Steven Mock’s title is accurate but overly modest. Symbols of Defeat in the Construction of National Identity does indeed survey the fascinating ways in which national communities commemorate their lowest moments, and does so very well. But it also constructs a powerful theory of nations and nationalism in order to account for the surprising inclination of nations to celebrate their own defeats. In other words, Mock seeks to change the way we understand national identity itself, not just one of its more potent symbols. He does so by focusing on the role of sacrificial violence in communal life, a subject often invoked in discussions of nationalism but rarely pursued with this degree of breadth and clarity.

Mock’s starting point is the extraordinary wealth of examples of nations that monumentalize their worst defeats. Israelis and Masada, Serbs and Kossovo’s field of blackbirds, Greeks and the fall of Constantinople are some of the most familiar instances. Dig a little deeper, however, and you find similar stories being told by nationalists in almost every era, continent, and religious community. Scholars have examined many of these examples in some detail, usually as the expression of an idiosyncrasy—or pathology—of the national community in question. But given such a wide range of cases, Mock wonders whether it is a norm, rather than exceptions to the norm, that needs explanation here. Indeed, he devotes his later chapter on “exceptions” to “imperial nations,” like China, Russia, and the United States, that seem to have no place for the celebration of defeats in their national culture.

Why, then, do most nations “elevate symbols signifying their own defeat to the center of their national mythology?” Mock argues that this practice is one of the most important things that distinguish nations and nationalism “as a modern ideology and form of social organization,” for it helps the nation “successfully resolve basic human psychological dilemmas of the sort that any social system must in some way address” (p. 7). The celebration or sacralization of defeat, he suggests, fills an abiding need in the construction of communities, one that used to be met in the premodern era by religious ritual. Far from a peculiarity of wayward nations, it is a basic building block of national identity and a vital clue in solving the mystery of why nations have become so prominent a mode of social organization in the modern era.

The theory of nations and nationalism that Mock builds in order to answer his question is unapologetically functionalist in character—though he seems well aware of and well prepared to address the problems that plague functionalist theories. Drawing heavily on Emile Durkheim and Freud, he argues that stable human societies require “the channeling and control of human violence through the reification and sacralization of social order.” Religious “myths and rituals of violent sacrifice” helped manage that function in the pre-modern world; the celebration of national defeats “perform the sacrificial function in a manner particularly suitable to the context of a modern national society” (p. 51).

This theory rests on a familiar assumption that Mock derives from Durkheim and Freud: “[H]umanity’s presocial, animal nature,” with its disposition toward “unrestrained individual fulfillment,” poses an obstacle to organization of any stable human society (p. 60). Human drives have to be disciplined and rechanneled away from their natural objects, which often dispose us to exercising violence against our neighbors, if we are to achieve any kind of social stability. But this disciplining has to be hidden or repressed if it is to be acceptable in the long run. Primitive societies achieved this goal by erecting sacred objects, totems, which embodied the collective identity of the community and made acceptable the harsh constraints that human society imposes on our selfish natures. Modern societies achieve a similar end by making the nation the totem to which we sacrifice our individual drives. “The nation,” Mock suggests, “amounts to the sum total of myth and ritual used to enable and then repress the violent function at the core of modern society” (p. 93). Ritual celebrations of national defeats are especially effective means for enabling and then repressing this form of discipline. They monumentalize the demise of our predecessors in a way that makes their sacrifice an object for emulation, but safely puts their authority over us on the other side of a dividing line that separates the lost golden age of autonomy from the current struggle for national self-determination.

Mock finds evidence for his theory in the remarkably consistent “script” that different nations seem to follow in monumentalizing their memory of catastrophic defeats (p. 95). Symbolic representatives of the nation are portrayed as choosing defeat and martyrdom. They put up a valiant fight, despite being betrayed by some members of their own community, but eventually fall to the forces of the “other” community. And the story invariably concludes with a hint of the future redemption of the lost heroes, suggesting the persistence in us of their commitment to the national cause. Inspired by this script, Mock takes us on a remarkable tour of different cultures of national defeat. Some of the territory he covers will be familiar to many readers; much of it will not. But wherever he takes us on this tour, he proves to be a reliable and insightful guide.

