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 THE NATION AS MIND POLITIC

PHILIP ALLorr*

Hegel called it "a glorious mental dawn."

Never since the sun had stood in the firmament and

the planets revolved around him had it been per-
ceived that man's existence centres in his head, i.e.
in Thought, inspired by which he builds up his
world of reality.'

He was referring to a development of ideas which, he be-

lieved, stemmed from the French Enlightenment and the
German Aujklarung. ' "All
2
thinking beings shared in the jubi-
lation of this epoch.
Two centuries after the dawn, we are inclined to be less
euphoric. We have learned that man's head, as a source of
reality, is a strange and dangerous place, as strange and dan-
gerous as the Universe, or Nature, or things-in-themselves,
or gods, or God. And we have discovered some formidable
obstacles in the way of thought-thinking-about-thought--ob-
stacles which, by the end of the twentieth century, have made
the human mind into a sort of ultimate unknowable, a nou-
menon within us, to use the Kantian term with sad irony.
Allowing the names of prophetic figures to stand as em-
blems for complex movements of thought which surpass
their individual work, we may identify three challenging idea-
complexes, and a fourth which is not yet realized to the same
degree. With Wittgenstein, we have been forced to face the
possibility that human communication is not the transfer of
something called Truth through a neutral medium called
Language. Communication would then have to be regarded

* Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

1. GEORG W.F. HEGEL, THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 447 (John Sibree
trans., 1900). The English translation of the passage quoted should, per-
haps, have used the word "it" instead of the word "him." Compare the
original German text of the passage: "Solange die Sonne am Firmamcnte
steht und die Planeten urn sie herumkreisen .. " GEORG W.F. HEGEL,
VORLESUNGEN UBER DIE PHILOSOPHIE DER GESCHICHTE 593 (1961).
2. HEGEL, supra note 1, at 447.
1361

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as simply another form of human activity, sharing in the in-

trinsic and irreducible ambiguity of all human activity.
With Freud, we have been forced to face the possibility
that human beings cannot know, and so cannot control, the
content of their own minds. On such a view, we would be
condemned to be strangers to our selves, our individuality
being merely a particular product of universal mental
processes.
With Marx, we have been forced to face the possibility
that what we see as our personal life is rather a life lived in a
reflexive continuum with our social circumstances, society
forming us as we take part in the forming of society in con-
sciousness. On such a view, our minds, our selves, would
have to be regarded as communal property, aspects of a per-
manent communal building-project.
A fourth complex of ideas, associated with the name of
Charles Darwin, has not yet reached a decisive level of unify-
ing coherence. It will force us to face the possibility that, as
in the case of any other animal, our minds, and hence our
selves, are of the same nature as chemical reactions.
There are those who would regard such movements of
thought not as obstacles to self-transcendence, but rather as
precious moments of illumination, freeing us from infantile
ideas about the mind and the self and society, creating the
possibility of deeper self-conceiving, of richer self-social-
izing, of human self-empowerment. Alternatively, they
might even be seen as decisive steps towards a new transcen-
dental philosophy of philosophy, the human mind tran-
scending all previous transcending of itself in consciousness.
One day, perhaps, a new Hegel will be able to greet another
glorious mental dawn. In the meantime, we must face the
fatigue and confusion of an oppressive noon.
At the very least, one might have expected that such for-
midable challenges to the capacity of the human mind to
transcend thought through thought would have led to a cer-
tain reticence in the expression of ideas, to a certain caution
in the application of ideas through social action. If we can
no longer speak sensibly of Truth or Reason, no longer use
the word "I" or "You" with confidence, no longer detach
ourselves on any sound intellectual basis from society or
from the physical world as objects of study, how can we say

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anything worthwhile about matters of society and psychology

which cry out for creative understanding but which reach
into the depths of our minds and our selves? May not silence
be the only appropriate response to questions, however ur-
gent, which surpass our capacity to speak? s
But the strange fact is that human beings still struggle to
be persons, full of projects, of love, of suffering, of anger, of
despair, of hope. Human beings still transform the natural
world through the application of ideas. Human societies still
struggle to survive and prosper in the name of ideas. Since
1789 ideas have poured forth as never before, flooding first
the minds of the learned, then the minds of the privileged,
and now the minds of the masses.
With 1789 it was possible to greet another new dawn,
not in transcendental philosophy but in the application of
ideas to the human condition, in human self-socializing and
human self-creating. Wordsworth spoke for a generation
who experienced what came to be known as Romantic enthu-
siasm and who thought that it was present at another eman-
cipation of the human spirit, a liberation which would release
every human possibility, personal and social.
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young
was very Heaven!"' 4 Humanity would overflow with its own
subjectivity and that subjectivity would recognize itself in the
overflowing power of Nature.
And it is true that, since that dawn, not only the individ-
ual subjectivity of the artist, the intellectual, and the man of
action but also self-conceiving collective subjectivities of
every kind (nations, states, cities, corporations, races, peo-

3. "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." LuD-

WIG WITTGENSTEIN, TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS 151 (David F.
Pears & B.F. McGuinness trans., 2d ed. 1974). "We feel that even when all
possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life re-
main completely untouched. Of course there are no questions left, and
this itself is the answer." Id at 149. "The solution of the problem of life is
seen in the vanishing of the problem." hd Wittgenstein may have offered
a possibility of-transcendental thinking about such non-sdentific philoso-
phizing in his own later philosophy. "We remain unconscious of the pro-
digious diversity of our language-games because the clothing of our lan-
guage makes everything alike." LUDWIG WrrTGENSTEIN, PHILOSOPHICAL
INVESTIGATIONS 224 (G.E.M. Anscombe trans., 1968).
4. WiLLM WoRwswoRTH, THE FOURTEEN-BooK PRELUDE bk. XI, pp.
109-10 (W.J.B. Owen ed., 1985).

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1364 INTERNATIONAL LAW AND POLITICS [Vol. 24:1361

ples, faiths, cultures) have conceived and reconceived their

selves with manic mental energy, and with manic social en-
ergy they have grown and fought and flourished, ceaselessly
making and remaking and destroying, transforming the
world.
Between the cold indeterminacy of transcendental phi-
losophy and the extraordinary vitality of ideologized social
practice the restless human spirit sought and soon found
within itself a new form of self-knowing. The "humane sci-
ences" (Geisteswissenschaften) seemed to offer a way of rescu-
ing humanity from its own excesses. Their Ur-prophets were
Goethe, the intelligent heart, and Hegel, the passionate
mind. The new University of Berlin 5 was a symbolic first al-
tar of the new unreligion. First in political economy, then in
historiography, then in sociology, then in anthropology, and
finally in pre-Freudian psychology, the humane sciences
sought to apply to subjective phenomena (personal and so-
cial) that intellectual ethic of objectivity which they took to
be the essential ethos of natural science. Academic profes-
sionalism and the scientific spirit might together provide a
means of harnessing the boundless energy of humanity, as
natural science had come to be a way of harnessing the inex-
haustible energy of nature. At last the subjective would be
made objective.
By using methods which had become characteristic of
botany and biology, especially taxonomy and morphology,
the humane sciences might thus find themselves able to say
something about human phylogeny (for example, why na-
tions exist) and even about human ontogeny (for example,
why this particular nation is as it is). By collecting facts
about human behavior and human societies over time and
space, by disciplined analysis and comparison and synthesis,
it might be possible to find some tentatively universal laws or
principles for the understanding of all the teeming particu-
larities of human experience. Human subjectivity-for-itself
might, to that extent, become human subjectivity-in-itself, a

5. For Wilhelm von Humboldt's conception of the new university, see

PAUL R. SWEET, WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT: A BIOGRAPHY 66 (1978). See
also Louis DUMONT, L'ID OLOGIE ALLEMANDE: FRANCE-ALLEMAGNE ET
RETOUR 115 (1991).

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sort of objectivity. The humane sciences are the self-order-

ing of the human mind as Other.

The professionalized humane sciences have generated

an effect which has made itself felt in the deepest recesses of
human self-conceiving.
The humane sciences have naturalized human phenom-
ena. By evacuating subjectivity from the study of human
phenomena, they have created a new reality which is neither
the reality of the hypothetical world of matter studied by nat-
ural science nor the reality of human subjectivity, known im-
mediately through experience and sympathy. This new real-
ity-the natural world of the human-is a middle kingdom in
which everything human, both social and individual, exists of
and for itself, neither merely as a side-effect of matter nor
merely as an emanation of the human mind.
The human mind had tried other methods of tran-
scending human phenomena through reality-forming. Reli-
gion was reality conceived as obligation-all reality conspir-
ing to propose the right ordering of a human life.
Mythology was reality conceived as will-all reality re-
sponding to the willing of agents and agencies whose resem-
blance to human beings went at least as far as their capacity
to will action. Natural science was reality conceived as hypo-
thetical necessity-the phenomena, which might have been
otherwise, are real if and to the extent that they are found to
be the source of regular effects. The new humane sciences
proposed something more dramatic-a human reality con-
ceived as actual necessity. The reality of the human world is,
in this way, more real even than the reality of the material
world, precisely because it presents itself as the reality that
we live. Human naturalism, as this form of self-transcen-
dence may be called, 6 is not merely a new professional activ-

6. The use of this term is intended to establish a difference from the

word "positivism," both in the complex Comteian meaning of that word,
see, e.g., AUGUSTE COMTE, DiscouRs SUR L'ESPRrr PosmF 18 (ibrairie
Philosophique, 1974) (1844), and its later more pedestrian uses (including
its use in legal theory). For an English translation of the relevant passages
see AUGUSTE CON=E, A DiSCOURSE ON THE PosrvE SPIRrr 19 (Edward S.
Beesly trans., 1903). For a discussion of a distinction in Husserl between
the "personalistic attitude" and the "naturalistic attitude" as "Lwo cideti-

