The roots of hegemony

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The roots of hegemony

The roots of hegemony:The mechanisms of classaccommodation and the emergenceof the nation-peopleLuis M. Pozo

This study is an investigation of the foundations of

hegemony, drawing and expanding on Gramscis

insight about the need for an ethico-political principle

such as the nation, linking dominant and subordinate

to attain hegemony. In order to overcome Gramsci's

limitations, it introduces the notion of mechanisms

of class accommodation, referring to inclusive iden-

tities whose effect is to render the reality of class

divisions politically irrelevant by stressing the organicunity of dominant and dominated. It investigates the

structural conditions for the nations emergence, linked

to the rise of capitalism, and the concrete ways in

which it was constructed, strongly dependent on its

nature as a mechanism of class accommodation.

Introduction

A common justification, it is claimed, for the powerof any dominant group over a subordinate one is thatit enables the collective purposes or general interests

of the society as a whole to be realised (Beetham, : );and as Beetham also points out, an idea of community thatembraces dominant and subordinate is central to securinglegitimacy (ibid: ). But he warns that to treat anycollective as an undifferentiated whole, as a single entitywith definable purposes and interests is to overlook the way

these purposes and interests are constructed by and mediatedthrough its internal relations of power (ibid: ).Very often,certain collectives are treated in this way regardless of their

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members actual differences in terms of power and resources.Nations and the national interest; peoples and their putativewills; the families of powerful magnates comprising aclientele of dependants; all of these have been invoked bydominant classes and their organic intellectuals in order todeny the salience of class, and to legitimate their rule.

This is not surprising. In order for a class society to befunctional; that is, for it to persist as a viable system of socialrelations of exploitation, some degree of social cohesion isnecessary. Arguably, the primary goal of the hegemony ofdominant classes over society is precisely to provide suchintegration in order to render the fact of class politicallymanageable. In this study, I undertake an investigation ofthe political/cultural foundations of hegemonyof theideological and institutional preconditions for thelegitimation of class rule. For that purpose, I introduce thenotion of mechanisms of class accommodation, which refersto the myths of community and inclusive (id)entities shapedby the systemic power of ruling classes. Aimed at de-classingsocial consciousness, preventing class unity and obscuringsubordinate classes interest in an independent politics, theeffect of these identities is to render the reality of classdivisions politically irrelevant by stressing the allegedlyfundamental, organic unity of dominant and dominated.The mechanisms can be defined as organising principlesthat predetermine collective experience by including peoplein a mythic community in the name of an ideologically andculturally constructed identification, which claims moralpriority and exclusive loyalty. They are necessary but notsufficient conditions for hegemony, involving the creationtime- and space-boundof collective identities that unitepeople of different classes through ritual and symbolicpractices, and through ideologies of common good and socialharmony. They form a framework of interrelated idioms andarguments (the ideological dimension) and ritual practicesand institutions (the performative dimension), closely knittogether in reality, but analytically separable. Ideologically,they consist of elaborations of a few basic themes conveyedin the formulae of consensual harmony,organic unity,symbolicequalityandcommon good, articulated through the functionalmetaphors of the family and the body.

Following Gramsci, I identify the nation-people as oneof those mechanisms.Strikingly, despite the importancethat should be accorded to the study of the foundations of



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hegemony, and despite the popularity enjoyed by Gramsciin recent decades, there is a glaring silence on the issue inGramscian scholarship and in the literature on the conceptof the nation. The reason may be that Gramsci himself wasuninterested in investigating, at either a theoretical orhistorical level, the hegemonic principles and the concept of nation (Gramsci : [all quotations from theQuaderniare the authors own translations]), which he placedat the basis of hegemony. That certain hegemonic principlesunifying dominant and subordinatethe nation amongthemconstitute the roots of hegemony was suggested byGramsci without further elaboration. He seemingly tookthese principles for granted, explaining that one replacedanother not by virtue of its intrinsically logical or rationalcharacter, but by becoming a sort of popular religion (ibid:, ). This somehow implied that they were trans-historic, always-already-constituted essences. But the processby which nationalism became popular religion, and itsdeterminants and conditionsand even the simple fact thatthe nation had to be imagined and constructed beforehandapparently escaped him. This, coupled with his preoccupationwith the achievement and maintenance of Italian nationalunity, prevented him from realising that if the nation-peoplerepresented a hegemonic principle characteristic of bourgeoishegemony, then they could hardly form the basis for non-bourgeois hegemonic projects. These two points reinforcedeach other, and might be the reason for his uncriticalacceptance of nation-centric views.

Gramscis seminal insights are very important. But thelimitations of his approach force us to search for confirmationof his intuitions in other sources. A review of the respectivebodies of literature of the modernisation school and theMarxist tradition, though limited themselves in this respect,confirms that the nation functions as a mechanism wherebyconsensual relationships between contending classes aresecureda role that constitutes a foundational moment inthe transition to a modern, bourgeois polity. The literatureprovides clues as to what the role of the nation was in itsformative stage, and which other mechanisms of classaccommodation had been historically relevant before.

If the nation constitutes the core of bourgeois hegemony,

an examination of the historical context in which thismechanism of class accommodation emerged should providea more satisfactory explanation for the appearance of the



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nation state than previous theories. The nation state, I willargue here, must be linked to the development of capitalism,which was crucially implicated in the political structuringof the system of territorial states and in the liberation of amass of labourers from patronage and corporate bonds, thusshaping the ways in which older, segmentary patterns ofaccommodation changed into all-encompassing ident-ifications comprising the whole population within thosestates. Furthermore, I will show that those older patternsinfluenced the development of new ones. Pre-bourgeois dis-courses and practices of accommodation gave way to newones within the accommodative framework of the functionalmetaphors of the family and the body. Fictive familyhouseholds and associated ideologies and practices ofpatronage, variously defined corporate arrangements, andcivism (a compact of local patriotism/citizenship in urbansettings): these were replaced by new mechanisms of classaccommodation related to the expansion of capitalism. Thesewere the nation-people and correlated aspects of nation-building and citizenship, modern forms of corporatism andideologies, and practices of social partnership.Trade/religious corporations and the polity as corpus mysticumgaveway to the corporate entity nation; fictive patrimoniallineages gave way to the fraternal, family-like bourgeoisnation; and urban civism was adapted as national, state-widecitizenship, and a new form of (national) patriotism.

In this paper, I explore the issues outlined above in turn.First, I assess the original Gramscian arguments at theinterface between hegemony and the nation-people in orderto highlight both their usefulness and their limitations, andhence the need to expand on them. Then I survey the relevantliterature on social cohesion and integration, which can beof use in overcoming the silence and ambiguity in Gramsciand in outlining a historical model of class accommodation.Finally, I focus on the nation as accommodative device,tracing the structural conditions for its emergence, tied tothe rise of capitalism, and the concrete forms in which itwas imagined and constructed, which are shown to dependon its nature as a mechanism of class accommodation.

