Cultural (Ethnic) and Contractual (Civic) Nations - BCJ Singer

Wesleyan University
Cultural versus Contractual Nations: Rethinking Their Opposition

Author(s): Brian C. J. Singer
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Oct., 1996), pp. 309-337
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CULTURAL VERSUS CONTRACTUAL NATIONS:
RETHINKING THEIR OPPOSITION
BRIAN C. J. SINGER
ABSTRACT
This paper begins with the opposition common to almost all discussions of the nation
and nationalism: that between the cultural and the civic (or contractual) nation. Behind
this opposition, however, one can detect a certain "complicity"between the two concep-
tions. And in order to understand the nature of this complicity, the paper proposes to
re-examine the origins of the modern nation during the French Revolution. The first
nation, it is argued, was conceived in strictly contractual terms; and yet within only a
few years the revolutionaries began stumbling towards a more cultural understanding
of the nation, which served to complement its contractual definition. This turn to a
more cultural discourse must be understood as responding to three rather pressing prob-
lems faced by an exclusively contractual conception. First there is the need to find a
stable anchorage for the nation in space and time. Second are the difficulties posed by
a purely voluntarist conception of national citizenship. Third, and above all, there are
the seemingly uncontrollable conflicts borne by the identification of the nation with its
political "constitution," and with the revolutionary regime said to embody that constitu-
tion. In this perspective, the emergence of a more cultural discourse must be seen as
an attempt to stabilize the post-revolutionary regime by depoliticizing the idea of the
nation. As such, this discourse's emergence is inseparable from "the discovery" of (a
national) society separate from the instance of democratic, political institutions. The
nation, then, has two discourses because it has a dual nature, both political and social.
The paper concludes with a reflection on the hyphen in the term "nation-state," as
indicating the need to bring society and polity together, but also to keep them apart.
I. THE OPPOSITIONBETWEENTHE CONTRACTUALAND CULTURALNATIONS
This paper begins with an opposition common to almost all discussions of the
nation and nationalism. 1 The opposition goes by different names: some contrast
an elective to an ethnic nationalism, others an ethnic-geographical nationalism
to a civic-territorial nationalism, others still a popular nationalism to a state
1. An earlier version of this paper was published in French in Societe. De la theorie et du politique
14 (Winter, 1995), 105-1 18.

310 BRIAN C. J. SINGER
patriotism, or again a collectivist to an individualistic-civic nationalism.2 The

terms vary, but the basic dualism remains the same: the first term in these
oppositions refers to what I will call a cultural definition of the national commu-
nity, the second to a political or, better, a contractual definition, with explicit
reference to an essentially political community.3 Each of these definitions is
provided with its own genealogy: the contractual nation is traced back to the
rise of modern democracy, while the origins of the cultural nation are seen to
lie in the mists of time, though scholars point to the beginning of the last century
and the rise of romanticism. Each type is also said to be paradigmatically
embodied within certain countries: the locus classicus of the distinction's elabo-
ration has been the comparison between French and German conceptions of
nationhood4; however, the distinction is sometimes said to describe a general
difference between western and other understandings of the nation. In fact,
the distinction seems to arise where and whenever the national question is
at issue.5
I expect that this distinction, whatever the exact words used, is familiar to
the reader. Briefly, the contractual definition can be described as artificial,
universalist and, with a qualification or two, as individualist.6 It is deemed
artificial because the nation is considered the product of a free association of
individual wills which, on the basis of rational discussion, has reached an explicit
or implicit consensus around publicly proclaimed principles and their institu-
tional embodiment. It is universalist in the sense that, in principle, individuals
can become citizens of that nation, provided that they agree to submit to the
2. These distinctions are drawn from, in order, Louis Dumont, "German Identity: Herder's
Volk and Fichte's Nation" in his Essays on Individualism (Chicago, 1986), Anthony D. Smith,
National Identity (London, 1990), Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cam-
bridge, Eng., 1990), and Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge,
Mass., 1992). The distinction was central to the earlier work of Hans Kohn, not to mention the
classic 1882 lecture of Ernest Renan, "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?" (reprinted in English in Nation
and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha [London, 1990], 8-22). Indeed, I would argue that the distinction
shadows the rise of the nation almost from the beginning.
3. I prefer to speak of a contractual definition because the civic dimensions of nationhood were
first articulated in terms of contractualist ideas; and of a cultural definition because to speak of
an ethnic dimension places too much emphasis on shared kinship. This distinction can be found
in J. Yvon Theriault, "Les mouvements ethno-culturels," in L'Ethnicite a l'heure de la mondialisa-
tion, ed. Caroline Andrew, Linda Cardinal, et al. (Ottawa, 1992), 5-20. I owe a certain debt to
this article in thinking through the relation between the two types, though my understanding of
the contractual nation is quite different.
4. This for historical reasons, among which one should include Herder's reaction to the Enlight-
enment, Prussian resistance to Napoleonic expansion, the Franco-Prussian war and the struggles
over Alsace-Lorraine, not to mention two World Wars. For two recent works that re-elaborate
and reaffirm the distinction in its locus classicus, see Louis Dumont, German Ideology: From
France to Germany and Back (Chicago, 1994) and Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood
in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
5. Thus, to choose an example close to home, Anglo-Canadians often speak of Quebec separat-
ists as ethnic nationalists -a claim that most separatists seek to deny.
6. Perhaps the best elaboration of this distinction can be found in Alain Renaut, "Logiques
de la nation," in Theories du nationalism, ed. Gil Delannoi and Pierre-Andre Taguieff (Paris,
1991), 29-46.

CULTURAL VERSUS CONTRACTUAL NATIONS 311
laws that reflect the underlying compact. Finally, the contractual nation is
individualist in that, as it is formed of the confluence of separate wills, the
individual (in terms of his or her existence, integrity, and interests) can be
said to precede the collectivity in a chronological and ontological sense.7 The
implication is that one is an individual first, an abstract exemplar of humanity
dissociated from all particular attributes; and that one's social determinations,
whether those of ethnicity, gender, class, family, or status, are without relevance
to the determination of one's national citizenship.8 In this sense, nationality
does not, strictly speaking, constitute a social determination, for it remains.
contingent upon the individual's accord. And it follows that the nation itself
is to be considered a contingent fragment of abstract humanity.
By contrast, the cultural nation is defined less by an original accord than by
a common relation to some combination of historical memory, geography,
kinship, tradition, mores, religion, and language. As such, it is conceived in
particularist, "organicist," and, with qualifications, "collectivist" terms. The
conception is "particularist"in that each nation is unique and can be neither
generalized nor imitated. It is "collectivist" in that it claims that individuals
cannot live outside society (and by extrapolation cannot live a "complete" life
outside the society of their birth). In the contractual conception the individuals
constitute the nation, but here the nation is said to form the individual (and
possibly to constitute individuality as a national trait).9Finally, it is "organicist"
in the sense that the national society, and the individual citizen's attachment
to that society, are said to be rooted in determinants that lie beneath that surface
of reason and volition provided by the nation's laws -and therefore beyond
the individual citizens' cognition and control.
It is in regard to this last trait in particular that the cultural nation is often
opposed to the contractual nation in terms of the latter's "rationality." The
contractual nation, in effect, presents itself as a pure construct of political
reason, the product of a general and generalizable accord reached through
open, public reasoning. By contrast, the cultural nation does not require such
reflexivity for either its foundation or perpetuation. There is no need for
''reason"to enter into the equation of the nation's existence when the latter is
rooted in blood and soil, custom and creed. And this "absence of reason" applies
7. Admittedly, in this context, there is another sense in which the contractualist definition is
often considered individualist: for the contract that constitutes the nation often has as its express
purpose the maximization of individual liberty. But this sense concerns the contents of the contract
and not the fact of the contract itself. Whether the contract is "Lockeian" or "Rousseauist,"
liberal or revolutionary, is for our purposes here a secondary matter, whatever its importance in
other respects.
8. John Rawls's "veil of ignorance" is but the most recent reformulation of this claim. A Theory
of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971).
9. Here one must introduce the qualification concerning "collectivism." That one speaks of a
"chronological" or "ontological" precedence of the collective over the individual need not require
the denial of individualism as a value. One might claim that the latter is culturally derived, and
that the quality of the individualism specific to a given society is to be understood as a national
trait or as an expression of the national genius.

not just to the "contents" of the cultural definition (or to the origins of these
"contents"); it is said to apply as much to the political consequences of the
cultural conception, which are often described as positively irrational. The
argument takes one of two forms. First where individuals appear a function
of their national society, they cannot act contrary to that society (or its represen-
tatives, or their policies) without violating something of themselves; the integrity
of the self thus appears to demand that individuals remain true to their "country,
right or wrong." Second, where the national culture is said to be implanted in
the deepest, least accessible recesses of self and society, outsiders can never
really become part of the nation. Moreover, if outsiders exist in large numbers
within the nation, their presence cannot but appear to threaten the integrity
of the nation and its culture. In sum, the cultural nation is said to be a potential
seedbed of authoritarianism and xenophobia-a claim that, it would seem, the
tragic events of this century have corroborated all too well.
II. THE COMPLICITY BETWEEN THE CONTRACTUAL AND CULTURAL NATION
Here, presented in its simplest and starkest terms, is the opposition that has
become central to almost all discussions of the nation. This opposition, one
should note, is employed not just by academics studying the national phenom-
enon, but as often as not, by partisans of different national causes. In fact,
this opposition appears very much a part of many a nation's self-understanding
and of the presentation of its own nationhood. And yet a rather singular com-
plicity exists between the two conceptions - in spite and because of the starkness
of their opposition.
This complicity appears, first of all, at the level of the facts. The contractual
and cultural nations constitute highly stylized, ideal types which one never
encounters, in their formal purity, in reality.10Any modern democratic nation
may be more or less contractual or more or less cultural compared to another,
but the two polar types that establish the axis are without factual correlates.
Consider only the following few points. The distinction between the contrac-
tual and cultural definitions applies as much to political tendencies within coun-
tries as to national differences between countries. Thus, the claim that a given
nation is contractual should be understood as implying that the clearly articu-
lated, militant cultural conception has only a secondary presence, and not neces-
sarily that it is absent.11When the most universal traits have, on the basis of
their historical genealogy, come to be identified with specific nations and their
civic culture, the universal can take on a nationalist) coloration, functioning
10. This claim in made in Dominique Schnapper, La communaute des citoyens. Sur l'idee
moderne de nation (Paris, 1994), chapter V.
11. Thus France is said to exemplify the civic nation, but the anti-republican right held a
militantly culturalist position (at least after it had largely abandoned earlier, strictly monarchist
and theocratic themes).