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ity nor merely a new intellectual method. It is a new meta-

physic.
The assertion by Hegel, set forth at the beginning of this
essay, is unHegelian; it is the voice of Hegel the hectoring
historian. Hegel the ingenious metaphysician had a more
complex and more significant view of the relationship of sub-
jectivity and objectivity and, incidentally, thereby provided a
possible metaphysical foundation for the human naturalism
of the new humane sciences. Correcting Descartes, Kant,
Fichte, and Schelling, among others, Hegel had (at least to
his own satisfaction) abolished and transcended the opposi-
tion of subject and object which had plagued philosophy at
least since fifth-century Athens.7 In absolute spirit, the ob-
ject is subject and the subject is object. The manifestation of
the subjective (the rational) is not other than the manifesta-

cally different modes of apprehension," see PAUL RICOEUR, HUSSERL: AN

ANALYSIS OF His PHENOMENOLOGY 59 (Edward G. Ballard & Lester E. Em-
bree trans., 1967). On Husserl's discussion of the Geisteswissenschaft-Auffas-
sung (human sciences apprehension) and the naturalizationof man, see id. at
68. Foucault also treats the period since Kant as radically new in relation
to what he calls the Classical (post-medieval) period, and he also relates it
to the development of the "human sciences" in which nature and human
nature are confused. MICHEL FOUCAULT, THE ORDER OF THINGS: AN AR-
CHAEOLOGY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 309, 341, 387 (Vintage Books 1973)
(1970). In what he calls the "Sleep of Anthropology," philosophy has
fallen asleep over the question "What is Man?," a question which hope-
lessly confuses the empirical and the transcendental. Id. at 341. His con-
clusion is that "man is a recent invention. And one perhaps nearing its
end." Id. at 387.
7. See GEORG W.F. HEGEL, PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT 55 (A.V. Miller
trans., 1977). This passage is discussed in ALEXANDRE KoJivE, INTRODUC-
TION .LLA LECTURE DE HEGEL 453 (1976). Koj~ve's lectures on Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris dur-
ing the 1930s are often critical of Hegel and might be said, in Hegelian
parlance, to amount to a sort of Aufhebung of Hegel. (Hegel himself re-
garded the Phenomenology as a preparatory work.) They had an important
influence on the notable French intellectual generation after 1945, includ-
ing Sartre, L6vi-Strauss, and Lacan. In the same discussion, Koj6ve links
Hegel's ideas with quantum physics and with the idea of science as a form
of myth. Id. at 454 n.1, 456.
For a particularly clear interpretation of Hegel's treatment of rational-
ity and actuality, see HERBERT MARCUSE, REASON AND REVOLUTION: HEGEL
AND THE RISE OF SOCIAL THEORY 153 (2d ed. 1983). See also WERNER
MARX, HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT: A COMMENTARY BASED ON THE
PREFACE AND INTRODUCTION 54 (Peter Heath trans., 1988); ROBIN G. COL-
LINGWOOD, THE IDEA OF NATURE 121 (Greenwood Press 1986) (1944).

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tion of the objective (the actual). Fact, consciousness, and

spirit are not in a hierarchy of transcendence. They are one.
There is no question of systems of human self-transcen-
dence. Humanity is naturally self-transcendent. Human his-
tory is natural history. History is self-justifying and self-
judging.8
Such a view seems to integrate human subjectivity into a
universal world-order which is neither mythological nor reli-
gious nor material. And it seems to ennoble and empower
the human will. As actualized in post-1789 human natural-
ism, the view has proved to be the unexpected source of a
new and particularly disabling form of human alienation.
There is an important difference between the rational-
ism of post-medieval humanism, culminating in the eight-
eenth century Enlightenment, and the human naturalism of
the period after 1789.9
Rationalism projects the human mind onto phenomena
and makes the phenomena into a system of order reflecting

8. "[TIhe history of the world which is the world's court of judg-

ment." GEORG W.F. HEGEL, HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT 216 (Thomas
M. Knox trans., Oxford Univ. Press 1967).
9. Edmund Husserl considered that what he called "objectivism" was
responsible for the crisis of modem man and saw modem philosophy as a
struggle between transcendentalism and objectivism. RCOEUR, supra note
6, at 161. He characterized positive science as a science of being which is
lost in the world.
There have been a number of retranscendentalizing attempts in the
20th century (the century of scientism, relativism, materialism, populism,
and of both nihilism and fanatidsm). To universalize the characteristic
activities of man (language, myth, religion, art, science, and history) rather
than the "essence" of man, see ERNST CASSIRER, THE PHILOSOPHY OF SY.-
BOLIC FoRMs (Ralph Manheim trans., 1957). To redeem individual signifi-
cance after Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl, see JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, BEING
AND NOTHINGNESS: AN ESSAY ON PHENOMENOLOGICAL ONTOLOGY (Hazel E.
Barnes trans., 1956) (in his later work Sartre moved from the dominating
influence of Hegel to that of Marx). To retranscendentalize philosophy
after Hegel and Marx, see HERBERT MARCUSE, ONE-DIMENSIONAL MAN-
STUDIES IN THE IDEOLOGY OF ADVANCED INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY (1964). To
regenerate humanism from a specifically Christian point of view in a world
dominated by science, see JACQUES MARITAIN, HUMAmSME XTGRAL
(1936); PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN, THE PHENOMENON OF MAN (Ber-
nard Wall trans., 2d ed. 1965). For an attempt to rer-anscendentalize the
philosophy of society in general (after Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Habermas,
and Foucault, see PHILIP ALLOTr, EUNOMIA: NEW ORDER FOR A NEW
WORLD (1990).

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the order of the mind. Rationalism is the self-ordering of

subjectivity. And there is an important sense in which this is
true even of mathematics and natural science.' 0 The beauti-
ful order of the universe which mathematics and natural sci-
ence reconstruct for the human mind seems to be a mirror-
reflection of a beautiful potentiality of order in the human
mind. It may be only that. It may be more than that. We
may never know.
Human naturalism, on the other hand, treats human
phenomena-personal and social-as containing an order
which is in principle independent of the observing mind.
The evacuation of subjectivity from human phenomena
seems to require that the specificity of human phenomena
must be found not in their subjectivity but in their actuality.
The rational is in the actual. The actual is not in the rational.
The actual of the human world-say, the institutional ar-
rangements of a particular society or the self-consciousness
of a particular nation-exists nowhere else than in human
minds, but for the humane sciences it is nevertheless a reality
"out there." It is a world made by human beings conceived
only as makers of the actual. Human beings, on this view,
become a sort of back-formation from the actual. The actual
is prior to the human. To be human is to be the postulated
cause of human effects.
The first consequence of this new human metaphysic is
that the human mind attributes an equal measure of reality
to all human creations. The necessity flowing from actuality
has the effect of dignifying all human creations. A salute, a
religion, a royal palace, an epic poem, a national anthem, a
law, a life of self-sacrifice, a surgical operation, a death in
battle, the burning of a witch, a nuclear weapon, the geno-
cide of a people, world war, and global warming are all actu-
alizations of the human mind. They are all equally actual.
They all equally call for explanation and understanding. In

10. Seventeenth-century rationalism (especially Descartes and Male-

branche), in integrating the order of the mind in the order of the universe,
followed in a Western tradition going back to Plato and beyond. For three
forms of 20th-century detranscendentalizing of science and scientific
method, see KARL R. POPPER, THE LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (3d
rev. ed. 1968); THOMAS S. KUHN, THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLU-
TIONS (2d ed. 1970); PAUL K. FEYERABEND, AGAINST METHOD (rev. ed.
1988) (the most extreme and the most spirited of the three).

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the eyes of human naturalism, they are all equally real. That
they may not be real but merely collective fantasies, simply
outward signs of a collective mental pathology, is a possibil-
ity that may be formally acknowledged but may then prop-
erly be bracketed out by the right-thinking humane scientist.
The second consequence is that humanity has become
passive in relation to its own creations. The creations of the
human mind are not merely reified, seeming so far as the
human mind is concerned to have a thing-like reality in the
world of human communication, capable of being the subject
or object of a verb-"England expects.... The stock mar-
ket is nervous.... They have chosen democracy.... ." More
than that, the creations of the human mind are treated as
autonomous sources of energy and significance, as if they
were human actors full of human desire and human mean-
ing, as if they were indistinguishable in principle from the
sources of material effects which are thought to fill the physi-
cal world studied by natural science, and which science ar-
ranges into fields and systems and structures, into "things."
Human passivity is painfully apparent in relation to the
products and by-products of naturalscience. It is the personal
ambition, the imagination, and the ingenuity of scientists
and engineers, fueled by economic incentives, which now de-
termine a substantial part of social development. Scientists
and engineers oppress us with the relentless normativity of
the actual. Humanity did not choose to work in systems of
mass production, to travel over land and through the air at
ever greater speeds, to fill the mind with images electroni-
cally generated on screens of various kinds, to prolong life
and alter states of mind by the use of chemical compounds,
to murder human beings by the millions and destroy whole
cities by the use of ever more ingenious weapons. The sup-
ply of such things created a demand, and the demand coop-
erated by rationalizing and optimizing their use. There is no
way of knowing what another human world might have been,
a world made by human desire and the human spirit and not
by human skill and the spirit of scientism.
In the economic field, the field of the social transforma-
tion of the material world with a view to human survival and
prospering, those who control great systems of social power
are obliged to watch and wait as a totalized economic system
of a nation or of the world, which contains nothing but the

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willing and acting of human beings, alters direction or dy-

namic, perhaps cyclically, as if it were a slow-witted monster
with instincts of its own, making and destroying human lives
as random side-effects. In the case of capitalism, its first phi-
losophy postulated a totalizing phenomenon which, free of
subjectivity, aggregates the willing and acting of countless
individual human beings to serve immanent purposes of the
system, of the so-called nation. I I Since 1945 there has been
a movement of thought which seeks to understand an eco-
nomic system by reference to hypothetical human beings
with hypothetical ideas and aims, rather than by reference to
the subjectivity, the ideas and aims, of actual human be-
ings. 12 And at the end of the twentieth century, there is a
tendency to elevate capitalism from a practical economic the-
ory which may be applied in a given society to a pure theory
of economic activity in general, or even to a transcendental
theory about our knowledge of ourselves as desiring-ma-
chines, postulating a natural and ultimately unavoidable con-
gruence between individual and collective desire, actualized
through the mechanisms of the capitalist system.' 3
In relation to political structures, naturalism is a great
deal older than the nineteenth century. Aristotle treated
political systems as if they were botanical specimens or
animal species.' 4 The intellectual tradition flowing from Ar-