Hegemony and the nation-people

Hegemony means a determinate system of moral life(Gramsci, : ), and it correlates with consensus



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and with political, moral and cultural leadership (ibid: ). Hegemony proceeds by finding mechanisms that elicitthe consent of the masses to class politics on an integrativebasis, as a prerequisite for the legitimation of the socialorder. This is encoded in Gramscis reference to a hegemonicprinciple resembling a sort of popular religion which, inthe form of patriotism and nationalism, is the nexuseffecting the unity of leaders and led (ibid: , ).The notion of hegemony, with its aspects of consent andsocial binding, prefigures the modes of social integrationinvestigated by DurkheimianWeberian structural func-tionalism but, despite the Durkheimian inflections inheritedby Gramsci via Sorel, retaining the role of class struggle(Buci-Glucksmann, : ). It is this preoccupation withsocial cohesioninstead of conflictthat, ironically, makes thisinternationalist communist liable to be seen as contributingto a classical issue from the nationalist agenda in Italy, alongwith such right-wing figures as Pareto, Mosca, Croce orGentile (Szporluk, : vii). Accordingly, Gramscisresearch on hegemony could be read as a reworking of thecharacteristic Italian theme of how to bring together thediverse classes and cultures which made up the Italian state(Bellamy, : )a crucially important theme for Italianelites since unification. In this sense, Gramsci was an Italianson of his times, and this may give us a clue as to why hewas unable or unwilling to problematise the concept of nation-people.2

According to Gramsci, the integrative ethico-politicalnexus between rulers and ruled changed from the personof the emperor or king who, embodying the authorityprinciple, personified a religion among peasants, to theconcept of fatherland and of nation (: ).

The problem is that Gramsci avoided a discussion of thehistorical emergence of those hegemonic principles which,had he addressed it, would have led him to conclude thatfictive kinship and corporatism, in the guise of extendedlineages of patrons and clients and trade/religious corp-orations, were more important as hegemonic principles thanthe alleged devotion of the masses to kings (Pozo, forth-coming). Likewise, he failed to thoroughly historicise thenation-people, mistaking the conditions for a bourgeois

hegemonic takeover (the construction of an identity and itsrepresentation as a non-fissured social formation) for theconditions for a proletarian one. Ironically, an investigation



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of the nation illuminated by the concept of hegemony provesLuxemburgs allegedly contrasting Marxist account of the roleof the nation correct. For while Luxemburg (: )claimed that, in a class-divided society, the nation as a uniformsocial and political whole simply does not exist, Gramscibelieved that national unity was valuable because the system ofproductionthe heritage of social wealthrepresented an areaof common interest between different classes.

However, he felt obliged to qualify the nationalpopularwith expressions such as profoundly popularand radicallynationalwhen referring to the revolutionary activity of thesubordinate classes, which hints that he was unsure that aproletarian hegemony through the nation-people wouldsuffice to end class oppression (Gramsci, : ). Hisuncertainty arises from the contradictory application of aprinciple associated with bourgeois hegemony to proletarianhegemony, due to the alleged necessity for the proletariat toreplace the bourgeoisie as the national class in order toachieve and maintain a genuine national unity.

The inconsistency in Gramscis account stems from hisconceptualisation of hegemony through the nationalpopularcompact necessarilydependent on the historically unique caseof the bourgeois nation-building project. He conceived thenationalpopular as a process of Jacobin inclusion andmobilisation of the subaltern classes, especially the peasantry,directly derived from the French Revolution (ibid: ),but then applied the nationalpopular to a future proletarianhegemony, still unseen and hard to forecast.

Arguably, the French masses had an interest in abolishingthe ancien rgimeby taking part in the historical bloc formedby the bour-geoisie, but not in remaining trapped foreverwithin the entity used by the bourgeoisie to represent its in-terests as universal.

For if what is at stake in the nationalpopular concept isthe construction of hegemonyinvolving the building of classalliances under the leadership of a unitary centre in order toform a collective will against a pre-existing hegemonic bloc(Forgacs, : ), then the hegemony to be constructedthrough the nation-people is none other than bourgeoisheg-emony. Marx grasped the conditions necessary for theformation of such a collective subject in his reflections on

the French bourgeois upheavals; that is, partial and merelypolitical revolutions in which a section of civil societyemancipates itself and attains universal domination:



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For apopular revolutionand the emancipation of a particularclassof civil society to coincide, for oneclass to representthe whole of society, another class must concentrate initself all the evils of society A particular social spheremust be regarded as the notorious crime of the wholesociety, so that emancipation from this sphere appears asa general emancipation. For oneclass to be the liberatingclasspar excellenceit is necessary that another class shouldbe openly the oppressing class. The negative significanceof the French nobility and clergy produced the positivesignificance of the bourgeoisie. (quoted in Szporluk, :)

In discussing, in The German Ideology,the quarrels betweenthe bourgeoisie and nobility, he insisted:

For each new class which puts itself in the place of oneruling before it, is compelled merely in order to carrythrough its aim, to represent its interests as the commoninterests of all the members of society it has to give itsideas the form of universality The class making arevolution appears from the very start, if only because itis opposed to a class, not as a class, but as a representativeof the whole of society, it appears as the whole mass ofsociety confronting the one ruling class. (Marx, :)

Gramsci never clearly exposed the nation-people as anad hoc, conjuncturally meaningful and necessarily short-livedcoalescence of interests under the aegis of the bourgeoisiein historically specific circumstances (as grasped by Marx);as the formation of a historical bloc, uniting material interestsand a dominant worldview in order to effect the transitionto bourgeois society. He thus translated a specific mode ofbourgeois hegemonic intervention into proletarian concerns.As a result, his followers made the theoretically abhorrentand practically disastrous mistake of promoting anaccommodation with the bourgeoisie through the nation-people concept after the Second World War, in a very dif-ferent historical conjuncture. This accommodation was infact unable to prevent, and very likely helped to bring about,

a regrouping of bourgeois hegemony under the politicalleadership of the Christian Democrats (Forgacs, : ).The ascent of Fascism had somehow re-enacted the Ris-



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orgimento, re-effecting a passive or defensive revolutionby transformist co-optation and the securing of masssupport. Gramsci opposed the same strategic alliance ofworkers, peasants and petty-bourgeois intelligentsia that hehad considered apposite in Italian conditions since theRisorgimento. This strategy may have been sound before thewar, but his characterisation of it as nationalpopular wasrather problematic. How this alliance could be anti-bourgeoisyet still nationalpopular, and avoid unravelling the Italianstate and blowing up national unity, is a question I thinkGramsci was unprepared to answer.

