The epistemic origins of the nation-state

• In Event: Science, Knowledge, and Technology Open Call Paper Session (Co-Sponsored by Global and Transnational Sociology Section)

Abstract

Classic theories explain nation-state formation as a response to industrialization, urbanization, conflict, or mass politics, but they largely take for granted the ideas that made the nation-state make sense and appear useful to historical actors. I argue that these ideas were not spur-of-the-moment, local fixes for modernization but were elaborated earlier and elsewhere by a set of state-adjacent intellectuals who constructed new ontologies of the individual, society, and state. Through social science journals, statistical societies, state agencies, and international congresses, these epistemic Others in the institutional environment shaped how states framed social problems and legitimated social policies. I name this process socio-scientization — the elaboration and reification of stadial, state-centric functionalist theory — and theorize it co-developed with and made nationalization seem reasonable, natural, and imperative. I further argue nationalization and scientization were reciprocally constitutive domestically and diffused translocally through epistemic flows, producing the characteristic institutional form of the Western nation-state. I corroborate this argument with 26 time series describing 21 states over 113 years using well-balanced fixed effects regression models. Thereby, I advance the institutionalist perspective on nation-state making by anchoring key mechanisms of macro-cultural change onto the very time and place it was made up in the first place.

Author

• Daniel Scott Smith, Duke University