11. Ernest Gellner has suggested that the appropriation of Adam Smith
by economists has obscured the fact that Smith saw that the Hidden Hand
had an effect on the whole structure of a society and not merely on its
economy. In this sense, he argues, Smith was not merely an apostle of
laissez-faire but also a sort of economic determinist. Ernest Gellner, Nation-
alism and the Two Forms of Cohesion in Complex Societies, 58 PROC. BRIT. ACAD.
165 (1983), reprintedin ERNEST GELLNER, CULTURE, IDENTITY, AND POLITICS
19-20 (1987). Perhaps, in this, as in other things, Smith was following the
French Physiocrats, who believed that society could be reformed generally
through economic freedom. On Smith's political views, see PETER GAY,
THE ENLIGHTENMENT-AN INTERPRETATION: THE SCIENCE OF FREEDOM
362 (1977).
12. For a survey of Social Choice theory and literature, see Richard H.
Pildes & Elizabeth S. Anderson, Slinging Arrows at Democracy: Social Choice
Theory, Value Pluralism, and Democratic Politics, 90 CoLUM. L. REV. 2121
(1990).
13. For the corrective view, that there is no one thing that can be called
"capitalism," see MICHEL ALBERT, CAPITALISME CONTRE CAPITALISME ch. 5
(1991).
14. It is tempting to see a parallel between Aristotle's confusion of

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1992] NATION AS MIND POLITIC

istotle and from the Greek and Roman historians turned all
humanity into spectators of a bizarre human comedy which
happens also to be the story of our own lives. The antics of
rulers and ruling classes, the long history of their crimes and
follies, have been made to seem as rational, as real, and as
natural as the long history of human achievement in the vari-
ous forms of human self-transcendence.
What the new human naturalism has added to this old
tradition is a new dignity, a new seriousness. The human
comedy is the same; the audience has been reconditioned.
We have learned to repress our spontaneous responses of
irony and doubt and pity and bitter anger, to watch instead
with the steady gaze of the entomologist as human beings
are oppressed and exploited and killed to serve some na-
tional interest, as the wealth of nations becomes the poverty
of the human spirit. It is the poor spirit of human naturalism
which, at the end of the twentieth century of all centuries,' 5
can engender the idea that humanity has now found a polit-
ical system, known as democracy, which ensures a natural
congruence between individual and collective willing
through the mechanisms of the democratic process. We are
being led to believe that we have found at last the natural
political habitat for the human species, a place called democ-
racy.16
The third consequence of human naturalism, perhaps a

morphology (forms of governments and political organs) and teleology

(the ethical purpose of the state) and the confusion of form and function
in comparative anatomy and botanical classification up to the time of Lin-
naeus (late 18th century). See [Link] C. DAMPIER, A HISTORY OF SCIENCE
AND ITS RELATIONS wrTH PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 167-68, 184-87 (4th
ed. 1966).
15. Isaiah Berlin, who has observed the public affairs of his time with
an exceptionally keen eye, has recently expressed the view that the 20th
century has been "the worst century that Europe has ever had." Nathan
Gardels, Two Concepts of Nationalism- An Interview with Isaiah Berlin, N.Y.
REv. BOOKS, Nov. 21, 1991, at 19, 22. (For corrections to the text, see
N.Y. REv. BooKS, Dec. 5, 1991, at 58.)
16. FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN
(1992). The co-existence and the prestige within the culture of the United
States of theories such as those Of JOHN RAWLS, A THEORY OF JUSTICE
(1971) and ROBERT NOZICK, ANARCHY, STATE, AND UTOPIA (1974) suggest
that democracy is not one single intellectual phenomenon in the United
States, let alone throughout the infinite variety of the world as a whole.
For a suggestion that there is not one and the same sort of democracy in

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by-product of the other two, is that human beings have

found a means of detaching the human effect from its human
cause. In this way, human beings can come to feel no further
need for transcending ideas of religion, mythology, or mo-
rality to explain and justify human effects. And so also they
will be able finally to detach themselves from human respon-
sibility for human effects. Human effects have come to be
seen as the product of objective human activity, the work of
the human species rather than the products of human sub-
jectivity. The mindless invisible hand of social evil is sup-
posed to generate macro-evil from countless indifferent acts
of public duty and private interest-the cunning of evil, to
paraphrase Hegel. Humanity is losing the power to distin-
guish the reality which made humanity from the reality which
humanity has made. Nations, races, democracy, religions,
the family, the marketplace, war, crime, so-called "human
nature" have become the given, the facts of human life, the
flora and fauna of our habitat, which have evolved spontane-
ously and necessarily as macro-effects of all the micro-causes
of actual human behavior in the human world as the human
world interacts with the physical habitat of the natural world.
When humanity ceases to believe that it is responsible for
humanity, we may say that humanity begins to cease to be
humanity.
The history of the twentieth century has shown, with
painful and repeated clarity, that that part of social develop-
ment which is not determined by the application of science is
now largely determined by the activity of collective subjectiv-
ities, especially nations and state-systems. In the world wars,
in the countless local and internecine wars, in the surging
idea-complexes of self-determination and nationalism, in the
ending of the colonial empires and the formation of new na-
tions, and in the economic struggle of the state-systems, the
fate of all human beings everywhere now rests on a set of
human phenomena which takes a leading place in the human
reality conceived by human naturalism.
The nation is a prime example of all the metaphysical
consequences of human naturalism. Any nation, because it
conceives of itself and is conceived of by others as a nation,

the United States and Europe, see Philip Allott, The European Community Is
Not the True European Community, 100 YALE L.J. 2485 (1991).

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19921 NATION AS MIND POLITIC

is dignified with a measure of human reality equal to that of

any other part of that reality, including that of any other na-
tion. The nation as Self, with its self-conceived subjects, and
the nation as Other, in relation to those individuals and col-
lectivities which are not conceived as part of its Self, are
treated as an actual modification of human reality, a natural
source of actual effects, in relation to which all, self and
other, must accommodate their self-conceived reality and
their willed action.
And, most dire of all the consequences, the nation has
detached itself from human subjectivity, human responsibil-
ity, human transcendence. Nations are a reality-for-them-
selves, a subjectivity-for-themselves. They are mind-made
matter. And human beings must simply accept that they live
in a place which is inhabited also by these alien subjectivities,
creatures which are half-human and half-thing. To invite
human beings to begin to take control over the idea of the
nation is thus to ask human beings to do something which
may now no longer be possible, namely, to redeem human
subjectivity by means of human subjectivity.
Such an undertaking would require that, going beyond
the taxonomy and morphology of the humane sciences, we
would reassert the psychic substance of social phenomena.
We would have to learn once again to conceive of them with
Romantic sympathy (Einfiih1ung/Mifffhlung) as mind-for-
mind, subjectivity seeing itself reflected in subjectivity. And
we would have to face the challenges of Wittgenstein, Freud,
Marx, and Darwin, as they seem to decree that mind is the
one thing that mind will never master.

In what we know of the ancient world we can hear the

human mind speaking to us, mind speaking to mind. And, in
the ancient world, the self-identifying of nations seems to
have been notably conscious and energetic and articulate, an
impression which may in part be due to the fact that the
Prachtbauten of public-realm self-identifying, architectural
and artistic and literary remains, presumably make up a dis-
proportionate amount of the relics available to us. Our
knowledge of ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and ancient
China happens to include a great deal of information about
their ideas of themselves. In the case of ancient Israel, we

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have extensive literary remains which reveal a people ob-

17
sessed with the idea of themselves.
In each of these cases, the nation finds a source of iden-
tity not merely in a present state of consciousness. We are as
we are because we have been as we were.
Furthermore, we may say that this retrospective self-na-
tionizing tends to take either a genetic or a generic form. In
the genetic form, the nation sees the source of its identity in
a story which may extend back into a mythico-religious realm
(as in the case of Egypt and Israel). In the generic form
(most perfectly exemplified by the Confucianized Chou king-
dom of China, the Pericleanized city-state of Athens, and, in
the modern world, the United States of America), the nation
sees the source of its identity in its idea of the special charac-
ter of its land, its people, its institutions, its values, its tradi-
tions. Those features have formed a national identity which
is also a national character and which is handed on from
mind to mind, from generation to generation.
Identity is also alterity. The struggle for self-identity
was also a struggle of other-identification. The genetic
source of identity conferred a particular identity also because
it was something that no other nation could claim. Mythic
events which gave birth to the forefathers of this people,
which conveyed the special favor of a god or gods (perhaps
theophanized as pharaoh or emperor) by assigning this land
and these boons to this people rather than to that were the
source and the guarantee not only of identity but also of uni-
queness. The ancient traditions and customs of a particular
nation were so dense and complex and inexplicable, if not
irrational, that no other nation could possibly match them.
The generic source of identity conferred a particular identity
also because it stood in stark contrast, highlighted and cari-
catured in story and art objects, with the always strange and
often despicable nature and behavior of other nations-the
Libyans, Asians, and Africans for the ancient Egyptians;"' the

17. Omitted from this group of nations are other ancient nations, espe-
cially the city-states of Mesopotamia, India, and Persia, whose identities
are too complex and obscure to include in the proposed paradigm.
18. HENRI FRANKFORT ET AL., BEFORE PHILOSOPHY 49, 122 (1951) (orig-
inally published as THE INTELLECTUAL ADVENTURE OF ANCIENT MAN
(1946)).