After all, the Fascists secured mass consent precisely byappealing to people and nationa staple of right-wingpolitics since the nineteenth century. During the war, theCommunists included bourgeois forces in the anti-Fascisteffort of all the people-nation, thus unwittingly contributingto the reinvigoration and re-legitimisation of the bourgeoisiein the post-war period, at a time when the circumstanceswere even further removed from those of the Fascist takeover,let alone from those of the Risorgimento, and when the bour-geoisie had already resumed its constitutive national role.Gramsciand hence also his followerswas seeminglyunable to see the dangerous openness of a nation-people,dictated by its very nature, to (re)colonisation by a bourgeoisieclaiming to act in the national interest. Thus, in the finalanalysis, the concept of hegemony underscores the essentialcontradiction at the heart of the notion of nation-people,as diagnosed by Luxemburg and intimated by Marx.

Consequently, Gramscis investigations are character-istically incomplete. He never systematically discussed thesocial and historical roots of the notion he placed at thebasis of hegemony. He somehow took it for granted, writingas if the Italian people-nation were a transhistoric essencealready discernible in the Middle Ages (Gramsci, : ). He deplored the lack of vision of the merchant oligar-chies and intellectuals of the Renaissance (save perhapsMachiavelli) for failing to ally themselves with the peasantryin order to gain full hegemony, and to form a nationalpopular historical bloc to unify the country. This was anach-ronistic since there was nothing remotely resembling anItalian nation in the Renaissance, and the resources that

would have been needed to build one vastly surpassed any-thing at the disposal of the ruling classes at that time, evenif they had found the task intelligible at all. Gramsci rightly



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viewed the Risorgimento as a passive revolution markedby the bourgeoisies failure to formulate a prog-rammaticunity of the interests of the people against the old non-national elites, implying that nationalpopular unity wasnecessary in order to achieve a successful bourgeoisrevolution,which explains the incomplete nature of that revolution inItaly. Gramsci was also right in highlighting the way socialarrangements reflecting the territorial and economic divisionof Italy prevented that unity (Gramsci, : , ).

The bourgeoisie failed to create a Jacobin collective willinvolving an alliance with the peasantry, hence the passiveor defensive nature of unification. Yet it was creating analternative collective will by allying itself with the pro-letariat, landowners and intermediate strata, and by excludingpeasants. This certainly meant that the Italian process ofnation-building was somehow inadequate: a passive,exclusively elite-led process. But it was, for all its lack ofpeasant involvement, as nationalpopular as any otherEuropean process of nation-building in its presuppositionsand methods, especially in the attempt to spread a sense ofnational identity previously lacking amongst the population.But in Italys case, only the northern masses were included.Southern Italy, a quasi-feudal mixture of declining feudalismand growing marketisation, buttressed by patronclientrelations, was incorporated as a colony. The national con-sciousness promoted by the bourgeoisie was barely under-stood in this milieu.3Thus, a historical bloc of integ-rativeideologies and material practices rallying together proletariatand bourgeoisie, culminating with Giolittism, was forged:one that, at the same time, depicted the southern peasantmasses as backward and as a hindrance to national unityand progress, in order to prevent their alliance with workers.The northern masses, influenced by the Church, the papers,the bourgeois tradition and propaganda, viewed southernpeasants as biologically inferior, lazy, savage andbarbarous, thus fostering mutual, violent hatred (ibid: ,, ).4 Though Gramsci rightly highlighted thedivisive, defensive aspect of that national ideology, he wasunconcerned with the construction of ideologies and practicesof social cohesion that impose ultimate goals and moralstandards as apreconditionfor divisive strategies to succeed.That is, he was unconcerned with the process of nation-building as such. Since the bourgeoisie had not fulfilled itsJacobin function, Gramsci charged the proletariat with



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doing this itself; but since he failed to conceptualise theJacobin moment as the starting-point for the constructionof a previously inexistent nation, he did not realise that hewas demanding that the proletariat undertake the task ofnation-building on its own. He failed to ask whether aprocess of nation-building that marginalised the bourgeoisiecould be national at all. He also overlooked the fact thatthe bourgeoisie was actually undertaking the task, howeverinadequately. Massimo DAzeglios famous dictum, We havemade Italy, now we must make Italians, speaks for itself.Forging a territorial state was not identical with building anation: that would have to be constructedand this thebourgeoisie, even more sensitive than Gramsci to the needfor social integration, viewed as of paramount importance,and acted accordingly.5

The search for integration

Gramsci was, then, somewhat ambivalent and ambiguousor simply silentin dealing with the issue of the ethico-political worldviews uniting dominant and subordinate.Revealingly, the concern with social integration was takenup not by Marxists working in the Gramscian tradition, butby structuralfunctionalist and modernisation theorists. Inthis section, I will review the literature in search of the themeof integration/incorporation in order to confirm Gramscisbasic insights, while remaining sensitive to the inclusive andfunctional role ascribed to the nation, and to references toolder modes of inclusion or identification in disparate strandsof scholarship. It should be stressed that there has been nofocused research on the nation-peoplelet alone on previousmechanisms of class accommodationin relation tohegemony, and that the study of integrative mechanisms hasbeen so far unsystematic and fragmentary. Hence theexploratory nature of this endeavour.

The most extensive treatment of the way stability andharmony may be fostered in a functional political system,inspired by what were perceived as historical crises ofincorporation of the working classes, came from the broadliterature on modernisation that drew to varying degrees onstructural functionalism, which in turn combined aDurkheimian concern with social cohesion with a Weberianfocus on legitimacy. It tracked the political evolutionnecessary in order to maintain stability in conditions of rapid



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structural change from traditional to modern societies.The incorporation of the industrial working class, seen asthe solution to the crises of modernisation, was investigatedas a protracted process of mobilisation followed byintegration (Germani, ) in terms of the related themeof inclusion in the political community through formalcitizenship (Bendix, ; Lipset, ; Marshall, ), orin terms of the institutional buffers needed to absorb theparticipation explosion (Huntington, ). In aparadigmatic study, Waisman (: ) concludes that theincorporation of the working class is the crucial variablein the relationship between modernisation and thelegitimation of capitalism.

This preoccupation was linked to the penetration ofcapitalism in emergent nation states in the context of ColdWar struggles, which prompted Western concerns about theachievement of cohesive polities. It entailed the devising ofthe doctrine for political development (Cammack, ; cf.Tilly, : ; Robinson, :)a theory of politicsin the process of capitalist modernisation, and a doctrine aimedat guaranteeing the capitalist direction of change: theinstallation and consolidation of capitalist regimes in thedeveloping world (Cammack, : ). Pro-capitalist organicintellectuals recommended nation-building as a policyprescription to imperialist elites and their colonial allies.Clearly, they viewed the nation as a tool with which classconflict could be stifled, deeming that the consolidation ofnational identity in the process of expanding politicalparticipation contributed decisively to the legitimation of classrule (ibid: , ). As Verba put it, a sense of identity with thenation legitimizes the activities of national elites and makesit possible for them to mobilize the commitment and supportof their followers (quoted in Cammack, : ).

