This book is a valuable addition to the literature on social identity and modern politics. In the manner of historical sociologists, John Lie synthesizes a vast body of scholarly literature—the book has a 100-page bibliography—in order “to illuminate and sublate the categories of modern peoplehood” (p. ix).

Lie develops two major arguments in this book: the priority of the modern state in shaping the primary forms of group identity in modern political life and the destructive effects of racialized social identities. These two arguments do not cohere quite as neatly as he would have us think, since, as it becomes clear in the last chapters, racialized identities develop in a much broader context than the drive of modern states to develop a corresponding sense of social identity or peoplehood. But each theme is pursued with intelligence and great erudition. And the analysis of the relationship between the modern state and social identity at least clears the decks of many misconceptions that keep us from understanding the nature of race-based social identities, even if we have to go beyond that analysis in the end.

Lie's syntheses of the arguments against treating shared language, religion, race, and culture as the foundation of modern peoplehood will be especially helpful for most readers. The author subjects each of these supposed bases of modern social identity to a thorough analysis and critique. In their place, he suggests that a “common consciousness” shaped by the “anti-entropic forces of the modern state” is responsible for creating the thin but powerful social identities that come to the fore in modern times (p. 42). “Modern peoplehood,” he declares, “is the product and predicate of the modern state, becoming a regulative ideal that governs political, intellectual, and scientific disciplines.” Everywhere the modern state has gone, it has sought to transform “a population … into a people” (p. 99).

Lie's main point is that the sense of belonging to a people is a product of the drive of modern states to extend their authority evenly throughout given territories. Like Ernest Gellner and many other “modernist” students of national identity, he ridicules the “intensely Whiggish” historical discourse that informs the theory and practice of nationalism (p. 115). The peoples that we see today are the products, rather than the creators, of modern states. Without the “anti-entropic forces of the modern state” to keep them within neat boundary lines, social identities would develop in much thicker, overlapping patterns—like Kokoschka abstracts rather than Mondrians, as Gellner once said. Recognizing this fact “vaporizes the seeming solidity of past peoples” (pp. 41–42).

There is a great deal to learn in this book about the impact of the modern state on modern social identities. But the argument remains incomplete because it does not give a full enough account of the relationship between the modern state and the variety of sources of social identity that it encounters. That incompleteness is registered in the vagueness of the concept “common consciousness” that Lie uses to define modern peoplehood. What exactly is common about common consciousness? Are we talking about an entirely new kind of mutual connectedness or a new form of something we have seen before? A people, it seems, is a group that is conscious of their peoplehood. In that case, what exactly are they conscious of? Lie cites Ernest Renan's famous description of the nation as “a daily plebiscite” to defend his reliance on a purely subjective criterion for defining modern peoplehood. But Renan pointedly insisted that two things make a nation: consent and the rich legacy of shared memories and historical artifacts that its members affirm as their common heritage. Lie is not suggesting that modern peoples simply affirm their shared participation in particular states—indeed, his goal is to unmask the way in which we have come to treat shared race and language and culture as the foundation of our common consciousness. So he needs to give a better account of the nature and sources of shared consciousness more generally and how modern states have come to deal with them. How else, for example, can we begin to make sense of the problem that lies at the core of so many communal conflicts in the modern world: the bad fit between existing state boundaries and the existing boundaries between peoples (p. 145)?

No doubt, we cannot make sense of modern peoplehood without looking closely at the peculiar role of the modern state in our lives. Indeed, I would agree with Lie that the modern state is the catalyst that transforms the problems of social identity in the modern world, thereby giving rise to wholly novel social problems like nationalism and ideological genocide. But if the state is a catalyst that brings life to new social combinations, then we cannot understand its effect on the world until we understand the forces it catalyzes. In other words, in order to make sense of the modern state's role in the transformation of social identity and its problems, we need a solid understanding of the general phenomenon of social identity and of the particular forms that the modern state has confronted. If it is common consciousness that defines modern peoplehood, then we will not understand the latter very well until we develop a much richer understanding of the generic and specific forms that common consciousness takes in human life.

We especially need such an understanding if we seek, as Lie does, “to sublate” as well as illuminate the concept of peoplehood. Why should recognizing the way in which the modern state has shaped the materials of common consciousness into the molds of modern peoplehood undo the bonds of mutual connection we feel? No doubt, it might free us of some of the illusions that we have developed about how deep the chasms are that separate one people from another. But if the modern state catalyzes our shared heritages in ways that produce strong but thin social identities, it will not stop doing so simply because we become more aware of the process. On this point, Lie seems a little more naive—if more humane—than other modernist students of nationalism, like Gellner or Benedict Anderson. Perhaps, however, his greater optimism stems from his focus on race, which modern states have had much more trouble bending to their efforts to create a common consciousness among its subjects.

In the end, Modern Peoplehood provides an excellent account of one half of the story about modern social identities. And while it downplays the other half, it still provides a very useful introduction to the problems of social identity within modern states.