a tax-paying estate that did not participate in the political life”.183
At the same time, one cannot help but notice that the evolution of the concept of the nation, from Rome with its developed civil institutions to the Middle Ages and then to our times, serves as an adequate reflection of the evolution of nation as a social group whose main feature is direct (albeit passive) involvement in the functioning of the social and political institutions of the state and the civil society.
In Rome, with its developed civil society, the whole population of the empire was in one way or another involved in the activities of the state institutions, and the concept of the nation included all citizens of Rome. At the same time, the barbaric periphery of the empire, which was at the stage of tribal unions and the dominance of tribal relations, was objectively closer to tribes (gens).
During the medieval period, the concept of the nation and the social class that considered itself part of it understandably narrowed down to the elite of the stratum, linked to the political and church power and state governing. Thus, medieval nations were relics of the late Roman Empire’s civil society, surrounded by the seas of natural economy and tribal archaisms. Nevertheless, the concept of the nation remained as the name for a system-building social group, defining the system of power (political) relations.
The consequent growth of cities, professions and trade was followed by the justifiable expansion of the meaning of the term, but this expansion was an objective reflection of the increase of the population and of the influence of the social group, comprising the civil society of the time with its stratified limitations.
The beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the increase in importance of the third estate was followed by demands to recognize it as a “nation’ – that is, to grant it civil rights corresponding to its role in the life of the society. Correspondingly, bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries removed obstacles to the expansion of the nation as a concept and as a social group, up to the size of the whole population of the state.
The final fixation of the concept of nation as a structured, culturally and psychologically integrated community of the subjects of the same state is linked to outstanding German philosopher Georg Hegel, who provided the most complete and system-like description of the sociophilosophical problem of the formation and evolution of nations among his contemporaries. In fact, Hegel introduced the very notion of the “nation’ as a basic category in sociophilosophical discourse.
The sociophilosophical doctrine of Hegel is based on the premise that historical development of humankind is predetermined by the evolution of a “global spirit’, which expresses itself through social manifestations of the “spirit of the nation’ (the “spirit of the people’).
According to Hegel, every nation is characterized by the development of the “spirit of the people’, which manifests itself in social forms and “is a certain spirit that creates an obvious, factual world, that… exists in its religion, in its cult, its customs, in its state system and its political laws, in all its institutions, in its actions and activities”.184
At the same time, Hegel’s “spirit of the people’ is a form in which the “global spirit’ can manifest itself: “Principles of spirits of a people in the necessary continuity are themselves only moments of a single united spirit, which elevates and finishes in the history through them, understanding itself and becoming all-encompassing”.185
Hegel’s “global spirit’ is reflected in history: “In global history, the idea of the spirit manifests itself in reality as a range of external forms, each of which finds its manifestation in an actively existing people. But this side of the existence is given in time as well as in space in the form of the natural existence and a special principle, typical of every global and historical people is also typical of it as a natural definitiveness.”
The “spirit of the people’, being the embodiment of the “global spirit’, expresses itself in the form of a state: “That commonality that manifests itself and is being learned through the state, the form into which all the existing is being moulded, is what constitutes the formation of a nation. Certain content, which is moulded into the form of a community and which lies in a certain reality, which is the state, that is the spirit of the people”.186
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