similarly to the most exclusionary cultural traits. 12Moreover, certain traits that
are said to define nationhood are susceptible to simultaneous contractual and
cultural interpretations: the national territory, for example, can be an object
of both administration and emotion, just as the national languages) may be
overlain with cultural values, even as it is a condition for participation in the
democratic public sphere.
There is no purely contractual nation. In comparisons between France and
Germany, the jus solis, that trait said to exemplify the French nation's civic
character, does not strictly speaking conform to the contractual definition. That
national citizenship is granted automatically on the basis of where one is born
(as opposed to the jus sanguinis which grants citizenship on the basis of whom
one was born to) implies that individuals belong to the nation prior to their
formal adherence to its founding principles. In other words, the jus solis sup-
poses a pre-contractual basis of nationhood for most citizens, and this cannot
but have cultural ramifications (though they be less direct than that of the jus
sanguinis). Even countries built on immigration, which supplement the jus
solis with a relatively easy "naturalization"process, 13are constantly elaborating
cultural (in the broad sense used above) self-definitions, if only to accommodate
their varied populations. Thus, for example, since the Depression the United
States has tended to speak of an "American way of life" -which provides, as
it were, the cultural ersatz required for the "melting pot."
One can also argue that there is no purely cultural nation. One might point
out that countries that uphold the jus sanguinis, like Germany, allow the natu-
ralization of at least some immigrants, or that many nations formed from
ethno-cultural separatist movements, like Ireland or Finland, are by all stan-
dards relatively tolerant and open. One can, however, point to terrible counter-
examples. The argument, then, must be somewhat more indirect, and will re-
ceive its full elaboration only in what follows. For the moment, let me simply
reiterate the claim made by several authors that cultural conceptions of the
nation arose in response to the formation of contractual nations, and that, as
such, the former could not but suppose and assimilate elements of the latter.
Louis Dumont, for example, speaks of the "ethnic nation" as a holist adaptation
to an increasingly individualist society-an adaptation that incorporates an
egalitarian ideal (though restrictedto those belonging to the ethnic community),
an understanding of authority as rooted in society (if not based on a voluntary
accord) and a capacity for mass mobilization, which first emerged with the
development of democratic, contractual nations.'4 I will in my own way make
12. That the claim to universality has often provided a justification for imperialist designs
externally, as well as the denial of full citizenship rights internally, is too well known to require
comment.
13. That this process usually involves an oath of allegiance implies that something of the original
contract is being duplicated. But if the process becomes too easy, the terms of the contract can
be said to have lost something of their original significance.
14. See Dumont, German Ideology, and in rather more dramatic form,"The Totalitarian Dis-
ease: Individualism and Racism in Adolf Hitler's Representations" in Essays on Individualism.

this claim my own by arguing that the "culturalist"tendency emerged from the
very "impossibility" of the contractual terms.
A more complex and paradoxical form of complicity between the two concep-
tions exists at that more "discursive"level where the two nations are presented,
elaborated, and justified. Whereas in the movement from definition to data,
one notes an intermixture or amalgamation of the two forms, in the movement
from definition to discourse, a contrary tendency appears to prevail. For the
terms, concepts, and theories associated with the two conceptions are drawn
from disparate, even incommensurable, disciplinary regions. The contractual
conception, clearly, develops out of the early modern republican and nat-
ural-law traditions, and has become sedimented in the language of political
theory. The cultural definition, by contrast, draws its language from almost
every field of intellectual endeavor except political theory (and, to a lesser extent,
political economy). History, in particular, has proved central to the elaboration
and affirmationof the nation's "cultural"distinctiveness;though ethnology, soci-
ology, linguistics, aesthetics, psychology, geography, and biology at different
times and different places, have all come into play. Now, such disciplinary
disparity allows for a certain discursive "parallelism." That is to say, the two
discourses, by the very fact that their terms and references are drawn apart by
the pull of different fields, are seemingly able to achieve varying modes of
coexistence. Sometimes the two discourses seem simply to talk past each other,
as if oblivious to each other's perspectives. Sometimes they appear, surrepti-
tiously, to complement each other, with each serving to fill in the other's referen-
tial gaps. And sometimes, to be sure, they also seek to undermine each other
by direct confrontation and critique. But even in this case, when the possibility
of complexity between them seems most remote, the two critiques, taken to-
gether, can be said to sketch a sort of circle from which it seems impossible
to exit.
Let me explain. For more than two hundred years the contractual discourse
has been criticized for its artificialism and individualism, and for its ahistorical
and fabricated rendering of the nation's beginnings.'5 Indeed, the whole of the
modern social sciences suggests, in one form or another, that "society"precedes
the individual.' But while the cultural discourse criticizes the contractual dis-
course's "descriptive"content, the latter criticizes the former's normative con-
tent, pointing, with justification, to the tragic events of this century. Even as
the contractual position cedes the empirical basis of the culturalist critique, it
15. Already in 1789, Jean-Joseph Mounier, when attacking the contractual nation (and as we
shall see, at this time the contractual nation was the nation), declared: "We shall remember that
the French are not a new people recently emerged from the depths of the forest in order to form
an association, but a large society of twenty-four million inhabitants ... that ... wants to regenerate
the kingdom in order that the principles of the true monarchy will always be held sacred." Cited
in Jean-Yves Guiomar. L'Idcologie national: nation, representation, propriety, (Paris, 1974), 91.
16. Did anyone ever believe the contract to provide such a narration? Possibly not, but I would
argue that, at least at the time of the civic nation's origins, alternative perspectives did not exist
to describe the nation's beginnings.

retains the moral high ground. As a result, the contract loses all relation to
the developing social sciences, but remains significant as a sort of technical
fable required to uphold and elaborate the normative dimension of political
life. One is tempted to say that both critiques are equally effective, but at
different levels; the contractual discourse prevails, as it were, at the level of
"political practical reason," and the cultural discourse at that of a "societal
pure reason." For two hundred years, the debate has turned around in circles,
always repeating the same claims, always scoring the same points."7And many
of us, finding something convincing on each side, are unable to completely
believe or fully disbelieve either conception.
Quite recently, however, the cultural discourse has seemed to be losing its
hold on the "facts." Historians are, with increasing confidence, pointing out
that nations, as we understand them, are historical creations, and relatively
recent ones at that. Nations are no longer to be considered the "subjects" of
history, the fundamental substance out of which a plurality of histories are
formed; nations appear now as objects of history, and are understood to be
the "products" of a certain modernity. As such, they cannot be seen as the
essential, incontrovertible entities they claim to be. Increasingly historical re-
search shows them to be social constructs like any other, formed of varying
degrees of artifice, expediency, contingency, and dissimulation. "(H)istorical
error is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation," Ernest Renan wrote some
hundred years ago; and as if the full import of this claim is only now being
realized, one speaks of "imagined communities," "the invention of tradition,"
and the use of selective memory and amnesia.'8 The narrative of the ethnically
defined nation would also seem to entail a certain fabulist moment, even if
that narrative, unlike its contractualist rival, would prefer to conceal its fictions
and present itself as entirely veridical.
Now one might think that this disclosure might provide the contractual dis-
course with a weapon with which to counter all claims to the ethno-cultural
basis of nationhood. Indeed, the contractual critique would hardly have to go
beyond the idiom of its enlightenment origins. It could criticize nationalism as
a form of religion, a tissue of superstitions and deceptions, the source of blind
fanaticism and endless massacres, foisted on a credulous population by a self-
serving intellectual elite - or by an equally self-serving petty-bourgeoisie seeking
to profit from the establishment of an independent state apparatus. It would
then promise an era when the veil of nationalist prejudices would be torn off,
and "man's"true identity would stand revealed, both relative to the specificity
of his individual reality and the generality of his species-being. Nationalism
17. A strong sense of the futility of the debate between "nationalists" and "cosmopolitans" is
provided by Pierre-Andre Taguieff, in "Le 'nationalisme de nationalistss' Un probleme pour l'his-
toire des idees politiques en France," in Theories du nationalism, ed. Delannoi and Taguieff.
18. Ernest Renan, "What is the Nation?" in Nations and Narration, 11; Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (London, 1991); and The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobs-
bawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge, Eng., 1983).

