Two decades ago, during a wave of handwringing about “the new nationalism” sparked by the war in Bosnia, the late political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain wrote that the nation-state remains “the best way we have thus far devised for protecting and sustaining a way of life in common.” Yet the nation-state is an abstraction, meaningful only insofar as it shapes the way individuals understand and order their interpersonal relationships. As Roger Scruton has written, citizenship defines the relationship between the individual and the state—which is to say between the citizen, other citizens, and non-citizens. William B. Allen, whose kind remarks on…
What’s True about Citizenship?
