Perfecting the nation: Enlightenment perspectives on the coincidence of linguistic and ‘national’ refinement

This article describes the correlation between language and nation in Enlightenment thought and its perceived value as a means to pursue investigations aimed at deciphering the ‘rules of social evolution’. In doing so, it further clarifies the manner in which ‘the nation’ was represented in contemporary texts, lending much-needed empirical support to recent overtures in this direction by scholars who have challenged the validity of temporally and spatially fixed ideal types. Dictionaries and other lexicographical works are used to illuminate the semantic traditions underlying the correlations cited above and the fitness more generally of ‘the nation’ for the anthropological pursuits of the period. The study is then extended to a survey of contemporary works of history, natural philosophy and other episteme, the texts under review supplying further testimony of a theoretical perspective in which nation, ‘manners’ and language were not only connected, but deemed to be in a relationship of coterminous perfectibility. This theoretical outlook explains, in conclusion, why endeavours aimed at linguistic refinement were explicitly identified as ‘national’ undertakings by Enlightenment-era reformers, providing, in turn, important historical context for one prominent stream of nineteenth-century nationalist discourse.