Anna Marisa Schön opens her lucidly presented, thoughtful and in the end quietly provocative new conceptual history of the nation with a quote from Acton (1862): “By making the state and the nation commensurate with each other …, it [i.e. the modern theory of nationality] reduces practically to a subject condition all other nationalities that may be within the boundary” (1).

Even in the golden age of nationalism, then, there were deep concerns about imposing the idea of the nation onto the messiness of real political landscapes. Nonetheless, it is still a nationalist logic which claims to underpin the current sorting of humanity into the two hundred or so distinct political units referred to as “nation-states.” But Acton’s problem has also not gone away: given that few nation-states today contain entirely homogeneous populations in terms of race, language, religion, and other markers of national identity, the status of minority groups remains at issue. For Acton, the best they can hope for is to subsist in “a condition of dependence” (1), since their full political incorporation would contradict nationalism’s very rationale—a “multinational nation-state” is obviously a nonsense.

So what is to be done? If strictly nationalist thinking arrives at its logical conclusion, then every single nation must have a state, and every state must comprise a single nation. To my mind, and to Schön’s too, this is hardly desirable. It is also unfeasible—this kind of perfect nationalism can exist only in fantasy. And it had seemed to some that to the realm of fantasy nationalist thought had indeed been banished. However, history has not in fact ended, a liberal, post-nationalist global order has not exactly triumphed. It scarcely needs pointing out that nationalism is again on the rise, if not just yet on the march.

The stakes, then, are high and Schön boldly confronts the problem. While she will make some normative prescriptions, the meat of Nations Before the Nation-State, sandwiched between two orientating chapters and a conclusion, is conceptual history. The central five chapters take us from Classical Greece up to later sixteenth-century France, at which time, Schön argues, “the concept of the nation first acquired a political dimension” (178). Schön tracks across her period the usage of several keywords: ethnos, gens, natio. As she explains, these terms were employed to capture ideas of human groupings defined by some combination of attributes and behaviors common to their members, such as ancestry, language, religion, and material culture. But crucially, they did not demarcate political communities, for which other terms were reserved: polis, civitas, populus, imperium.

As early as chapter 3, the potential normative payoffs start to become apparent. Given the dislocation between ideas of national and political belonging in Greco-Roman thought—the Greeks considered themselves a distinct nation, yet were split across more than 700 poleis, while the Romans forged a multiethnic empire—contemporary nationalist assumptions about the naturalness of the fusion of nation and state can be challenged. And in subsequent chapters Schön continues to press her case. During the post-Roman period, a nationally pluralistic vision of empire persisted in the first barbarian successor kingdoms (chapter 4), and in the later medieval Holy Roman Empire (chapter 5). In the centralizing polities of late medieval France and England, the conceptual groundwork for the nation-state was laid, but this is a story about the fashioning of the sovereign state, rather than the politicization of the nation (chapter 6); on Schön’s account, the latter is a firmly early modern, and French, development (chapter 7).

The cumulative force of these chapters is to undermine the modernist thesis of the emergence of the nation. This is a valuable corrective. Schön can show that, contra Gellner, Anderson, Hobsbawm, and others, the concept of the nation predates that of the modern state. Although nations can find their place within states, states do not have to make nations.

While Schön’s historical reconstruction is largely convincing, it is not wholly original. As Schön herself notes, medievalists have long observed that ideas of national identity were not foreign to the Middle Ages, even if some have shown a tendency to politicize the nation. The originality of her work lies in its application of these insights to an impressively wide-ranging reading of Western political thought. This is explicitly a survey of elite discourse, encompassing largely canonical names—Thucydides, Cicero, Dante, etc.––though also some lesser-studied figures, such as Engelbert of Admont, Pierre Dubois, and Nicole Oresme. While there is nothing inherently wrong with focusing on elite thought, the approach does prevent Schön from considering how deeply ideas of the nation penetrated pre-modern mentalities.

