrink)

(1998). Universities, elites and the nation‐state: A reply to Delanty. Social Epistemology: Vol. 12, Sites of Knowledge Production: The University, pp. 73-77.

Most theories of nationalism presume a causal link between 'culture' and 'identity' in the analysis of nationalism. This article argues for a more contingent linkage while drawing conclusions for the 'globalization of cultures-national identity' nexus in different theoretical domains. It goes on to review core assumptions about transnational identity formation, arguing that a distinctive phenomenon is a tendency to approach identities as strategic resources. This has significant impact on, for example, perceptions of boundaries and images of belonging. Finally, the article (...) addresses central figurations between identity, globalization and European integration, in the context of the European Union viewed as an instrument for proactively handling transnational problems, and it proposes some salient differences between this 'Euronationalism' and nationalism in more traditional formats. (shrink)

In his anthology of socio-political essays, Evolution and Human Life, Oka Asajirō, early twentieth century Japan’s foremost advocate of evolutionism, developed a biological vision of the nation-state as super-organism that reflected the concerns and aims of German-inspired Meiji statism and anticipated aspects of radical ultra-nationalism. Drawing on non-Darwinian doctrines, Oka attempted to realize such a fused or organic state by enhancing social instincts that would bind the minzoku and state into a single living entity. Though mobilization (...) during the Russo-Japanese War seemed to evince this super-organism, the increasingly contentious and complex society that emerged in the war’s aftermath caused Oka to turn first to Lamarckism and eventually to orthogenesis in the hopes of preserving the instincts needed for a viable nation-state. It is especially in the state interventionist measures that Oka finally came to endorse in order to forestall orthogenetically-driven degeneration that the technocratic proclivities of his statist orientation become most apparent. The article concludes by suggesting that Oka’s emphasis on degeneration, autarkic expansion, and, most especially, totalitarian submersion of individuals into the statist collectivity indicates a complex relationship between his evolutionism and fascist ideology, what recent scholarship has dubbed radical Shinto ultra-nationalism. (shrink)

This essay explores the matter of hegemony in the global system from the standpoint of global capitalism theory, in contrast to extant approaches that analyse this phenomenon from the standpoint of the nation‐state and the inter‐state system. It advances a conception of global hegemony in transnational social terms, linking the process of globalisation to the construction of hegemonies and counter‐hegemonies in the twenty‐first century. An emergent global capitalist historical bloc, lead by a transnational capitalist class, rather than (...) a particular nation‐state, bloc of states, or region, is pursuing a hegemonic project. The US state is seen as the point of condensation for pressures from dominant groups to resolve problems of global capitalism. US‐led militarisation is a contradictory political‐military response to the crisis of global capitalism, characterised by economic stagnation, legitimacy problems and the rise of counter‐hegemonic forces. (shrink)

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)

In Christianity and the Nation-State, Gary Chartier provocatively offers readers unexpected critical distance from some familiar ways of understanding, justifying, and navigating existing political arrangements. People in multiple societies are posing important questions about the authority and functions of the contemporary nation-state and about potential alternatives to this seemingly inescapable institution. Chartier seeks to develop a distinctive theological response to the conditions prompting these questions. Affirming liberalism and cosmopolitanism, he reflects critically on nationalism, localism, religious establishment, (...) and theological accounts of political authority. He highlights links between sin and state power and underscores deficiencies in democratic rhetoric and theory. He rejects the idea of a global government, advocating a nonterritorial alternative he labels 'radical consociationalism. Moreover, he presents concrete suggestions for life under the rule of the state. (shrink)

Kant is invariably read by his followers as antipathetic to all forms of nationalism. Yet he was interested in differences of national character and used an organic metaphor to explain why states should not be broken up or annexed (unfortunately he never commented explicitly on the dismemberment of Poland by Prussia and its allies). He favoured a plural world in which national differences of language and religion prevented the emergence of despotic world government. So his acknowledgement of a limited obligation (...) to provide refuge to vulnerable people should not be amplified into an acceptance of culturally disruptive mass migration. (shrink)

