What is a Nation?

Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify | Listen on other platforms

What is the difference between a people and a nation? In this podcast, Marc Barnes and Alex Denley discuss Ernest Renan's influential lecture "What is a nation?". Renan argues that a nation is not formed by common descent, language, religion, or geography. Rather, a nation is a spiritual principle that requires sacrifice, and a forgetting of the past. Marc and Alex discuss Renan's definition of a nation and how it formed the development of nation states in the modern period.

Registration is open for New Polity Conference 2025!

Ernest Renan's lecture can be found here:

Check out Marc's essay "National Forgetting"

Subscribe to New Polity Magazine!

Join the conversation on our Discord