Chapter 5 offers a probing survey of late reflections on nationhood in the context of the German Empire, focusing on Engelbert of Admont, Dante Alighieri, and Marsiglio of Padua. By 1300, radical changes to the political landscape – especially the curtailing of imperial power and the rise of independent territorial kingdoms – prompted medieval thinkers to rethink and refine the principles of political order, resulting in two broad currents of thought: renewed imperialism and defenses of territorial monarchy. Medieval proponents of empire, despite their different argumentative approaches and strategies, treat a number of similar problems: the source of imperial authority, the end and purpose of world government, and the legitimacy of the empire’s claim to universal rule, that is, over all nations of the world. While Engelbert and Dante aim to reconcile national pluralism and political unity through some variant of legal pluralism, Marsiglio suggests that the various national communities that are part of the empire have to consent to imperial rule, offering explicit normative criteria for multinational politics.

The final chapter brings us back to the contemporary political dilemmas we face today and discusses how the recovery of premodern conceptions of the nation helps us think through the challenge of national pluralism and resurging nationalist sentiment. It encourages openness to some virtues of empire as a multinational form of politics, considers the merits of a pluralistic political order, and suggests new avenues for cultivating democratic solidarity in diverse polities. In particular, the chapter engages with liberal multiculturalist arguments to illustrate the advantages of medieval approaches to national diversity. In place of self-government rights, the book suggests legal pluralism and policies of recognitions as more fruitful arrangements for multinational polities. Moreover, the chapter applies the insights of the study to the European Union and the United States, respectively. It concludes by responding to a number of liberal nationalist concerns, especially the need for pre-political partnership to undergird democratic politics.

Following the argument to its logical conclusion, Chapter 7 finally considers when and how the nation did come to be understood in a political sense. It traces constitutional differences between France and England through the writings of John Fortescue and sketches the rise of the nation-state in France by examining the thoughts of Jean Bodin, Michel de L’Hopital, Francois Hotman, and a number of Huguenot thinkers. The chapter challenges theories of “English exceptionalism,” indicating that France’s nation-state status, in theory and practice, arises at about the same time as England’s. In particular, it calls attention to the different forms of “nation-state” that come into being in England and France. In England, the “nation” becomes synonymous with the populus, the people, as understood broadly in classical and medieval thought, and associated with the Parliament. In France, the “nation” becomes synonymous with and subsumed under the new modern state, represented by the King and his centralized administration. The chapter thus lays the groundwork for understanding the distinct circumstances for conceptual recovery in the present, which are discussed in the Conclusion.

Chapter 2 surveys extant theories of the nation and outlines the main positions in the historiographical debate. It begins with the primordial theories first posited by German Romantics, before turning to the “dominant orthodoxy,” modernism. It remains widely accepted that the nation is a distinctly modern type of community, the product of the profound intellectual and structural changes Western Europe underwent from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. The chapter draws attention to the role of the state in modernist theories to explain why nations are generally defined as sovereign political communities. Medieval historians for their part have contested the modern dating of the emergence of nations and provided plentiful evidence for the existence of national communities prior to the sixteenth century. Even so, many scholars adhere to a political conception of the nation. The chapter highlights a tendency among medievalists to gauge the presence and cohesion of medieval nations principally by their degree of political institutionalization and discusses the anachronism of previous approaches to nationhood, thus illustrating the historiographical relevance of the study.

Chapter 4 examines the post-Roman reconfiguration of national and political identities under the influence of barbarian “invaders” and probes how, if at all, the decline of the Western Roman Empire affected the idea of the nation. The chapter focusses on two post-Roman successor kingdoms, the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy and the Visigothic kingdom in Spain. The first section takes a close look at the representation of national diversity in Cassiodorus’ Variae. The collection of letters bears testimony to the sophisticated rhetoric of state that was employed to legitimize Ostrogothic rule in Italy and documents the court’s sustained efforts to promote political unity precisely by accommodating the cultural and social distinctness of Goths and Romans. The bulk of the chapter then engages in an analysis of the seminal but today largely underrated work of Isidore of Seville, including his Etymologies and Chronicles. His writings demonstrate the continued conceptual distinction between nation and people and reveal a distinctly multinational vision for the Visigothic kingdom as he appropriates the imperial ideal for the Visigothic rulers.

Chapter 3 begins the conceptual history of the nation where our current vocabulary originates, in classical Greece and Rome. It examines the conception of cultural-linguistic communities in the context of the two principal alternatives to the nation-state – city-state and empire. The chapter moves from Greek conceptions of ethnicity as depicted in Herodotus’ Histories to Cicero’s reflections on the relationship between national and political communities in the Roman Empire and concludes with an examination of the idea of the nation in the Vulgate, the late fourth-century translation of the Bible. The analysis shows that ethnos, gens, and natio referred to communities defined by descent, language, and geographical homeland but were not understood in a political sense. Moreover, Roman thinkers were not only acutely aware of the twofold loyalties to nation and polity; they also sought practical arrangements for accommodating diverse national groups within a single political order. The chapter discusses Roman ideas on citizenship, administrative subsidiarity, and legal pluralism.