The basic concern, within this literature, was to insulatepolitical institutions from social pressure and to control theparticipation of the masses in order to achieve stability underthe rule of responsible elites (ibid: ). The central questionwas that of mass politicshow to include the massesinnocuously in the political community, controlling theparticipation explosion (ibid: , )? Social integration,deemed indispensable to securing social harmony (ibid: ), was invariably linked to a proper process of nation-building and to the achievement of a sense of national unity(ibid: , , , ), identified with political development



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or modernisation' (ibid: ). Progress in overcoming thecrisis of identity and legitimacy brought about by the politicalbreakthrough of the masses depended upon clarifying bothindividual and collective feelings of identity, and establishingan appropriate common identity and elite autonomy andauthority over the masses (ibid: , ).

Thus, the prescription involved extensive social engineeringthrough mass media, educational systems, etc., and the creationof a responsible middle class; and through stressing a senseof national loyalty, but retaining traditional bonds ofinterpersonal loyalty (patronclient relationships) whenrequired (ibid: ). Stories of success were contrastedwith stories of failures: Japan succeeded through themanipulation of citizenship rights, the cultivation of national

symbols and the use of the school system for politicalindoctrination. Latin America failed due to the alleged lack ofmass parties of national integration (ibid: , , ).

In Mouzeliss more sophisticated account (: ), during the course of the modernisation of Europeansocial structures after the Industrial and French Revolutions,the lower classesexposed to national markets, educationalsystems and administrative networkswere politicallyincluded in one of three ways: The integrative mode, in north-western Europe: ahorizontal form of inclusion based on the interplay betweenthe corps intermdiaires of the ancien rgime and thecentralising drives of absolutist monarchies.The incorporative clientelistic mode of semi-peripheralregions like Greece: political inclusion via the extensionand centralisation of already available patronage networksand organisations.The incorporative populistic mode, employed in regions

such as the Balkans: inclusion via the attachment of themasses to a populist leader.

Oxhorn () depicts limited processes of controlledinclusion in Latin America, referring to hierarchical patternsof controlled political participation: a state corporatism builtupon clientelistic and populistic appeals.

Marxism, opposing this literature, has produced rivalaccounts that nonetheless display a certain revealing affinityin which, to compound Gramscis oblivion, the functionally

inclusive dimension of the nation becomes a commonplacemade out of scattered references, scarcely theorised ordeveloped. The Gramscian system of moral life or popular



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religion is recast as a civic (or civil), secular religion.The all-inclusive capacity of the nation underscores nat-ionalisms potential as a secular religion, fitting forconservative purposes: the most integrative and stabilisingforce; the functional creed par excellence (Miliband, :). The nation is linked to the demise of older forms ofcollective identification, and to the changes that convertedsubjects into citizens and prompted the arrival of mass politics(Hobsbawm, : , , ). The means applied inorder to construct new identities were the creation of politicalsymbols depicting the nation as a community that was oftenemblematically represented by kingship as a surrogate forthe peoples unity (ibid: , ), and the extensive useof ritual, ceremony and myth amounting to the creation of acivic religion (ibid: , ).6The story behind the creationof this civic religion, seen by Hobsbawm as hegemonictrickle-down, is best described as the construction of apolitical/cultural identity that spuriously embraces dominantand subordinate as a foundational moment or preconditionin a hegemonic process.

Since hegemony comprises that part of a dominantideology that has been naturalized (Comaroff& Comaroff,: )encompassing the constraints that shape the formsof struggle: the ways in which subordinate classes understandand resist their domination through institutions, images andsymbols shaped by the process of domination itself(Roseberry, : )the construction of a sense ofnationhood is crucial. For, once established as the corner-stone of peoples identity and consciousness, the nationrepresents an ideological and institutional structure ofimmense power, which already determines the possibleforms of political activity and belief (Eley, : ).Associated with the nation, the state withholds from publicview the fact of class struggle, presenting itself as the politicalunity of the people-nation (Poulantzas, :; Balibar,: ; Miliband, : ). Thus, in seeking orwielding state power, political forces, even those of the Left,become agents of what Nairn () calls the nationalisationof class. The British Labour Party, for example, becomesan agent of political socialization and social control,mediating between nation and class:

by upholding the values of the nation against the valuesof direct action, revolution or sectional interests, it



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legitimates existing society and militates against thedevelopment of a revolutionary political consciousnesson the part of the working class. [It acts] to maintainvalues to which the working class has already beenexposed, and usually absorbed from other institutions ofpolitical socialization such as the family, the educationalsystem, the church, the media and even the ConservativeParty. (Panitch, : )

Political parties became nationalparties, cast in the historicalrole of integrating the interests and demands of the workingclass with those of the nation as a whole; that is, integrativeparties imbued with a conception of the social order as beingbasically unified rather than fissured, and effecting a com-promise between the interests of various classes bymeans of policies in the national interest (ibid: ). Suchpolicies attempt to obtain the working class consent to moreexploitation by means of a communitarian conception,defining a community of interests between capital and labourin the name of a supposed interest transcending social classes(Foa, quoted in ibid: ).7 Analogously, fascist movementsused the nation to reinterpret a class-ridden reality as classlessunity. According to Marcuse, fascism presents a unitythat combines all classes. A classless society on the basisof and within the framework of, the existing class society(quoted in Neocleous, : ). Vlkisch thought is amechanism for not only incorporatingthe working class butalso subduing it (ibid: ). The nation makes theseoperations possible, whatever the type of bourgeois politicalregime, for the people-nation represents the unity of society,the overcoming of class divisions at the level of politicalpractice, and the state legitimises itself and achieves its goalsby appealing to that unity.

Clearly, then, two opposite schools of thoughtcon-servative and radicalalmost complement each other whenassessing the role of the nation. Both see it as the essentialnexus in societies undergoing capitalist modernisation: acivic religion, recalling Gramscis popular religion,binding together all classes in capitalist social formations.Both, although for different reasons, are concerned with socialcohesion; and each reaches basically the same conclusions.

This cannot be accidental. In their own ways, both capture afundamental property of the nation-people as a historicalphenomenon. Scattered references to patronage/clientage and



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corporate categories give us some clue as to where to begina systematic investigation of the mechanisms of class accom-modation before the maturation of capitalism; and I haveattempted to do this elsewhere (Pozo, forthcoming). In thenext section, I explore the structural determinants of theemergence of nation states from territorial states, and theconcrete forms in which the nation-people were set forth asthe basis for any attempt at bourgeois hegemony.

