Law cannot create a nation that lacks material productive capacities

Evidence

This means that a group of individuals can always come together and can always give itself laws and a legislature; it can give itself a constitution. If that group of individuals does not have the capacity for commerce, handicrafts, and agriculture, or the ability to form an army, a magistrature, and so on, it will never, in historical terms, be a nation. It might be a nation in juridical terms, but never in historical terms. A contract, a law, or a consensus can never really create a nation. Conversely, it is perfectly possible for a group of individuals to have the wherewithal, the historical ability to develop works, to exercise functions, without ever having been given a common law anda legislature. Such people would, in a sense, be in possession of the substantive and functional elements of the nation; they are not in possession of its formal elements. They are capable of nationhood, but they will not be a nation. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 235

Categorization

• QUESTION: Foucault stops short of saying such people are actually a nation — worth pushing: what does ‘capable of nationhood’ imply for stateless peoples?
• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s race-thinking-and-statelessness interest; also echoes Arendt on stateless peoples. — connects to: Society’s development cannot be explained by physical laws of quantity.; Law is the state’s instrument for creating a desired type of citizen; Socialism lacks an intrinsic art of government and must invent one — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 586

Related

• Law is the state’s instrument for creating a desired type of citizen (similarity 0.86)
• Society’s development cannot be explained by physical laws of quantity. (similarity 0.79)