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barbarians for the Chinese; the Egyptians, Persians, Spar-

tans, and Corinthians for the Athenians; the Gentiles for the
Jews; and the Europeans for the new Americans. We are
who we are because, fortunately, we are not as other peoples
are.
The self-identifying and the other-identifying were also
a sort of self-ordering, calling forth particular social struc-
tures and functions and values. To defend the identity sug-
gested itself as a primary interest of the nation (national se-
curity) and hence a primary responsibility of the ruler and
ruling class. To enrich, to celebrate, and communicate the
identity (education) were primary responsibilities of particu-
lar parts of the ruling class-a priesthood, a lay derisy,
craftsmen. To use the identity as an axiomatic basis for the
derivation of legislation and executive action (government)
was the primary responsibility of other parts of a ruling
dass-an assembly, a royal council, a mandarinate, a bureau-
cracy, a judiciary. To live and die for the identity could then
be put to the people as the primary responsibilities of those
privileged to be members of the nation (citizenship).
If all the public life of the nation seemed to be bound up
with the self-identifying of the nation, then it can be sup-
posed that the whole of social consciousness would be a con-
stant process of self-reinforcement reaching deep into the
consciousness of the individual nationals.
The result is that not merely the daily lives of the nation-
als, but their actual personal identities as individual human
beings would become caught up in the overwhelming pro-
cess of national self-identification. I am as I am because we
are who we are.
It is, perhaps, in Rome that this totalitarian tendency is
the most evident, as the Romans invented themselves with
exceptional panache, trying (with the help of Virgil and Livy,
the sacralization of the Emperor, and other rather uncon-
vincing forms of religious behavior) to fabricate a genetic
Rome, but having to satisfy themselves with an overblown
generic, fantasized Rome of dignity, order, law, and free-
dom.
With the development of Christianity, a new form of
self-identifying took place. By an ingenious piece of sym-
bolic reconceptualization, a particular sect, which came to be

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called Christians, managed to detach an identity from the

Jewish nation and reattach it to humanity as a whole, to uni-
versalize it. A prophetic figure, conceived physically as the
son of a Jewish woman, was reconceived mentally as the Son
of Man, an idealized representative of humanity in general,
and was then reconceived again, not merely as a God who
spoke to and favored his people and not merely as a mysteri-
ous theophany, but as a God who had, in some sense, be-
come present in humanity, thereby repairing the separation
between the divinity of the One-Good and a mankind which
had been alienated from that divinity.19 Christianity then de-
veloped an anti-national self-identification, as a City of God
or "a kingdom not of this world," 20 a universal non-nation,
even as the ecclesiastical organization of the Church of
Rome took on more and more of the attributes of a medieval
nation or super-nation.
Then, paradoxically, this universal religion became
available also as a powerful instrument of national self-iden-
tification, in five notorious phases of world social develop-
ment-first, with its acceptance by the Roman Emperor Con-
stantine in the fourth century; then through its acceptance by
the barbarian kingdoms of Europe formed after the collapse
of the Roman Empire; 21 then under the dialectical pressure
of Islam (from the seventh century), another universal reli-
gion rooted in ancient Israel which became available also as a
powerful instrument of national self-identification and a
powerful basis of mutual alterity; then as an element in the
powerful development of distinct national identities in Eu-

19. Campbell takes the view that, in the ancient world, mythology di-
vided into two streams, a division which still affects human consciousness,
between an "oriental" mode, based on an intrinsic union of the divine/
natural/universal and the human/individual, and a near-eastern/occiden-
tal mode, based on an intrinsic separation between the two. JOSEPH CAMP-
BELL, THE MASKS OF GOD: ORIENTAL MYTHOLOGY 3-34 (1962). Hegel
makes a similar point in relation to ancientJewish thought in GEORG W.F.
HEGEL, THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 195 (John Sibree trans., 1956). See
also ERNST CASSIRER, THE MYTH OF THE STATE 37-38 (1946); MAx WEBER,
ANCIENTJUDAISM 3-5 (1952).
20. The locus classicus, apart from the New Testament itself, is St. Au-
gustine in The City of God.
21. For a corrective to the commonly held view that the early medieval
kingdoms lacked collective consciousness, see SUSAN REYNOLDS, KINc-
DOMS AND COMMUNITIES IN WESTERN EUROPE 900-1300, at 250-56 (1984).

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rope after the Reformation of the sixteenth century; and, fi-

nally, as an element in the imposed re-identifying of colo-
nized peoples in all parts of the world.
In the meantime, the self-identifying traditions of the
tribes of Israel had become detached from their particular
locus in Palestine, and had been reconceptualized as Juda-
ism, a sophisticated metaphysical and ethical structure which
became the central feature of the self-identifying of a virtual
nation, whose virtual nationals were dispersed throughout
the world, until Zionism in the nineteenth century sought to
reassert the geographical aspect of the national self-identify-
ing.
We must learn to see these familiar phenomena not as
events in history but as interesting expressions of human
psychology, and sometimes as symptoms of psychopathol-
ogy. It is an aspect of our own psychology, magnified but
not beyond recognition, which is displayed through the art
of self-justifying self-promotion practiced by those who build
nations in the mind and not merely on the battlefield. It is
an art in which some nations have excelled above all others,
especially, it seems, those nations which have found it useful
to believe that their subjugation of other lands and peoples
was a destiny consistent with the special nature of the nation.
We are alone among mankind in doing men
benefits, not on calculations of self-interest, but in
the fearless confidence of freedom. In a word I
claim that our city as a whole is an education to
Greece, and that her members yield to none, man
by man, for independence of spirit, many-sidedness
of attainment, and complete self-reliance in limbs
22
and brain.
For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy
God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a
special people unto himself above all people that
23
are upon the face of the earth.

22. The text of the Funeral Oration of Pericles as reported. or

imagined, by Thucydides may be found (in a translation of Wilamowiuz's
text) in ALFRED E. ZIMMERN, THE GREEK COIMONWEALTH: PoLMcs AND
ECONOMICS IN FIvr CENTURY ATHENS 205 (Oxford Univ. Press 1969) (5th
ed. 1931).
23. Deuteronomy 7:6.

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Remember, Roman, to rule the people under

law, to establish the way of peace, to battle down
the haughty, to spare the meek. Our fine arts,
24
these, forever.

Great Britain shall triumph, her ships plough

the sea;
Her standard is Justice; her watchword, 'Be
25
free.'

Let our object be, OUR COUNTRY, OUR

WHOLE COUNTRY, AND NOTHING BUT OUR
COUNTRY. And, by the blessing of God, may that
country itself become a vast and splendid monu-
ment, not of oppression and terror, but of Wisdom,
of Peace, and of Liberty, upon26which the world may
gaze with admiration forever!
Seen in a psychological perspective, what seems to be
happening in such exemplary cases of national self-identifi-
cation is a threefold process, three processes in one:
(1) Projection of the individual's self-process onto the
collectivity;
(2) Introjection of the collectivity's self-process into the
individual;
(3) The forming of a subjective totality identified as the
collectivity (the nation).
The individual concerned may be a self-conceived par-
ticipant in the collectivity (a national), or a self-conceived
non-participant (an alien), in which case the process is one of
self-identification through alterity (such self-identification
then being part of the self-identifying of all three parties-
the national, the alien, the collectivity).
By projection we would mean something loosely analo-
gous to its meaning in Freudian psychology. The individ-

24. VIRGIL, THE AENEID 173 (Rolfe Humphries trans., 1951).

25. David Garrick, Heart of Oak (1759), reprinted in MARGARET BARTON,
GARRICK 293 (1949).
26. Daniel Webster, Speech at the Placing of the Cornerstone of
Bunker Hill Monument (June 17, 1825), in WEBSTER'S FIRsT BUNKER HILL
ORATION AND WASHINGTON'S FAREWELL ADDRESS 26 (Fred N. Scott ed.,
1905).

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ual's personal struggle for self-identification seems to the in-

dividual to be mirrored in the self-identifying of the collec-
tivity. And the individual not only focuses considerable
psychic attention on the collectivity but also imputes to the
collectivity the full range of individual psychic processes
(identifying, constraining, directing, motivating processes),
at all levels of consciousness and unconsciousness, so that
the collectivity comes to have a psychic process, which is con-
gruent with, and a continuation of, the individual psychic
process. By this means, the individual's self-identifying
comes to be part of the self-identifying of the collectivity.
The nation becomes an inseparable part of our desiring.
By introjection we again would mean something loosely
analogous to its meaning in Freudian psychology. The indi-
vidual makes part of the self-forming process into something
that, while being conceivable as "other," is nevertheless also
able to function as part of the individual's self-forming. Ef-
fects are produced in the individual psychic process originat-
ing from that "other" and acquiring a sort of necessity, and
certainly a special power, stemming precisely from the fact
that they surpass the individual's psychic process, that they
are part of a significantly autonomous psychic story which is
not only the individual's own.
By this means the self-identifying of the collectivity be-
comes part of the individual's personal self-identifying.
The subjective totality is generated by the interacting
and integrating of the projection and introjection processes
of many individuals (nationals and aliens). It is important to
note that the subjective totality (the nation) is neither a thing
that is created and that then takes on a life of its own nor is it
merely an illusion shared by an indefinite number of individ-
uals.
The subjective totality is and remains an integral part of
the psychic process of the individuals, but it always surpasses
the process of any given individual. The individuals enter
and leave the subjective totality, as they are born and die, as
they are naturalized or expatriated. The nation is thus just
one of those countless remarkable phenomena of the human
reality, the reality made by the human mind, which depend
on us to think them into existence and to maintain them in

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existence by our thinking, but which at the same time think

us into existence and sustain us in existence.
A nation can become extinct as a self-identifying nation;
if remembered at all, it then continues to exist only as an
alterity, seen from the point of view of those who remember
it. In this way, even a nation which is extinct as a self-identi-
fying nation can have identifying effects-for example, Ath-
ens in relation to republican Rome, ancient Greece and
Rome in relation to Renaissance Europe, ancient Rome in
relation to Napoleonic France, Teutonic Germany in relation
to the Germany of the nineteenth century, ancient national
identities of some of the "new" states which have emerged
from imperialism after 1945.
To speak of a state-system as a body politic is as much to
speak in metaphor as if one were to describe a state-system
as a Leviathan or a Mortal God or the March of God on
Earth. 27 To speak of a nation as mind politic is to use lan-