Imagining communities: Nation and/as

accommodation

In order to understand why and how the new mechanisms ofclass accommodation adopted their modern, all-encom-passing form, we must consider the way in which thedevelopment of capitalism affected the spatial clustering ofsocio-political organisations, and rearranged social relations.The low level of development of productive forces and therelatively widespread access to the means of production inpreindustrial Europe underpinned the extra-economiccharacter of surplus extraction in conditions of close personalintercourse, limited social and spatial mobility, widespreadilliteracy, limited means of ideological conditioning, andfragmented sovereignties. In this context, hegemonicprinciples appeared in the shape of sections across the socialstructure modelling vertical communities: extended lineagesof lords and dependants predicated on the metaphor of thefamily household.In urban settings, there was a dynamicinterplay between patronage systems and corporatearrangements modelled after familial and bodily metaphors.Both competed with civism: universalist notions of civicpatriotism brought about by the concentration of artisanalproduction and commercial capital (Pozo, forthcoming). Tothose could be added the presence, largely confined to self-serving elite ideologies, of remote entities barely capable ofeliciting a sense of identification, which would later influencethe conception of the nation in the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies. These were dynastic states as a corpus mysticum,with a princely figure as head/father (Bendix, ; Cohen,: ; Pitkin, : ; Manicas, : )afigure viewed by Gramsci as the social cement in precapitalist

societies. What circumstances determined the change inaccommodative patterns from segmentary and/or local touniversalist notions encompassing the whole state population?



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Both the system of territorial states and the nation formowe a great deal to the rise of capitalism. State and nationare interrelated phenomena arising from the politicalstructuration of the world capitalist system (Wallerstein, :; Hobsbawm, : ; Patterson, : , ). Buta set of territorial states was the chronological andorganisational precondition for the emergence of nations(Balibar, : ; Calhoun, : ; Tilly, ).There were other possibilities for the spatial distribution ofpolitical power: political federation or empire; theocraticfederation; trading network of city-states, etc. (Balibar, :; Tilly, : ; and for the dichotomy betweenterritorialism and capitalism in early modern state-form-ation, see Arrighi, ). However, capitalism and theterritorial state developed mutually reinforcing features.Capitalism freed resources for state-making, and at the sametime, the existence of several territorial states reduced thecapacity of governments to capture or smother the operationsof private capital. Genuine economic growth and strengthdepended on strong mercantile states laying the groundsfor an expansion of capitalist production, and regulatingand protecting the operations of an integrated economy(Tilly, : , , ; Hobsbawm, : ff.). Thuspowerful incentives existed for the formation of strictlybordered territorial states usually imagined as grostaaten(small states were considered unviable), which could con-solidate and promote capitalist social relations. In thiscontext, politicaleconomic changes liberated the massesfrom patronage and corporate bonds to create the mass offormally free workers required for the expansion of capitalism.Then commenced the construction of more inclusive, state-wide identities due to the ascendant bourgeoisies urge torepresent its interests as those of a population freed fromspecial or corporate jurisdictions, against the vested interestsof the old order (Balibar, :; Hobsbawm, : ).The words nation and people did not define a collectiveidentity with political capabilities until the rise of thebourgeoisie to predominance8. Hence the mass character ofnational consciousness, attained following a process withno birth date, which locates fully-fledged nation states inthe nineteenth century (Connor, : ).9

Nationalism10,forged in that crucible, locates the sourceof individual identity within a people, seen as the bearerof sovereignty, the central object of loyalty and the basis of



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collective solidarity (Greenfeld, : ). The modern senseof national identity derives from membership in a peopledefined as a nation. Every member of the people thusinterpreted partakes in its superior elite quality and it is inconsequence that a stratified national population is perceivedas essentially homogeneous, and the lines of status and classas superficiala principle that lies at the basis of all nation-alisms and justifies viewing them as expressions of the samephenomenon (ibid: ). It was in order to render classlines superficial that new identities and solidarities wereconstructed11 through ideological conditioning and ritualpractices, creating a Bourdieuan habitus: the inculcation ofknowledge and discipline through routinised practice (Billig,: ; Karakasidou, : ; see also Alfonsi, :; Balibar, : , ; Delannoi, : ; Heater,: ; Hobsbawm, ; Rokkan, : ; and theconcept of habitusin Bourdieu, ). Ideologies, practicesand institutions were created or reshaped in order tohomogenise the population into a culturally cohesive whole.This was necessary in order to buttress the claim that therewas a harmonious social unity where there remained classdifferences, which, unlike their cultural counterparts, couldnot be eliminated but whose political relevance had to belessened. Two processes were crucial. First, the refashioningof old conceptions of kingship and the dynastic realm asfictive kinship and corporation, to match the new conditions.Ideological motives and cultural trends were selected throughintellectual debate within the literate elite, involving a recon-ceptualisation of the familial and bodily metaphors that hadinformed class accommodation in the past. Second, therecasting at a territorial-state level of the mercantile exper-ience of towns and city-states, with their notions of citizenshipand patriotism, was crucial.12

Organic intellectuals retained the metaphors of the family,of a natural order, and of the body, integrated in the harmonyof the ensemble of its parts. The utility of these metaphorsrests on the fact that they represent communities asfunctional, and as havens of social harmony pervaded by theidentity of interests. Organic analogies to represent socialharmony have been popular since Plato. The extended fictivefamily, seemingly the antithesis of the nation-people

(Calhoun, : ), was reconstituted as a functionallyequivalent (id)entity, more inclusive but with the sameorganic and emotional connotations (Balibar, :;



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Gilbert, : ). The familial idiom was rooted in long-standing practices. The domestic unitthe oikos or domusin the form of the nobiliar dominion, the peasant mansusorthe house/workshophad constituted the material and ideo-logical foundation of the sociopolitical order, a centralelement of the constitutionin the wider sense since the MiddleAges, if not before. The concept of family derived from it,meaning originally (famulus) the people depending on ahouse, a borough, a castle, bonded together by patronclientties. The central features of patronage/clientage, characteristicof societies of a broadly feudal type, underpinned its useful-ness as a mechanism of class accommodation, for it bothserves as a mechanism for maintaining ruling class interestsand at the same time systematically inhibits the articulationof class as a source of overt political conflict, providingsome mechanism for representation and participation inpolitics by and on behalf of people of subordinate classes,and some kind of stake in the system while its main benefitsgo elsewhere (Clapham, : ). The existence ofpatronclient vertical relations in a deferential socialhierarchy inhibits the significance of class as a form ofhorizontal solidarity, and undermines the legitimacy ofegalitarian forms of ideology (Johnson & Dandeker, :). Bourgeois organic intellectuals ideologicallyconstrued the nation as a family because they came tonaturally dwell on past traditions of class accommodation,but reconfigured the metaphor in the light of the newbourgeois sentimental family. Loyalty to fictive lineageswas replaced by loyalty to the fatherlandnot apatrimonialfatherland,but a civicfatherland. Citizenship performed, forthe nation, the role that patronage/clientage performed forthe extended family. In France, literate elites obsessivelypromoted ideals of deep social unity that negated classdifference and sought to bring the French together in a moralcommunity calledpatrie, which was itself a sentimental familywrit large (Maza, : ). Those ideals were highlyfunctional and emphasized the harmonious integration ofsocial groups into a transcendent whole (ibid: ). Thebourgeois sentimental drama of the second half of the eight-eenth century promoted the ideal of a community thattranscended social divisions, for which the metaphor of choice

was the family (ibid: ). As dHolbach contended, anypolitical society is but an assemblage of particular societies;many families make that bigger one called the nation (quoted



