Abstract
Abstract The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the gradual formation of discourses on identity which linked together the concepts of race, nation, and ethnic group or community. Each of these categories was initially conceived as discrete and homogeneous. Theories of race posited biology, geography, and climatic conditions as the bases for differences in skin colour and, by extension, in the ability to contribute to the progress of civilization through the arts and sciences. Models of nationhood primarily took two forms, one civic and one cultural or ethnic, both of which remain influential today. Civic nationalism, founded on the values of liberty and justice, is underpinned by social contract theory, as depicted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by John Locke and David Hume, and, in particular, in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract of 1762. According to Rousseau, the state is established and acquires legitimacy in terms of the ‘general will of the people’, rather than through force.
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