A Social Theory of the Nation-State: The Political forms of Modernity beyond Methodological Nationalism

A Social Theory of the Nation-State: the political forms of modernity beyond methodological nationalism construes a novel and original social theory of the nation-state.  It rejects nationalistic ways of thinking that take the nation-state for granted as much as globalist orthodoxy that speaks of its current and definitive decline.  Its main aim is therefore to provide a renovated account of the nation-state’s historical development and recent global challenges via an analysis of the writings of key social theorists.  This reconstruction of the history of the nation-state is divided into three periods: classical, modernist, contemporary. For each phase, it introduces social theory’s key views about the nation-state, its past, present and future.  In so doing this book rejects methodological nationalism, the claim that the nation-state is the necessary representation of the modern society, because it misrepresents the nation-state’s own problematic trajectory in modernity.  And methodological nationalism is also rejected because it is unable to capture the richness of social theory’s intellectual canon.  Instead, via a strong conception of society and a subtler notion of the nation-state, A Social Theory of the Nation-State tries to account for the ‘opacity of the nation-state in modernity’.