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in ibid: ). The old-regime fatherland that stressed thepatron-like figure of the king was recast as the fraternalrevolutionary nation. The patr ie , Adrien Lamouretteclaimed, is a second, vast family whose members arelinked by a sort of civic fraternity. France is no longercomposed of anything but a single family of brothers andequals, wrote the Club of Auch to the Abb Grgoire. Allthe French are brothers and make up but a single family,stated a decree of (all quoted in Bell, : , ).This notion of fraternity owed a great deal of its force tothe long-standing thrust of class accommodation attachedto it in politicaleconomic writing, defining the polity as acomposite of productive classes on whose harmony progressand prosperity depended: a theory, according to Condorcet,that unified for the sake of a common felicity the differentclasses into which societies are naturally divided into afraternity of the human kind. As Mercier de la Rivireclaimed, the law of property established in society a frat-ernity that interested everyone in each others conservation.[T]he ownerworker and the simple worker, according toRoederer, were unified by the frater nit ncessa ire delindustrie dans la division des mtiers (all quoted in Bach,n.d.). Sooner or later, claimed Sieys (: ), givingthe theme of class accommodation the appearance of absolutenecessity, it will be necessary that all classes containthemselves within the limits of the social contract mutuallyobliging all the associated. The common good or generalinterest was to define public morality on the grounds of anaturally just division of labour. Class differences were nat-ural (Les ingalits de proprit et dindustrie sont comme lesingalits dge, de sexe, de couleur, ibid: ), and they weresurreptitiously fused, as the first article of the Dclarationdes Droits proclaimed, with the common good (lutilitcommune), which was itself predicated on the protection ofprivate property and free enterprise. The pursuit of privateinterests would make up the physiocratic general interestof the body social.

Diverse types of corporations (trade-related, religious,etc.) had been put, from the Middle Ages onwards, to thetask of uniting people of diverse classes in supposedlyharmonious communities, with the aim of fostering mutual

affection or concordia (a single heart). Just like the familyhousehold, the body, as an ensemble of unequal but usefulparts, was an immediately graspable metaphor for a func-



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tional, harmonious community. The organic metaphor statedthat it was indeed right that different persons should performdifferent tasks; it tended to sanctify the division of labour inits existing form, people should be content with their stationin life; the idea of an organic division of labour was theantithesis of the idea of equality (Black, : ). Thispattern, characteristic of urban Europe, was reflected at theterritorial-state level in the form of the corpus mysticumthe body politic identified with the body of the sovereignking: the head commanding over the members, estates orcorporate orders. During the revolutionary era, the corpsofthe old regime were abolished as obstacles to the constitutionof a state-wide unified commodity regime and to the unme-diated relation between citizen and nation, and conceptionsof the body politic were transformed following a commonbourgeois pattern.

In Britain, the mystic body of the king became the mysticrepresentative body of parliament. The symbol of the statewas ascribed to king and parliament jointly (Manicas, :; Morgan, : ; Pitkin, ; Bendix, , :). Then parliament was transformed from its medievalroots into a national assembly representing the nation-people as a single body or corporation with interests. AsEdmund Burke put it, parliament was an assembly of onenation with oneinterest, that of the whole (Manicas, :; Bendix, : ; Morgan, : ch. ; Pitkin,: ). This was precisely the stance of the FrenchNational Assembly (Woloch, : ). The technicalidiom of the French medical profession, widely recognisedamong the bourgeoisie due to its use in advertising papersor affiches, reconstructed the meaning of the political vocab-ulary centred upon the symbolism of the body. Widely usedconcepts were circulation, effervescence, exaltation andregeneration of the nationunderstood not as the body ofthe realm; that is, as the king, but as the bodies of thebourgeois readers of the affiches; that is, the body social,understood as the organic unity of the nation-people (Jones,: ). Through the medical idiom, the bourgeoisie crea-ted new conceptions of the body in order to legitimate newroles in political life (Outram, ). These conceptionsdeveloped in medical, political and literary thought were

bourgeois: individualised, self-determining and public-spirited. The monarch was criticised metaphorically in themmoires judiciaries, and the body of the state was recomposed



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as the body of the nation, which was a bourgeois body, forthe affiches allowed readers to remake the body of Frenchsociety in their own, bourgeois, imagean image of organicharmony (Jones, : ). This organic conception derivedfrom the idea of the social contract naturalising class dif-ference and underpinning the body politic. This, in Rousseausterms, may be considered as an organized, living body,resembling that of man, in which citizens are the mem-bers, which make the machine live, move and work (:).

Just as the incipient mercantilisation of medieval city-states resulted in attempts to promote a sense of civic identity,the mercantilisation of territorial states laid the ground forthe ulterior construction of nationhood. Medieval towns wereincipiently mercantile, providing protected and regulatedenvironments that promoted craft production and trade net-working, integrating the operations of a merchant-capitalisteconomy embedded in the feudal one through municipallegislation and the control of citizenship (Katznelson, :). Mercantilism in the eighteenth century was aninstrument of unification in the same fashion but at a higherlevel, which progressively created much larger and flexibleeconomic units coinciding with the boundaries of states (ibid:). In this context, classical and Renaissance republicanthought and the experience of government of autonomouscities and city-states exerted increasing in-fluence (Kiernan,: ).

The coming-of-age of the bourgeoisie and the notion ofthe peoples sovereignty during the English Revolution drewon principles of citizenship and patriotism fermented inEuropean towns for centuries. The people was construedas an all-inclusive identification against the old privilegedelites, in the context of the growing social differentiationand the rising power of the upper yeomanry, rich merchantsand artisans. This ideal of citizenship inherited by seven-teenth-century England and refined by Locke, Hobbes andHalifax, among others, linked to the rise of capitalism(Turner, : , ), was to define the broadlyliberal vision that shaped the nineteenth century. It was aclassless society of citizens, staatsbrgers, or citoyens, quitecapable, nonetheless, of co-existing with the reality of bourg-

eois class society (Langewiesche, : , , ). Thenotion of the people, with its universalist overtones, provedfitting for masking class divisions. The people was progres-



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sively construed as an inclusive category, as the emergentbourgeoisies aspirations converged with those of the generalpopulation in the decades before the French Revolution,coming to match the concept of nation: the mass of personswho live in one country, who compose a nation (Greenfeld,: ). They were the Third Estate: the wholepopulation of the country except for a few thousand individuals(the nobility). Furthermore, the interests of the bourgeoisieles classes disponibles du tierstatwere expressly consideredto be identical with those of le reste du peuple (Sieys, :). The evident inequalities within the people were con-sidered politically irrelevant.

