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i dont think nations have a substance---the nation is a signifier only--no essence, no defining features as such---within any given nation-state, the various political positions try to bundle associations with that signifier, but it is always a bundling that hold as natural only for the people involved in that position.
look at this as elaborating a set of arguments--a political organization (broadly undersood) elaborates a series of arguments about how its members (who does this depends upon the structure of the organization, its history, the way it mobilizes adjacent cultural institutions, etc.) think concerning how the world/nation-state is and/or should be--people who agree with those arguments internalize the elements and logic, and see the world in terms of those elements and logics.
since the nation-state is a function of capitalism, it makes no sense to not look at the history of its production in specific terms.
this view is sometimes a problem for folk--it is kind of like how a believer reacts to someone who does a sociology of their belief system.
that aristotle outlined a ideal-type for thinking about the good city in the politics and that features of that ideal type appear knit into contemporary versions of nationalist ideology does not mean that the category of the nation-state has existed since aristotle--rahter, it means that when the people who were articulating various political positions across the period of the development of the nation-state in its modern form, they looked to aristotle to help them think about what they were doing.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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