This paper is dedicated to a problem of power of European nation state during the process of shaping the postindustrial civilization. The author points that the nation state is a relic of an industrial era. Globalization is a real fear for relatively small European states. So, integration is a necessity. But the integration does not mean the centralization of rules. Today we can see a comeback to preindustrial political paradigmatics: decentralization and deconcentration of authorities. The future (...) of Europe is in three-level system that has been built by supranational institutions, e.g. EU, decentralized states (federations and regionalized states) and regional (quasi-states) and local community. But the European Union will not become a federation. It would be a conservation of industrial models. The Europeans must rather think of a new formula of integration. Neo-medieval empire is an adequate to changes’ direction proposal. The author also notices that we are the observers of essential change of identity. The national identity has been relativized by globalization and uniformitarian character of American cultureas well as by aspiration of regional and ethnic groups. European national identity and consensuses could be rather a supplement than an alternative for today’s national identification. (shrink)

This paper offers a tentative analysis of some problematic "post-totalitarian" elements that can be found in the processes of establishment of the post-Yugoslav nation-states and have their origin in the time before, during, and after the period of wars and collective crimes. "With a little help" from Arendt, it asks questions about some features of the new post-war communities and their nation-states, such as the following: Why are they based on ideologies of non-responsibility for the past and on (...) some very unpleasant features of the newly established "citizenship" and national identity - producing new exclusions and inventing new techniques of tribal nationalist and racist dehumanization within the framework of a new nation-state's "demographic policies? The analysis is paying special attention to the phenomenon described as an "organized innocence syndrome " - while alluding to Arendt's portrayal of German "organized guilt" under the Nazi-regime and elaborating on her notion of responsibility - a problematic "identity" basis for a nascent state, its citizenship and political institutions in general. To illustrate the phenomenon of organized innocence as a conditioning commonality of all the newly established states, special attention is paid to the post-war case of those called the "erased people" in Slovenia.". (shrink)

Many in the human rights community have expressed concern about the illiberal religious political system found in Iran today. However, Iran is not unique in its illiberal religious nationalism. Some contemporary liberal democracies in the West also have a history of illiberal religious nationalism. The English and later the British discriminated against Catholics in various ways. The Irish also have a history of discrimination against Protestants and inequality towards women which was based on a deep seated illiberal Catholic nationalism. In (...) all of these cases moderation and liberalization occurred over time. An interesting question is whether moderation over time might be repeated outside of Europe, especially in religiously based nations in the Middle East.When looking especially at the evolution of Ireland we notice that: economic prosperity spread throughout the population, the perception of a threat from the United Kingdom declined, European norms were spread within Ireland, and there were scandals within the Catholic Church. All these factors diminished the power of Irish illiberal Catholicism over time. If the external threats to Iran were removed and economic prosperity was to spread, as corruption and scandals came to light, we might expect that Iran may begin to moderate its political system.The goal of this essay is to analyze what conditions are conducive for the gradual transformation from an illiberal, religiously defined nation-state to a more moderate, democratic one by examining Iran and Ireland. This article suggests that the evolution of religiously based political systems can lead to more democratic political systems which are more cooperative with other countries and are less supportive of violence and terrorism. (shrink)

Endorsing Bill Readings’ argument that there is an intimate relationship between the dissolution of the nation-State, the undermining of the Humboldtian ideal of the university and economic globalization, this paper defends both the nation-State and the Humboldtian university as core institutions of democracy. However, such an argument only has force, it is suggested, if we can revive an appreciation of the real meaning of democracy. Endorsing Cornelius Castoriadis’ argument that democracy has been betrayed in the modern (...) world but disagreeing with his analysis of modernity, it is argued that the tradition of modern democratic thought can only be properly comprehended in relation to the ‘radical enlightenment’ originating in the Renaissance, efforts to subvert this by the ‘moderate enlightenment’, and the revival and reformulation of the radical enlightenment in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century. It is shown that subsequent political thought only becomes fully intelligible in relation to the on-going struggle between the radical and the moderate enlightenments, and that it is necessary to appreciate that the moderate enlightenment, manifesting itself in neo-liberal thought, is profoundly anti-democratic. While the radical enlightenment was developed in the nineteenth century by philosophical idealists, it is suggested that the achievements of the idealists can be successfully defended now only on naturalistic foundations through process metaphysics. Process metaphysics, it is shown, provides the basis for reviving the Humboldtian model of the university, the democratic nation-State, and a vision of the future as ‘communities of communities’ to counter the dissolution of all communities into the global market promoted by neo-liberals. (shrink)