380 Am Soc (2010) 41:375–381 second, that support for such movements may be driven by ideal or symbolic rather than material interests, by issues of dignity and recognition rather than redistribution. Chuck’s instrumentalist, incentives-based account goes further in explaining elite- claims-making, but it has its limits even in this domain. The prospect of controlling a state apparatus, or sharing in the spoils of such control, is indeed a powerful incentive; and if claiming to speak in the name of a nation—and organizing convincing “we are a nation” performances—is the only way to secure such control, then deploying nationalist rhetoric and organizing nationalist rituals can do useful political work for elites. But what makes that political work actually “work”? What are the conditions of its efficacy? Such political work is likely to work when two conditions are met: first, when nationhood is widely accepted by powerful states and institutionalized in powerful organizations as the sole legitimator of independent statehood; and second, when nationhood is widely available to and internalized by ordinary people as a basic “principle of vision and division of the world,” in Bourdieu’s terms. The bellicist— and deeply materialist and instrumentalist—story line about the shift from indirect to direct rule and the consequent change in incentives can’t explain these large scale cultural transformations. Chuck did give a cultural twist to his theory of nationalism in later formulations. But this remained largely confined to the performative, recognition-seeking dimension of nationalist claims-making; and the efficacy of these recognition-seeking perform- ances presupposes larger cultural transformations that Chuck’s theory does not address. In other words, Chuck’s theory takes for granted the wide availability and powerful legitimacy of the category “nation” as a major principle of vision and division of the social world. It therefore risks explaining one aspect of nationalism by another aspect of nationalism—explaining nationalist claims-making by the pre- existing availability and legitimacy of nationhood as a resonant and legitimate cultural and political category. Put another way, Chuck offers a theory of nationalism without nationhood. The theory addresses the political form of nationalist claims-making while ignoring the cultural content of nationalist sense-making. Yet this limitation should perhaps be understood as a virtue. The term “nationalism” designates a notoriously multifaceted and protean field of phenomena. As a result, no single comprehensive theory of nationalism is possible. Chuck provided a remarkably succinct and powerful structural account of the ways in which the changing dynamics of war-making and state-making shape new kinds of claims- making by central rulers and threatened peripheral elites. This is not the whole story of nationalism, but it is a key strand in a complex and multi-stranded story. And Chuck formulated the causal logic of this strand more clearly and powerfully than anyone else. For this alone, he should be more widely recognized as an important theorist of nationalism. His account of nationalist performances, too, usefully situated nationalism in the wider field of social movements and contentious politics. Chuck was once the respondent to an after-dinner talk I gave on ways of rethinking nationhood. He characterized my remarks, fairly enough, as “a bridge halfway.” Warming to the metaphor, Chuck observed that “anyone venturing out very far along [this bridge] runs the risk of plunging into new confusions,” and indeed—pushing the metaphor still further, as Chuck liked to do—risks “drowning” in those “murky waters” (1994:15).