ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the social processes and cultural resources of the formation and persistence of nations. The question of pre-modern nations requires a deep historical perspective and a cultural genealogy of nations that stretches back to the ancient Near East and the classical world. The chapter distinguishes "nation" as a general category from the historical manifestations of the nation as a human community, one which takes different forms and reveals various features in different epochs, over and the basic features of the ideal type. The modernist conception of the nation sees it as the quintessential political form of modern human association. One of the main problems with the modernist conception is its failure to recognize that the term "nation" is used in two quite different ways. It denotes an analytic category differentiating the nation from other related categories of collective cultural identity; it is used as a descriptive term enumerating the features of a historical type of human community.
