Happy first day of 2026. I went to sleep at 1:04 am after zero glasses of champagne and too much scrolling on Zillow. New year, new goals, and yes—
I’m starting yet another book club:
A book club about the development (invention?) of the nation-state. I want to answer the question: how did the nation-state become the only way we organize political life at scale?
We take for granted that the world is divided into countries with fixed borders, passports, and exclusive citizenship. But this is a recent creation, roughly 200 years old. Before it, people organized differently. Authority overlapped. You could owe allegiance to multiple powers: a local lord, a king, the Pope. Empires had to manage diverse cultures and peoples, instead of demanding homogeneity. Your identity was …
Happy first day of 2026. I went to sleep at 1:04 am after zero glasses of champagne and too much scrolling on Zillow. New year, new goals, and yes—
I’m starting yet another book club:
A book club about the development (invention?) of the nation-state. I want to answer the question: how did the nation-state become the only way we organize political life at scale?
We take for granted that the world is divided into countries with fixed borders, passports, and exclusive citizenship. But this is a recent creation, roughly 200 years old. Before it, people organized differently. Authority overlapped. You could owe allegiance to multiple powers: a local lord, a king, the Pope. Empires had to manage diverse cultures and peoples, instead of demanding homogeneity. Your identity was tied to your local village and your local customs.
The nation-state was constructed through violence, bureaucracy, and deliberate cultural engineering. It wasn’t inevitable. It competed against alternatives and won. Then it was imposed globally.
The arc:
Choosing only 12 books to answer such a big question is always hard (and subjective) but here’s my attempt after too many Reddit threads, too much debating with ChatGPT, and too many Wikipedia rabbit holes.
Before asking how the nation-state was built, you have to notice you’re inside one. That’s what the first book does well. Then, we’ll read about Medieval Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Chinese statecraft, the French Revolution, the founding of the USA, the invention of national identity, people escaping state control in the mountains of Southeast Asia, and finally where we are now.
The order isn’t strictly chronological. It’s designed to unsettle first, go deep into history second, and speculate last.
The books:
**January: James C. Scott — Seeing Like a State. **What states do: make legible, standardize, control 1.
February: Marc Bloch — Feudal Society. Medieval Europe before the state: overlapping jurisdictions, multiple allegiances 1.
March: Hendrik Spruyt — The Sovereign State and Its Competitors. Why the nation-state won against city-states and leagues 1.
April: Karen Barkey — Empire of Difference. The Ottoman alternative: managing diversity 1.
May: Dingxin Zhao — The Confucian-Legalist State. Chinese centralization, 1,800 years before Europe 1.
June: Alexis de Tocqueville — The Old Regime and the Revolution. How France destroyed local autonomy 1.
July: Alexander Hamilton et al — The Federalist Papers. The American alternative: fragmentation 1.
**August: Benedict Anderson — **Imagined Communities. Building nationalism 1.
September: Eugen Weber — Peasants into Frenchmen. How France manufactured Frenchmen 1.
October: James C. Scott — The Art of Not Being Governed. How people escape state control 1.
November: Hedley Bull — The Anarchical Society. Are we returning to medieval-style fragmentation? 1.
December: James Dale Davidson & William Rees-Mogg — The Sovereign Individual. Technology shifts power from states to individuals
Why it matters:
We’re living through a strange moment. The nation-state’s grip seems to be both loosening and tightening. On one side: digital nomads, remote work, competitive jurisdictions, network states, platform governance, the EU’s growing power over its members. On the other: the rise of nationalism, crackdowns on immigration, backlash against tourism, borders hardening again. Understanding how the current order was built is the first step to imagining what might replace it, or what it might become.
To recap: one book a month, starting with Seeing Like a State today. And I’ll publish my take on each book by month’s end. Come nerd out.
postscript 📮
I’m serious, let me know if you want to join. :)
I’ll start a group chat and do a Zoom call every two weeks to discuss. You can join even if you’re not sure you’ll read them all. Basically, let’s hang out.
No posts