would be replaced by a "natural religion of humanity," and the nation by a

"world federalism" promising general concord and perpetual peace.'9 Admit-
tedly, my presentation of the argument has been exaggerated to draw attention
to the eighteenth-century parallels, but the central elements of this argument
are clearly discernible in many a "cosmopolitan" critique, and not just of the
Marxist or neo-Marxist variety. It remains, however, an enlightened critique
of a post-Enlightenment phenomenon; and though its exposure of nationalist
myth-making may be entirely valid, its arguments appear, in the end, rather
quaint. It makes little difference to the sense of Scottish identity whether or
not Scots realize that the original Scottish clans did not wear plaid tartans; and
it makes even less difference to French identity whether or not Frenchmen are
aware of the conflicts provoked by the Albigensian heresy (Renan's example).
Again the arguments appear singularly futile, whatever their validity. Many
have condemned the nation, and many more have condemned nationalism,
and yet the nation remains a potent force, while nationalism still appears ines-
capable.20
Let me try to summarize what I mean by the complicity between the two
nations and their respective discourses. Arguably, at a factual level, neither
the contractual nor cultural nation exists as a pure type; instead, to varying
degrees and in varying forms, almost all nations appear formed of a promis-
cuous blend of civic and cultural elements. At the discursive level, to be sure, the
oppositions -between the universal and particular, the volitional and organic,
rational and pre-rational, individual and collective -could not appear starker.
But on reflection, behind these oppositions, there exists a discursive parallelism
which appears to allow and even demand the coexistence of the two definitions.
With their basis in disparate fields, it is possible for each discourse to exist
without explicit acknowledgment of its opposite; even as, in the silence of their
mutual disregard, each can unwittingly compensate for the other's lacunae.
And when the contrast is rendered explicit, and the two discourses turn their
critical guns against each other, each hits its target but seemingly without real
effect -as though, secretly, each served to neutralize the other's most rigorous
claims. After two centuries, the claim that nationhood has a cultural basis
appears impervious to all normative and empirico-historical critiques, while
the contractual nation, as embedded in the institutions of the democratic polity,
appears indispensable if not inevitable, in spite and because of the artificiality
of its narrative of origins. Though the complicity cannot be openly admitted,
it is a complicity nonetheless, where the terms of each discourse can barely
19. As shall be seen, the contractualist perspective, because it treats national boundaries as
fundamentally arbitrary, will often have an internationalist horizon.
20. Eric Hobsbawm claims that historians are only now subjecting the nation to the critique
of historical reason, at a moment when the national phenomenon has passed its prime. That the
claim to national sovereignty cannot have the force it once had, even in the central countries, is
not in dispute. I would simply note here that the claim that the nation will soon be superseded
has been made almost since the beginnings of the nation's existence. Nations and Nationalism
since 1780, 182-183.

exist without those of its opposite, and where together they form an unspoken
if seemingly impossible whole. This loose, incoherent complicity renders the
nation simultaneously nebulous and certain, the seemingly inescapable horizon
of collective existence in modern societies.
III. THE CONTRACTUAL ORIGIN OF THE MODERN NATION
In order to approach this complicity and its implications, it is necessary to

begin with the contractual side of the nation's definition, because it is in contrac-
tual terms that the nation, in its modern sense, was first defined. Such a return
to origins requires a number of historical claims that may well be contested,
and will be defended only briefly here. The first of these claims is that the
modern nation, in its full sense, emerges with the French Revolution of 1789.
Prior to this date one can certainly speak of antecedents, anticipations, and
even of proto-nations or proto-nationalisms, but the nation can be said to have
first emerged in its modern form, and in a commanding position, when the
Estates General declared itself a National Assembly. Or when it was declared,
not much later, in "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen"
that: "Leprincipe de toute souverainete reside essentiellement dans la Nation."2"
My second claim - and it follows from the first - is that the birth of the
modern nation is inseparable from the "rise of democracy."22And while it is
true that the "revolutions" of early modern Europe prior to 1789 had their
democratic moments, because the French Revolution alone was explicitly and,
some might say, relentlessly democratic in inspiration, it was the first explicitly
to declare itself a "national revolution." And by the latter the revolutionaries
meant not just that the Revolution involved all France, but that the Revolution
constituted France as a nation, and constituted France by constituting the nation
(that is, the citizen body) as sovereign. In other words, what defines the nation -
not just for me, but for the eighteenth century-is its association with (the
legitimate basis of all) power. It is for this reason that the origins of the modern
nation are not to be located in the identificatory pull of a monarchic sovereign23
21. "La Constitution de 1789" in Les Constitutions de La France depuis 1789, ed. Jacques
Godechot (Paris, 1970), 33-34. This claim is hardly original on my part, and can be found, among
others, in Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 3rd ed. (London, 1966); Hans Kohn, Prelude to Nation-
States: The French and German Experience 1789-1815 (Princeton, 1967); Hobsbawm, Nations
and Nationalism since 1780; and Conor Cruise O'Brien, "Nationalism and the French Revolution,"
in The Permanent Revolution: The French Revolution and its Legacy, ed. Geoffrey Best (Chicago,
1989). And in the recently published A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. Francois
Furet and Mona Ozouf (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), Pierre Nora opens his piece on the "Nation"
with the claim: "Surely everyone agrees that it was the Revolution that gave the word 'nation' its
synergy and energy."
22. This implies that the nation was (and still is) first and foremost a political phenomenon,
born of an attempt to transcend all "particularisms"in a notion of common citizenship. See in
this regard Schnapper, La communaute des citoyens, chapter 2.
23. Say France before 1789, as in the article by William F. Church, "France" in National
Consciousness, History, and Political Culture in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Orest Ranum (Balti-
more, 1975). This is not to deny that the proto-nationalism which had developed under the French
monarchy did not lay the foundations. To quote Renan: "Cette grande royaut6 6tait si hautement

or state apparatus.24Only where power is explicitly identified with the mass of

citizens in their union can one properly speak of a nation.25For similar reasons,
if with greater difficulty, one cannot situate the modern nation's commencement
where democracy was diluted within the forms of mixed government.26
One must remember that political terms, when first employed in the definition
of a new regime, often had a conceptual rigor, which would be subsequently
lost. In this regard, the United States of America was originally defined as
neither a nation nor a democracy. It was not a "nation" but a "union" (after
it had been a "confederation"); and those who had considered themselves "na-
tionalists" were obliged to change their name to "federalists," as the former
term implied "the tyranny of a strong, centralized government." Nor was it a
"democracy"but a republic, in which the balance of powers, with its reference
to earlier forms of mixed government, would counter the democratic element
as represented by Congress.27There was a notion of popular sovereignty, but
its impact was much diluted by its dispersion through the numerous state govern-
ments and different branches of the federal government. Ultimately the practice
of sovereignty belonged to the local level, and thus coexisted in some tension
with the "national"government.28As such, there was not that explicit conjoining
of the nation with power (or sovereignty), as clearly expressed in the notion
of "national self-determination," which in my view marks the beginning of the
modern nation, and gives it its explosive force.29
The "first"nation, then, was France, and it was first conceived in a strictly
contractualist manner. The contractual definition was to be understood "liter-
national, que le lendemain de sa chute, la nation a pu tenir sans elle." Quoted in Schnapper, La
communaute des citoyens, 158.
24. Elizabethan England according to Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism, or Spanish America in the
early nineteenth century according to Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities.
25. The cultural nation could not come first. By themselves, blood, language, tradition, and
place do not require a relation to power. The precedence of the contractual discourse allowed the
cultural nation to define itself as sovereign, and thereby take on immense political significance.
26. Mixed government implies that elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy are all
included within the political constitution, usually in the form of a balance of powers. As such
sovereignty cannot lie in the nation, but is attributed to, for example, "the King in Parliament,"
as in Great Britain.
27. It has been argued that the first widespread and positive use of the term "democracy" in
the former thirteen colonies was precisely at the time of the French Revolution, when "democratic
societies" emerged to oppose the Federalist-dominated government of the time. This claim is made
by James Miller in an unpublished paper, "Modern Democracy: From France to America." For
more on these societies see Richard Buel Jr., Securing the Revolution: Ideology in American
Politics, 1789-1815 (Ithaca, 1972), 97-105.
28. Thus, where in France the democratic republic implies a narrowing of the distance between
the people and their government, in the United States the same terms suggest a widening of that
distance, as the people seek to "roll back" government. On the American revolutionaries' under-
standing of the terms nation, democracy, republic, and so on, see The Blackwell Encyclopedia of
theAmerican Revolution, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), particularly
661-68 1.
29. That this explosive force was immediately apparent is suggested by the testimony of Goethe,
among others. After having witnessed the French troops withstand the withering fire of the Prussian
troops to the cry of "Vive la nation," he wrote that the battle of Valmy opened up "a new era in
the history of the world." Albert Soboul, The French Revolution 1787-1799 (London, 1974), I, 269.

ally," for the contractual discourse alone provided the terms with which to
"imagine"the nation. It alone could articulate the nation's being and becoming;
it described what a nation is and ought to be, and how it had to come to be.
And yet, within only a few years, the nation was also being referred to in very
different terms. The conceptual scaffolding of the contractual nation had not
collapsed, but had been supplemented by another, more culturally oriented,
discourse. There was no attempt to merge the two discourses, or to oppose
them, or even to acknowledge their juxtaposition. As a result, the effects of
the introduction of a more culturally oriented definition of the nation were,
at a discursive register, rather subtle.
That the more cultural conception of the French nation followed, if in some-
what inchoate form, hard on the heels of the enunciation of the contractual
definition, owed little to the influence of Herder or of German romanticism,
however much later authors would rely on them.30The cultural discourse ap-
peared so quickly and "spontaneously" because the realization of a purely con-
tractual nation proved impossible. The revolutionaries stumbled towards the
cultural nation as a response to the difficulties, both real and symbolic, raised
by the attempt to institutionalize the contractual nation in its undiluted form.
Only by considering these difficulties can the complicity between the contractual
and cultural nations be appreciated.
There were three sorts of difficulties: the problems faced by the contractual
discourse in its attempts to anchor the nation in space and time; the difficulties
it encountered in defining who does or does not belong to the nation; and most
importantly, the difficulties arising from this discourse's tendency to identify
the nation with its polity. As a foretaste of the essay's thematic development,
I should add that behind all these difficulties what is ultimately at issue is the
presentation of power - its "substance,"its origin and its relation to the question
of institution. And closely connected to the presentation of power is the presen-
tation of society-its properties, origins and its relation to institution.31
30. Many authors see the cultural discourse as an exclusively right-wing phenomenon, and trace
the emergence of the modern nationalist right in France to the trauma induced by the Franco-
Prussian War. Much more interesting, from our perspective, are those who trace the shift from
"city-nations" to "tribe-nations"to the Coppet circle, and notably Madame de Sta&l.In this telling
the shift appears as a reaction to the revolutionary imaginary, at the confluence of enlightenment
and romanticism, by a "liberal"author associated with the discovery of the "modern liberties" of
civil society. See Martin Thom, Republics, Nations and Tribes (London, 1995) and to a lesser
extent, Jean-Yves Guiomar in La Nation entre l'histoire et la raison (Paris, 1990). The claim is
seductive, and not incompatible with my own, but as this paper will make clear, behind this shift
there lies much more than the filiations of a strictly intellectual history. For this reason, without
entering into the somewhat vexed question of Schlegel's influence on Madame de Stael, I must
downplay the importance of German romanticism. As for Herder, whose writings predate the
Revolution (not to mention the Napoleonic invasions), and who is often seen as being at the origin
of German romantic nationalism, because his discussion of the singularity of different national
cultures never conjoined the nation thus defined to power, it was not, and could not be, nationalistic.
31. The following analysis builds on my earlier work, Society, Theory and the French Revolu-
tion: Studies in the Revolutionary Imaginary (New York, 1986).

