ABSTRACT
The universally observed decline of the nation most often arouses satisfaction and, perhaps, even hope. Many people would agree with the expression proposed by Mario Vargas Uosa at a conference entitled "Democracy Today." Once the political order is organized into nations, wars and other constraints of collective life due to the centralization of political life are inevitably national. Modern democracy arose from a national form. The modern nation, whose democratic ideal was born in England during the sixteenth century, appeared since the American and French Revolutions as the sole legitimate and universal political organization. Regardless of their sensibilities, sociologists have underestimated the fact that in modern society, the social tie was from on essentially political, that is to say national. The romantic criticism of rationalistic and abstract "modernity," which often inspires sociologists, is in effect willingly transposed to the nation, the specifically "modern" form of political order, whose abstraction and rationalistic ambitions are condemned as inhumane.
