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The subject of the political reality of modernity:
towards a genealogy of modern nation

Levytskyy V.S.,

Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia, victorsl2609@gmail.com

elibrary_id: 1169409 | ORCID: 0000-0001-9744-5345 | RESEARCHER_ID: GZG-3184-2022

Article received: 2025.07.19 20:19. Accepted: 2026.02.18 20:19


DOI: 10.17976/jpps/2026.03.11
EDN: IJMXYM

Rubric: Theory and methodology of political studies

For citation:

Levytskyy V.S. The subject of the political reality of modernity: towards a genealogy of modern nation. – Polis. Political Studies. 2026. No. 3. https://doi.org/10.17976/jpps/2026.03.11. EDN: IJMXYM (In Russ.)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the genealogy of the modern nation and its constitution as a subject of political reality. First, based on the analysis of the discourse on the nation, three main traditions of understanding the nation are distinguished therein: substantialist, desubstantialist and deontological. Further, to determine the scientific validity and heuristic value of these approaches, the article examines the etymology and semantics of such concepts as “ethnos”, “nation” and “people”. As a result of the analysis, the historical variability of the meanings of these terms and the uniqueness of the modern combination of the field of meanings of the concepts “nation” and “people” are stated, which makes it possible to assert the connection of the modern understanding of the “nation” with the formation of a new cultural paradigm – modernity. Based on the conclusion reached and in order to trace the phenomenology of the nation’s formation as a subject of political reality, an analysis of landmark documents of the era is carried out: peace treaties, declarations and decrees. The conducted research allowed us to state that the nation became the subject of the political process at the turn of the XVIII-XIX centuries. In this regard, it is argued that the birth of a modern nation is the result of a systemic cultural transformation associated primarily with a rethinking of the nature of the individual and the essence of the social process. Philosophical explications play an important role in such transformations: in the philosophy of the Enlightenment it was proved that a person is an autonomous, free, equal subject, and the voluntary unity of many such individuals – the people/nation acts as a new form of political legitimacy. At the same time, it is shown that the idea of an autonomous self–sufficient personality is not an innovation of Enlightenment thinkers, but a secularized form of Christian anthropology. As a summary, it is stated that the nation, like modernity itself, appears as a result of the detranscendatalization of the Christian cultural paradigm and is a post-Christian phenomenon, genetically dependent on it.

Keywords

nation, people, ethnos, modernity, political reality, Christianity, secularization.

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