THE CONTRACTUAL NATION'S DIFFICULTIES:

1. THE NATION AS CHRONOTOPE
We take it for granted that the nation is situated in time-space relations, though
we seldom consider how these relations shape our understanding of the nation.
Even less do we consider how the nation itself models our understanding of time
and space. From the perspective of the contractual discourse, this "chronotopic"
aspect of the nation assumes a rather singular character.
Consider first the contractual nation in its relation to time. The French nation
is formed by a rupture in time produced by its own act of foundation. It only
constitutes itself as a nation by breaking with the previous temporal regime.
There is something circular about such an act: for only in its capacity as sover-
eign can the nation constitute itself, but only by virtue of its constitution can
it become sovereign. Within this circle described by the act of self-determi-
nation, time tends to become concentrated, as it were, around the founding
moment. One might even say that, within the tear in the fabric of time resulting
from this momentous act, time becomes most meaningful. By contrast, the
past before the rupture loses all value, with the partial exception of a very
distant, imaginary age prior to the Frankish invasions (thus the talk of the
"regeneration"or renewal of an ancient contract that predated the rise of the
aristocracy).32Relative to this distant past, the more recent "feudal" past, al-
ready designated an "ancien regime," appears under the sign of a near fatal
degeneration; indeed, by virtue of its proximity, it menaces the present with
its baseness and ignorance. Thus the revolutionaries attempt to eliminate the
past from the present, most notably by promulgating a new calendar, and
vandalizing "gothic" monuments.'3
However, it is not just the meaningfulness of the past, but also that of the
future, which the Revolution would deny. Within the contractualist optic, the
future can be presented in only two possible scenarios. In one of them, the fu-
ture appears to distance itself from the act of foundation, as demonstrated by
the decline of patriotic virtues, the weakening of the national will, growing
fractiousness ... in short, by a return to the corruption of the past. In the other,
the future is presented as a continuous (or possibly discontinuous) reiteration of
acts of national regeneration, that is, as the indefinite repetition of an exemplary
present. At one level, by its refusal to see temporal events as the encoded
unfolding of a transcendent will, this discourse participated in the history of
secularization. But at another level, in attempting to rescue the body politic
from the depredations of time, it appeared to return to the earlier notion of
32. This is, of course, the revolutionary sequel to the competing representations of the French
history provided by the these nobiliare and the these royale. See Peter Gay, The Enlightenment.
An Interpretation. Vol. II: The Science of Freedom (New York, 1969), 465-483, and Keith Michael
Baker, "Memory and Practice: Politics and the Representation of the Past in Eighteenth-century
France," in Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), 31-58.
33. Emmet Kennedy, A Cultural History of the French Revolution (New Haven, 1989), chapter
8; Bronislaw Baczko, Utopian Lights (New York, 1989), 158-174.

an aevum,34 of a form of temporality that would arrest the relentless march
of temporal decline by introducing something of the infinite within the finite.
Such an understanding of time, did not, by itself, create insuperable diffi-
culties. Nonetheless, without entirely disappearing, it was to give way to more
complex and modern conceptions of the nation's relation to time. In this regard,
the efforts, beginning with the Abbe Gregoire, to save the past from vandalism
are exemplary. The idea of a national patrimony not only sheltered the past
from the fury of the present (and protected the present from the ghosts of a
still breathing past), it effectively nationalized the past. Declared the property
of the nation as a whole, the national patrimony was to be removed from
current economic and political circulation, as well as from its original religious,
monarchic, or aristocratic contexts, and placed in a space apart, where, neutral-
ized and aestheticized, it could be displayed for the public's general edification.35
Once the past became national, the path was now open for the creation of the
great narratives of the nineteenth century, which made the nation the privileged
subject and subject matter of history, and which were to be imprinted into the
minds of every pupil as a precious heritage. Moreover, armed with a past, the
nation conceived as a community of destiny could then be projected onto a
future, itself conceived according to either the clear, straight lines of evolu-
tionary progress, or the more irregular, jagged lines formed by the increasingly
intense pursuit, with other nations, of the "great game" of power.
In sum, as the contractual conception loses its discursive monopoly, the
nation is increasingly able to welcome its past (and future) as integral to its
self-definition. Instead of being a symbolic menace to the nation's substance,
the past appears to be a source of that substance, and so becomes subject to
growing investigation and narrative elaboration. Its origins no longer seen as a
negation of time's fateful course, the nation becomes the guarantor of temporal
continuity, linking the present to (what now appears as) the relative closure of
the past and the relative openness of the future. That is, time appears increas-
ingly and exclusively as a historical, narrative time, even as history increasingly
appears as a narrative of nations -their rise, their fall, the flowering of their
genius, their contribution to the onward march of progress, and other typ-
ical stories.36
34. Krzysztof Pomian, L'ordre du temps (Paris, 1984), 42-44.

35. The history of the museum in France is exemplary here. See Roland Schaer, L'invention
des musees (Paris, 1993), and especially chapter 3 of Kennedy, A Cultural History.
36. By far the most interesting discussion of the relation of the nation to temporality is to be
found in Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, particularly 22-36. As I understand his
discussion, it is constructed around the contrast between the "simultaneity-along-time" of a pre-
secular age, and the temporality of the secular and, ultimately, national world. By simultaneity-
along-time, he is speaking of a perspective on time that supposes a divine being that transcends
time, and can "perceive" all time at a single glance because time unfolds in accordance with His
plan. To this the author contrasts a secular "simultaneity-in-time"that, instead of stretching past,
present and future along a single axis, would open itself to the multiplicity of the present. So far
so good. However, the author at times seems to suggest that, within the perspective of "simultaneity-
along-time," one cannot conceive the same event enacted at the same time by a large number of
people without face to face relations - for such a conception would imply an imagined community,
that is, a nation (though, obviously, the imaginary community of Christianity supposes every

The contractual understanding of space also proves untenable in the long

run. Here the problem lies not with an incapacity to move beyond an indefinite
present, but with an inability to remain within a definite territory. At a first
moment, the contractual nation knows only an internal, volitional space formed
by what the Abbe Sieyes termed the "ascending movement" of power, whereby
individual wills combine by stages to establish a single, representative, general
will for the formulation of the law. It is only at a second moment, associated
with power's "descending movement," that is, with the law's execution, that
an external space is constituted. And this latter, essentially administrative space,
by reason of its dependence on a volitional "space," can, and indeed must,
either expand or contract as the number of those in agreement with the nation's
constitution either expands or contracts. There is nothing determinate about
the space presented by the contractual nation; there are, in principle, no external
limits to its size. Accordingly, there is much discussion, and some action, relative
to the expansion of France, whether by means of voluntary unions, wars of
liberation or missionary conquests.37Here, the difficulties raised by such a cava-
lier and potentially aggressive treatment of national space are too obvious to
merit commentary.
Rather than dwelling on the dangers of an arrogant universalism, consider
the paradoxes introduced by the contractual discourse in its attempt to designate
Christian realizes that every other Christian spends Sunday morning at mass). At other times the
author seems to suggest that simultaneity-along-time rendered the perception of two or more
simultaneous but unconnected events impossible (though I find it impossible to imagine that our
ancestors could not conceive of A cuckolding B while C was entertaining D). And at still other
times, he contrasts such simultaneity to empty, calendrical time (though calendars were not a
secular invention). Still there is more than a germ of truth in the contrast, and it lies with the
(implicit) claim that prior to secularization, events appeared saturated with meaning, because the
origin and significance of those events lay outside time. By contrast, simultaneity-in-time demands
that events first appear as fundamentally open-ended, for their significance is, as it were, suspended
on a contingent future. Without access to a supra-temporal perspective, one cannot determine
with certainty, relative to a given set of events, which details are relevant, which interpretations
incumbent, and which outcomes ineluctable. In this regard, Anderson's discussion of the emergence
of the newspaper and modern novel is admirable. Within the modern world, our lives and those
of our communities are rendered as fragile narratives pieced together from disconnected bits of
information. Still, the author could have looked more closely at the character of these narratives;for
the very need to establish a sense of certainty (and the certainty of sense) requires these narratives
to do more than just relate a mere concatenation of events. The contrast between a saturated,
sacral time and an empty, secular time (denuded, as it were, of all imagining) is too simple. The
contractual narrative, which we argue was decisive for imagining the national community at its
origins, may imply a simultaneity-in-time, but it would also freeze time beyond its contingency-
and wherever constitutional principles are still held "sacred," this discourse retains something of
its original, binding force. Similarly, one might argue that the cultural discourse of the nation
owes far more to the "anterior"narrative forms of the myth or epic than to those of the novel,
let alone the newspaper.
37. The ultimate expression of such expansionist tendencies was voiced by Anacharsis Cloots,
the self-styled Orator of the Human Species: "We will place the two Indies under the yoke of the
Rights of Man; and this yoke will prove more durable than those of the monks of Madrid or the
merchants of Liverpool. I can attest to the good citizenship of the pagan and Islamic guards of
Pondicherry and Chandernagor. Let each person cultivate his own field in his own way, and practice
the cult he pleases; the general law will protect all cults and all cultures. Anacharsis Cloots; Ecrits
revolutionnaires, 1790-94, ed. M. Duval (Paris, 1979), 250.

