First delivered as a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1882, Ernest Renan's
What Is a Nation?
is a seminal text in the study of nation, nationalism, and nineteenth-century European history. In it, Renan critically reviews the prevailing theories of nationhood of his time. Finding all inadequate to the task, he then develops his own, historically-informed theory wedding considerations of historical continuity to the imperative of present consent.
In an afterword, the political theorist Nathalie Krikorian-Duronsoy distinguishes Renan's idea of the nation from the social contract tradition, particulary in its Rousseauist variant. In Renan's view, the nation is not a mere sum of individuals but an autonomous entity in its own right. Only by grasping this may one move beyond the extremely partial reading to which
has long been reduced and recognize the various ways in which Renan's thought intersects with contemporary debates regarding immigration, identity, and the future of the nation state.