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In recent decades, Dutchness has become an intensely debated issue in Dutch public sphere. The article problematises the labelling of nations and nationalisms that occurs in public and academic understandings of these developments. Craig Calhoun's concept of discursive formation is argued to be more fruitful for understanding the recent contestations over Dutchness. Yet Calhoun's theory is itself in need of elaboration. Whereas Calhoun proposes to focus on the extent to which nations are constructed as publics of highly differentiated members, it is precisely this image that is central to an exclusionary discourse of Dutchness and enables the exclusion of cultural others from the Dutch imaginary. By analysing the enactment of Dutchness through discourses on citizenship, the surprising congruence of pluralism and exclusion in the Dutch context is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a speech by Craig Calhoun, political research from New York University, delivered at the London School of Economics and Political Science on April 16, 2008, in which he discussed cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and the views of social anthropologist Ernest Gellner.

This article responds to Craig Calhoun and other critics of the author by defending the seriousness and coherence of public sociology as a distinct realm within a national and global disciplinary division of sociological labor, and as an antidote to external subversion. Two visions of the public sociologist are two visions of social change; the one riding on the claimed universality of intellectuals, the other riding on the organization of subaltern groups. For the traditional public sociologist the privileged site is the university, while civil society is the locus of misrecognized suffering; for the organic public sociologist civil society is the source of insight into what is and what could be, insight excavated and elaborated by the sociologist. This gives two divergent visions and divisions of sociology as a field of power. In the conception of traditional public sociology the danger comes from the invading forces of mass media, consultantships, technocracy, commodification and politicization of the university, refracted within the field of sociology as the subjugation of the academic to the extraacademic. In the conception of the organic public sociology domination appears as rationalization. Here the danger comes from science itself, such as neoliberal economics that imposes a singular model on all, precisely because it does not acknowledge the critique of its theoretical foundations or the lived experience of the people its theorizes.