a national space. For the designation of a "territorialnation" requires not just
that a specific space be newly configured, but that "external" space acquire a
new importance, despite its dependence on an interior, volitional extension.
Formerly space was distributed hierarchically around the centers of power,
such that the greater a region's distance from the center, the greater its de
facto independence and the more blurred its loyalties. But once the nation was
declared sovereign, every area became, in principle, equal to every other in its
relation to power-a fact that, of itself, betokens a much closer articulation
of power to space, independent of the administrative content of that articula-
tion. And with the national space thus organized "horizontally," it became
increasingly important from the perspective of power that this space was clearly
delineated from without, even as it was homogenized within. In other words,
at the very moment that the borderlands, in accord with the contract's adminis-
trative logic, were losing their overlapping jurisdictions, ambiguous identities
and high levels of autonomy, and that the former frontier regions were being
fully incorporated into the national community as demarcated within unambig-
uous national boundaries38-at that same moment, by virtue of the contract's
constitutive logic, all boundaries were being revealed as fundamentally arbi-
trary. For this reason alone, stability demanded that, beyond all administrative
exigencies, the nation be identified with a circumscribed territory. Just as the
French nation sought to locate itself within the continuity of a particularhistory,
it would seek to inscribe itself within the "fissures"of a particular geography,
initiated, if somewhat ambiguously, with Danton's talk of France's "natural
frontiers,"39and culminating in all the attempts by geographers and others to
ground French identity and national character in the "soil" and "subsoil" of its
territory.40In spite of the contract's universalism, it was during the revolutionary
period that, with only minor qualifications, France established its present
limits - limits that persisted despite the expansionism of the Directory, Con-
sulate, and Empire.41 But in order to understand fully why, during this period,
38. In this regard, Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees
(Berkeley, 1989) is most instructive, though the author's claim that the decisive turn represented
by the revolutionary period as regards the local population's identification with France, was due
to essentially local reasons, is rather dubious. For another work on the institutionalization of a
national space with reference to France and the French Revolution, see Michel Foucher, L'Invention
des frontieres (Paris, 1986), 97-145 or by the same author, chapter 2 in Fronts et frontieres
(Paris, 1988).
39. Though the concept of "naturalfrontiers"predates the Revolution. See Sahlins, Boundaries,
34-49.
40. See Guiomar, La Nation entre l'histoire et la raison, for a discussion of attempts by nine-
teenth-century French geographers to define the specificity of the French character as a function
of its geology.
41. One might think that the contractual definition would give new force to the concept of a
universalizing empire. And although France did expand during this period, the bulk of its conquests,
instead of being incorporated as provinces in an expanded France (as during the ancien regime),
were arranged into separate, subordinate states. During a first period, these states were referred
to as "sister republics"-and one does not have to be a feminist to understand that sorority without
does not have the same weight as fraternity within. During the Napoleonic era, when the idea of
an empire was openly advocated, France remained "la grande nation" distinct from its conquests.

the nation came to be identified with the territory that it had delimited, and
why this identification and delimitation proved so durable, one must turn to
the second set of difficulties raised by the contractual discourse, that touching
on the definition of citizenship.
V. THE CONTRACTUAL NATION'S DIFFICULTIES:

2. THE NATION AS A SOURCE OF IDENTITY
To be part of a nation is to be a citizen of that nation, and to enjoy all the

rights and obligations that citizenship implies. Prior to the Revolution, that
is, prior to the "invention of citizenship," one should speak of privileges rather
than rights; and the only "privilege"denied foreigners, as a function of lacking
the qualitye de franais," was that of inheriting and bequeathing property.42
After the Revolution, if one was not French one was not, by definition, a French
citizen, and if one was not a citizen one was, in principle, without rights. At
the limit, one found oneself outside the law, outside the society constituted by
the law, that is, thrust back into a state of nature. With the identification of
nationality with citizenship, one's nationality took on a potentially life-and-
death significance.
Within the terms of the contractual definition, individuals can become citizens
provided that they agree, at a minimum, to submit to the nation's laws. Citizen-
ship, unlike privilege, is not a function of ascriptive qualities, does not depend
on where or to whom one was born. The abstract individualism of contractual
discourse renders all particular attributes irrelevant to the question of nation-
ality.43And if national identity, whether at the individual or collective level,
is not something ascribed, then it must be something achieved. The nation can
become a nation only by establishing a national constitution, and the individual
becomes a national citizen only after having sworn allegiance to that constitu-
tion. Indeed, the two acts are two sides of the same coin: the nation is constituted
(or continuously reconstituted) as a nation by the (continuous repetition of)
the acts of allegiance that constitute the individuals as citizens. By swearing
loyalty to the French Constitution (and by thus participating in the formation
of a general will) individuals simultaneously declare their identity as French
citizens and France's identity as a nation. This "logic" is clearly reflected in the
language of the Revolution's first few years. Thus, for example, one spoke of
"uniting oneself with the nation" ("s'unir d la nation"), with the implication
being that one is not a French citizen until one has rallied to the revolutionary
principles on which the nation is founded. Those who failed to rally, whether
42. By what was termed the "droit d'aubaine" the property of foreigners was, upon their death,
to revert to the monarch-though by the eighteenth century this "right" on the part of the king
was rarely exercised. See Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, chapter
2 , and Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York, 1991), 90-93.
43. One will object that, historically speaking, women, children, the poor, the mentally handi-
capped, domestics, actors, and so on, did not enjoy full possession of their rights. True, but they
were still citizens, though "passive" ones, to use the language of the Revolution.

by refusing to accept the contract's terms (counter-revolutionaries) or by failing
to abide by its conditions (common criminals), placed themselves outside the
protection of the nation and its law.
Now the problem with such a definition of citizenship is that it tends to define
internal opposition in the terms of external conflict. Within a contractual nation
one can share little with those who hold to different political principles; they,
in a sense, belong to a different nation-or better, they belong to no nation,
for they are said to have rejected the principles constitutive of the national (read:
legitimate) community.44Moreover, if citizenship is formed through individual
volition, and the nation is formed through general volition, then the presence
of resistant, recalcitrant, or even indifferent individuals cannot but diminish
the nation, threatening not just those in power, but the regime, the national
community, and ultimately, the social bond itself. The integrity of France re-
quires that those who form the nation declare themselves, in order that those
who would not be part of the nation be exposed. The symbolic logic at work
here demands that the circumstances be forced: the internal enemies must be
flushed out in order to preserve the virtue of the whole. "On a besoin de grandes
trahisons" was Brissot's war cry when declaring hostilities on the surrounding
powers. External war was pursued to combat internal enemies. And in effect,
when after a first moment of uncertainty the threat from without was repelled,
the number of enemies within increased exponentially as the struggle against
factions was waged with ever greater ferocity. External war and internal conflict
changed places, as every political difference tended to be assimilated to the
language of treason. It thus became imperative, in order to calm the domestic
situation, to find the means by which internal and external struggles could
be dissociated.45
Many have claimed that the wars of the Directory, Consulate, and Empire
were a corruption of the properly revolutionary wars, because they were moti-
vated less by revolutionary fervor than by flagrant opportunism. But this oppor-
tunism helped the regime to separate foreign conflict from domestic divisions.
External wars could now be waged independently of internal politics, and
without direct effects on the nation's "constitution" and the demarcation of its
"internal"frontier. To be sure, Napoleon appears to contradict this argument;
his domestic rise to power was clearly built on his foreign military success. And
yet this rise to power depended on the dissociation of internal and external
conflict. For it was only on the basis of such a dissociation that the internal
failings of the Directory and the success of the external campaigns could appear
unrelated, so that Napoleon, as the proverbial man on horseback, could appear
wrapped in his military glory alone, unsullied by the political debacle and in-
44. Thus counter-revolutionaries and criminals are taxed with being "anti-social."
45. Whether the external war was waged to pursue internal enemies, as I am arguing here (see
chapter 14 of my Society, Theory and the French Revolution), or the internal war was waged to
defeat the external enemy, as is often argued by others, makes little difference relative to the need
to dissociate internal from external conflicts.

ternal divisions at home. Napoleon, moreover, managed to achieve what had

eluded the previous regime: he turned almost all real violence exclusively
outwards.
Now such a dissociation of "inside" from "outside" could not have occurred
without a further change. Increasingly, as a Frenchman one was fighting for
the honor and glory of France, rather than for the Revolution, its defense,
consolidation, or expansion; this obviated internal violence. The dissociation
of "inside"and "outside"supposes the dissociation of the nation from its Revo-
lution; nationality is defined less in terms of individual will and political associa-
tion, and more in terms of collective inherence and cultural affiliation.46The
first step in dissociating the nation from its Revolution occurred, somewhat
paradoxically, under the Terror, when all foreigners living in France, including
those most loyal to the Revolution, became suspect.47Henceforth place of birth
took precedence over political position. The vast majority of the French today
are thus born French; they are born in a clearly demarcated territory called
France and possess a common history. Here then lies one reason why the post-
Thermidorian conquests (though the tendency begins under the Terror), in
contrast with the wars of the ancien and early revolutionary regimes, added
relatively little (and nothing lasting) to the territory of France.48Once identified
with a particular geography and history -and as the almost inevitable counter-
part and translation of the latter, with a particular national character-France
acquired a durable form that, in symbolic terms, was to prove relatively immune
to passing agitations. Regimes would come and go, but France would remain
immutable. But in order to understand the full import of this "particularizing"
discourse for the stabilization of post-revolutionary France, we must turn to
the third set of difficulties, those concerning the relations between society and
polity, nation and state.
VI. THE CONTRACTUAL NATION'S DIFFICULTIES:

3. THE NATION AS POLITY AND AS SOCIETY
In order to achieve minimal internal accommodation, it was imperative that

the definition of citizenship be depoliticized. Such depoliticization, however,
46. Need I note that this misidentificationwas only partially realized. The imprint of the original
revolutionary discourse could never be completely effaced; and France, at least within the dominant
republican tradition, was perceived, relatively speaking, as an essentially civic nation.
47. The transition from the cosmopolitanism of the early revolutionary period to the suspicion
of all foreigners characteristic of the late Jacobin period is described in Kristeva, Strangers to
Ourselves, 148-167.
48. To be sure, the Treaties of Paris, concluded after the defeats of Napoleon, ensured that
France remained largely within the frontiers of 1789. My point is the following: At a first moment,
France was constituted as a nation on an essentially voluntary, contractual basis. At a second
moment, France came to be identified with a specific territory, which appeared as the nation's
"empirical"foundation. The fact that the latter was based on the former meant that all conquests
could be lost without threatening France's integrity. (In this regard, the victorious powers proved
most accommodating, possibly because none of the major players shared borders with France.)
By contrast, the loss of areas that had been part of the original "constitution," as occurred later
with Alsace-Lorraine, would appear traumatic.

