Those of us who set out to analyze political passions always run the risk of appearing rather unworldly, like pedants who comprehend everything about what makes a joke funny but the need to laugh. I agree then, with Steven Mock, that we students of nationalism should be the last people to ignore or “downplay the importance of myth” in political life. And I share his skepticism about the prospects for any attempt to separate the two images of community, the sovereign people and the intergenerational nation, whose interconnections explain the distinctive character of nationalism as a social force, according to my book. Why, indeed, should we expect to pry apart in practice something that took more than 300 “pages of rational argument”—not to mention 20 years of my life—to disentangle? That is why the last chapter of my book is titled learning to “live with” nationalism rather than “getting beyond” its influence on our lives. Identifying the sources of nationalism’s hold over us does little, in itself, to diminish its power.

My goals in working out this distinction between nation and people are therefore primarily historical and analytic. On the one hand, I want to show that the new understanding of the people as constituent sovereign is the catalyst that turns a relatively old form of community, the nation, into the new force that we call nationalism. On the other hand, I want to show that it is the combination and mutual reinforcement of two distinctive motives, beliefs about political justice inspired by this conception of popular sovereignty and feelings of mutual concern and loyalty inspired by membership in national communities, that make nationalism such a powerful and durable force. I do not deny that my disentangling of nation and people serves practical or normative goals as well. But these goals are far more modest than providing us with something like a universal solvent of nationalist passions. They concern how, rather than whether, we engage in nationalist conflict and competition.

For example, it might help moderate the intensity of nationalist conflicts if we could get social and political theorists to recognize that it is only the conflation of the nation with the sovereign people that has made the idea of a general right to national self-determination seem plausible. For while nationalists hardly wait for cues from theorists before making exorbitant demands, the language in which they make these demands often reflects the modes of justification that the latter refine and make popular. Rights are what nationalists are always ready to claim. But the invocation of a general right of nations to have the final say over what goes in “their” territory, a way of talking that deepens and intensifies the demands that they make on others, draws on concepts introduced and maintained by theorists—most often, liberal theorists. Of course, persuading political theorists to change the way that they talk about something of such importance may seem no less quixotic an aim than disentangling the way in which we use nation and people in ordinary political speech. But the very fact that we continue to invest our time in producing hundreds of pages of rational argument suggests that we believe that such goals are not completely beyond our reach.