ABSTRACT
The Venetian state functioned from its inception as a collective apparatus of patrician money-owners who also manned its higher ranks and ruled over all other classes of society. At the political and ideological–cultural level, the state legitimated the exercise of bourgeois political power as being in the 'common interest'. Sporadic references to 'Italy' before the 'age of nationalism' shall not be perceived in the framework of contemporary national ideologies. The process of nation-building was initiated in Europe centuries after capitalism had established its rule in many social formations and parts of the continent. Nationalism and national identity emerged in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, roughly in the wake of the French Revolution. The importance of territorialization seems again, in the era of neoliberal financialization, to be losing ground: non-national forms of governmentality based on market rules have once again been playing a decisive role.
