From another author, the title of this book might suggest a normative argument; but Rogers Brubaker’s aims are characteristically analytical and empirical. Like his seminal Ethnicity without Groups (2004) (and like my own Political Peoplehood, 2015), Grounds for Difference combines new essays with a number of earlier ones—revised here to produce thematically linked reflections on the forms of human difference that are most socially and politically significant today. Two new essays address how best to understand the rising inequalities we now see, and the many ways that biology is resurfacing as an explanation for, especially, racial and ethnic inequalities. The rest explore how religious differences have become more deeply contentious than linguistic ones, contrary to historic trends, as well as how modern nationalism can still be understood as at most intertwined with, not identical to, religion; how, accompanying heightened migration, claims of diaspora and transnational identities have emerged as factors in modern global politics; and how fashionable “multiple modernities” claims may distract us from grasping global processes generating an epoch-defining diffusion of broadly similar political and economic concepts and organizational forms. The two new chapters are the most fully developed, but each displays Brubaker’s exceptional breadth of learning, analytical acuity, and shrewd empirical insights.

The opening chapter, “Difference and Inequality,” critiques Charles Tilly’s arguments in Durable Inequality (1998) that inequalities within modern major institutions are linked to external “categorical inequalities,” such as race, ethnicity, gender, religion, citizenship, and education. According to Tilly, institutions generate inequalities either by exploiting certain categories of persons or excluding them from opportunities and resources (“opportunity hoarding”). Brubaker states, a bit misleadingly, that categorical differences are not “intrinsically linked to inequality” (p. 11). In fact, different entities must be unequal on some dimensions or else they would be identical. What he means is that categorical differences need not be tied to substantial material and status inequalities—and so we must explore how and why they are. Brubaker contends persuasively that categories like citizenship, which primarily excludes, and gender, which primarily divides labor, and race and ethnicity, which do both, operate differently from one another (in more nuanced ways than can be summarized here). And he stresses that with the partial exception of citizenship exclusions, categorical inequalities are today chiefly generated by the ways in which persons are socially “produced” with different resources and aspirations; by the subtle ways that processes of selection for valuable positons are categorically skewed; and by the ways that unequal structures of positions, some lucrative and prestigious, others not, are themselves created.

Brubaker’s illuminating discussion stops short, however, of analyzing the politics, the political agents, and their motivations that create these structures of positions, these processes of skewed selection, and these modes of human socialization, with their categorically inegalitarian consequences. Apart from citations to scholars, this first chapter is devoid of proper names, or even typologies of the political actors who might generate the patterns it delineates convincingly. To a lesser degree, this feature is true of all the ensuing chapters, and it comprises the book’s only real weakness (which we might excuse by saying that Brubaker is a sociologist, not a political scientist—but he is a political sociologist!). Patterns and processes play the role of independent variables more than any recognizable political agents.

In truth, however, there is little to fault in Brubaker’s important second chapter, “The Return of Biology.” The political agents involved are still not highlighted, but they and their often benign motives can be readily identified. And the chapter focuses on a disturbing development about which too many social scientists are in denial: Despite several decades of our insisting that race is a social construction, many factors—including genomic research, innovations in biomedicine, forensic uses of DNA, public fascination with genetically aided genealogy, and claims of authentic indigenous and ethnic identities—all simplified and amplified by the media, are giving fresh life to biological conceptions of race and ethnicity. While replying with a powerful defense of constructivist perspectives, Brubaker issues an equally powerful call not to ignore or dismiss these developments.

The remaining chapters are united by a concern to ensure that scholars do not throw out with the bathwater the findings that Brubaker sees as important to retain in scholarly accounts holding that the modern era has been marked by the rise to predominance of nation-states, in which conceptions of shared national identity are often intertwined with, yet not identical or reducible to, religious conceptions. Brubaker does maintain that while in early modern Europe the rise of nationalisms based on language eclipsed religion as a prime axis of political identities and conflicts, today religious worldviews constitute “deep diversity” that modern nation-states find far harder to manage than linguistic disputes (p. 97). But he sees other much-discussed recent developments as over-hyped.

Brubaker particularly regards as exaggerated the notions that transnational memberships, including “diasporas” of various sorts, are displacing nation-states. He stresses that only 3% of the world’s population migrates, and that new transnational political networks are generally political projects through which either nation-states seek to gain external support or petitioners abroad hope for nation-state assistance. Both types of endeavor extend but do not displace the nation-state system. Brubaker acknowledges that that system is not and has never been universal, uniform in its components, or unchanging, but he insists that it remains the dominant political structuring that most distinguishes global “modernity” from past eras. His account may somewhat understate the power of the numerous challenges to the primacy of nation-states that are visible in the contemporary world, and it risks deflecting attention from the great variety of forms taken by today’s nation-states; but it still is far more right than wrong.

This reviewer must note, however, that in his last two pages, Brubaker adds a previously undiscussed term—“peoplehood”—as one that is linked to the “nationhood and citizenship” of the nation-state, but that is not simply identical to either (p. 153). Although he does not define the term, he uses it in a way that encompasses both nationalism and modern state citizenship, and much more. He notes that the language of peoplehood can be used “by states but also against them.” It can help to legitimize a nation-state, to demand a new polity, or to claim only a measure of autonomy within an existing regime. “Peoplehood” also can be presented as state-fostered or prepolitical, and it can be “understood as grounded in citizenship, history, language, way of life, descent, race, or religion” (p. 153). In a work so often concerned with drawing distinctions that clarify categories used in both scholarly and popular discussions, it is striking to find at the end the brief introduction of a term that is “extremely flexible and adaptable,” so much so that it encompasses many of the categories that Brubaker has previously differentiated (while concisely sketching arguments I needed two books to make).

Brubaker employs this term “peoplehood” to advance his closing contention, that we can still speak of a single global “modernity,” not “multiple modernities,” while recognizing fully the great diversity of states, nations, citizenships, and, yes, “peoples” that the modern world displays. I am persuaded that stressing “multiple modernities” can blind us to globally interconnected economic, political, and cultural processes constructing the modern world, and in particular to the diffusion of the ideas and organizational models that have made nation-states preeminent in global political life. But I submit that the recognition that we can only understand modern processes of nation-state construction, contestation, and transformation by invoking the broader, more encompassing category of political “peoples” suggests something more. We should also be careful about overstating the differences between “modernity” and “premodernity.” Yes, it is true that beginning in the seventeenth century, and especially in the course of the twentieth century, the world came to be dominated by regimes that can more or less be called nation-states, with shared features that in many respects differentiate them from the empires, city-states, tribes, theocracies, and other polities that prevailed in earlier epochs of human history. But it is possible that there are elements of the tasks of constructing political communities, political peoples, that are enduring features of political life, shared by both premodern and modern political endeavors. Analyzing the politics of membership and difference in ways that begin with nation-states may lead us both to overlook those continuities and to minimize the variations in political community construction and contestation that are now occurring and emerging.

The possibility that there are common features to the construction of all conceptions of political community that can nonetheless generate wide variety is what led me to explore “political peoplehood” at the same time that Rogers Brubaker was writing Grounds for Difference. Despite the differences in our projects, there are grounds for thinking that they can usefully inform each other. But I would not claim that the contributions are symmetrical, because I have been so greatly informed by Brubaker’s latest outstanding book. Many other readers will be as well.