On Geoffrey Benjamin’s deep sociology of the nation-state

ABSTRACT: What is the unseen presence of the nation-state? What is so mystifying about the state of social theory that has effectively masked the nature of its cultural hegemony? At the time of his initial writing, Geoffrey Benjamin’s ruminations on these themes were novel and theoretically critical. Thirty years on, many of these conceptual mysteries remain unresolved. However, like the advent of governmentality, neo-liberalism and biopolitics, the omnipresence of national imagination and violence of state power still warrant problematization.