George Kateb’s lead essay in the March issue of Cato Unbound argues against the supposed virtues of patriotism, the “love of country.” Such devotion, he tells us, arises from deep misunderstandings of the place of the country in the lives of its citizens and the nature of political authority. The metaphorical view of nation as parent reinforces these confusions, and instills in the public a misplaced sense that they owe the same sort of devotion to their homeland as to those persons who quite literally brought them into it. And so patriotism turns out also to be a dangerous sentiment: it “makes virtues do the work of vices while promoting the praise of vices as disguised virtues,” and so functions as “the greatest asset in the internal and ever-present war against the sentiments and institutions of free government.”

As I understand it, Kateb’s argument proceeds in two distinct stages. In the first place there is a discussion of what I will call the metaphysics of citizen and country. Kateb argues that it is only according to the old, mistaken understanding of the political, according to which the state has some sort of special ontological priority to its occupants, that patriotic devotion can be thought of as an appropriate sentiment. Once we come to think of political community as underwritten by a “social contract,” we see that a nation is not a proper object for anything resembling filial love, and that its citizens are by no means obligated to identify their individual ends with its own. Secondly, however, Kateb raises the specifically pragmatic question of whether, ontological issues aside, patriotism is a good thing—that is to say, whether its social and political consequences are or aren’t good ones. It seems clear that these two classes of questions can receive distinct answers: Kateb could be right about the metaphysical status of the notion of state as patria but mistaken in his argument that this understanding is politically unhealthy, or vice versa. My contention, though, is that Kateb’s argument ultimately gets things wrong on both counts.

Let me start with the metaphysical issues, and return to the question of consequences a bit later on. Of the ontological confusions wrought by the nation-as-parent metaphor, Kateb has this to say:

I do not literally owe to my country my coming into existence. It’s true that I could not go on if I didn’t live in some society, but my genes are not politically identifiable; a country is not a biological entity. My parents could have moved after I was born; my country could have lost the territory in which I was born; I could have been abducted and raised elsewhere. My parents are one thing, my country another, altogether different.

This contrast is rather weak, and spelling it out seems to me to reveal a significant defect in this portion of Kateb’s argument. For in the first place, it simply is not true that my having come into existence is independent, in this way, of my relationship to country: my mother and father quite likely would never have known each other if they had not both been Americans, and if they had managed to meet up and procreate it would have been under such different circumstances that it is hard to make sense of the idea that any of the children they might have had would have been numerically identical to me. Moreover, while it is true that I could have been separated from my country after birth or conception, the same goes for my association with my parents: I can, for example, make perfectly good sense of a counterfactual world in which they left me on the door of an orphanage and departed, never to come into contact with me again. And my relationship to my nation is, in these respects, not all that different from that in which I stand to my mother and father; both cases are marked by correlative classes of metaphysical necessities and contingencies.