Bensel's Modern Foundings: Connecting State, Nation, and Regime, through Juridical Equality

Abstract This article draws on Richard Franklin Bensel's magisterial The Founding of Modern States to highlight a point neglected in current political science debates: regime- and state-building are inextricably linked to the definition of a people, to nation-building. Bensel argues that these processes are defined contemporaneously at the critical founding moment, disquietingly noting this involves mythological conceptions of the popular will across all regime types. He explores six paradigmatic cases: democratic cases like England, France, and the United States, as well as nondemocratic regimes like Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. His analysis shows that democracies do not differ from alternative forms of government either by invoking “the will of the people,” as all regimes do so, or by process. Instead, he explains the variation across cases based on differences in the concept of the "Transcendental Social Purpose" (TSP), which provides the founding narrative of a state, i.e, how “the people” and their common aims come to be defined. We build on his argument to further specify the conditions of regime emergence: regimes that define the people based on actualized juridical equality within clear territorial boundaries become democracies, whereas regimes that define the people based on essentialist attributes (e.g., race, religion, or even class), while extending them beyond state boundaries, result in nondemocracies. This variation, in turn, is explained by greater state capacity to achieve such depoliticization prior to regime formation. Finally, we survey the literature to show how nation-building has been neglected in accounts of state- and regime-building, even though, as Bensel’s book and this account suggest, it is constitutive of both processes. The insight suggests new avenues of exploration.