Nation, People, Population: “National” Political form of Civil Society

The purpose of the article is to analyze the “story of the history of the emergence of European nations” as a historical narrative; the variability of “told stories” presented in the form of scientific sociological discourses reveals significant “ambiguities” (E. Balibar) in the representation of the nation, which provides material (objects) for subject thematization in scientific research. The task is to identify and determine the conditions for the possibility of a consistent representation of the nation and the principle of its structure. The second part of the analysis of the narrative history of the emergence and formation of European nations focuses on M. Foucault’s statement that “a nation is one of the forms of civil society”. It is revealed that the political community of the “nation” as an actor of the revolutionary struggle is defined in the “discourse of war”; the population as an object of “police care of the state» in the managerial paradigm is attributed the freedom of rational pursuit of particular interests, that is, the right to «public use of freedom” (I. Kant) within the framework defined in this way; the institution of such freedom is called “civil society”; the nation is presented as a form of unity (together with the state, on whose behalf the narrative of the nation is built), restraining the “centrifugal” of particular interests. It is concluded that the nation is presented as an intermediary between citizens and the political order of a liberal state.