Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism. By Anthony W. Marx. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 288p. $26.00.

This is a bold and challenging study of European nationalism based on the following thesis: Nationalism was a phenomenon of state building that predated the eighteenth-century starting point favored by most scholars and whose genesis was elite pragmatism and popular mobilization. Moving the origins of nationalism back to the sixteenth (and even late fifteenth) century allows Anthony Marx to make two arguments, one explanatory and the other evaluative. Of the two, the former seems to be more persuasive.