About the author
French historian, philologist, and orientalist (1823–1892), one of the most influential public intellectuals of the French Third Republic. Trained for the priesthood before losing his faith, Renan wrote a famous and controversial Life of Jesus (1863) treating the Gospels as history. His 1882 Sorbonne lecture on the nation, delivered in the aftermath of France's defeat by Prussia and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, remains the classic statement of the voluntarist, civic theory of nationhood.
Synopsis
A lecture delivered at the Sorbonne in 1882. Renan dismantles the candidates usually offered for what defines a nation — common race, language, religion, material interest, or natural frontiers — showing each to be insufficient. He argues that a nation rests on two things: a rich legacy of shared memories (including, crucially, things its members have chosen to forget), and present consent, the daily wish to continue a common life. The nation, in his famous phrase, is 'a daily plebiscite.'
Quote to notice
Direct quote · Public domain“A nation is a daily plebiscite, just as the existence of the individual is a perpetual affirmation of life.”
Renan grounds the nation in continuous consent rather than fixed inheritance. Because a nation is sustained by the ongoing will of its members, nationality becomes a matter of choice and affirmation, not an unchangeable fact of birth or blood — which makes membership in principle open and the nation a moral, not a biological, community.
To avoid a bubble
Pair with ethnic or romantic theorists of nationhood (Fichte, Herder) for the rival view that a nation is rooted in blood, language, and descent, and with Gellner or Anderson for the modern social-scientific account that treats nations as recent constructions.
Reading note
Short enough to read in a sitting. Note how much work the idea of collective forgetting does in his argument — Renan insists that every nation is founded on historical violence its members must agree not to remember too clearly. Read it before Anderson's Imagined Communities, which builds the modern theory on foundations Renan laid.
Best paired with
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities.