Most orderly nation states teach their citizens something about the history of their people and place. It might be presented as something of a fairy tale, with some of the nation’s unpleasant truths hidden from view; others convey their history as a kind of morality play, where we moderns have overcome the evils of our national pasts. Yet most of us won’t be taught much about what forces made the nation states that populate our world.
In Making a Modern Political Order, James J. Sheehan attempts to offer a history of the nation state as we know it, from its origins in other, now mostly unfamiliar, forms of political order to its emergence in the democratic age as nearly the singular expression of political community. Despite its relative brevity, the book draws on a lifetime of historical inquiry and generates insights from the history of political thought, anthropology, and sociology to make an informative account, one that helps us better understand some of today’s most pressing political challenges. Sheehan emphasises the effects of how the move away from aristocracy and toward equality shifted western peoples’ sense of what makes government legitimate. He also shows how this changed the sense of what politics is for.
Read Full Article »