ABSTRACT
Revolutionary war, understood as a method of political struggle waged primarily by mobilizing energies latent in a certain kind of society and organized and routinized, can be considered a concrete example of nation-building in process. "Building a nation" is a pretty bit of rhetoric, but it leaves a great deal to be desired as a social science concept. Nation-building is presumably a metaphoric rubric for the social process or processes by which national consciousness appears in certain groups and which, through a more or less institutionalized social structure, act to attain political autonomy for their society. The process of nation-building, which occurred subsequent to the establishment of autonomy, is associated with nationalism. Nationalism in its ideological manifestation is an assertion of a people's right—however distinguished—to determine its political destiny autonomously. Nationalism implies democracy in the sense of public participation in politics, since its assertion of basic political right is in the form of self-determination.