27. For a discussion of Aristotle's use of the organic analogy between

the state and the human body, see ERNEST BARKER, THE POLITICAL
THOUGHT OF PLATO AND ARISTOTLE 276-81 (1959). Hobbes uses the body
politic analogy in various ways for different purposes. In the introduction
to Leviathan, he carries the analogy to a rather absurd length, saying that
the Leviathan or Commonwealth or State is "but an Artificiall Man," in
which the sovereignty is "an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the
whole body." THOMAS HOBBES, HOBBES'S LEVIATHAN 1 (Oxford Univ.
Press 1909). Locke uses body politic to refer to the political society as a
whole. JOHN LOCKE, Two TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT 331-32 (Peter Las-
lett ed., student ed. 1988). He overuses it, in the same chapter, to assist
his unconvincing argument in favor of majoritarianism. Id.
The formula attributed to Hegel that the state is "the march of God in
the world" (der Gang Gottes in der Welt) is an addition (Zusatz) to paragraph
258 of his Philosophy of Right. GEORG W.F. HEGEL, HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF
RIGHT 279 (Allen W. Wood ed. & H.B. Nisbet trans., Cambridge Univ.
Press 1991) (1820). Hegel uses the organicist view of the state at
paragraphs 267 and 269, and considers the subjective aspect of the state,
including the nature of patriotism. Id. at 288, 290. In the Mind Objective,
the second section of Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, he considers mind in rela-
tion to "the spirit of a nation" (paragraph 514) and as Political Constitu-
tion, "the mind developed to an organic actuality" (paragraph 517). GE-
ORG W.F. HEGEL, HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF MIND 119-21 (William Wallace
trans., 1909) [hereinafter HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF MIND]. At paragraph
539 he refers to the state as "living mind." Id. at 132. However, it should
be stressed that all these passages depend on a special concept of"mind"
or "spirit" which, one might say, it is the aim of the whole of his philoso-
phy to construct and which is only distantly related to the purely subjective

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guage in a different way. It is to propose a name for a theo-

retical model of a particular set of phenomena within human
reality which we are attributing to a set of particular psycho-
logical processes. It is to propose that we find within our-
selves, within our own struggle for personal identity, some-
thing that we recognize as being merely the continuation of
that process, its extension or expansion beyond what we con-
ceive to be our personal location in space and time. A nation
is not something which is like mind organized politically. A
nation is mind organized politically.
What we recognize in the nation is what we call in our-
selves personality. What we must expect to find in the nation
is all the possibilities of the whole human personality, of that
subjective totality that is the integrated product of mind and
which integrates us with the whole of the universe beyond
our own locus in space and time. This means that we will
find the unconscious mind at work in the nation, so that the
reality conceived by the nation will be full of all the bizarre
effects that the unconscious part of the mind can cause. It
means that we will find neurotic and psychotic behavior in
the behavior of the nation. It means, above all, that we will
find that the nation is capable of good and evil, because the
nation is that same mind which, in each of us, is capable of
good and evil. The human mind, acting as nation, can do
good, ensuring the survival and prosperity of its nationals
without harming others. And the human mind, acting as na-
tion, can do evil, great evil, all the evil of which the human
mind is capable. So it is that our response to the nation can-
not be merely that of the human naturalist observing human
phenomena. The human mind as nation engages our moral
responsibility as human beings.

In the spirit of post-medieval humanist rationalism,

Hobbes and Locke (and other social philosophers of the
same era) took up again an ancient tradition, of Plato and

concept of mind with which we are concerned in the present study. For
Hegel's use of the concept of spirit or mind, seeJOHN N. FINDLAY, HEGEL:
A RE-ExAMINATION 34-57 (1958).
In the work of Herbert Spencer and Henri Bergson, organicism finally
surpassed metaphor and became metaphysics.

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Aristotle and the Stoics and the theorists of natural law, to

propose a denationalized, universalized theory of politically
organized society. Such a society is as it is not because it is a
subjective nation but because it is the actualization of a par-
ticular structure of ideas, which can be represented in the
form of a conceptual model conforming to the principles of
logic, rather than as a story or a description reflecting the
practical effects of human subjectivity. For such a theory, the
ontology of a politically organized society is metaphysical
not physical, philosophical not historical. A politically or-
ganized society is a manifestation of mind, not of minds.
It is well that the seventeenth century was able to de-
velop theories of such a kind, since it made possible the
existence of the modem state, a form of social organization
that is systematic in character and may or may not be the
political organization of a pre-existing nation. If a non-na-
tional state-society generates a national collective subjectiv-
ity, then it does so as a by-product of its successful self-or-
ganizing as a state.
The reconceiving of the idea of the non-national state
made possible, in particular, the conceiving of the United
States of America, which was not created as a united nation
or a union of nations but as an institutional structure-system,
the essence of which was set out in the United States Consti-
tution, an essence which was a refreshing blend of mildly Pu-
ritan New England zeal and the best ideas available to a well-
educated late-eighteenth century gentleman from the long
history of universalist thought about the good life in society.
The United States, almost immediately, became an inspira-
tion for all those who wished to create a state de novo, often
as a purposive repudiation of something which had gone
before-a degenerate genetic nation, a colonial regime, or
some other form of social system which had come to seem
alien. Once established as a state, the United States lost no
time in trying to make of itself a nation. 28 It became a prime

28. See MERRILL JENSEN, THE NEW NATION 85 (1950). Strangely, it

seems that the Declaration of Independence did not acquire its status as
an affirmation of the nation's specificity until, perhaps, 1812. See GARRY
WILLS, INVENTING AMERICA: JEFFERSON'S DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
324 (1978); CARL BECKER, THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE: A STUDY
IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL IDEAS 224-38 (Vintage Books 1970) (2d ed.
1942). For the thesis that, even before the Declaration of Independence,

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19921 NATION AS MIND POLITIC 1383

example of the single-minded and energetic creation of a ge-

neric nation through the manipulation of the minds of the
people, as Plato and Hobbes had prescribed, in order to con-
solidate and sustain the existence of the state. 29 It also
thereby initiated a development full of sinister potentiality
that would affect state-systems and genetic nations and ge-
neric nations alike: namely, the systematic appropriation by
the institutional authority of the state-system of the subjec-
tive energies of the nation.
Following in another tradition set by the Greek, Roman,
and medieval historians and reinvigorated by Machiavelli,
Montesquieu and Voltaire offered a dialectical correction to
the transcendentalist view of the state. It is the utter particu-
larity of every politically organized society which is, on the
contrary, the basis of the ontology of politically organized
societies in general. Such societies are unique manifesta-
tions of universal social forms,30 but the specificity of a given
society-as a function of geography, climate, culture, na-
tional character and as a function of the society-forming ac-

the United States existed as a self-conscious nation (at least in the sense of
a distinct political consciousness), see N.M. BUTLER, BUILDING THE AMERI-
CAN NATION: AN ESSAY IN INTERPRETATION 35 (1926).
29. Since, for Plato, the orders of the soul, of society, and of the uni-
verse are a single order, it follows that a society has to be interested not
only in public matters but also in all that affects the life of the soul (poetry,
music, myth, and education in general). See, e.g., PLATO, PLATO'S REPUBLIC
55-59 (I.A. Richards ed. & trans., 1966); PLATO, PLATO's STATES.%tAN 230-
31 (J.B. Skemp trans., 2d ed. 1987); PLATO, Philebus (R. Hackforth rans.),
in THE COLLECTED DxALOGUES OF PLATO 1092 (Edith Hamihon & Hunting-
ton Cairns eds., 1961); PLATO, THE LAWs OF PLATO 40 (Thomas L Pangle
trans., 1980). For Hobbes, "it is the Unity of the Representer, not the
Unity of the Represented that maketh the Person One." HOBBES, sUpra note
27, at 126. A cause of the weakness and dissolution of states lies in various
forms of fragmentation, including moral and intellectual fragmentation.
JIt at 247-57. It follows, incidentally, that universities must be kept pure
in their teaching, free from "the Venime of Heathen Politicians, and from
the Incantation of Deceiving Spirits." IL at 556.
30. It is important to recognize the universalizing aspect of Montes-
quieu's approach, even when he is at his most particularizing. ("In a na-
tion [such as England] so distempered by the dimate as to have a disrelish
of everything, nay, even of life, it is plain that the government most suita-
ble to the inhabitants is that in which they cannot lay their uneasiness to
any single person's charge .... ") He is explaining English political free-
dom. MoN-TESQUIEU, SPIRrr OF THE LAWS 231 (Thomas Nugent trans.,
1949).

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tion of dominant individuals-explains the existence of that

society and is not merely part of a more or less picturesque,
ab extra account of its nature and customs.
As practical theories influencing the actual life of given
societies, both Montesquieu's and Voltaire's ideas were full
of tantalizing ambiguity, as seen from the position of a ruler
or a ruling class. Were they revolutionary or reactionary?
The transcendentalist theory might dignify the status quo of
a given society with the charisma of metaphysics, but it also
might provide a supra-societal theoretical basis (such as nat-
ural law or natural rights) for seeking to transform a society,
suggesting a status quem. The theory of contingency might
dignify the status quo with the charisma of practical inevita-
bility and even might allow a ruler to claim to be the embodi-
ment of the true nation, but it also necessarily implied that
contingencies, and hence social structures, might change in
uncontrollable ways.
The development of a new theory of the nation, in the
later eighteenth century, may be seen as a dialectical surpass-
ing of transcendentalism and contingency in the conceiving
of politically organized society. Herder's paradoxical idea of
the nation is of something which is transcendentally spe-
cific. 3 ' All nations have in common their uniqueness. It is
the nature of a nation to be uniquely itself, its self having
being formed by long, profound and mysterious processes,
material and subjective, which have, as it were, secreted a
nation from within itself. The analogical discourse is organic
rather than mechanical, where the organic phenomena in
question are not merely bodies but the deeper life-processes
of living nature. On this view, the nation is thus non-tran-
scendental, in the sense that its whole explanation is to be
found deep within itself. But the nation is also transcenden-
tal, in the sense that it is not a mere accumulation of contin-
gencies: it has a unique pattern or genetic program which
unfolds in, and can only be known through, its actualized
history. A nation is not a completed aggregate but a growing
totality. A nation is self-transcending.