The first chapter introduces and outlines the project of the book. As a point of departure, it discusses the logic of the nation-state and explains why this ideal is fundamentally unrealistic and, therefore, inadequate as a principle for political organization. Contra liberal nationalists, it argues that even where the “standard liberal package” is granted to all citizens, the nation-state remains intrinsically exclusionary and unjust. Moreover, the chapter discusses the limitations of existing approaches to national pluralism, including liberal multiculturalism and constitutional patriotism before laying out the ensuing research agenda. In order to recover an alternative to the nation-state, the book proposes to examine the theoretical relationship between nations and political organization prior to the rise of the nation-state in the early modern period. The chapter addresses both methodology and source selection.

With Chapter 6, the analysis moves from the German Empire to France, examining the claim that the gradual emergence of independent territorial monarchies from the fourteenth century led to the identification of nation and polity and the formation of proto-nation-states. The chapter shows that Pierre Dubois, Nicole Oresme, and Christine de Pizan – key figures in conceptualizing the nature and self-understanding of the late medieval French monarchy – all reject the ideal of world government and begin to theorize some of the elements of independent statehood. However, they do not (yet) think of the territorial kingdom or “state” in national terms. Dubois’ proposal for the recovery and settlement of the Middle East is especially revealing in this regard. In his work, the Holy Land functions as a conceptual blank slate for the projection of an ideal political order, and he envisions a multinational settlement where expatriates from all parts of Europe would live under a common legal and jurisdictional system. The chapter thus shows that the inevitable alternative to the empire was not the nation-state.

Focusing on the decades leading up to the Declaration of Independence, chapter 5 presents historical arguments in favor and against independence. Selections from Patriots and Loyalists show that both the liberal social contract and the republican political contract could be levered in support of either position. Based on the political contract between ruler and ruled, Jonathan Mayhew argued that the people as a whole has a duty to rebel when the ruler becomes tyrannical. Daniel Leonard, in turn, opposed the Parliament’s oppression of the colonies from a liberal perspective, contending that men enter civil society to protect their property and that taxation without representation violated the principles of the social contract. After the First Continental Congress, however, Leonard changed to the Loyalist side and excerpts from his later writings reveal the use of republican arguments about virtual representation to argue against independence. Jonathan Boucher, again, argued based on the Locke’s theory that a right of resistance is incompatible with the duty to submit to majority decision. Other authors in this chapter include Daniel Dulaney, John Adams, Thomas Paine, and Peter Oliver.

Chapter 6 deals with the question of American self-understanding after the Declaration of Independence—were they one people or many peoples?—and the framing of the state constitutions. The first part of the chapter offers substantial excerpts from the first constitutions of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts as well as critical examinations of these documents by contemporaries, including passages from Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and Benjamin Rush’s Observations on the Present Government of Pennsylvania. The selections reveal two fundamental problems to be decided by the state constitutional conventions: who was qualified to write a constitution and who should approve and ratify it—the people at large or the natural aristocracy? The second part of the chapter presents the Articles of Confederation and excerpts from related writings. The same confrontation between the principle of corporate representation and the principle of numerical majorities played out in the debates on the Articles of Confederation as delegates disagreed whether to emphasize the union or the states.

Chapter 4 discusses the political theology of the American Puritans and their influential legacy of the bi-dimensional covenant. Arriving on the shores of the New World in the 1620s and 1630s, the Puritans set about the ambitious project of creating perfect theologico-political communities. In particular, the Puritan settlements combined republican and liberal perspectives: On the one hand, the church covenant resembled in its horizontality the social contract theory, by creating a religious community with an accepted government from the free accord of its individual members. On the other hand, the vertical covenant of each church with God was modeled after the classical political contract between the people and its rulers. Thus, both the liberal apprehension of the people as a collection of equal individuals and the republican understanding of the people as of corporate whole were implemented in the colonies of New England. The chapter includes samples of the Puritan compacts, excerpts from the Articles of Confederation of the United Colonies of New England, and selections from the writings of John Winthrop, John Cotton, Roger Williams, Nathaniel Ward, John Wise, and others.

Chapter 9 gives attention to some of the voices and groups that were often excluded during the founding period. From the destitute dreams of a complete make-over of property laws, to individuals mistrusting all governments, to Native Americans, to women, and—last but not least—African Americans; what was their place and role in the body politic? The chapter includes selections from Thomas Skidmore’s The Rights of Men; from the American Transcendentalists; from speeches by Native Americans, including Tecumseh and Pushmataha; and from the early nineteenth-century women’s rights movement as represented by Abigail Adams, Mary Wollstonecraft, who as widely read among American women, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The arguments of these authors reveal inherent tensions between the liberal and the republican view of society, i.e., between the idea of fundamental equality of all individuals, regardless of their race, gender, or beliefs, and the classical republican recognition of diversity among members of society. The chapter thus raises questions about the relative merit of abstract and descriptive representation.