The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism

Foreword by Yosef Kaplan vii

Introduction 1

1 Voluntarism and the Organic Nation 5

Organic and Voluntarist Nationalism 6

Cultural Determination and the Political Ideal 10

Ethnic and Civic Nations 15

Cultural Primordialism 21

Conclusion 25

2 The Nation: Modern or Perennial? 27

The Modernist Orthodoxy 27

Modernist Historiography 30

The Perennialist Critique 34

Continuous Perennialism 35

Recurrent Perennialism 40

Ancient Nations? 41

Conclusion: Problems with Perennialism 50

3 Social Construction and Ethnic Genealogy 52

Invented Traditions, Imagined Communities 53

A Critique of Social Constructionism 61

An Ethnosymbolic Account of Nations and Nationalism 62

Conclusion 76

Bibliography 89

Index 101