31. Berlin takes a lenient view of Herder's responsibility for the ex-
cesses which would flow from his powerful idea of the Volksgeist of a nation.
ISAIAH BERLIN, VICO AND HERDER: Two STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
156-65 (1976).

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It is tempting to believe that there is some deep-struc-

ture connection between this individualization of the nation
and the contemporaneous development of the idea of the
3 2
personality of the individualized human being. The Ro-
mantic enthusiasm for the self-creating, self-fulfilling and
self-transcending human being, spiritually rooted at the
deepest level in all the processes of Nature, also seems to be
present in the invigorating idea of the self-filled organic na-
tion. Whatever the connection may be as a matter of intel-
lectual history, there is no doubt that the heightened subjec-
tivity of the Romantic period flowed powerfully into the new
idea of the nation.
The humane sciences of the nineteenth century played
an ambiguous role in the etiology of the dramatic social ef-
fects which flowed from the newly energized idea of the na-
tion. While political science, sociology, and pre-Freudian
psychology were pursuing the grail or the snark of the
universality of the human phenomenon, anthropology and
historiography were doing that, as well as providing inciden-
tally rich and abundant material to feed the spiritual hunger
of the new national subjectivity. Savigny and the Historical
Right School of historians in Germany were seeking not
merely, as good human naturalists, some sort of historical
"truth." Like good proto-Marxists, they also were seeking a
form of "higher necessity" to be found in the history of a
nation, a necessity which incidentally is the source of the au-
thority of the legal system and of all other systems of social
33
authority, including state-system authority. In this way, the
nation and the state are bound together in a holy union of
transcendental reality.
As human naturalism lent to the idea of the nation the
self-confidence of its new faith in the subjective-made-objec-
tive, there remained the problem of reintegrating the subjec-
tivity of the individual into the subjectivity of the non-na-
tional state-system, into politically organized society consid-

32. For a discussion of this topic, with references, see Pierre-Andr6

Taguieff, Le Nationalisme des "Nationaistes': Un problhne de l'histoiredes des
politiques en France, in TH ORiES Du NATiONAuSME 64 (Gil Delannoi &
Pierre-Andr6 Taguieff eds., 1991).
33. HERBERT MARCUSE, REASON AND REvoLUTION: HEGEL AND THE RISE
OF SoCIAL THEORY 367-74 (2d ed. 1954); ERNsT CASSIRER, THE MIMI OF
THE STATE 182 (1946).

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ered in its universal, transcendental aspect. In the fertile

obscurity of Rousseau and Hegel the conjunction of individ-
ual and social subjectivity made possible the integration of
all human reality.
The "problem" of Rousseau and the "problem" of
Hegel are remarkably similar. Were they passionate believ-
ers in human subjectivity or passionate believers in social
solidarity? The biographical question is of lesser impor-
tance, although, in the light of the evidence, it seems per-
verse to insist that, whatever the uses to which their ideas
have been put in real-world social practice, their personal
aim was to provide a basis for submerging the individual in
an all-powerful state-society.3 4 From very different philo-
sophical points of departure, they both are saying that there
is no reason to suppose a natural antagonism or even a natu-
ral duality between the individual and society. Not just any
society, admittedly, but a good society or a more rationally
achieved society could be a place where self-fulfillment was
the same thing as social fulfillment, either because society as
an agent of willed action is capable of conceiving of itself as
the social manifestation of the citizen as agent of willed ac-

34. "The Philosophy of Mind, and in fact the whole of the Hegelian sys-
tem, is a portrayal of the process whereby 'the individual becomes univer-
sal' and whereby 'the construction of universality' takes place." MARCUSE,
supra note 33, at 90. "Hegel's whole philosophy turns its polemical edge
against pure individuality, which the Romantic movement had raised on its
banner at that time, with its 'law of the heart,' which this individuality was
supposed to realize, but which for Hegel meant the descent into the 'in-
sanity of subjectivism.'" FRANKFURT INST. FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH, ASPECTS
OF SOCIOLOGY 42 (John Viertel trans., 1973). The reference is to the chap-
ter entitled "The Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit," in
Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind. Chapter Three of Aspects of Sociology con-
tains an account of the background to the 19th-century ambivalence to-
wards individualism. Id. at 37-53. The apparent ambiguity of Hegel in
these matters is most impressively treated in SHLOMO AVINERI, HEGEL'S
THEORY OF THE MODERN STATE 176-93 (1972). Rousseau's "discrepan-
cies," as they are called in Louis ALTHUSSER, MONTESQUIEU, ROUSSEAU,
MARX: POLITICS AND HISTORY 113-60 (Ben Brewster trans., 1872), are
most convincingly treated in ERNST CASSIRER, THE QUESTION OFJEAN-JAC-
QUES ROUSSEAU (Peter Gay ed. & trans., 1954). Popper's one-sided view of
Rousseau and Hegel (as of Plato and Marx) seems, by comparison, to be a
caricature. See KARL R. POPPER, THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES (4th
rev. ed. 1963). The early (1844) writings of Karl Marx might be seen as an
effort to find a single solution to the ambivalences of both Rousseau and
Hegel.

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tion, or because society as the actualization of social potenti-

ality is capable of conceiving of itself as the actualization of
the same spirit which actualizes the potentiality of the indi-
vidual through the processes of individual consciousness.
Our ideal self as a person and as a citizen is, on either view,
one ideal. The moral order and the social order are one.
Human reality is a single reality.
By these various means, nation, state and individual
were brought together in a potent compound that could
enter, with mind-flooding energy, into the mind politic of
any nation, and that could be used and abused by those con-
trolling the institutional authority of any state-society. It is a
development of the human mind that has, as things turned
out, determined the subsequent course of European history,
and then of world history.

It follows from all that has been said above that the
moral problem of the behavior of nations in the twentieth
century-in particular, the evil which has been done by na-
tions acting through state-systems and by nations at odds
with state-systems-is a complex one. We have identified a
set of powerful resistances that somehow must be overcome
if we are to understand and to deal with the problem:
(1) The indeterminacy of transcendental philosophy un-
dermines our capacity to understand the phenomena of the
nation rationally and to judge them morally;
(2) The naturalism of the humane sciences detaches the
phenomena of the nation from our subjectivity, including
our moral consciousness, individual and collective;
(3) The naturalism of the humane sciences renders us
passive in relation to the behavior (political, economic, tech-
nological) of the nation, as passive as a remote tribe cow-
ering before the omnipotence of Nature;
(4) Our minds are full of the overflowing subjectivity of
the modem nation, of our own nation or nations, and of
other nations;
(5) The institutional authority of the state-systems re-
lentlessly appropriates the phenomena of national subjectiv-
ity and transforms them into facts of power, instruments of
power, commodities.

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In short, we feel that we cannot judge the nation and its

works, we cannot control the nation and its works, and yet
we cannot escape the nation and its works.
To oppose such formidable forces, we have been able to
summon up only a modest array of intellectual weapons:
(1) The idea that the mind which is involved in the mind
politic of the nation is precisely the same mind as the mind
which is involved in individualized human behavior;
(2) The idea that self-nationizing is the same process as
self-personizing, forming a subjective totality which feeds on
the mind that it feeds;
(3) The idea that, having regard to (1) and (2), there is
an indissoluble moral unity between the nation as mind poli-
tic and the person as mind individualized.
So it is that we find ourselves in the same condition (but
what a different condition after three such centuriesl) as the
self-contemplating Descartes. The best efforts of philoso-
phy, of academicism, of scientism, of economism, and of
state-power cannot separate us from that first hearth and last
refuge that is our own consciousness. In our immediate and
inescapable experience of our internal forum we must find
the means to re-experience the public forum. In the commu-
nicating of our own self with itself, our most intimate experi-
ence, we must find the means to communicate with, and to
cure, the self-communicating nation.
How to begin? We could try to re-experience, as if we
were reliving some personal experience of our own, the de-
velopment of the self-consciousness of actual nations. Us-
ing, as compass and map, our own conceptions of what it is
to be a person, what it is to be a healthy or virtuous person,
what it is to be a diseased or evil person, we might begin to
imagine a way to find a sympathetic understanding of self-
nationing, the kind of understanding that alone would entitle
us to pass judgment on the behavior of nations, to condemn,
if need be, the evil that nations do, and to propose therapies
for the sicknesses that afflict nations and those whom they
infect with their sicknesses. To make a start somewhere, we
might consider, as a tentative and rudimentary thought-ex-
periment, what is perhaps the most striking instance of mod-
em times-the reconceiving of German national conscious-
ness in the nineteenth century.

