How to Defend Nationalism, and How Not to

“The Virtue of Nationalism”? The very title of Yoram Hazony’s new book will be repugnant to readers for whom nationalism has simply become a dirty word, associated with authoritarianism, racism, and bigotry: a vice, not a virtue.

But this only proves the book’s timeliness. Drawing on history, political philosophy, contemporary politics, and the Hebrew Bible, Hazony—president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and author of previous works on the political thought of the Hebrew Bible—sets out to redeem nationalism’s reputation. He does so with a robust defense of what he calls the “national state”: a polity with defined borders, an effective central government capable of maintaining order, and a dominant national group. Such states participate in what Hazony calls the “order of nations,” an international system in which numerous national states seek the betterment of conditions within their own territory while—crucially—respecting the sovereignty of others.

The book is divided into three parts. In the first, Hazony lays out his distinction—originally articulated in Mosaic—between “two visions of world order”: one based on his favored model of multiple independent national states and the other based on a single imperial state that seeks to impose peace and order by unifying states under one supreme authority. He then traces a history of these competing visions, from the ancient Near East to the modern West. In the second part, he makes the case for the nation-state’s superiority over empire. In the third he undertakes to rebut the claim that nationalism is a source of hatred, to explain how it came to be discredited, and to connect disdain for nationalism with hatred of, in particular, the Jewish state.