Groups

One of the unusual approaches to this blog will be its individualist cosmopolitanism. I will assert that groups of people are not real, separate bounded entities. They instead are simply conglomerations of individuals, for one reason or another. This does not mean that the individuals of which a group is composed are self-instituted discrete bodies. Jurgen Habermas's insights will be useful here, to situate such thinking in the discourses through which peoples comprehension of the world are constituted.

For the purposes of this blog, that will mean accepting that nations and other organisations are fictions - long-running and behaviourally important, undoubtedly - but fictions nonetheless. If readers wish to take issue with this idea please do it somewhere else. There may be valuable aspects to national loyalty, for instance, or to behaviours promoted by citizenship, but these will be approached separately and distinctly. Anyone who holds that there is something genetically intrinsic about one particular nation that is somehow transcendent to all others above and beyond cultural discourses is unwelcome. They need to accept their basic racism and head off for more intolerant climes....