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Beginning with the period of German Romanticism,

Germans set themselves the task of rediscovering not only
what it is to be human (a task that they shared with European
Romantics everywhere) but also what it is to be German.
They went in search of what Hegel would call "the indwell-
ing spirit and the history of the nation... by which constitu-
tions have been and are made."35 It was a task made easier
by the relative sparseness of the information and by the pas-
sage of time, and it was a task which, for the same reasons,
could be at the same time both an enthralling exercise in
dry-as-dust objectivity and a thrilling exercise in rampant
subjectivity. With remarkable facility and surprising cer-
tainty there could be conjured out of the cold northern mists
of a remote Teutonic past a German self which was heroic,
pure, creative, dynamic, and masterful. In such an interest-
ing mirror, it was possible to see and judge a German self
that had somehow, in the meantime, become petty, provin-
cial, bloodless, and aimless. It was not difficult to see that
Germany was a genetic nation that had collapsed into a
patchwork of insignificant nations, together forming some
sort of shadowy and unsatisfactory generic nation, a nation
that had not remained true to its self but which could, per-
haps, be made to become its true self once again.
In the office of official psychoanalysts to the German na-
tion, the brothers Grimm, whom we may take as symbolic
heroes of a movement that involved countless scholars, in-
cluding adepts of the new human naturalism, were able by
their vast labors to bring up from the depths of German un-
consciousness a German soul which manifested itself
uniquely in German language, folk-tales, literature, art, reli-
gion, and even mythology.3 6 In a more Jungian framework,

35. HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, supra note 27, at 137. Hegel was
disparaging about the medieval mystifying of Germany's origins. AvINEI,
supra note 34, at 21-22, 229. Gellner is dismissive, even scornful. of at-
tempts to universalize the idea of the nation, to make of it a natural and
inevitable category of human socialization. The idea of the nation is a con-
tingent thing, arising in particular ways in particular social conjunctures.
Geilner, supra note 11, at 165-87. "The great, but valid, paradox is this:
nations can be defined only in terms of nationalism, rather than, as you
might expect, the other way round." ERNEST GELLNER,NATIONS AND NA-
ToNALISM 55 (1983).
36. See JACOB GRIMM, DEUTSCHE MYTHOLOGIE (Akademischc Druck-u

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Richard Wagner (once again, a hero-figure standing for

countless German artists and writers) transmuted the new
consciousness through the magical processes of art into
something which could return, as all art does, to take on a
new universalized life in the depths of German unconscious-
ness. By these means, German consciousness, at its most ar-
ticulated and at its most secret, was changed.
The German case is merely an extraordinarily open, ex-
plicit, and purposeful example of what all nations do all the
time, in a much more disordered way. It raises, as all such
cases do, the questions of why such a reforming of national
self-consciousness occurs and of what its consequences are.
In the case of Germany in the nineteenth century, it
seems particularly perverse that a people should redefine
themselves in so romantic a spirit when (a) German scholars
were using the spirit of objectivity to carry the humane and
natural sciences to the highest levels attained anywhere in
Europe; (b) the Prussian state was leading Europe in the ra-
tional reorganization of the social, if not political, aspects of
society; and (c) German business and industry were applying
the lessons of the British industrial revolution to generate an
economy rapidly overtaking, in scale and sophistication, any
other European economy.
Renan drew attention to the essential part that forget-
ting and error play in the formation of national conscious-
ness. 3 7 The self-image may be based on false information
about the past and present situation of the nation, and it
may, probably must, involve the repression of much that is
inconsistent with the ideal-self-image. We may go further
and say that national self-consciousness is a form of private
fantasy, a reality-for-themselves of the nationals whose rela-
tionship to the reality-for-non-nationals is secondary. How-
ever, in the case of nations, the private fantasy is necessarily
a public fantasy. The development of German consciousness
was as much a matter of interest for other Europeans, espe-
cially the French and the British, as was German material

Verlagsanstalt ed., 1953) (1835); RICHARD WAGNER, My LIFE 280, 343 (A.
Gray trans., 1983).
37. Ernest Renan, Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?, Speech at the Sorbonne (Mar.
11, 1882), in ERNEST RENAN, DISCOURS ET CONF-RENCES 277-310 (5th ed.
1947).

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progress. Germans were fellow members of a European so-

ciety, a European family, even a European nation, and their
state of mind could not be a matter of indifference to the
other members. To a greater extent with the French and a
lesser extent with the unreflective British, the development
of a new German consciousness generated 38
modifications in
all non-German national consciousness.
In these facts lie the roots of the pathology of national
consciousness. In the age-old language of historians-a
form of language which, strange to say, is still used by spe-
cialists in international relations-Germany was envious of the
prestige of France and resented the world-power of Britain.
France had a priceless possession, its private fantasy, the
French nation-la France-which had been brought forth
from a thousand years of history, a history that had to be
transmuted from being a record of remarkably sustained cul-
tural excellence of all kinds ("culture" in the high-culture
sense, rather than in the anthropological sense) into a sup-
posedly coherent history of a self-knowing, self-forming
political nation. Britain, sub-Germanic in national origin,
but a mongrel people, irrational and indolent in matters of
social organization, had, as a reward for no particular merit
or effort, outplayed many other worthier players in the inter-
national power game and had collected all sorts of unde-
served advantages, including a blithe national self-confi-
dence. In order to be able to play in the world-power-game, Germany
wanted to make itself into a world-power nation like Franceand Brit-
ain. Such is the world view of the human naturalists.
From such a viewpoint, these hypostatic bodies-politic-
state-systems with personal names-are supposed to behave
like real human beings in all but one respect. Their psychol-
ogy is the psychology of the nursery, of books for children,
of fairy tales.
It was not a Gulliver called Germany which had taken a
drink from the bottle of nationalism marked Dink-Me, in or-

38. On Franco-German mutual nationalizing, see Taguieff, supra note

32; Pierre Birnbaum, Nationaismed lafranqaise,in THEORIES DU NATIONAL-
ISME, supra note 32, at 125-38; DuMoNT, supra note 5. "Athens uras neces-
sary to Sparta, in the exercise of her virtue, as steel is to flint in the pro-
duction of fire." ADAM FERGUSON, AN ESSAY ON THE HISTORY OF CIVIL So-
ciErr 59 (1966). See also GAY, supra note 11, at 340.

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der to become a giant in a world of giants. It was the

Germans who were re-forming their minds as collective sub-
jectivity as they re-formed their minds as individualized per-
sonality, allowing the new subjective totality to overwhelm
their long-cherished regionalism and diversity. The conse-
quences of such a re-forming of consciousness are felt in the
personal lives of individuals and also in the social life of the
nation, its social life within itself and in the company of other
nations and their nationals. In order to be able to make the
judgment that those consequences, in a given case, are dis-
eased or evil, we must treat them not as the product of infan-
tile personifications but as the everyday work of all-too-
human human beings. To deal with the strange behavior of
nations, we need not iron laws of history or game-theories of
power-politics or rational-choice theories of economics, but
a nosology of the mental diseases of national identity.
A list of such diseases would include the following:
neurotic nationalism; psychotic nationalism; biological ra-
cism; hysterical xenophobia; religious fanaticism; terrorism;
and anti-semitism.
There must be an overwhelming presumption that not
merely wickedness but mental disease is involved in human
behavior which leads to such terrible evil as the events of the
two World Wars of the twentieth century. We may hazard
the diagnosis that World War I was a war of neurotic nation-
alism and that World War II (in Europe and Asia) was a dis-
ease of psychotic nationalism.
The nationalist neurosis of World War I was a sort of
neurosis d six, an interactive neurosis involving most of the
German, French, British, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and
Ottoman Turkish ruling classes, together with some part of
their respective masses, to the extent that they were manipu-
lated by those ruling classes. If patriotism conceives the na-
tion in fantasy, nationalism conceives the nation in obses-
sion. The neurosis in question involves some unresolved
conflict of self-identification and hence of self-esteem and
self-preservation. Such a neurosis is not a problem of acute
social significance unless and until it involves other people,
including the people of another nation, or involves an inter-
action at the subjective and/or practical levels between the
different national obsessions, feeding on each other, rein-
forcing each other.

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The Cold War was another example of such a neurotic

interaction. Here the folie d deux was between the United
States, which despite its relative antiquity continued to con-
ceive of itself as a generic nation, and the Soviet Union,
which had been formed when a small part of the Russian rul-
ing class chose to re-form the old genetic nation into a ge-
neric nation, defined by its particular social structures and a
particular set of universalist ideas (Marxism-Leninism) put to
exceptionalist use. It is the nature of generic nations that
they continually must compete (in war, sport, trade, or
whatever), in order to reaffirm continually their exceptional
nature. In the Jungian typology, they are closer to the ex-
traverted end of the personality spectrum; in Riesman terms,
they tend to be other-directed.3 9 In the Cold War, the two
nations drove each other (and the other nations infected by
their neurosis) into more and more irrational behavior,
above all into a wildly hypertrophic accumulation of military
weapons-those fetishistic props of troubled identity, like a
fast car or a young mistress. With the end of the Cold War,
Russia reverted to an untidy genetic status, in which the sub-
nation of Russia once again may come to imperialize some or
all of the other sub-nations. The United States is left to
struggle with its identity in new and especially difficult cir-
cumstances.
If the first World War was a neurotic episode involving
the newly genetic German nation, the second World War
was, from a clinical point of view, a very different thing.
Psychotic nationalism may be called madness, if we de-
dare our grounds for continuing to use that terrible word.

