ABSTRACT
This chapter defends a civic nationalist use of the term "nation". It discusses a contractarian theory of moral and political association and describes the importance of cultural commonalities in the organization of just states. According to contractarian theory, the legitimacy principle for states is egalitarian and voluntarist. The authority of the state and its laws is grounded in the equal wills of its members to pursue their good together as a common good through moral norms. On the contractarian theory, every legitimate state needs a communal identity strong enough to ensure the loyalty of its citizens in any conflict between the common good of the whole as realized through the norms of justice and the particular good of individuals and groups. A successful polity on the contractarian theory must create its own distinctive political culture, and this will be greatly assisted if its citizens possess a common culture in other areas.
