Michael Herzfeld has spent a career showing that the grand abstractions of political life — the nation, the state, Europe itself — rest on habits of speech that almost nobody examines. Now emeritus at Harvard, he has written on Greek bureaucracy, on what he calls “cultural intimacy,” and on the “crypto-colonial” predicament of countries never formally colonized but shaped all the same by European power. His short essay “A plethora of polities,” published in a HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory forum honoring the late political scientist James C. Scott, presses the case to a practical conclusion. Anthropologists, he argues, should stop talking about “the state.”
His reasoning begins with alarm. Far-right movements across Europe and the United States have seized the language of culture while rejecting the anthropological premise that culture is learned rather than inherited by blood. The results appear in the wreckage of the Yugoslav Federation and the civil war in Sri Lanka. Against this, Herzfeld finds the compound “nation-state” doubly misleading. It assumes we agree on what a nation is, and it assumes the word “state” means something transparent. Both assumptions fail.
Take the nation first. Because scholars have scrutinized “state” far more closely than “nation,” an ethnic definition of nationhood has crept into ordinary talk unchallenged. Herzfeld notes that even ideologues who insist they defend culture rather than race betray a fear of biological mixing. He points to Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s pronatalism, which he reads against the fascist obsession with stirpe, or stock. Italy’s demographic problem could be solved by welcoming immigrants and letting them marry Italians. No pronatalist government will take that advice. Bans on “ethnic food” in historic city centers reveal the same logic of contamination, and “white nationalism,” lately disguised as “Christian nationalism,” reveals the racial premise outright.
History supports him. The entities born of Westphalia in 1648 were religious rather than national; they became national only with mercantile empire. Colonial administrators defined ethnicities as instruments of divide and rule. In crypto-colonial states such as Greece, Iran, Nepal, and Thailand, rising middle classes embraced ethnonational logic to advance their own standing, excluding minorities while cultivating profitable alliances with the European powers they feared. Herzfeld’s sharpest illustration comes from the Greek-Turkish population exchange that followed the Treaty of Lausanne. Religion, not language, determined who moved. Refugees arrived in Greece speaking no Greek. In Turkey in 1990 Herzfeld met Cretan Muslims classified as Turks who still composed verse in their Greek dialect, and an elderly woman whose Turkish extended to “good day.” States decide who belongs. Folk ideas of blood then fuse with pseudo-science, and the amalgam turns lethal, as it did under Nazism and again in the Balkan wars. Where clan feuds once met local machinery for reconciliation, nations at war have none.
Then Herzfeld turns on his own remaining constant. The state is no steadier a concept than the nation. Here Giambattista Vico enters, and here the essay becomes interesting for readers who care about his legacy.
Vico appears twice, both times briefly. Herzfeld reports that Vico supposedly won his only prize for an essay on the etymology of the word “state,” that the essay is lost, and that a close reading of the New Science suggests Vico would have exposed the civic disabilities buried in a term related to “static” and “stability.” Later, Herzfeld credits Vico with the insight that the history of political language records transformations in the political structures people actually inhabit — an insight, he warns, we ignore at our peril.
The method Herzfeld then applies is thoroughly Vichian. Calling the Greek polis a “city-state” begs the question, as does calling it democratic. He prefers “polity,” notes that modern Greek politia means something like a way of life and stands opposed to kratos, the capricious power that citizens endure, and observes that many Italians think it civile to hide undocumented migrants from officials. Latin civitas has shrunk to “city,” much as Thai moeang has, though moeang once named a mandala-shaped cosmos with the king’s regenerative power at its center. Treat such polities as states and you project modern assumptions backward. Call them polities and you risk less. Herzfeld closes by proposing that the discipline rename itself the anthropology of polities, reserving “ethnonational state” for those polities where ethnic identity governs membership and access to rights, and detaching the state as bureaucratic institution from nationhood altogether.
That program is recognizably the New Science at work: philology married to philosophy, vulgar speech treated as a witness to buried institutions, the order of ideas tracked against the order of things. Vico’s demonstration that the Latin word for law preserves the memory of the assemblies that made it is the ancestor of Herzfeld’s demonstration that civitas shrinking to “city” records the migration of power to metropolitan centers.
Yet the essay hands Vico scholars two problems. The first is documentary. Vico appears in no citation and no reference entry. The lost prize essay is introduced with “allegedly” and left unsourced, so a reader cannot check it. Neither can a reader check the “close reading” of the New Science said to license Herzfeld’s conjecture. In a five-page tribute, brevity is expected; but the appeal to Vico is load-bearing, supplying the warrant for the whole etymological argument, and load-bearing claims deserve references. Herzfeld earned this ground long ago in Anthropology through the Looking-Glass, which reads the discipline itself as a Vichian project. Newcomers get no route back to that work.
The second problem is selectivity. Vico’s etymologies served a universal scheme — an ideal eternal history through which all nations pass, a common nature of nations, a providence working behind human intention, and the recurrence of corsi and ricorsi. Herzfeld wants the reverse: particularity, and resistance to any framework that flattens polities into one shape. Borrowing Vico’s philology while discarding his metaphysics is defensible, and many have done it, but it should be declared rather than assumed. Otherwise Vico functions as a talisman.
Declaring it would also have paid. Vico’s account of the heroic aristocracies is the strongest resource in the New Science for Herzfeld’s argument, and it goes unused. There the patricians claim descent from the gods, monopolize the auspices, withhold marriage rights from the plebeians, and make ancestry the sole criterion of civic standing. That is Herzfeld’s ethnonational state in its earliest form, and Vico offers it not as analogy but as genealogy. The ricorso beckons too. Vico’s “barbarism of reflection,” in which a late civilization sinks into a cruelty worse than the first barbarism because it retains the manners of reason, sits uncomfortably close to Herzfeld’s “deliberately misinformed cruelty of race-based selection.” Invoking it would have cost him, since the ricorso carries the cyclical providence he means to avoid — but the cost is worth naming.
One further irony deserves mention. Herzfeld reads the root of “state” as promising stability. The same Indo-European root yields Greek stasis, meaning faction and civil war. The word conceals not merely civic disability but civil strife, which is exactly the kind of buried contradiction Vico built his etymologies to expose. Herzfeld leaves it on the table. He also proposes “polity,” a term descended from polis, shortly after warning that classical Greek holds our vocabulary too tightly. Vico would answer that no vocabulary is neutral, and that the remedy is not a cleaner word but permanent vigilance about the words we have. That vigilance is, in the end, what Herzfeld practices, and what makes this brief essay a demonstration that Vichian philology still works as political critique.
Herzfeld, Michael. “A Plethora of Polities: The State, the Nation-State, and the Ethnonational State.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 16, no. 2 (2026): 371–75. https://doi.org/10.1086/741752.
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