Sociology and the nation-state : beyond methodological nationalism
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Abstract
The equation between society and the nation-state in sociology has been subject to
severe criticisms in recent times. This equation has been given the name of
‘methodological nationalism’ and is underpinned by a reading of the history of
sociology in which the discipline’s key concept, society, and modernity’s major sociopolitical
referent, the nation-state, allegedly converge. At the critical level, my thesis
argues that this is too restrictive a view of the history of the discipline and at the
positive level it reconstructs the conventional version of sociology’s canon in relation
to nation-states. The first part of the thesis surveys the main trends in the current
sociological mainstream, reviews the rise of the critique of methodological nationalism
and establishes a distinction between a referential and a regulative role of the idea of
society in sociology. The body of the thesis constructs a history of the sociology of the
nation-state in its classical (K. Marx, M. Weber and E. Durkheim), modernist (T.
Parsons and historical sociology) and cosmopolitan (U. Beck and M. Castells)
moments. As an essay on the history of sociology, this thesis seeks to uncover how the
conceptual ambivalences of sociology reflect the actual ambivalences in the position
and legacy of nation-states in modernity