Nationalism, Social Theory and Durkheim

The aim of this book is comparatively simple: it is to make the point that Durkheim, when writing about society, was actually writing about the formation of the modern French nation, specifically as it was reinventing itself under the Third Republic. Further, that he was also looking more generally at the problem of nation formation, the dominant emerging form of sociopolitical organisation in a modernising age (the nineteenth century) and thereafter. In this Durkheim was probably no different than any of the other classical sociologists. Most had, subconsciously at least, the nation-state as the model of what they meant by society, if not as it was, at least as it should be. Nation was the political outer form of society and society referred to the internal structures of social organisation that gave substance to the political form as a real entity (Giddens, 1987).