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Fantasies of Nationalism: Between Nation/State Dialectic and Liberal Thought

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The Nation/State Fantasy

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Abstract

After the fragmentation of the state as modality of unity in late eighteenth-century thought, the fantasy of congruency becomes endemic to modern thought and practices. To exemplify this, this chapter analyses two political discursive formations that emerge in nineteenth-century Europe that draw on and further develop the discursive space of the nation/state and its idealised congruency. The first discursive formation is Hegel’s (political) philosophy in which state and nation are in a constant dialectical relationship as part of the telos of world history. The second discursive formation stems from liberal and democratic thought, focusing on the writings of James Mill, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, thus illustrating how congruency is assumed to be vital to liberal democracies and the idea of representative democracy.

In its initial stage, a nation [Volk] is not a state, and the transition of a family, tribe, kinship group … to the condition of a state constitutes the formal realization of the Idea in general within it. If the nation … does not have this form, it lacks the objectivity of possessing a universal and universally valid existence [Dasein] for itself.

(Hegel 1991 [1820/1821]: 375, square brackets in the original)

Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities.

(Mill 1946 [1861]: 292)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The gender construction here is quite explicit as women are confined to the family and the household: ‘[w]oman [die Frau] […] has her substantial vocation in the family’ (Hegel 1991[1820/1821]: 206, see Lloyd 1984 and Stone 2010).

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  1. School of Social, Political and Global Studies, Keele University, Keele, UK

    Moran M. Mandelbaum

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Mandelbaum, M.M. (2020). Fantasies of Nationalism: Between Nation/State Dialectic and Liberal Thought. In: The Nation/State Fantasy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22918-4_5

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