Cultural versus contractual nations: Rethinking their opposition

History and Theory

Volumn 35, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 309-337

  Singer, Brian C J ^a  

^a YORK UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0000473526     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2505452     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. and Conor Cruise O'Brien, "Nationalism and the French Revolution," in The Permanent Revolution: The French Revolution and its Legacy, ed. Geoffrey Best (Chicago, 1989)
2. John Rawls's "veil of ignorance" is but the most recent reformulation of this claim. A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass. , 1971)
3. An earlier version of this paper was published in French in Société. De la théorie et du politique 14 (Winter, 1995), 105-118
4. These distinctions are drawn from, in order, Louis Dumont, "German Identity: Herder's Volk and Fichte's Nation" in his Essays on Individualism (Chicago, 1986)
5. Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (London, 1990)
6. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge, Eng. , 1990)
7. and Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass. , 1992)
8. The distinction was central to the earlier work of Hans Kohn, not to mention the classic 1882 lecture of Ernest Renan, "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?" (reprinted in English in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha [London, 1990], 8-22). Indeed, I would argue that the distinction shadows the rise of the nation almost from the beginning
9. I prefer to speak of a contractual definition because the civic dimensions of nationhood were first articulated in terms of contractualist ideas; and of a cultural definition because to speak of an ethnic dimension places too much emphasis on shared kinship. This distinction can be found in J. Yvon Thériault, "Les mouvements ethno-culturels," in L'Ethnicité à l'heure de la mondialisation, ed. Caroline Andrew, Linda Cardinal, et al. (Ottawa, 1992), 5-20. I owe a certain debt to this article in thinking through the relation between the two types, though my understanding of the contractual nation is quite different
10. This for historical reasons, among which one should include Herder's reaction to the Enlightenment, Prussian resistance to Napoleonic expansion, the Franco-Prussian war and the struggles over Alsace-Lorraine, not to mention two World Wars. For two recent works that re-elaborate and reaffirm the distinction in its locus classicus, see Louis Dumont, German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back (Chicago, 1994)
11. and Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass. , 1992)
12. Perhaps the best elaboration of this distinction can be found in Alain Renaut, "Logiques de la nation," in Théories du nationalisme, ed. Gil Delannoi and Pierre-André Taguieff (Paris, 1991), 29-46
13. This claim in made in Dominique Schnapper, La communauté des citoyens. Sur l'idée moderne de nation (Paris, 1994), chapter V
14. See Dumont, German Ideology, and in rather more dramatic form, "The Totalitarian Disease: Individualism and Racism in Adolf Hitler's Representations" in Essays on Individualism
15. Already in 1789, Jean-Joseph Mounier, when attacking the contractual nation (and as we shall see, at this time the contractual nation was the nation), declared: "We shall remember that the French are not a new people recently emerged from the depths of the forest in order to form an association, but a large society of twenty-four million inhabitants . . . that . . . wants to regenerate the kingdom in order that the principles of the true monarchy will always be held sacred. " Cited in Jean-Yves Guiomar. L'Idéologie nationale: nation, représentation, propriété (Paris, 1974), 91
16. Ernest Renan, "What is the Nation?" in Nations and Narration, 11
17. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (London, 1991)
18. and The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge, Eng. , 1983)
19. "La Constitution de 1789" in Les Constitutions de La France depuis 1789, ed. Jacques Godechot (Paris, 1970), 33-34
20. Hans Kohn, Prelude to Nation-States: The French and German Experience 1789-1815 (Princeton, 1967)
21. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780
22. And in the recently published A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Cambridge, Mass. , 1989), Pierre Nora opens his piece on the "Nation" with the claim: "Surely everyone agrees that it was the Revolution that gave the word 'nation' its synergy and energy. "
23. Say France before 1789, as in the article by William F. Church, "France" in National Consciousness, History, and Political Culture in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Orest Ranum (Baltimore, 1975)
24. This is not to deny that the proto-nationalism which had developed under the French monarchy did not lay the foundations. To quote Renan: "Cette grande royauté était si hautement nationale, que le lendemain de sa chute, la nation a pu tenir sans elle. " Quoted in Schnapper, La communauté des citoyens, 158
25. It has been argued that the first widespread and positive use of the term "democracy" in the former thirteen colonies was precisely at the time of the French Revolution, when "democratic societies" emerged to oppose the Federalist-dominated government of the time. This claim is made by James Miller in an unpublished paper, "Modern Democracy: From France to America. " For more on these societies see Richard Buel Jr. , Securing the Revolution: Ideology in American Politics, 1789-1815 (Ithaca, 1972), 97-105
26. Thus, where in France the democratic republic implies a narrowing of the distance between the people and their government, in the United States the same terms suggest a widening of that distance, as the people seek to "roll back" government. On the American revolutionaries' understanding of the terms nation, democracy, republic, and so on, see The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Cambridge, Mass. , 1991), particularly 661-681
27. That this explosive force was immediately apparent is suggested by the testimony of Goethe, among others. After having witnessed the French troops withstand the withering fire of the Prussian troops to the cry of "Vive la nation," he wrote that the battle of Valmy opened up "a new era in the history of the world. " Albert Soboul, The French Revolution 1787-1799 (London, 1974), 1, 269
