ABSTRACT
The central argument of 'What is a nation?', a lecture delivered by Ernest Renan at the Sorbonne in 1882, is perfectly clear. 'His main purpose', Ernest Gellner has observed,
is to deny any naturalistic determinism of the boundaries of nations: these are not dictated by language, geography, race, religion, or anything else. He clearly dislikes the spectacle of nineteenth-century ethnographers as advance guards of national claims and expansion. Nations are made by human will. ... 1
