ABSTRACT
The history of nationalism is a confusing one, and when this is added to the conceptual morass surrounding “modernization,” the difficulty of relating the two concerns is compounded. Nationalism is rarely a central issue in analyses of modernity and vice versa. In relating nationalism to the question of modernity, a paramount image of the modernization process—common to liberals, traditional Marxists, and their hybrid offsprings—is to view the central parameters of this process in terms of economic forces and their morphological/ecological correlates and derivatives. Two major figures who grappled with these problems, Marcel Mauss and Max Weber, are better known for other writings, yet their contributions in this context are analytically superior to contemporary sociological writings on nationalism and hence merit an extensive discussion. Of particular interest is that their respective analyses converge toward what may be viewed as a dynamic, voluntaristic sociological perspective on the nation.
