I thank Anatol Lieven for the kind words expressed at the beginning of his critique and for his conclusion that I am a brilliant political economist. He reasonably enough notes some of the things I neglect, like India and Africa, and the politics of personal identity, to which I can only reply in pragmatic terms—is not the book long enough without them? He says very little about either economic or military power, which is at least half the book. He focuses overwhelmingly on the intersection of ideological and political power, especially on nationalism and what he calls “political culture.” So I too will focus on this terrain. We obviously disagree on some issues. However, some of his substantive criticisms are mixed in with misunderstandings of my arguments, often due to the fact that he has not apparently read—or not read carefully enough—the second and third volumes of my Sources of Social Power. This is especially true of nationalism, which he accuses me of neglecting in my previous volumes as well as this one. This is untrue. My second volume, on the long nineteenth century, has the subtitle “The Rise of Classes and Nation-States” and its central argument is that the two emerged entwined, mutually influencing one another. For example, I argue that the resolution or repression of class conflict went beyond the local or sector level and served to increase the salience of the nation-state in peoples’ everyday lives. Despite what he says, I also discuss the rise of mass national education and mass national armies. I stress that the origins of modern welfare states lay in veterans’ benefits, specifically discussing the Bismarckian programs in Germany, although in the case of France and the USA, I trace this practice further back, well before Bismarck. Clearly, national identities intensified in the nineteenth century, although I stand by my argument that “a sense of nationhood did diffuse but rarely dominated people’s consciousness.” Here, we clearly disagree. I would also stick by my statement that nineteenth century states did a lot less than twentieth century states, or that aggressive nationalism grew much more in the twentieth century. But my discussion of nationalism and national self-identification is more nuanced than a simple “rise and rise” story. I try to identify the precise social location of emergent nationalism, seeing its nineteenth century heartland as the middle class who worked in the state sector. Outside this sector, I do not find much support for aggressive nationalism. For example I say, Int J Polit Cult Soc (2016) 29:217–220 DOI 10.1007/s10767-015-9213-3