The people were the sovereign subject, conceptualised asa body imagined by Jacques-Louis David as a statue withthe word light on its forehead; on its chest, nature andtruth; on its arms, power; on its hands, work (quoted inBaecque, : ). The political aspirations andactivities of urban artisans were diverted by the chance, histor-ically unprecedented, to participate in politics as the people.Corporate identities melted into the unity of the people,whose politics cut across class barriers.

The largely middle-class Jacobins mobilised the sans-culottes by appealing to inclusive and vague notions offatherland and nation, which permitted them to dismissworkers material demands in the name of the general will(Hunt & Sheridan, : ). The class-divided butnonetheless unified people grounded national wealth. Thisprinciple was cunningly expressed in an influential speechby the deputy to the Convention, Franois Antoine de BoissydAnglas, who seemed to have a knack for framing andarticulating conservative Thermidorean stances on pivotalissues (Desan, : ):

The mass of men born in France, this is the people.Part have acquired property a second part of thissame people is working to acquire some or to gain more.[These] two groups [are] called the rich and the poor;they serve each other their union is their force, and intheir misunderstandings or harmony depend theunhappiness or the prosperity of the state. (quoted in ibid.)

Boissy dAnglas forthrightly allied the defence of propertywith the will of the people and based the Republic on theacceptance of class difference (ibid.). Citizenship based on



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the people was an ideal of inclusion, not of liberation. Itrepresented the bourgeois ideal of political emancipationwithin a classless polity. It was, however, as Marx ()realised, an abstract and juridical device that stood in forhuman emancipation, reducing the person to the egoisticindividual of bourgeois society and the abstract moral personof the political community. In , citizenship wasextended to everyone; and then differences of wealth andstatus could be allowed to remain because they wouldsomehow no longer matter (Higonnet, : ). After, the reality of class structure was at once acceptedand denied by the Directory (ibid.).Class difference constitutedthe nation. In contrast to culturaldifference, it could not be abolished. The nation, as itprogressively emerged in the minds of organic intellectuals,fulfilled these basic prerequisites: symbolic equality withinan organically unified community. Equality which couldnot be achieved in any practical sense would be achieved onan ideological and illusory plane (ibid: ). The rationalefor the cultural interventionism of the Jacobins and theirsuccessors, from the Directory to the Third Republic,regarding the homogenisation of culture, education andlanguage, rested upon the efforts of the revolutionarybourgeoisie to reconcile its commitment to community andspiritual or moral equality with their equally seriousdetermination not to give way on the economic and socialhierarchy (ibid: ). Since there is now nothing but theFrench, class hatred was abolished, claimed Cabanis (:), in the name of Francewhich was to become, acc-ording to Michelet, a powerful organism whose parts areso skilfully brought together (quoted in Gerson, : ),fulfilling Sieyss dream of melting all parts of France intoa single body [and] a single nation (quoted in Bell, :).

Thus, when dominant classes struggled to constructmythic communities embodied in practices and institutionsin order to ground their hegemonic projects, the task wasinscribed within the spatial and social framework of theterritorial state and its free population. Hence accom-modation took shape in the form of all-encompassing(id)entities comprising the whole population within the

boundaries of states: (id)entities whose concrete shape derivedfrom older modes of accommodation. Nation, people andthe nation-state form emerged in this context.



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Conclusion

Hegemony implies the consent of the dominated to classpolitics, based on an alleged common identity transcendingsocial cleavages: an ethico-political element, in Gramscis

terms, embracing dominant and dominated alike. In thispaper, I have searched for the mechanisms that rest at thebasis of the hegemony of dominant classes over society. Ihave introduced the notion of mechanisms of classaccommodation, referring to those communitarian (id)ent-ities acting as hegemonic principles that unify people ofantagonistic classes in order to render social divisionspolitically irrelevant within functional polities. I have foll-owed Gramsci in considering the nation to be one of those

mechanisms.However, despite the fundamental importance of these

issues there has been, to date, no systematic research onthem within Marxist scholarship. The emergence of thenation-people has not been studied in relation to hegemony;and the study of the mechanisms necessary in order to effecta functional unity between people of different classes beforethe maturation of capitalism must begin virtually fromscratch. I have contended that this may be due to the limit-

ations of Gramscis account. He never undertook an invest-igation of the concepts he put at the basis of hegemony, andthis was probably a consequence of (and in turn aggravated)his preoccupation with Italian nation-building and nationalunity, which prevented him from problematising the nationas a form of bourgeois intervention rather inapplicable toproletarian concerns. This has made it necessary to searchfor confirmation of Gramscis seminal insights in themodernisation and Marxist bodies of literature, however

unsystematic and limited they themselves are. The searchhas produced a convergence of disparate and rival sourcesthat reveals a certain consensus. The nation emerged in thecontext of class accommodation during the twofold processof bourgeois revolution and capitalist modernisation,fulfilling the functional role of being the precondition forany attempt at constructing historical blocs within whichantagonistic social forces could coexist. Further researchreveals that the form the nation-people assumed depended

on the development of capitalism, which decisively influencedthe political/spatial structuration of the system of territorialstates with their populations of abstract citizens, and on the



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adaptation of the material and ideological forms that accom-modation had taken on in previous epochs.The basic accommodative themes of consensual harmony,organic unity,symbolic equalityandcommon good were playedout within the quintessentially functional metaphors of thefamily and the body. These metaphors, used in the past todescribe several kinds of communities at various levels, wererecast according to new conditions and put to the task ofrepresenting the new forms of community required forbourgeois hegemony. Fictive kinship and the organic analogy,which had represented vertical communities from patron/client lineages and religious confraternities to urban com-munes and dynastic realms, were recast as the horizontal,all-inclusive, fraternal nation-people defined by citizenship.This article highlights the fact that the bourgeoisie and thenationalpopular are indissolubly linked; that the latter is aconstitutive moment in the formation of the former as ahegemonic class, whereas the former gives the latter its raisondetre.Thus Gramsci was indeed right in exposing nation-alism as the ethico-political element underpinning bourgeoishegemony; but he was misled in believing that the proletariatcould be hegemonic within a framework historicallyassociated with bourgeois concerns. For it is difficult toforesee the outlook of (and therefore to square the nationwith) a proletarian hegemony concerned not with the main-tenance but the transcendence of social divisions.