could not occur as long as the nation was presented in strictly political terms.
If France was not just the revolutionary regime, then French society had to be
separable from revolutionary politics and, indeed, from the polity itself. But
this supposes a very different understanding of society and its origins than that
found in contractual language.
In such language society is, essentially, an association. It is the result of a
pact between individuals for the establishment of a common "institution" for
the pursuit of common ends.49Thus, despite obvious differences, both France
and the Jacobins were, in the eyes of the late eighteenth century, equally de-
serving of the appellation "society." To be sure, the Jacobin society never
claimed to constitute the nation in its entirety (even if it claimed to represent
the interests of the entire nation).50As associations, both were societies, though
the "purpose"of the nation/association was much the broader and more funda-
mental -that purpose being to foster a common life on which all could, in
principle, agree. With the national society thus broadly equated with the social
bond, the terms of identity were completely rewritten. As the basic unit of
collective existence, the nation provided a master identity that replaced or, at
least, overrode all the multiple, crisscrossing identities of the ancien regime.
Henceforth, the nation, with its specification of an all-inclusive societal iden-
tity,5"would prove rather jealous of any category that sought to compete with
it on its chosen terrain.
More importantly, the equation of the nation, association, and society em-
bodied an ideal of almost total reflexivity. As the product of a rational decision,
a decision that establishes a general accord for the enactment of that decision,
the society of the contract appears endowed with a maximal capacity for action
and reflection relative to its own "institution." Within "the circle of self-
determination," where the terms of reason and volition appear as both cause and
consequence of the contract, society is presented as virtually in full possession of
itself, simultaneously producer and product of the fully conscious exercise of
an undivided power. Enclosed within the terms of national sovereignty is the
image of a society at the height of its power, wrapped up, as it were, within
its own legislative self-mastery. The stakes of such an "imaginary constitution"
of society, however, are not merely "theoretical";they will be played out within
the collectivity's symbolic dimension.
49. Raymond Williams speaks of the evolution of the meaning of society from (face-to-face)
fellowship to the most abstract and general term for the "body of institutions and relationships
within which a large group of people live." Contractual notions, by extracting "the general laws
of fellowship or association," permitted the term's abstraction, which preceded (but also prepared
the way for) its generalization. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Glasgow, 1966),
243-246.
50. The term "parties," with its open admission of a certain partiality, was inadmissible in the
"nation one and indivisible." Only those who claimed to speak in the name of the whole had a
right to participate in the "chose publique."
51. With the nation equated with society, the use of the former term began to stabilize around
its present meaning. No longer would one speak of "la nation bretonne," "la nation juive" or "la
nation d'itudiants."

In effect, with the nation both constituting and constituted by a single, sover-
eign power, everything appears to depend upon the presentation and representa-
tion of that power. The very substance of society-its order, coherence, and
identity -appears dependent on the power that forms it, or more precisely, on
the appearance of that power, on the semblance of its soundness, and on its
apparent unity and integrity. This is not to say that the "substance" of power
is without import, but we are speaking here of the imaginary or symbolic consti-
tution of power. And what of the nation's specifically political representation,
the fact that the democracy is not direct, that the nation is present in the
constituent and legislative assemblies only through its representatives? The
question of political representation, though relevant, is of secondary import.
In principle, it is the integrity and unity of the nation that must be demonstrated,
for the nation alone is sovereign. However, since the nation is only rarely
directly visible, the image of national well-being must be relayed in large part
by presenting the national representatives as united in their will and virtuous
in their character. In the French Revolution, unlike the American Revolution,
the difference between representatives and represented had to be minimized,
symbolically speaking, such that the imperatives of unity and incorruptibility
were equally incumbent upon both the people and their government.52 With
the health of society appearing directly dependent on the integrity of the sover-
eign power (that is, the will of the people as constitutive of the nation), that
society can be said to be entirely encompassed within its political mise en scene.
Society appears immediately and fully political -which is to say that politics
in its usual, everyday sense, with its play of opposing opinions and interests,
becomes well nigh impossible. Any crack in the national consensus, any sign
of corruption or division, whether among the citizens, their representatives,
or in the relation between the two, and the national society appears to totter
on the threshold of symbolic collapse. And since the signs of corruption and
division continuously reappear (not just because an undivided, virtuous society
is impossible, but because such signs are markers in the politics of identity,
and instruments in the struggle for power) - the revolutionary nation finds itself
convulsed by increasingly violent but futile attempts to combat those targeted
as corrupt or factious. In the end, the attempt to institute a national sovereign
within the context of contractual principles produces, as Hegel had noted in
his own inimitable manner, a radically self-destroying reality.53
52. By contrast, when reading The Federalist Papers, I am struck by how the representatives
are to compensate for the lacunae of the represented. Not all the people, it seems to suggest, are
virtuous; and therefore the government must be arranged so as to encourage virtue to move up the
rungs of political representation. And not all the people share the same interests, so the governmental
structuresmust be ordered so as to blunt the effects of social division. Neither of these compensatory
maneuvers, it should be emphasized, would have been possible-at least without contradiction-
had the Americans adopted the concept of national sovereignty.
53. Georg F. Hegel speaks here of "the sheer horror of the negative," The Phenomenology of
Mind (New York, 1967), 608. See also Joachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1982).

VII. THE DISCOVERY OF SOCIETY
Though the contractual definition of the nation, by presenting society's existence

as conditional on the nation's political "constitution," threatened to engulf
society in uncontrollable political conflicts, it also prepared, if indirectly, the
way towards a "separation" of society and "relativization" of the polity. For
the nation, identified as the "originary" power in the constitution of society,
withdraws not just behind the representative institutions of governance, but
behind the citizen body itself. As the power behind power, as the "constituent"
power behind all "constituted" powers (including that of the Constituent As-
sembly), the national sovereign is not, as noted earlier, directly visible (except
perhaps, and then not without ambiguity, in nationwide insurrections, festivals,
and elections). In this interpretation, the nation cannot be equated with the
institutions of power - be they those of a direct or indirect democracy - nor
with an actual state of consciousness or volition, however rationally conceived
or effectively enacted. As the origin of power and the power of origins, the
nation is amorphous; it exists, in the words of the Abbe Sieyes, "independante
de toute forme."54 Borrowing from Claude Lefort, one might speak of the
sovereign as occupying "an empty place."55And by virtue of its "emptiness,"
the national society appears to exist independent of its political constitution,
as something that is everywhere and nowhere at once, simultaneously intangible
and all-encompassing.
In this regard, one might speak of a "discovery of society" proceeding in
two stages. In the first stage, society is understood as a voluntary association,
and equated with the polity, while in the second, society slips out from under
the polity and acquires, beneath the surface of contractual forms, a properly
societal "substance." The claim that the national sovereign is fundamentally
indeterminate56may be considered a first step in the transition to the second
54. Joseph-Emmanuel Sieyes, What is the Third Estate? (London, 1963), 126-128. (I have
quoted the original, because it renders the nation's essential indeterminacy much clearer.) Note that
his response to the question, "what is the nation?" cannot be reduced to the "travauxparticuliers"of
homo economicus or the political ambitions of the Third Estate, as implied by William Sewell,
Jr. in his otherwise enlightening book, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The A bbe Sieyes and
What is the ThirdEstate? (Durham, N.C., 1994). For a further elaboration of Sieyes' understanding
of the nation, see chapters 8 and 11 of my Society, Theory and the French Revolution.
55. Claude Lefort, "The Question of Democracy," in Democracy and Political Theory (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1988), 9-20. In principle, there are two positions of power: the visible position of
governance, and an "invisible" position, here that of the sovereign nation, which founds and
legitimates the visible position. When Claude Lefort speaks of the position of power as empty,
he is referring above all to the first, visible position; the claim being that the person or persons
in power can never be fully identified with that power, and can therefore be removed with minimal
symbolic consequences. But if the visible positions can never be completely filled, it is because the
invisible position also remains "empty." If any trait, or set of traits, was to define the nation with
neither ambiguity nor remainder, if the question "what is the nation?" was to receive a definitive
response, then the visible power would be much more easily filled, and democratic rotation un-
dermined.
56. A position largely limited to Sieyes. The more common position among the revolutionaries
was to treat the national sovereign as a determinate entity susceptible to positive realization.

stage. But it is only a first step: for as long as the nation's existence appears
dependent on (however intangible) a sovereign will, it remains difficult to speak
of a separation of the national society from the political nation. Such a separa-
tion is much more easily accomplished in the terms of the cultural discourse.
Once the collectivity is located in the particulars of time and space, its existence
need no longer be presented as conditional upon the manifestation of the "will
to will" of the nation one and indivisible. With its feet firmly planted in the
rich soils of a distinct history and geography, the nation stands, as it were,
beneath the succession of regimes. Instead of the national society's existence
being contingent upon a political act, politics becomes ancillary to society. As
such, political divisions do not immediately threaten the nation's "ontological"
security. For behind almost all political divisions, there can be said to lie a
more fundamental, unspoken bond formed spontaneously in a dense soci-
etal commonality.
In a word, the supplement of a cultural discourse allows the nation to be
depoliticized. Such depoliticization implies not just the separation of polity
and society, but a transformation of how the term society is to be understood.
Society, its emergence and continuance, order and coherence, can no longer
be presented as the product of an explicit accord, but appears as the outcome
of ill-defined and scarcely discernible, "spontaneous" social processes. Ulti-
mately, the "discovery" of society must be equated with the discovery of
such processes.
This is to say that the emergence of the cultural discourse is not unrelated
to the emergence of the "social sciences." The latter were formed of several
strands, each of which described these "spontaneous" processes in different
terms; yet all of them sought to counterpose the nature of society to the claims
of the polity, as if the need to establish a distance was a necessary inaugural
gesture.57To be sure, what I have termed the "cultural"discourse cannot, strictly
speaking, be equated with the "scientific"discovery of society. The concern of
the cultural discourse lies more with the presentation than the explanation of
the (national) society; thus it labors at that more prosaic but ultimately more
consequential level where the general doxa of modern societies is conceived.
It does influence the more formalized discursive practices, most directly those
that serve to describe the nation, its geography, history, ethnography and folk-
lore. And its influence percolates, to one degree or another, to all the different
57. Briefly, a first strand, the one that is most closely associated with the republican tradition,
and stretches from Montesquieu to de Tocqueville, can be said to contrast the general laws of the
polity with the particular moeurs of the society, in order to show how the one serves to ground
and condition the other. A second strand, that associated with the Scottish Enlightenment, equates
society with "the wealth of nations," and opposes the egoism demanded by a growing division of
labor to the political asceticism of classical republicanism. A third strand, originally tied to the
counter-revolution, would contrast the abstract artificialism of the contractual discourse to the
supposed organicism of the social bond. And a final strand that begins with Saint-Simon would
denounce the ineffectiveness of a purely political revolution, and recommend a socio-technological
revolution instead.

