Hazony means nations in the old-fashioned, tribal, and even ethnic sense—he regards a nation as a collective of tribes that comes together organically to form a political whole. He wrote that the nation is “distinguished from all of humanity in that it possesses a quite distinctive character, having its own language, laws, and religious traditions,

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To have ‘roots’, we are taught, is to have a home. It means belonging to a distinctive place and people, which is something elevated as inherently good. City-states, nation-states and other polities based on territoriality often sacralise ‘roots’ and sedentariness while devaluing, controlling or even outlawing mobility. The profound hatred that is... See more

The issue is that humans will inevitably seek out ways of finding intimacy and connection with strangers, with people they will never meet. Should we challenge the nation’s role in that process? Or allow it to step into a breach that would otherwise be filled by an ascendant consumer culture, in which identity and belonging are defined by what one

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