These days, pleas for national unity and social part-nership are being routinely issued for different purposes,from the requirements of war to competitiveness in worldmarkets. Furthermore, the construction of a pro-capitalistand increasingly authoritarian supra-national (id)entityEurope has been described as an organic process, withlong-lived cultural, economic and political roots (Hallstein,: ), with the purpose of restoring an organic wholerespecting organic realities (Rusi, : ). For those whofind those purposes illegitimate, the importance of aninvestigation of the roots that ground hegemony should notneed to be spelt out.

Notes

. Gramsci never defined the terms nation or people.He used themoften lumped together indistinctly asnation-people, people-nation, nationalpopular,



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popularnationalin a variety of senses and contexts,cultural and political. Especially in his discussions onthe contrast between France and Italy, nation appearsto be a cultural construct on the part of intellectuals,whereas people denotes the actual mass of thepopulation. He insisted, however, that the two oughtto coincide linguistically and historically. In French,German or Russian, he wrote, National andpopular are either synonymous or nearly so(Gramsci, : ). Italy was anomalous in that theterm national does not in any case coincide withpopular because in Italy the intellectuals are distantfrom the people, i.e. from the nation (ibid.). In thispaper, I use nation and nation-people interchangeably.

. Gramsci was aware, apparently, of the constructednature of nations. Individualised representations ofthe nation were for him mere metaphors coveringvertical and horizontal social distinctions juxtaposedby state coercion, and culturally organised into a moralconsciousness, contradictory but at the same timesyncretistic (Gramsci, : ). Unfortunately,he overlooked the fact that the creation of that moralconsciousness had to be historically situated.

. Gramsci noted peasants lack of a collective conscious-ness such as those he revealingly ascribed to thebourgeoisie and proletariat: the nation for propertyowners, the class for the proletariat (Gramsci, :). He then found himself in the awkward position ofurging an agency with a collective class consciousness(the proletariat) to strike an alliance with the peasantryaround a nationalpopular consciousness, which wasa bourgeois consciousness.

. For a consideration of the southern question, see Chubb(). Marx himself tended to treat the nation as agiven when assessing the divisive aspect of nationhood.He saw the working class as divided into hostile campsby nationality: a hostility artificially kept alive andintensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers[and] all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes(Marx to Meyer and Vogt, in Marx & Engels, :). However, national feelings must be (artificially)

given birth before being kept alive and intensified.. Gramsci tried to reconcile his desire for Italian national

unity with his commitment to proletarian inter-



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nationalism by affirming the alleged interest of theItalian people-nation as such in a modern form ofcosmopolitanism, which he identified with the RomanEmpire and the medieval communesas if there wereanything distinctively Italian about classicalimperialism or medieval civism. He, apparently withoutirony, denounced the nationalistic and imperialisticoutlook of national unification as French, and as ananachronistic excrescence alien to Italian history,extolling instead the Roman and medievalcosmopolitanism, as if the Roman Empire were lessimperialistic for being Italian (Gramsci, : ).

. The concept of civil religion originated with Rousseau,who charged it with the tasks of binding together allmembers of society and defining their duties. It stronglyinfluenced Durkheim. It is rendered as a systematicnetwork of moods, values, thoughts, rituals and symbolsthat establishes the meaning of nationhood within anoverarching hierarchy of significance, and thosesymbols and suasions must speak to all sorts ofconditions of men (Davis, : , n. ). Comparewith Coleman (quoted in Bryant : ), whodescribes it as a set of beliefs, rites and symbols whichrelates a mans role as citizen to the conditions ofultimate existence and meaning.

. See Panitchs remarks on corporatism (: ;:; : ) and his discussion ofintegrative ideologies and practices in the Conservativeand Labour Parties (). On the theory and practiceof class collaboration in the Labour Party, see Saville(). Kiernan links nationalism to imperialism andto the purpose of unifying antagonistic classes (:).

. See Hroch (: ); on conflict and the selection ofcultural markers, see Brass (: ). Pre-existingideas and values are modified by elites in a process ofconflict-motivated selection in order to create a politicalidentity and generate massive popular support. Culturalmarkers are selected and used as a basis for differen-tiating the group from other groups [and] for enhancing

the internal solidarity of the group (Brass, : ,emphasis added). Some authors link the homogenisationof culture to state-making, although they do not prop-



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erly differentiate between state-making and nation-building. Tilly (: ) notes the difference, but over-looks it when explaining homogenising drives (ibid:, , ). Motivations adduced for homogenisingdrives are: to increase the loyalty of the population; tostandardise and centralise the mechanisms of controland taxation; and to routinise the operation of desiredpolicieshardly credible reasons for cultural, asopposed to merely administrative, homogenisation. SeeTilly (: , ), Ardant (), and Rokkan().

. For the problem of identifying patterns of group-identity formation in antiquity and the Middle Ages,see Pohl (). Reynolds () and Englund (:, n. ) stress the dynastic, familialpatrimonialnature of kingdoms or territorial statesfar fromnational sentiment, as they are commonly understood.The modern origin of nations is asserted in Gellner(, ), Hobsbawm (, ), Balibar (:, ) and Billig (: ). Smith (: ) reluctantly opts for modern European origin.Andersons () location of nationalisms origins incolonial fringes is unconvincing, and lacks empiricalsupport. Rokkan (: , cf. , ) locates nationstates already in the sixteenth century and even inmedieval times, but elsewhere associates the emergenceof nations and national ideologies with the FrenchRevolution (ibid: , ), as do Woolf (: )and Brubaker (: ). Greenfeld () locates thefirst nation in sixteenth-century Britain, but the generalEuropean phenomenon in the eighteenth. Accordingto Kohn (: ), national sentiment first appear-ed with the ascent of the seventeenth-century Englishmiddle classes. For a general overview, see Kiernan(); for etymology and the conceptual evolution ofnation, see Connor (), Hobsbawm (: ff.),Greenfeld (), Kedourie (: ) and Rokkan(: ).

. I define nationalism primarily as an ideology that assertsthat nations must and do exist, and that their existenceand continuity in time and space must be defended.

Gellner refers to a principle asserting the correspon-dence between nation and state (Gellner : , cf., a distinctive species of patriotism), accepted by



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Hobsbawm (: ). For Griffin (), nationalismis an ideology animated by a sense of belonging to andserving a perceived national community.

. This is not to suggest that the accommodation of classis what nationalism is all about. Nevertheless, evenprogressive nationalist movements such as those ofnational liberation have involved the suppression ofclass differences (Harris, ; Patterson, : ;Billig, : ).

. For a detailed account of the themes outlined below,see Pozo (forthcoming) and Pozo (unpublished).

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The roots of hegemony