Am Soc (2010) 41:375–381 379 Of course, Chuck’s passionate pursuit of parsimony stood in chronic tension with his equally passionate engagement with the superabundant richness and sheer exuberant variety of the empirical world, historical and contemporary. This dynamic—and I would say unruly—tension was part of what made his work so appealing, even to those otherwise quite allergic to reductionism. But I digress. Parsimony has its price. In focusing on the instrumental usefulness of the language of nationhood to elite participants in struggles over extraction and power—central rulers on the one hand and peripheral elites or cultural brokers on the other—Chuck did not ask other questions about that language. He did not ask about what made the language of nationhood plausible, resonant, meaningful, or inspiring to ordinary people—or indeed if and when it was plausible, resonant, meaningful, or inspiring to them. He did not ask how people who belonged to particular states came to understand themselves as belonging also, or indeed primarily, to particular nations. He did not ask how ordinary people came to identify with and commit themselves to elite-led national movements. An instrumental account, built on material incentives, goes much further in explaining state-seeking nationalist claims-making by elites than in explaining popular support for such claims. For understanding the shifting self-understandings, identifications, loyalties, and commitments of ordinary people in response to state- led or state-seeking nationalist projects, Chuck’s emphasis on the instrumental usefulness of nationalist rhetoric is not all that instrumentally useful. Chuck rightly emphasized the enormous advantages of controlling a state of one’s own in an age of expanding state power. But to whom do those advantages accrue? Nationalists would have us believe that they accrue to “the nation” as a whole. Chuck was in general skeptical—and I think rightly so—about nationalist rhetoric. He noted that the claims of nationalist movements, like those of social movements, “always include a measure of mystification” (1998: 178), in that they tend to exaggerate the unity and coherence of their putative constituencies as well as their own claim to represent and speak for those constituencies. But I don’t think Chuck pushed his skepticism towards nationalist rhetoric far enough. Nationalist rhetoric turns on a metaphor of ownership: every nation should have “its own” state. But that metaphor—to use Chuck’s term—frequently involves a mystification. States may “belong” in theory to the nations for whom they are named; but they often belong in practice to a much narrower set of people. Those who stand to participate in or benefit from control of an independent state have powerful incentives indeed to seek to establish such a state. But for ordinary people, the material incentives are mixed at best. Independent statehood entails a pervasive shift in the scale of political, social, and economic organization. Those who will occupy the corridors of power or fill the public sector jobs in the new state stand to benefit substantially from the downward shift in scale; but others may be harmed by the constriction of fields of production, mobility, and exchange. I don’t think Chuck paid enough attention to these mixed incentives. Although he doesn’t say so directly, various formulations suggest that all members of “the nation” will benefit from the establishment of an independent state, and that popular support for independence reflects the same calculus of incentives that accounts for elite claims-making. He doesn’t consider two alternative possibilities: first, that there may be minimal or limited popular support for state-seeking nationalist movements; or