strands of the social sciences, not just because description often precedes expla-
nation, but because the particular description that it provides underlines the
separation that these sciences suppose. It is not, however, my intention to trace
the genealogy of society's discovery in all its complexity, and I will thus restrict
my comments to a few, more general points.
To conceive of society in terms of spontaneous processes implies that society's
existence is self-evident (a claim inconceivable within the terms of the contrac-
tual discourse). Society appears ineluctable; the citizen is now always of so-
ciety.58One is tempted to speak here of the emergence of a "faith" in society,
but a paradoxical faith, one that requires an "unquestioning belief" in the sheer
facticity of society's reality. This "faith"allows the (at least partial) dissociation
of moral questions from the questioning of society -a movement that thereby
permits the examination of all those aspects of social life that were ignored
because they lack a moral nature, as well as a reexamination of all those aspects
that had been discussed in exclusively moral terms. In a word, one can speak
here of the beginnings of a social realism that has since become second nature.
The apprehension of these social processes, whatever their particulars, sup-
poses that society cannot be presented, either in real or ideal terms, as consti-
tuted from the clear consciousness and effective enactment of its (moral) law.
Instead society appears in real terms as formed (and continuously re-formed)
at a pre-conscious, pre-rational level out of an obscure tangle of multiple,
but often modest determinations. Once society is separated from its political
constitution, it is reinstituted beneath the surface of its legal constructions,
where it appears the bearer of its own implicit modes of self-regulation. In these
circumstances, the question of the nation's precise origin loses its immediate
relevance; for such an origin no longer directly underwrites either the mainte-
nance of the national reality or the realization of the societal ideal. The "imagi-
nary institution of society" no longer appears reducible to a founding act.
Society appears always already there, the locus of an incontestable if intan-
gible presence.
With society declaring its partial independence, elements of the contractual
discourse may well remain, but as their usage is restricted to an increasingly
narrowly conceived political sphere, their significance cannot but be altered.
The political sphere still presents itself as a privileged pole of conscious action,
but as it loses its pretension to the totality, it must surrender its original "sover-
eignty." While still said to be "above" society, the political institutions can no
longer - in direct violation of the principle of hierarchy59- be said to incorporate
or encompass society. What is below now has precedence over what is above,
the political realm appearing tributary to a societal reality judged more funda-
58. Martin Thom speaks, in this regard, "of the virtual elimination of outworldliness" and the
"generalrepudiation of suicide" as "thequintessence of liberty."Republics, Nationsand Tribes, 110.
59. Thus the subjects of the monarchy were said to be incorporated into the king's body, even
as Eve is said to be made from Adam's rib. On the "encompassing"character of hierarchy, one can
consult Louis Dumont's many works on the subject, notably Homo Hierarchicus (Chicago, 1980).

mental. It is society that lays claim to a now inchoate totality, while the polity
is reduced to one specialized domain among others.
Such a reversal of the relation of society and polity disrupts the conception
of political representation parlayed by the contractual discourse. Where the
community is defined in its essence by its possession of a sovereign power, the
substantive difference between the nation and its representatives tends to be
glossed over; both are essentially powers, and while the representative power
remains beholden to the power represented, because the former is to mirror
the latter, the only admissible difference is ultimately a numerical one. As a
faithful reflection of the nation, its political representation easily becomes a
substitute for the nation. However, where the nation cannot be reduced to
the terms of a political association, the political representation cannot mirror
the national society, for the two entities now appear too qualitatively disparate
for the one to be reflected in the other. To be sure, the institutions of power
may still be said to represent the nation in the sense that they seek to forge the
appearance of at least a minimal capacity on the part of the collectivity (or its
functioning majority) to react coherently to the challenges facing it. But the
institutions of politics can only re-present those aspects of society that lend
themselves to treatment in political terms (that is, still, in terms of a "general"
consciousness and volition) -and those appear, relative to society as a whole,
rather limited. For society, by virtue of its spontaneity, complexity, and intangi-
bility, appears, in political terms, largely unrepresentable. The political repre-
sentation can only represent power, and the concept of society now overflows
the terms of power. The nation, as the ultimate source of political institutions
and their decisions, may still appear sovereign; but its primacy is not really a
function of its power, since it is no longer to be primarily understood, in its
real functioning, within the terms of power.
VIII. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE HYPHEN IN THE NATION-STATE
Society, then, in its modern sense, can be said to emerge discursively in the
transition away from a strictly contractualist account of the nation. That such
a transition proved difficult is demonstrated, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted,
by the revolutionaries' unwillingness to look favorably on the existence of inter-
mediary bodies.60It is not just that the "bodies" of a nascent civil society were
assimilated to the institutions of an older corporate order, but that they were
considered as separating individual citizens from the "representationnational"
and, therefore, as obstructing their perception of, and participation within,
the general will.61The discursive acceptance of societal autonomy was not a
60. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.,
1955).
61. The Loi Le Chapelier which declared the "annihilation of all corporations of citizens of
the same state or profession" as "one of the fundamental bases of the French Constitution" provides
the most notorious example of these tendencies. The fact that this law was largely used to suppress
workers' associations should not cause one to lose sight of its more general justification. See French
Revolution Documents, ed. J. M. Roberts (Oxford, 1966), I, 244.

spontaneous outcome of the democratic revolution as expressed in the Rights
of Man. Individual rights do not in and of themselves point to the societal
freedoms implied by the existence of an intermediary level between the indi-
vidual (or family) and the institutions of governance. In order for the integrity
of civil society to be accepted, it had to be released from (the seemingly imperious
imperatives of a democratic) "political society." In effect, the distinction be-
tween the civil and political realms affirmssociety's independence from its polit-
ical constitution. As such it replaces all those distinctions -between the "pou-
voirconstituant" and the "pouvoir constituj," the citizen and the "representation
nationale" the individual and the general will - that had tended to render society
and polity synonymous. And it is, I would argue, this division between (civil)
society and the polity that underlies the modern nation-state, or better, that
underwrites the hyphen at its core. For if the nation is considered synonymous
with society (that is, a specific civil society), and the state is understood as
re-presenting the polity,62then the hyphen that simultaneously unites and sepa-
rates the nation and its state, can also be said to unite and divide the society
and its polity.
At this point in the argument, it is necessary to return to that complicity
between the contractual and cultural definitions of the nation, with which this
essay began. For it is my contention that each definition complements and
contradicts the other along the fault-line traced by the hyphen. The cultural
discourse would define the nation via society, while the contractual discourse
would define that same nation via its political institutions. And all the adjectival
pairs conventionally used to describe the opposition between the definitions -
universal and particular, individual and collective, the artificial and organic,
rational and non-rational - can be articulated around the difference between
society and polity. As such, the opposition between the two discourses concerns
not just competing conceptions of nationhood; it serves to present the fault-line
internal to (and, dare we say, constitutive of) modern nations. By presenting
the nation at a double register, the two discourses taken together can be said
to uphold that division between the society and polity (or between civil society
and the state)63which has proved crucial to the functioning of modern democ-
racies.
62. The state represents the national polity and not the national society because, as already
explained, once the distinction between society and polity is made, society proves fundamentally
unrepresentable in political terms.
63. Throughout this essay I have tended to restrict my analysis to the division between society
and polity, without considering the supplementary division represented by the state. Here I will
simply note that the acceptance of the latter (and it should be remembered that the term "state,"
understood as institutional entity separate from society, only appears in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries) is conditional on the "prior"acceptance of division between polity and
society. Without this more basic division, the state (and particularly its administrative apparatus)
tends to appear in an almost exclusively negative light, for it appears to come between the nation
and its representation, and is said to deprive the citizenry of its "self-activity," when not oppressing
the people under a bureaucratic yoke. One should add that this revolutionary animus against the
state apparatus does not prevent the latter's unprecedented expansion. Paradoxically, only when
politics appears as a separate realm of activity, can the state's role be accepted-and limited. See
my Society, Theory and the French Revolution, chapter 13.

