ABSTRACT
Reflections on the tension between patriotic loyalties and wider moral obligations have a long history in Western political thought. This chapter discusses Jean-Jacques Rousseau's pessimistic approach to republican political values with the more sanguine expectations of contemporary political philosophers, and accounts for part of the difference by pointing to the presence of nationhood as a tacit assumption in the thinking of the latter. It illustrates this claim by looking at some of the ways in which political thinkers rely on more or less hidden presuppositions about nationhood, and then considers what is it about nations that make them so easy to take for granted. The chapter then describes the advantages of being able to smuggle in a notion of political community and deals with a paradox in the reputation of that lover of paradoxes, Rousseau.
