Il paradosso dello Stato-nazione: critica dell’ontologizzazione nel pensiero di Michael Herzfeld

This article offers a critical reading of Michael Herzfeld’s *Lo Stato-nazione e i suoi mali* (2024), focusing on what it calls a paradox at the heart of the book: Herzfeld’s analysis treats the nation-state as a recognizable and historically stable object of critique, while his own ethnographic material repeatedly shows that the apparent solidity of the nation-state dissolves in practice into negotiation, permeability, inconsistency, and local moral worlds. The article argues that this is not a minor rhetorical tension but an epistemological contradiction that weakens the coherence of Herzfeld’s theoretical frame. The article begins by reconstructing Herzfeld’s main thesis. Herzfeld identifies a politically consequential confusion between “state” and “nation” as a source of contemporary ills, including racism, exclusion, aggressive nationalism, and even genocidal violence. In this account, the state is primarily an administrative apparatus that delivers practical functions, while the nation is a mythic and emotionally charged construct that demands a singular, pure, and immutable identity. When these two are fused, the state becomes an instrument of exclusion, and national symbolism supplies the moral rhetoric through which systemic violence can be justified. Herzfeld’s ethnographic and comparative canvas, with Rome (especially the Monti neighborhood) as a privileged site alongside counterpoints from Greece and Thailand, is presented as a laboratory for observing how official narratives of “eternity” and national grandeur coexist with decay, gentrification, patronage, informal solidarities, and everyday complicities. The book’s broader ambition is an anthropology that studies power as well as subalternity, exposing the cultural rhetorics and “intimacies” that normalize exclusion. The article’s critique is organized around the claim that Herzfeld ends up ontologizing the nation-state. From the title onward, Herzfeld is said to mobilize the nation-state as a definable, stable, and recognizable historical model, a machine that naturalizes identity, rationalizes power, and legitimates violence. The article situates this move near Timothy Mitchell’s idea of the “state effect”, the discursive and practical production of the appearance of a coherent entity that separates public from private and inside from outside. However, the article argues that Herzfeld goes beyond Mitchell by assigning the nation-state a quasi intentional malignity, making it the primary site of institutional racism and exclusion as if it were a coherent agent. This, the article suggests, risks the kind of reification criticized by James Ferguson, where “the government” is treated as a centralized subject rather than as multiple, uneven, and often contradictory regimes of practice and representation. Against this ontologization, the article highlights the implicit counter-argument contained in Herzfeld’s own ethnography. The detailed Roman material, and the comparative observations elsewhere, are read as showing sovereignty as always incomplete and socially assembled: bureaucratic informality, local gestural codes, marginal solidarities, dialectal registers, and the workings of “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld 2005) reveal a state that is fragmented, negotiated, and dependent on citizens’ performative participation. Here the article aligns Herzfeld’s ethnographic yield with Akhil Gupta’s view of the state as a heterogeneous ensemble whose apparent unity depends on belief, repetition, and unequal encounters with paperwork, offices, and structural violence. In this reading, the lived reality of the nation-state looks less like a monolith and more like a contested accomplishment. The article argues that Herzfeld’s best empirical pages undermine the theoretical image that frames them. To explain why the mismatch matters, the article introduces Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the “illusion of doxa”. The core claim is that critical scholarship can end up thinking with the categories it aims to unmask. Applied to Herzfeld, the allegation is that while the book denounces essentialized national identity, it partially reproduces an essentialized concept of the nation-state by attributing to it homogeneous traits (bureaucratic rationality, racist violence, sacralized identity) that function almost like a negative myth. The article notes that Herzfeld sometimes gestures, especially toward the end, toward a more contextual definition of the state, but it treats this as a late correction that does not govern the conceptual work performed across the book. The resulting contradiction is framed as epistemic: a methodology finely attuned to local ambiguity and nuance is paired with an ideal-typical representation of the nation-state that flattens precisely the complexity the ethnography displays. A further argumentative node is the critique of Herzfeld’s concept of “courteous racism”. Herzfeld is read as treating discourse about national culture, including forms of cultural pride, as a soft but substantively violent racializing practice, in line with debates on “new racisms” and differentialist racism (Balibar and Wallerstein; Taguieff). The article challenges the logical conditions for that inference. To claim that cultural pride is racism in disguise, the article argues, one would need to show that the relevant actors treat culture as non transmissible in the way biological descent is. Yet many national-conservative discourses, in practice, presuppose assimilation as possible, and sometimes desirable. On this basis, the article contends that conflating patriotism or cultural consciousness with racism is analytically unjustified and rhetorically corrosive: it dilutes the concept of racism until it becomes a synonym for any collective identity claim, thereby weakening critique rather than sharpening it. In the final sections, the article proposes an alternative way of conceptualizing the nation-state that preserves Herzfeld’s insights while rejecting a one-sided picture. Two correctives are developed. The first is an affective and historical point: states can generate passion as states, not only as instruments of national myth. Drawing on autobiographical vignettes centered on Venice and the legacy of the Serenissima, the article argues that administrative hierarchy, regulatory discipline, and institutional continuity can be objects of admiration and emotional investment. The tourist’s fascination with Venice is interpreted not as the beauty of an ethnic nation but as the beauty of state capacity, the political and administrative sedimentation that made enduring art and infrastructure possible. This theme is reinforced through contemporary Italian examples where public identification aligns with the state’s demand for responsibility and rule-following, contrasted with culturally familiar forms of opportunism. The second corrective is political-economic. Building on Gellner and especially Polanyi, the article argues that the nation-state has historically functioned not only as an identity-producing and disciplining apparatus but also as a mediating institution capable of constraining the expansion of a self-regulating market. If state-led cultural standardization helped create national markets, the state has also been a key site for resisting the commodification of labor, nature, money, and later welfare domains such as health and education. From this perspective, some phenomena labeled “populist” or “nationalist” can be reread, Polanyianly, as localized attempts to resist abstract economic universalism. The article therefore proposes the nation-state as an intermediate space between local community and global indistinctness: not a definitive solution, but a political level where rights, representation, collective claims, and organized difference can be negotiated. The conclusion returns to the initial paradox. The article frames its intervention as a call to hold together ethnographic sensitivity and theoretical description without turning the nation-state into either a sacred object or a demonological one. The key question posed is how a method that excels at revealing local gradients, ambivalence, and “intimacy” can be consistently paired with a generalizing portrayal of the nation-state that treats it as a compact and uniformly pernicious entity. The article suggests that making this tension explicit is itself an important epistemological task, and a necessary step for any critique of state and nation that aims to remain faithful to the complexities of empirical life.