The Death of the Nation-State?(A World Beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State) (Book Review)

A World beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State by Pierre Manent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) If the nation-state is indeed dying, who will be the mourners at its funeral? Not the many figures in contemporary academia who have denounced it as the haven for institutionalized oppression and international aggression, at once too weak to deal successfully with transnational problems like environmental pollution and too powerful for the safety of its tyrannized inhabitants. Among the figures at the graveside, however, will be at least one political thinker whose academic credentials will be difficult to denigrate. Pierre Manent does not dispute that powerful forces do indeed threaten the survival of the nation-state in many parts of the world, but he argues convincingly that this development is to be regretted, because of its deleterious effect on democratic citizenship.