Class 2: The Genesis of Nations (2)
from a thousand years to now.
Okay. I'm glad we had this moment.
I feel like this awkwardness has now been dealt with.
Okay, good.
So I'm not gonna surprise you
when I say that that's not how history actually works.
There isn't really a three part.
There isn't really a golden age, diaspora return to gold.
That doesn't really happen.
But the story is reflecting something.
It's reflecting a change that is happening.
It's a way of handling a change which is happening.
And that change is the entrance of the people into politics.
So the nation and the way we're talking about the nation
is a modern form of politics,
which involves, if not everybody,
it's meant to involve the masses.
It's not feudalism.
It's not the nobility being in charge, right?
It's not monarchy, it's not aristocracy, it's not oligarchy,
it's not rule by the few.
The nation means rule by the many.
Doesn't necessarily mean democracy,
but the nation means a form of politics
in which the subject of politics
is supposed to be the people.
That's an idea which seems very commonsensical now.
I mean, even the people who are against it
say that they're for it as you might have noticed.
Basically everybody in the world,
as they do away with democracy, they talk about how, yes,
the only way to have democracy
is to suppress all of these votes.
Only if I count the votes it's a demo-- you know.
But very rarely people say, oh, I'm against democracy.
It's commonsensical. But that's very new, right?
The idea that the people are the subject of politics
is only a couple hundred years old.
So these stories are a way of handling a transformation.
They're a way of handling change.
So now I'm moving from what they say about themselves
to how they actually work.
The reason that they actually work
is that in the 19th century, let's say, more or less,
there comes a time when you have to handle
a form of politics in which the people now matter,
large numbers of people now matter.
And so you need some version of the past
which accounts for that.
And the version of the past that you can give
is the one that says way back when,
the people were in charge
and now the people are gonna be in charge again.
Or way back when, the people were virtuous
and now they're gonna be virtuous again
once we do away with the empire or the diaspora
or one of the things which was in the way
of this pattern from happening.
So the story is a way of making sense of something,
making sense of a challenge, which actually had to be met.
And the challenge is what do you do
as the people enter politics?
That's a challenge which was met in all kinds of other ways.
Like the Marxists who we're still gonna talk about
met the challenge in a certain way.
So the people are entering politics,
there is some kind of transformation.
And I want you to mark this.
We'll get to this part of the course here in a few weeks,
but think about what is changing.
Is it that there's now a big capitalist economy
and so people are encountering each other in new ways.
Is it that there's now a functional state,
which is able to collect taxes
and make people perform military service.
These are some of the changes that are associated
with modernization.
But something is changing
so that it no longer seems normal to say
that the king is just in charge
or the nobility is just in charge.
Something is changing so that
that no longer seems plausible.
There's still kings and queens,
but they basically serve as the kind of rhetorical cover
for welfare states.
They're not what they used to be.
Fascinating as they are, the adventures of Harry and Meghan,
that's not what royalty used to be like.
It was a little like that,
but that was never the essence of it.
So at a certain point, it stopped seeming plausible
that a few people should be in charge
and how do you handle that?
Well, you handle that with a story.
So you have modern politics
and modern politics has to have a story
about how the people are coming into politics,
why the people should come into politics.
And this story is displacing other stories.
Okay, here comes question time.
What's another story?
What kind of story would that have been displacing?
What's a story that would've made sense? Yeah.
- [Student] So a king is chosen
by some religious, like God, right?
Now I'm the king and I control society.
- Yeah, okay. So divine right.
Or you're the king, because how about this?
You're the king because your father was king.
I mean, that seems ridiculous, right?
Just because his father was king he gets to be king?
Doesn't that seem insane?
Was your father king? - No.
- Okay good.
'Cause I get in trouble
if I get into revealing your personal life.
So if anybody's father is king,
I need to know now or in an email preferably, all right.
It could be. All right.
So that notion, so his father was king and his father,
it's absurd, doesn't it seem?
But in other historical circumstances,
it could have made perfect sense.
It obviously did make perfect sense,
but not in modern historical circumstances
it somehow seems not to make sense, but it's a story.
The story of genealogy,
the story that his family is better than other families.
Perhaps they're half gods, something, right?
What's another kind of story that this could have displaced?
Yeah.
- [Student] Something related,
but just like landowning people or landowning--
- Good. Excellent.
Excellent. That's a very good example as well.
But it can be related because the right to property
is inherited.
I mean, that's something which is still true in our system.
And it's commonsensical.
If Zhenya has a bunch of land.