Nevertheless, I have some reservations about Mock’s explanation for the prominence that nations give to accounts of their worst defeats. One concern is the number and prominence of the exceptions to his theory. It is admirable of the author to draw attention to these exceptions himself. But it seems an awfully large gap in the evidence to fill if it is large enough to include Russia, China, the United States, and England or Great Britain, among other nations. (And it is an even larger gap, if you include nations like France among the exceptions. Mock does not, arguing that the attention lavished by the French on Joan of Arc makes France a paradigmatic case for his theory. But it seems to me that the French celebrate Joan’s martyrdom as a harbinger of victory—like Thermopylae or the Alamo—rather than as a symbol of national defeat.) With so many prominent exceptions, one wonders whether one can continue to treat the reliance on memories of traumatic setbacks as the norm in the construction of national identities—especially when one of these exceptions seems to drain national defeat of all of its trauma by embracing its “conqueror,” William, as something like its founder. Mock, it seems to me, has a surprisingly broad and varied pattern to explain, rather than anything like a norm of nation building.

My more serious reservation with the author’s theory, however, concerns the central assumption that drives it: that stable human societies can only be established and maintained by violently repressing and then redirecting their self-seeking drives. Mock shares this assumption with Durkheim and Freud, as well as a whole host of influential thinkers who believe that the calculation of self-interest is too unstable a foundation for lasting social structures. But I do not see how we can continue to endorse this assumption in the light of what we now know about human nature and moral psychology. Nothing that we now know about hunter-gatherer bands—nor of the primate societies that preceded them—suggests that we would end up with Freud’s “primordial horde” or Durkheim’s unrestrained self-seekers “if our basic animal natures were left to their own devices” (pp. 60–62). On the contrary, we seem to be social animals all the way down. Our genes may be entirely selfish in their quest to reproduce themselves, but the creatures that they help construct are not. We seem to possess other-regarding dispositions toward reciprocity and social friendship that are no less natural than our more selfish dispositions toward self-preservation. If that is the case—and I do not see how it can be denied without challenging the findings of evolutionary psychology and social anthropology—human drives do not have to be violently repressed and redirected in order to establish lasting forms of social cooperation. The nation, with its tendency to monumentalize the violent sacrifice of our ancestors, does not fill “the role in the modern context that what we now call ‘religion’ filled in the premodern one” (p. 80) for a very simple reason: we do not need this role to be filled.

Nationalism’s students have been slow to acknowledge and adjust to the untenability of this assumption about human moral psychology, most likely because the alternative seems to be an even more untenable assumption about our “primordial” drive to form national communities. Most, therefore, try to explain the rise of nationalism by identifying either the counterintuitive ways in which it actually serves our interests or, like Mock, the forces that counter our naturally selfish drives. The former unmask nationalism as a kind of masquerade, showing that it does not really require the acts of self-sacrifice that it regularly demands. The latter, in contrast, show that these demands are even greater and more traumatic than they appear on the surface, because they cut against our nature in ways that we have to hide from ourselves. But if social cooperation has roots in our moral psychology just as deep as self-seeking, then we do not need to choose between treating the rise of nationalism as either an expression or a traumatic repudiation of our selfish natures. The question, instead, is why this particular form of social cooperation, with its emphasis on intergenerational ties and cultural heritage, has supplanted other forms in an age that claims to place little value on inherited ties and obligations. Mock answers the question by suggesting that the nation has a distinct advantage in this competition: its capacity to satisfy our abiding need for a kind of social discipline that religious ritual can no longer deliver in modern circumstances. If, however, we have never had such a need, then we will need to look for answers to this question elsewhere.

Needless to say, my focus on the more theoretical parts of Symbols of Defeat in the Construction of National Identity in this review expresses my own interests as a moral and political theorist. But it also reflects one of the book’s most striking virtues. Mock’s tour of different national cultures of defeat is well worth the price of admission to his book. So it has much to offer even to those readers who have little interest in the kind of theory of nationalism that it constructs. But it is the combination of empirical breadth and sustained theorizing that makes this work unusual. Typically, studies that survey so broad a swath of national culture offer little more than a cursory—and quickly forgotten—introductory chapter on nationalist theory; while studies that offer more sustained theoretical arguments tend to cherry-pick the examples most useful to them. Here, in contrast, theory and evidence are treated with equal and admirable seriousness. You may, like myself, remain somewhat skeptical in the end about some of Mock’s conclusions about the role played by the celebration of defeat in the making of national community. But you cannot help but be impressed and enlightened by the combination of argument and empirical evidence that he marshals in their defense.