"Nations and Nationalism" by Ernest Gellner (1983)

Gellner's thesis flatters the educator: A nation state is not a monopolist on violence. A nation state is a monopolist in setting general-education standards.

A nation is a labour market. A nation state is the entity that supports this market by supplying the public good that enables it: general education. With this interpretation, one can construct nonesensical sentences (typically referring to pre-industrial or post-industrial societies), for instance, to imply that mathematicians are a nation. Whenever such a sentence reads nonsensical, replace "nation" with "identity." The mathematician is an identity.

Another, equivalent, interpretation of Gellner is that a nation is a language, which circumscribes the labour market in a modern economy.

Cambridgeshire is not a nation state because the success of Cambridge University relies on the pool of applicants and the set of employment opportunities that transcend the boundaries of Cambridgeshire.

Gellner asserts that unique to a nation state is the culture that is shared across all social classes, instead of a collection of cultures, one for the ruler and many for the ruled. A test of a common culture is incidence of jokes, whether humour travels across class and ethnic boundaries, and whether there is humour at all.