The growing power of the nation state manifested itself in increased bureaucratic activity, the rebuilding of capital cities, and overseas expansion. Simultaneously there was debate about the meaning of the nation and state power. Commentators differed over the values and characteristics of the rising nation-state and even whether it was beneficial. Even those who supported it expressed varying opinions that cited obedience to the state (Excerpts 1 and 2) and the need for national unity, as evidenced in Excerpts 3, 4, 5, and 6.
1. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, “What Is Government,” 1851
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a French printer turned activist and essayist, had energetic reactions to the rise of the nation-state and its more active government. Proudhon also wrote about the economy and encouraged people to abandon large-scale industry for more mutual, cooperative work. He had a large following, especially among artisans.
To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.
Source: Pierre Joseph Proudhon, “What Is Government,” in General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, translated by John Beverly Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), 293–94.
2. Giuseppe Mazzini, “On Nationality” (1852)
Mazzini founded the movement Young Italy in 1831 and advocated the unification of Italian states in the Revolution of 1848 on the peninsula. From the 1820s and into the 1860s he agitated for a democratic type of unification and even after the founding of the united Italian kingdom agitated for the incorporation of Rome into the new nation. Here is an essay written after the failure of the 1848 revolutions and before the success of unification efforts.
It was not for a material interest that the people of Vienna fought in 1848; in weakening the empire they could only lose power. It was not for an increase of wealth that the people of Lombardy fought in the same year; the Austrian Government had endeavored in the year preceding to excite the peasants against the landed proprietors, as they had done in Gallicia; but everywhere they had failed. They struggled, they still struggle, as do Poland, Germany, and Hungary, for country and liberty; for a word inscribed upon a banner, proclaiming to the world that they also live, think, love, and labor for the benefit of all. They speak the same language, they bear about them the impress of consanguinity, they kneel beside the same tombs, they glory in the same tradition; and they demand to associate freely, without obstacles, without foreign domination, in order to elaborate and express their idea; to contribute their stone also to the great pyramid of history. It is something moral which they are seeking; and this moral something is in fact, even politically speaking, the most important question in the present state of things. It is the organization of the European task. It is no longer the savage, hostile, quarrelsome nationality of two hundred years ago which is invoked by these peoples. The nationality . . . founded upon the following principle:—Whichever people, by its superiority of strength, and by its geographical position, can do us an injury, is our natural enemy; whichever cannot do us an injury, but can by the amount of its force and by its position injure our enemy, is our natural ally,—is the princely nationality of aristocracies or royal races. The nationality of the peoples has not these dangers; it can only be founded by a common effort and a common movement; sympathy and alliance will be its result. In principle, as in the ideas formerly laid down by the men influencing every national party, nationality ought only to be to humanity that which the division of labor is in a workshop—the recognized symbol of association; the assertion of the individuality of a human group called by its geographical position, its traditions, and its language, to fulfil a special function in the European work of civilization.
Source: Giuseppe Mazzini, “Europe: Its Condition and Prospects,” Essays: Selected from the Writings, Literary, Political and Religious of Joseph Mazzini, ed. William Clark (London: Walter Scott, 1880), 266, 277–78, 291–92, as found in Fordham Modern History Sourcebook, http:/
3. Lord Acton, manuscript notes, no date
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, known as Lord Acton, was a wealthy Catholic scholar and diplomat in Britain. He supported the South in the U.S. Civil War because he thought it represented the principle of federation—that is, states’ rights under a federal government. He was also an avid researcher, devoted to finding facts and historical truth.
The state absorbs or transcends the will of individuals. They must obey it. Obedience must be made easy. It is easiest when all are of one race and character, formed by the same past. Harmony then more easily preserved, without effort, or repression, or force.
Source: Manuscript note in his papers published posthumously. John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, Selected Writings of Lord Acton: Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality. J. Rufus Fears, ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988), III:560.
4. Abraham Lincoln, Speech, 1858
As a candidate for the Republican nomination to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln made the following speech about conditions in the rising U.S. nation-state. It was said to be radical but at the same time credited with Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 election. Partly as a result of that victory, the South voted to secede from the union.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing or all the other.
Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.
Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, 1863
Lincoln gave a more elaborate view of the foundations of the nation-state in his commemoration of the horrendous battle of Gettysburg.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
5. Proclamation of the German Empire, January 18, 1871
The Proclamation of the German Empire provides a statement not only bringing the individual German states into being as a single nation but also expressing the values and goals of the newly unified nation-state.
We, Wilhelm, by the grace of God King of Prussia, do herewith declare that we have considered it a duty to our common fatherland to answer the summons of the united German princes and cities and to accept the German imperial title. In consequence, we and our successors on the throne of Prussia will henceforth bear the imperial title in all our relations and in all the business of the German Empire, and we hope to God that the German nation will be granted the ability to fashion a propitious future for the fatherland under the symbol of its ancient glory. We assume the imperial title, conscious of the duty of protecting, with German loyalty, the rights of the Empire and of its members, of keeping the peace, and of protecting the independence of Germany, which depends in its turn upon the united strength of the people. We assume the title in the hope that the German people will be granted the ability to enjoy the reward of its ardent and self-sacrificing wars in lasting peace, within boundaries which afford the fatherland a security against renewed French aggression which has been lost for centuries. And may God grant that We and our successors on the imperial throne may at all times increase the wealth of the German Empire, not by military conquests, but by the blessings and the gifts of peace, in the realm of national prosperity, liberty, and morality. Wilhelm I, Kaiser und König.
Source: James Harvey Robinson, ed., Readings in European History, 2 vols. (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1904–1905), II:571–75; Otto von Bismarck, The Man and Statesman (New York, 1899), II:48–51. In http:/
6. Ernst Renan, “What Is a Nation,” 1882
Ernst Renan was a French scholar and essayist who engaged the issue of the consolidating nation-state head on, writing one of the most complete considerations of its attributes. Though a decade after the other writers, he sums up sentiments so thoroughly that writers of our own day take his essay as capturing the nation-state moment.
A nation is therefore a great solidarity constituted by the feeling of sacrifices made and those that one is still disposed to make. It presupposes a past but is consolidated in the present by a tangible fact: consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life. A nation’s existence is a daily plebiscite, just as an individual’s existence is a perpetual affirmation of life. I well know, that is less metaphysical than divine right and less brutal than the alleged historical right. . . . We have driven metaphysical and theological abstractions from politics. What remains? Man remains, his desires and his needs. The secession and eventual collapse of nations are the consequence of a system which places these old organisms at the mercy of frequently unenlightened wills. Clearly in matters like these, no principle should be carried to excess. . . . Nations are nothing eternal. They had a beginning they will have an end. A European confederation will probably replace them. . . .At present, the existence of nations is a good and even necessary. Their existence is the guarantee of liberty, a liberty that would be lost if the world had only one law and one master.
Source: Ernest Renan, Discours et Conferences (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1887), 277–310, in Hans Kohn, ed., Nationalism: Its Meaning and History (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1955), 139–40, with my edits and retranslations.
Questions to Consider