ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter we tried to demonstrate how political philosophers and jurists between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, in need of social and political categories, normative principles and theoretical institutional models for social and political ordering after religious wars and political revolutions, (re)constructed the meanings of basic terms and concepts, such as sovereignty, territory, state, people, nation, community, belonging, and legitimacy. In order to overcome religious dogmas and metaphysics in line with the development of natural sciences, these categories, principles and models led, however, to reifications or even naturalisations of social relations and processes. Moreover, the reification and naturalisation of basic concepts and terms have to be seen as the vantage point for the creation of the modern ideologies of liberalism, nationalism, and racism, as well as the fusion of the ideologies of liberalism and nationalism in the nineteenth century, which finally led to the monist-identitarian nation-cum-state paradigm which frames our understanding of social and political relations between and within national states to this day.
