Modern Peoplehood is a most impressive achievement by an extraordinarily intelligent, courageous, and—that goes without saying—‘well-read’ mind. The scope of this work is enormous: it provides no less than a comprehensive historically-grounded theory of ‘modern peoplehood,’ which is Lie’s felicitous umbrella term for everything that goes under the names ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ and ‘nationality.’

Lie’s objective is to treat a series of large topics that he sees as related but that are usually treated separately: the social construction of identities, the origins and nature of modern nationalism, the explanation of genocide, and racism. These multiple themes are for him aspects of something he calls ‘modern peoplehood.’ His mode of demonstration is to review all the alternative explanations for each phenomenon, and to show why each successively is inadequate. His own theses are controversial but he makes a strong case for them. This book should renew debate.

In discussing what are usually termed race, ethnicity, and nationalism, here rendered felicitously by the general term ‘peoplehood,’ Lie has produced an original, erudite work that will appeal to sociologists, political scientists, and historians, as well as a wider public interested in race, ethnicity, and nationalism. It is a groundbreaking contribution that will recast our understanding of some of the core issues of our day.