Stunned into transcendental silence by the philosophical

phenomena labelled above as Wittgenstein, Freud, Marx,
and Darwin, we must begin to find some way to incorporate
them into a new way of speaking, at least of speaking at levels
other than the transcendental level. We may try to find in
them-separately and taken together-a new subjectivity-be-
yond-subjectivity, a new conception, if not of rationality or
morality, then of sanity.
The Nietzschean resonance is no coincidence. Nietz-

39. DAVID RIESMAN, THE LONELY CROWD 17-25 (1950).

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sche, lonely prophet, saw the twentieth century and it drove

him mad. Wittgenstein, Freud, Marx, and Darwin are all
spiritually post-Nietzschean. He saw that the products of the
human mind, however sophisticated and self-assured, cannot
be contained within the categories of rationality and moral-
ity, that all the efforts of the mind are nothing but a sort of
permanent self-exploration in the dimension of sanity, that is
to say, an exploration by the mind of the mind's reality-for-
itself. Modernism in the fine arts and music and literature
would be the twentieth century's exploration of the mind's
reality through the power of creative imagination. Totalitari-
anism, of left and right, would be the twentieth century's ex-
ploration of the reality of the self-socializing mind through
the power of the mind-filling institutional authority of the
state-system.
The reality of the totalitarian nation is a possible reality
for the self-nationing of the human mind. The twentieth
century has demonstrated that. Nazi Germany might not
have been Nazi Germany without a great European war. But
Nazi Germany without a great European war might have be-
come a German nation of perfected self-judging rationality
and morality. Without a great European war and without the
Cold War, Stalinist Russia might have become as perfect a
version of a greater-Russian nation as that difficult sub-conti-
nent may permit.
The psychotic personality of the human individual is
similarly capable of apparently self-surpassing behavior.
The behavior is self-surpassing from the perspective of pub-
lic reality, the reality shared by most people and incorpo-
rated in the self-forming of society. But the behavior is not
at all self-surpassing; in the perspective of the private reality
of the psychotic person it is rational, moral, and sane. In the
processes of society, including self-nationing, psychotic real-
ity can also be a public reality.
That is a phenomenon that evidently has existed
throughout the whole history of human socializing, but it is
one that has become of great practical significance in the
twentieth century, given the intensity of the socializing of
modern nations and the intensity of their social interaction.
The private reality of a Hitler, a Stalin, a Mussolini-not to
mention the dozens of other less successful but no less sinis-
ter holders of personalized institutional authority all over the

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world in the twentieth century-is also the public reality of a

nation.
In the case of Hitler, the phenomenon is at its most
acute and most sensitive. An aspect of the reality-for-itself of
Nazi Germany was the discovery within the self-conceiving of
the genetic German nation of an element which can only be
called biological purity-and that element also was
powerfully present in the reality-for-himself of the socially
marginal Hitler. The German nation then might be said to
be genetic not merely in the metaphorical sense that we have
been giving to the term, but in a descriptive sense. It has
been rather rare for a nation to include a notion of biological
purity as a primary element in its self-conceiving. (Oddly
enough, Japan may be another example.) But there is fre-
quently such an element latent somewhere in the self-con-
ceiving of genetic nations and, perhaps, even in that of ge-
neric nations. (The treatment in the United States of native
Americans and black Americans may be evidence of such a
thing.) And such an element is probably a pathogenic factor
in several of the mental diseases of national identity listed
above.
Freud took a step that now seems irreversible when he
removed the frontier dividing the mentally normal from the
abnormal, the mentally healthy from the diseased. He also
took the first step towards removing the frontier between
personal psychology and social psychology, in two rather ru-
dimentary attempts-on the one hand, using the work of
previous psychologists who had studied "crowd" phenom-
ena;40 on the other hand, constructing one of his myth-mod-
els, as one may call them, that would find at the root of soci-
ety something analogous to the Oedipal myth-model at the
root of individual personality. 4 ' What we are considering in

40. See Sigmund Freud, Group Pychology and the Analysis of te Ego, in THE
STANDARD EDITION OF THE COMPLETE PSYCHOLOGICAL WORKS OF SIGMUND
FREUD 18 (James Strachey ed. & trans., 1974). The focus is on the effect
on the psychology of the individual of participation in groups rather than
on the nature of the group.
41. See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points ofAgrement Between
the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, in THE STANDARD EDITION OF THE
COMPLETE PSYCHOLOGICAL WORKS OF SIGMUND FREUD, supra note 40, at
13. Having put forward his explanation of the origin of sodety, Freud says
that it is surprising to him that the problems of social psychology should

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the present essay is the possibility that there is no frontier at

all between personal psychology and the social psychology of
the nation as collective subjectivity.
After Freud, in the work of the supposedly Freudian La-
can, 4 2 but also in the work of those who have opposed the
ideas and practices of Freud-based psychiatry, 43 the very idea

prove soluble on the basis of one single point-man's relation to his fa-
ther. Id. at 157. He expresses concern that "I have taken as the basis of
my whole position the existence of a collective mind, in which mental
processes occur just as they do in the mind of an individual." Id. He is
recognizing in advance the criticism that there is no generally accepted
biological explanation for the species-inheritance of mental events as part
of human phylogeny. He had been anticipated by Hume and Nietzsche in
the idea of society as the product of the repression of natural instincts.
For three other works by Freud which explore the psychic aspect of
society, see Sigmund Freud, The Futureof an Illusion, in THE STANDARD EDI-
TION OF THE COMPLETE PSYCHOLOGICAL WORKS OF SIGMUND FREUD, supra
note 40, at 5; Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in THE
STAN-
DARD EDITION OF THE COMPLETE PSYCHOLOGICAL WORKS OF SIGMUND
FREUD, supra note 40, at 21; Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, in THE
STANDARD EDITION OF THE COMPLETE PSYCHOLOGICAL WORKS OF SIGMUND
FREUD, supra note 40, at 23. They are written in Freud's broader, more
Jungian mode and do not amount to a rigorous philosophy of the psychol-
ogy of society. For an impressive response, especially to Civilization and Its
Discontents, see HERBERT MARCUSE, EROS AND CIVILIZATION: A PHILOSOPHI-
CAL INQUIRY INTO FREUD (1955).
42. Lacan did not publish any exposition of a "general theory," and
rejected the idea of general psychological theory. This has not prevented
the publication of numerous Lacan texts nor the development of an aca-
demic extractive industry mining those texts (now at the tertiary level of
writing about the secondary literature). We are waiting still for a general
theory of the psychology of society. It may be hoped that, when it comes,
it will be more exhilarating, ennobling and empowering than the work of
either Freud or Lacan. Especially on the philosophical resonances of La-
can, see MIKKEL BORCH-JACOBSEN, LACAN: THE ABSOLUTE MASTER (1991).
See also MARCELLE MARINI, JACQUES LACAN (1986); SHOSHANA FELMAN, JAC-
QUES LACAN AND THE ADVENTURE OF INSIGHT (1987); DAVID MACEY, LACAN
IN CONTEXTS (1988); MALCOLM BOWIE, LACAN (1991).
43. There is a very substantial literature critical of Freud at all three
levels of theory: transcendental (about his empirical-metaphysical-mytho-
logical method); pure (as to the coherence and appropriateness of his con-
cepts and structures); and practical (as to the social and psychic and
clinical implications of his work). On levels of theory, see ALLOTr, supra
note 9, at 14-38.
On schizophrenia seen from a "communications" aspect, see Gregory
Bateson, Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia, in STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF MIND
201-27 (1973). On psychopathology and language, see MICHEL FOUCAULT,
MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION: A HISTORY OF INSANITY IN THE AGE OF REA-

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1992] NATION AS MIND POLITIC

of madness is being dissolved. It is a step that seems inher-

ent in the work of Freud but that, for some reason, he ap-
pears to have been inhibited from taking. The uniquely priv-
ileged status of the public reality of normal society is being
challenged; the irredeemably alien character of private reali-
ties, even psychotic realities, is being mitigated.
New conventions of self-determination will have to be
established, new rules as to the forming of the reality of the
individual human being within the self-forming of the socie-
ties to which the individual belongs. The concept of mental
illness is a set of conventional limits on the right of self-de-
termination of the human individual. On the hypothesis pro-
posed in the present essay, the self-determining of nations is
simply a special case of all human self-determining, and the
self-determination of a nation must be seen as subject to
conventional limits within the reality-for-itself of the society
of all nations. With nations as with individuals, madness may
be defined conventionally, in a form which is deliberately
fashioned on the model of Kant's structuring of the rational-
ity of morality, in the following terms. The madness of na-
tions is the self-forming of a nation within a reality-for-the-
nation that could not become a reality for the society of all
nations, the society of the whole human race. In this sense,
Nazi Germany was a mad nation.
Madness is contagious, and the second World War was a
contagion of madness. But sanity also may be contagious. A
more optimistic hypothesis has been proposed in relation to
individual mental illness-that a family-member may take on
as a scapegoat, so to speak, the mental illness of a family, and
so make sane the other family members.44 We might say that

SON (Richard Howard trans., 1973). For an impassioned evocation (in al-
most impenetrable prose) of the socio-political implications of Freud, see
GILLES DELEUZE & FELIX GUA-rARI, ANTI-OEDIPUS: CAPrTALISM AND
SCHIZOPHRENIA (Robert Hurley et al. trans., 1977).
44. "From the observer's standpoint the ostracized or scapegoated
person thus takes an important covert family role in maintaining the
pseudo-mutuality or surface complementarity of the rest of the family."
Lyman C. Wynne et al., Pseudo-Mutualityin the Family Relalions ofShizophrn-
ics, 21 PSYCHIATRY 205, 214 (1958). "One of the covert roles the patient
takes in becoming overtly schizophrenic thus may be to allow other family
members to achieve vicariously some measure of individuation." Id. at
219.

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the European Community is the product of a European fam-

ily made sane by the madness of Nazi Germany. But the Eu-
ropean Community is, at most, only a half-formed generic
nation, defined by its peculiar social structures and formed
by the fusing and transcending of the national state-systems
in the state-system of the Community. It has not yet discov-
ered itself as the genetic European nation. Until it does so, it
will not be able to modify significantly the national self-con-
ceiving of the participating nations. The danger of patholog-
ical national developments remains.
We also might say that the future of the whole world, as
a society of nations and as a society of human beings, de-
pends on finding a way ofjudging and modifying the behav-
ior of nations, of making the nations sane. Such a way will be
found not by moral exhortation, social pressure, or the mak-
ing of law. It will be achieved only by a reconceiving of the
human society as a self-transcending nation of all nations, a
reconceiving of the reality-for-itself of a humanity at last
made sane by the age-old madness of nations. Democracy
will be defined, not in terms of institutional arrangements
and constitutional guarantees (which can so easily be a mask
for illusion, corruption, exploitation, and decadence), but in
terms of the health and happiness of the people.
For the whole of self-socializing humanity, the redeem-
ing ideal will be not world peace but world happiness, not
45
the wealth of nations but the health of nations.

45. "A thousand paths are there which have never yet been trodden; a
thousand salubrities and hidden islands of life. Unexhausted and undis-
covered is still man and man's world .... Verily, a place of healing shall
earth become!" FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA 89 (Os-
car Levy ed. & Thomas Common trans., 1964).

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