Making a Modern Political Order: The Problem of the Nation State

Alexis de Tocqueville, one of James J. Sheehan’s guiding lights,1 described “the real work” of the French Revolution as being “to abolish those political institutions [...] which we normally describe as feudal, in order to replace them with a more uniform and simple social and political regime based upon social equality.”2 Like Tocqueville, though, Sheehan knows the story is longer and subtler than that: the work of replacement began at least a century before 1789, unfolded in a piecemeal and sometimes half-conscious way, and continued on long after, though with increasing coherence.3 Like Tocqueville, Sheehan knows such sweeping change could not simply be the product of one single revolution, calendar year, or theorist, but that broader forces and concepts must be at play in such a transformation.