As I have shown, the contractual discourse, left to itself, tends to assimilate

the societal totality to its political institution (and, ultimately, to the revolu-
tionary state)-with potentially disastrous consequences. However, since the
original revolutionary era, such an assimilation is rendered increasingly unlikely
by the "discovery"of society beneath the modes of political regulation. There
is still a danger that the division between society and polity will be denied, but
the threat comes from the other direction. The danger is not so much that
"society" will be engulfed in the name of its political self-determination, but
that the relative autonomy of the political realm will be submerged in the name
of some societal principle. The threat is that, in the name of society, or of
those traits deemed to be essential to its being (or becoming) -whether these
traits be specific to one society or to all64-the contractualist safeguards of the
democratic polity will be swept away.
One can thus say that, in terms of their "logic," both the contractual and
cultural conceptions of the nation taken by themselves represent a certain
danger. With the cultural discourse, one is dealing with a narrative that would
construct the polity entirely from societal materials, as if by reducing politics
to the expression of exclusively national traits, it could legitimate the state by
the mere fact of its being tied to a specific society. The contractual discourse,
by seeking to construct society from political materials alone, would ground
the nation-state in the seemingly irreproachable basis of freely given, reasoned
consent, but not without casting suspicion on all intermediarybodies and partial
interests that come between the individual and the general political association.
Considered separately, each of the two discourses tends, if from a different
direction, to efface the division between politics and society. But taken together,
these same discourses, by the very parallelism of their opposition, serve to
sustain this division, and counter the difficulties that it entails.
It is for this reason that both discourses are to be found in all functioning
modern democracies, though of course they differ in relative strength from
country to country.65This co-existence is composed of both conflict and com-
plicity. At one level, the more visible level, the two discourses remain opposed.
Often their opposition is reflected in the divisions of national politics, as when
one party claims to represent the "real" nation, the "heartland," the "pays
profond" - that is, the cultural values that define the nation - while the other
party, in an attempt to be more inclusive, claims to base its arguments on more
general principles. But at another, less visible level each discourse is affected
profoundly by the presence of the other; for each penetrates the other in a way
that undermines the other's more authoritarian tendencies. It has been my
argument here that the presence of the more cultural definition of the nation,
64. Though my concern here is more with the discourse that holds such traits to be specific to
a particular society, that is, with the cultural conception of the nation, it is interesting to note
that both nationalists and communists affirma societal substance exclusive of the political division -
a fact that may help account for the rapid conversions in some of the formerly socialist republics.
65. One should also add that the contents of not just the cultural, but the contractual discourse
vary from country to country, as well as the mode of their "co-existence."

by establishing, nay, by guaranteeing the nation's existence and integrity at a
pre-political level, serves to parry the symbolic terror that results from the need
to present the nation as politically one and indivisible. Similarly, the presence
of the contractual discourse, by virtue of the "abstract universalism" of its
discourse on rights, not only presents a barrieragainst the persecution of cultural
differences, it prevents the terms of national identity from being defined, socially
speaking, in overly determinate and exclusivist terms. As long as the contractual
discourse holds, one cannot say a priori, on the basis of some ascriptive charac-
teristic, who can or cannot be a part of the nation; and while this does not
mean that the question of the defining characteristics of the cultural nation
will disappear, it does suggest that such a question cannot be answered defini-
tively.66The cultural discourse, then, can be said to facilitate the play of political
divisions, while the contractual discourse renders the society more open to the
expression of sociocultural differences. And, it should be added, the freer the
play of political divisions, the greater the openness of society, and vice versa.
In sum, the expression of both political divisions and social differencesis favored
by and, possibly, even based on the division between society and polity, nation
and state.
In principle, nation and state can exist separately. There are, after all, nations
without states (for example, Scotland), and states without nations, or what
amounts to the same thing, states with more than one nation (as when "imperial"
structures are imposed on several nations, or on several pre-nationalistic ethnic
groups, or even on a single pre-nationalistic ethnic group, which retrospectively,
appears to be the case in Somalia). A nation without a state, or with a surfeit
of states (for example, Germany before unification, or the Middle East in the
eyes of pan-Arabists) appears to suffer an almost ontological deficit (while an
ethnic group without a claim to its own state, that is, without a nationalist
movement, is hardly a nation at all).67And a state without a nation (or with
a number of nations) is said to be artificial, without a foundation, and destined
to perpetual instability. Nations without states, states without nations: they
appear as so many anomalies. Most people, therefore, would interpret the
hyphen in "nation-state" as a demand for the conjoining of the two terms.68
However, I am insisting on an imperative of a rather different sort, that the
66. In effect, the cultural discourse ensures that the nation will not be presented as the product
of a voluntary, political will, while the contractual discourse ensures that it will not be considered
the natural excrescence of an involuntary, "organic"societal substance. Together the two discourses
ensure that the position of the sovereign nation remains "empty." See note 55.
67. In the opening sentence of his acceptance speech, Jacques Parizeau, the separatist premier
of Quebec said-and I am paraphrasing-that for the second time in its history, Quebec now had
the chance to become a normal nation. By "normal" he meant, of course, that Quebec could
become sovereign and possess its own state.
68. Though according to Anthony Smith only "about 10 per cent of existing states" are "candi-
dates for the title of 'nation-state"' if by that term we mean "that the boundaries of the state's
territories and those of a homogeneous ethnic community are coextensive, and that all the inhabi-
tants of a state possess an identical culture." "State-Making and Nation-Building," in The State
in History, ed. John Hall (Oxford, 1986), 228-229.

hyphen must keep the two terms apart, while it also brings them together. This
hyphen, in truth, has a difficult, complex character; it simultaneously unites
and divides, such that the two terms appear separate but not autonomous,
united but not fused. And this division, and the two terms that compose it,
are in large measure unique to modern democracies. Neither classical democracy
nor the early republican discourse spoke of a "state"in the modern sense, while
the term "nation" was, at first, rarely used in a political context.69 Only later
when, via the contractual discourse, the "nation" was tied to the concept of
citizenship, did it take on a political significance; and then the nation's signifi-
cance was, as noted, entirely political.70
I have argued here that the stabilization of the post-revolutionary regime
demanded that politics relinquish its claim to the totality and withdraw to a
more limited, modest role. And in effect, the political nation, in attempting to
institutionalize itself above in the state, and to ground itself below in society,
increasingly mediated between terms that, even as they proceeded from its own
fissure, became increasingly autonomous. It was as though politics, which had
at first sought to absorb state and society within its sovereign embrace, would
find itself bounded by these same entities. At one level, the division between
society and politics, nation and state, separates a principle of action from a
principle of identity, such that the integrity of the national identity can be
safeguarded from the vicissitudes of political action. At another level, this
division presents two different modes of constitution (or, better, institution71):
a more visible, centralized, statist mode of institution, and a more spontaneous,
inchoate "societal"mode. With its own mode of institution, civil society further
distances itself from the polity and its principle of action; indeed it appears
the bearer of its own "laws"that the state can transgress only at its own peril.
At the same time, the statist mode appears to diverge from purely political
action as first conceived; for increasingly the state appears as an apparatus,
something simultaneously rational and opaque, that resists dissolution into the
69. And there was, to be sure, no concept of sovereignty or national self-determination among
the ancients.
70. One should not consider the ancient "polis" as equivalent to a "nation"; for the household
(not to mention the meteques) remained figuratively, if not literally, outside the polis. Citizenship-
not full citizenship but citizenship period -remained restricted to those who had the right to partici-
pate in the city's political life. Thus, the distinction between active and passive citizens, found in
the Revolution, would have made no sense. This distinction supposes a concept of representation
(the idea that active citizens represented passive citizens in the public domain) that was foreign
to the ancients. But above all, this distinction implies, by the mediation of a concept of human
or civil rights, that the nation formed by the contract encompasses both the public and private
dimensions. Only in this manner could those considered unable to participate in political life be
considered citizens; and only in this manner could the nation, as a political entity, embrace the
society in its entirety.
71. It is better to speak here of institution rather than constitution, for the deliberative, consen-
sual connotations of the latter term no longer seem appropriate to the post-revolutionary presenta-
tion of society and state.

popular will.72 In the face of the uncontrolled dissemination of society into
multiple foci of institution, and as if to compensate for the growing divergence
between the models of sovereignty and bureaucracy, the state recovers some-
thing of a symbolic role, however indirect or secondary. As the legitimate pole
of concerted action, the state appears to guarantee the nation its grasp on itself
and its destiny. By reason of its visibility, the state is made to reflect the "state
of the nation," that is, its well-being, confidence, resolve-or lack thereof.
It serves as a "distorted mirror" of the nation, presenting a momentary and
anthropomorphized image of an intangible and immutable entity. Thus, if at
a first glance the hyphen can be said to tie the state to the nation by separating
the state's action from the nation's identity, a closer look at this hyphen points
towards both a refraction of the nation's identity in the state, and a proliferation
of action, beyond all strictly political exigencies, within society. The relation
suggested by the hyphen proves extremely complex, implying both a "splitting"
and a "doubling"of the logics of action and identity, such that state and society,
polity and nation, are tied all the closer even as they are wedged further apart.
York University
Toronto, Canada
72. When speaking of a state, one is no longer referringto persons (the prince, the representatives
or, even more abstractly, "la representation nationale", but of an apparatus that, having its own
substance and rules, takes on a systemic, reified, and distant character. The increasing use of the
term "state" (and the coinage of its twin, the "bureaucracy")suggests the institutions of power
increasingly appeared outside political control.


Cultural (Ethnic) and Contractual (Civic) Nations - BCJ Singer

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Cultural (Ethnic) and Contractual (Civic) Nations - BCJ Singer

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Wesleyan University

Cultural versus Contractual Nations: Rethinking Their Opposition

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I. THE OPPOSITIONBETWEENTHE CONTRACTUALAND CULTURALNATIONS

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patriotism, or again a collectivist to an individualistic-civic nationalism.2 The

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II. THE COMPLICITY BETWEEN THE CONTRACTUAL AND CULTURAL NATION

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would be replaced by a "natural religion of humanity," and the nation by a

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III. THE CONTRACTUAL ORIGIN OF THE MODERN NATION

In order to approach this complicity and its implications, it is necessary to

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or state apparatus.24Only where power is explicitly identified with the mass of

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THE CONTRACTUAL NATION'S DIFFICULTIES:

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34. Krzysztof Pomian, L'ordre du temps (Paris, 1984), 42-44.

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The contractual understanding of space also proves untenable in the long

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V. THE CONTRACTUAL NATION'S DIFFICULTIES:

To be part of a nation is to be a citizen of that nation, and to enjoy all the

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ternal divisions at home. Napoleon, moreover, managed to achieve what had

VI. THE CONTRACTUAL NATION'S DIFFICULTIES:

In order to achieve minimal internal accommodation, it was imperative that

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Though the contractual definition of the nation, by presenting society's existence

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VIII. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE HYPHEN IN THE NATION-STATE

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As I have shown, the contractual discourse, left to itself, tends to assimilate

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