A Nation is a Soul
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Declaration of Arbroath
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Linked in the article (13 min read)
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Ernest Renan
14 min read
The article opens and centers on Renan's famous 1882 lecture 'What is a Nation?' which defines nation as 'a soul, a spiritual principle.' Understanding Renan's full intellectual context—his controversial biblical scholarship, his role in French civic nationalism debates, and his influence on modern nationalism theory—would deeply enrich the reader's understanding of this foundational concept.
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Imagined community
14 min read
The article directly references Benedict Anderson's concept of 'imagined communities' as central to understanding nationalism. This academic concept from Anderson's influential 1983 book explains how nations are socially constructed through shared narratives and media, which is exactly the 'nation-as-social construction' framework the author is exploring.
“A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things which, properly speaking, are really one and the same constitute this soul... One is the past, the other is the present.”
- Ernest Renan, 1882
Welcome to December. While some American readers are still recovering from Thanksgiving, and Advent calendars open the runway to Christmas, I felt moved to mark a lesser-known moment in the calendar - a public holiday in my home country of Scotland called St.Andrew’s Day. (November 30th was a Sunday, so the public holiday is today).
I just enjoyed watching an earnest BBC Newsround video suggesting five million Scots will all be eating Cullen Skink and going for Scottish country dancing tonight. The truth is that St. Andrew’s is mostly ignored, and certainly less observed than Burns Night or Hogmanay (New Year’s Eve). Some banks and Schools don’t even recognise St. Andrew’s Day as a public holiday.
And yet, maybe we should take these days more seriously. Who wants unstructured time? How many mere Mondays do we have to put up with? I like the alliance of gonzo history, makeshift mythology, and collective identity. Is it not human to make things up before making them real?
The Buddhist cognitive scientist Evan Thompson puts it like this:
Although some illusions are constructions, not all constructions are illusions.
St Andrew’s Day is a construction, but not an illusion, because Scotland is a nation, and nations are real. More to the point, nations have a certain kind of reality that is worth attending to today, and every day. In my work for Perspectiva, we question the viability of the nation state, because it’s a modern institution called into question by the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity known as the metacrisis.
To survive the 21st century, we may need to transcend and include the nation-state, but that makes it all the more important to understand the nation as such. There is no intelligent doubt that nations exist, nor that Scotland is a nation, and most Scots, regardless of their views on independence, feel this to be true and important. What is legitimately doubted and contested, however, is how clear the idea of nation is, and how much nations matter - morally, culturally, educationally, politically, and legally.
Third horizon thinking features different patterns of polycentric governance, perhaps a technologically wise global commons, shaped by a planetary ethos and ...
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