What is the status and legitimacy of the nation within the horizon of liberalism today? Surveying three representative, contrasting, recent works in contemporary political philosophy, I argue that the nation loses its status and legitimacy from every side. John Rawls's allegedly status-quo preserving theory in The Law of Peoples (Rawls 1999) defends only the shell of sovereignty and in fact points toward cosmopolitan aspirations. Cosmopolitan liberals, and conservative nationalists, therefore, claim with reason that liberalism is not capable of conferring status and legitimacy on the nation's "arbitrary" restrictions of individual autonomy (Nussbaum and Cohen 1996, MacIntyre 2003). But, in doing so, cosmopolitan liberalism creates a grave problem, for liberalism depends upon citizens to uphold freedom and upon limits to freedom to make freedoms meaningful. One would think to turn toward so-called liberal nationalist theories of liberalism, like David Miller's On Nationality (Miller 1995). But these, in turn, defend the nation only by depleting it of any content and rendering the very concept of the nation hollow. Neither of these two possible corrections of liberalism solves its problems with particularity and social unity; each only exacerbates them. My work as a whole therefore shows that contemporary liberalism tends to undermine the nation, on which it nevertheless relies. I demonstrate each part of the argument in separate chapters: two on Rawls's liberalism, one on Nussbaum's cosmopolitanism, and two on David Miller's liberal nationalism. These three perspectives represent a fairly complete spectrum of contemporary liberal thinking about the status of the nation.
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