280 A Positive Century (1815–1914)practices, and customs. Th e nationality school joined the historical school
in opposing the universalism of natural law, and in favoring the idea of plu-
ralism and diversity instead.
Th e earliest major champion of the core idea of the nationality school— of
a nation as a cultural unit more fundamental than a state— was the Prus sian
schoolmaster and roving intellectual Gottfried Herder, in the late eigh-
teenth century. His was a cosmopolitan vision, with the world as a confed-
eration of nationalities living in harmony. Another early expression of the
nationality principle was by the Franco- Swiss literary fi gure Germaine de
Staël, in her book On Germany in 1810. She expressed the view that the
ideal goal for a state was that it would display an ethnic and cultural unity,
with its citizens united by a common language and historical memories.
According to the nationality thesis, states are merely the external trap-
pings of nations. In the words of Savigny, the state is “the bodily form of the
spiritual community of the nation.” Th e nationality school applied this
idea to international law, to produce the thesis that states and nations should
be brought into closer conjunction. More specifi cally, the contention was
that a people constituting a nationality possesses a fundamental right to
form themselves into a state. Th e most prominent and forceful proponent of
this notion was the Italian publicist and would- be revolutionary, Giuseppi
Mazzini, the found er (in 1830) and guiding spirit of “Young Italy.” Th is was
a nationalist movement advocating the expulsion of Austrian rule from the
north of Italy, Bourbon rule from the south, and papal rule from the center—
all to be supplanted by the birth of a single Italian state that would embody
the destiny of the Italian people to be united po liti cally into one state, as
they were already united culturally into one nation.
Mazzini was one of the supreme idealists and propagandists of world his-
tory. Narrow and jealous forms of nationalism were not his style. On the
contrary, he was a thoroughgoing cosmopolitan who saw the various na-
tionalities of the world as operating harmoniously despite— or even because
of— their diverse outlooks and traditions. His picture resembled that of the
liberal economists, who similarly saw the economic regions of the world,
with their diff erent resource endowments, as all contributing to the prog-
ress and integration of the world economy in general. Mazzini believed that
every nationality has its unique character, with its distinctive gift s to off er to
the greater human family. Between the countries of the world, he enthused,