Sociological and Historical Discourse of the Nation: Method and Structure

Abstract

The sociological and historical discourse of a nation transforms the usual ideas about the need for a nation as an exclusive form of political unity of a sovereign people: the historical and sociological conditionality of the nation and the randomness of the historically unique constellation of the circumstances of the emergence of the new European nation-state are revealed. The preconditions and foundations of the sociological-historical discourse of the nation are usually not explicated: “liberal metaphysics” (K. Schmitt), the essence of which is defined as an endless discussion of autonomous individuals-subjects, postulates political loyalty to the state, the citizen of which is the individual, as the basis of the nation as a civil society and the choice of national identity based on the free decision of the autonomous citizen-subject; “ethnic groups” and “historical national communities” are regarded as material, the form and meaning of which is determined by the political nation, the formation of which is due to the need for mass mobilization of the militaristic territorial new European state, the democratic form and expanding political and social citizenship. Changing the configuration of these conditions cancels, gradually, but necessary, the reality of the nation, which is now viewed as a remnant (V. Pareto), representing a social danger (nationalism, ethnic terrorism). Sociological and historical discourse of a nation through causal information (M. Weber) claims to reduce the reality of a nation to the socio-historical conditions of its formation and existence, that is, to completely remove the nation and the national as an “irrelevant” (and marginal) form of identification for modern times.