"With over 300 million people, today's United States is larger than any premodern empire, larger indeed than the entire world population for most of human history. To our ancestors, it would have seemed absurd to imagine that these 300 million could ever really be an 'us,' a community evoking real loyalty; anyone who's begun each school day standing for the Pledge of Allegiance can appreciate the amount of work that goes into maintaining it. For many of the most famous scholars of nationalism, from Elie Kedourie and Ernest Gellner to Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm, it must therefore be understood as an essentially modern phenomenon, one that revolves around creating nations rather than simply liberating them.
"The Virtue of Nationalism has little interest in such questions."
Daniel Luban at The New Republic reviews Yoram Hazony's The Virtue of Nationalism.
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