Still, it is enough for Schön’s purposes to show that at least some people, some of the time, thought about nations as meaningful, non-political human communities before the advent of the nation-state. Indeed, she is sometimes content simply to demonstrate that a particular theorist did not consider polities to be defined by nationality. For instance, she notes that, for Marsilius of Padua, “nationhood alone does not satisfy the essential criterion of political association” (130), highlighting instead ideas of consent and popular sovereignty. These are basic points about Marsilius’s political theory, but there may be some utility in communicating them to a wider political science audience.

Although Nations Before the Nation-State could be criticized for being overly synthetic, it succeeds in its ambition to bring pre-modern history to bear on contemporary issues of nationalism. Whether we are convinced by Schön’s proposed solutions is, however, another matter. She has shown that non-politicized ideas of the nation were sustained within two core pre-modern political structures—city-state and empire—and she seeks to draw inspiration for her normative theory from both.

The case of the city-state appears relatively uncontroversial. For Schön, it “illustrates possibilities for the devolution of political authority, for increasing municipal self-government and strengthening democratic practices” (189). One could presumably follow the Ancient Greek example and divide a single national group into multiple states; indeed, we already have something like this today: the Sunni Arabs, for instance, split across several Gulf monarchies. But the problem with Schön’s recourse to the Greek poleis, and to the medieval Italian communes too, is that the citizen populations of these polities were largely ethnically homogeneous. Therefore, apart from supporting arguments for breaking up monoethnic nation-states where they currently do exist, it is not clear exactly how the pre-modern city-state helps us address nationalism today.

At least it is not clear until we see that Schön’s preferred city-state is subsumed under something resembling an empire. That pre-modern imperial ideas and practices might aid us in developing an alternative to the nation-state is by far the book’s most contentious claim. Schön herself realizes this, feeling it necessary to remind the reader that, “not without cause, imperialism has fallen into disrepute nowadays.” She also notes that pre-modern theorists were somewhat “idealistic” and did not always accurately portray the realities of empire. Yet Schön persists: “we ought to remember that all models for political life are—to a greater or lesser extent—idealistic,” and “some elements of imperial governance merit careful reconsideration today” (182).

Of particular interest to Schön is Cicero’s vision of empire. It is true that for Cicero the populus Romanus was defined by civil, not national, identity. This allowed Rome to incorporate into its citizen body various national groups, albeit often forcibly following their military conquest. It is also correct that Cicero claimed the Romans ruled as free subjects many of the peoples to whom they did not grant citizenship. However, to conclude that, for Cicero, “Rome’s suzerainty was only justifiable … if, and as long as, the empire lived up to strict moral standards and actually guaranteed political rights, legal prerogatives, and military protection to provinces and individuals” (65), is to fall under the spell of imperial propaganda couched as moral philosophy. As the classicist Myles Lavan has shown, the Romans routinely acknowledged that they had enslaved their provincial subjects, as Cicero himself does outside his philosophical works. Indeed, Cicero’s model of the protectorate was designed to address this specific ideological issue: Rome’s provincial populations, while in fact utterly at the mercy of Roman military dominance, were said to remain the free, yet dependent, clients of a benevolent patron. A pluralistic legal order which can account for the complexity of governing multiethnic populations may well be desirable today, but Ciceronian imperial ideology, let alone the brutality of actual Roman imperial practice, is hardly a promising place to look for guidance.

Schön is at pains to underline that Nations Before the Nation-State is “not a call for neo-imperialism” (189). Yet in failing to register the ideological power of her sources to obfuscate relationships of domination, she enters some dangerous territory. Along with Michael Hawley, who is cited in her discussion of Cicero and named in the acknowledgments, Schön is helping to set an emerging trend in contemporary American political theory: the revamping of aspects of pre-modern empire (see Michael Hawley, ‘“The Protectorate of the World’: The Problem of Just Hegemony in Roman Thought,” Polis 37 (2020): 44–71). Although no doubt well meaning, this does not strike me as a welcome development. If we really are to learn “lessons from imperialism” (183), then we must come to a clear-eyed understanding of its various ideological iterations as revealed in history.