Abstract

The modern revival of classical republican themes in political thought has not in general been sympathetic to nationalism. Despite the communitarian overtones of the republican critique of liberal individualism, the vivid sense of political solidarity, and the commitment to shared responsibility for a public world, republicans have in general conceived of citizenship as an alternative to nationhood rather than an expression of it. Moreover, republicans have sometimes explicitly claimed or more often tacitly assumed that good citizens are patriotic but not nationalistic. Republican polities, in other words, tend to be understood as different from nation-states, with different and less objectionable sources of solidarity.