If I have a million acres,
why shouldn't my children have a million acres?
It still seems commonsensical.
But the idea that there's a property class
and the right to own property is something special.
So you people over here have the right to own property
and the rest of you have the right
to work on their property.
That seemed plausible for hundreds of years,
but at a certain point around again,
around the 19th century, it stopped seeming plausible.
But that story that not just that a person,
but that a group is maybe different from another group.
Maybe the nobility thinks that it's descended
from other people, it often did, right?
Or the nobility has earned rights because historically,
the nobility fought the wars or something,
but they're different, they have the right to rule
and they have the right to own land.
So those are different stories which are displaced
by the national story or challenged by the national story.
And they represent different kinds of political systems.
For example, let's imagine an absolute monarchy
or let's imagine a system that we'll come to,
like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,
where the noble class gets to vote
and the noble class gets to own land,
but other people don't.
And at a certain point, that starts to seem problematic.
So we have a story that brings the people
to the center of politics,
but doesn't say that directly, right?
It seems to make all of history make sense.
It's a story that brings people to the center.
And this is where I have to talk about Marxism
because it might have occurred to you that this whole,
I'm not gonna check you on this.
And I don't know how many of you
know very much about Marxism
or how much that comes across your education.
When I ask this in graduate classes,
there's the guy who raises his hand or the woman, it's like,
yeah, I grew up in the People's Republic of China
and we studied Marxism.
So you might have noticed
that Marxism also has a three part story.
Marxism also has a story about a golden age
and about transformation
and about the people coming to the center of politics.
In the Marxist story,
it used to be that none of us owned any property
and that was fine.
And then technology came along
and technology created new social relations.
And along with them came private property.
Private property alienated us from ourselves, bad.
But one day we will get rid of private property
and we will all seize it together
and that will be good again.
Okay, I'm simplifying this a lot.
But there's also a three part story. Interestingly, right?
Marxism and the modern idea of the nation
actually emerge at about the same time,
around the middle of the 19th century.
And they're very much in dialogue with one another.
And they're actually very similar,
one difference being that the Marxist story
is about the class.
It's about a non-national class, a working class.
Whereas the national story is about particular nations.
It's about particularities.
Or to put it in a different way, the national story...
Don't hide your phone behind your computer.
The national...
Don't use electronics at all.
The national story is pretends to be just about you.
But in fact, everybody's national story is very similar.
The Marxist story is supposed to be about everyone,
but in fact, the Marxists had a terrible time
getting the various nations to line up.
So the two stories are our in tension with one another.
Does anyone know what the Marxists say about the nation?
What the Marxists thought about the nation,
especially at the beginning?
Or wanna take a guess?
Or not.
Yeah? - [Student] Did they think
it was gonna be a transitional state?
- Good, true.
They associated the nation with capital--
either with feudalism or with capitalism,
but not with socialism.
So we're gonna get over it. Yeah.
Jack?
- [Student] Political and economic revolution.
So transition to this socialism movement.
- That's in the Soviet Union. Yeah.
So the Soviet Union is an attempt
to go through all the stages very quickly.
And so in the Soviet Union, the idea is that first,
we're gonna do the capitalist style modernization.
And with that, will come the nation, that's in 1920s.
And then in the 1930s we'll have an economic revolution
where maybe we'll get through the nation
very quickly that way.
So the basic idea that the Marxists have
is that the nation is associated
with a period of history that's passing.
And this is where they have trouble.
But if there's capitalism and the capitalism advancing,
and there's more nationalism,
that's a kind of misunderstanding.
So Marx and Engels had a tremendous problem
with actual workers because actual workers
were very often in favor of imperialism, for example.
They had a tremendous problem with actual workers
who were influenced by the national politics,
who had turned out,
were as nationally oriented or more nationally oriented
than the middle classes or the nobility.
So nationalism has a tremendous problem or sorry,
Marxism has a tremendous problem with nationalism.
And as a result of this,
some of the first people who theorized about the nation
in an interesting way,
were Marxists who were trying to deal with this problem.
Around the year 1900,
there were several Marxists who said essentially,
look, modernization isn't doing away
with the national question, on the contrary,
modernization is bringing about the nation
and we have to deal with that.
The nation isn't actually part of the feudal past,
it's part of the modern, even the proletarian future.
And so this was a Pole, his name was Kelles-Krauz.
And then he was in dialogue
with several people called Austro-Marxists.
They made the argument, an interesting argument,
that if you have capitalism that uproots people