28. Many authors see the cultural discourse as an exclusively right-wing phenomenon, and trace the emergence of the modern nationalist right in France to the trauma induced by the Franco-Prussian War. Much more interesting, from our perspective, are those who trace the shift from "city-nations" to "tribe-nations" to the Coppet circle, and notably Madame de Staël. In this telling the shift appears as a reaction to the revolutionary imaginary, at the confluence of enlightenment and romanticism, by a "liberal" author associated with the discovery of the "modern liberties" of civil society. See Martin Thom, Republics, Nations and Tribes (London, 1995)
29. The following analysis builds on my earlier work, Society, Theory and the French Revolution: Studies in the Revolutionary Imaginary (New York, 1986)
30. This is, of course, the revolutionary sequel to the competing representations of the French history provided by the thèse nobiliare and the thèse royale. See Peter Gay, The Enlightenment. An Interpretation. Vol. II: The Science of Freedom (New York, 1969), 465-483
31. and Keith Michael Baker, "Memory and Practice: Politics and the Representation of the Past in Eighteenth-century France," in Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, Eng. , 1990), 31-58
32. Emmet Kennedy, A Cultural History of the French Revolution (New Haven, 1989), chapter 8
33. Bronislaw Baczko, Utopian Lights (New York, 1989), 158-174
34. Krzysztof Pomian, L'ordre du temps (Paris, 1984), 42-44
35. The history of the museum in France is exemplary here. See Roland Schaer, L'invention des musées (Paris, 1993)
36. and especially chapter 3 of Kennedy, A Cultural History
37. The ultimate expression of such expansionist tendencies was voiced by Anacharsis Cloots, the self-styled Orator of the Human Species: "We will place the two Indies under the yoke of the Rights of Man; and this yoke will prove more durable than those of the monks of Madrid or the merchants of Liverpool. I can attest to the good citizenship of the pagan and Islamic guards of Pondicherry and Chandernagor. Let each person cultivate his own field in his own way, and practice the cult he pleases; the general law will protect all cults and all cultures. Anacharsis Cloots; Écrits ré volutionnaires, 1790-94, ed. M. Duval (Paris, 1979), 250
38. In this regard, Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, 1989) is most instructive, though the author's claim that the decisive turn represented by the revolutionary period as regards the local population's identification with France, was due to essentially local reasons, is rather dubious
39. For another work on the institutionalization of a national space with reference to France and the French Revolution, see Michel Foucher, L'Invention des frontières (Paris, 1986), 97-145
40. Though the concept of "natural frontiers" predates the Revolution. See Sahlins, Boundaries, 34-49
41. and Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York, 1991), 90-93
42. Raymond Williams speaks of the evolution of the meaning of society from (face-to-face) fellowship to the most abstract and general term for the "body of institutions and relationships within which a large group of people live. " Contractual notions, by extracting "the general laws of fellowship or association," permitted the term's abstraction, which preceded (but also prepared the way for) its generalization. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Glasgow, 1966), 243-246
43. Georg F. Hegel speaks here of "the sheer horror of the negative," The Phenomenology of Mind (New York, 1967), 608
44. See also Joachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass. , 1982)
45. Joseph-Emmanuel Sieyès, What is the Third Estate? (London, 1963), 126-128. (I have quoted the original, because it renders the nation's essential indeterminacy much clearer. ) Note that his response to the question, "what is the nation?" cannot be reduced to the "travaux particuliers" of homo economicus or the political ambitions of the Third Estate, as implied by William Sewell, Jr. in his otherwise enlightening book, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyès and What is the Third Estate? (Durham, N. C. , 1994). For a further elaboration of Sieyès' understanding of the nation, see chapters 8 and 11 of my Society, Theory and the French Revolution
46. Claude Lefort, "The Question of Democracy," in Democracy and Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass. , 1988), 9-20. In principle, there are two positions of power: the visible position of governance, and an "invisible" position, here that of the sovereign nation, which founds and legitimates the visible position. When Claude Lefort speaks of the position of power as empty, he is referring above all to the first, visible position; the claim being that the person or persons in power can never be fully identified with that power, and can therefore be removed with minimal symbolic consequences. But if the visible positions can never be completely filled, it is because the invisible position also remains "empty. " If any trait, or set of traits, was to define the nation with neither ambiguity nor remainder, if the question "what is the nation?" was to receive a definitive response, then the visible power would be much more easily filled, and democratic rotation undermined
47. Martin Thom speaks, in this regard, "of the virtual elimination of outworldliness" and the "general repudiation of suicide" as "the quintessence of liberty. " Republics, Nations and Tribes, 110
48. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Garden City, N. Y. , 1955)
49. The Loi Le Chapelier which declared the "annihilation of all corporations of citizens of the same state or profession" as "one of the fundamental bases of the French Constitution" provides the most notorious example of these tendencies. The fact that this law was largely used to suppress workers' associations should not cause one to lose sight of its more general justification. See French Revolution Documents, ed. J. M. Roberts (Oxford, 1966), I, 244
50. Though according to Anthony Smith only "about 10 per cent of existing states" are "candidates for the title of 'nation-state'" if by that term we mean "that the boundaries of the state's territories and those of a homogeneous ethnic community are coextensive, and that all the inhabitants of a state possess an identical culture. " "State-Making and Nation-Building," in The State in History, ed. John Hall (Oxford, 1986), 228-229