What is the difference between a people and a nation? In this podcast, Marc Barnes and Alex Denley discuss Ernest Renan's influential lecture "What is a nation?". Renan argues that a nation is not formed by common descent, language, religion, or geography. Rather, a nation is a spiritual principle that requires sacrifice, and a forgetting of the past. Marc and Alex discuss Renan's definition of a nation and how it formed the development of nation states in the modern period. Registration is still open for New Polity Conference 2025! Ernest Renan's lecture can be found hereSubscribe to New Polity Magazine! Check out Marc's essay "National Forgetting"