From Ontology to Political Philosophy – a category error?

It is often said that relating ontology to political philosophy is a category error. Metaphysics deals with being; political theory deals with institutions, laws, and collective decision‑making. The two domains, it is argued, should not mix. But this objection only holds if political concepts are treated as pure abstractions. My argument is that nations are not abstractions. They are actualities.

A concept can be an abstraction. Liberal political philosophy largely operates at this level: nations are treated as legal fictions, containers for rights, or procedural units. They are conceptual constructs first, and anything actual about them is secondary. But nations are not like that. Nations are something that is somewhere in space and time. They are not transcendental ideas; they are extended actualities.

In my metaphysical system, the first intelligible distinction is between presence and coherence. Presence is the outward movement of being: the pressure to appear, to impose itself, to occupy coordinates, to enter into relation. Coherence is the inward movement of being: the gathering into identity, the formation of a centre, the “thatness” that allows something to endure. These are the minimal grammar of intelligibility.

This grammar applies to all actualities. Even the simplest intelligible unit—the monad—has presence and coherence. It stands forth as something, and it gathers itself as something. It has externality and interiority. It is not an abstraction; it is an actuality.

This distinction becomes crucial when we consider political entities.

A club or association has coherence—shared identity—and some presence—relational activity. But its presence is thin. It does not impose itself upon a domain. It does not occupy territory in any essential sense. Its presence is relational rather than spatial.

A nation is different. A nation has coherence—shared identity—but it also has thick presence: a dense, spatially extended form of outward being. A nation occupies territory not incidentally but essentially. It stands forth as an actuality in space‑time. Its presence is territorial, geometric, jurisdictional. It is not merely a cultural group; it is a spatially extended being.

Thus a nation is an actuality with two essential dimensions:

• Presence: it is something that is somewhere—an extended being in space and time.
• Coherence: it is a connected aggregate—its members share a bond that makes the group intelligible as a nation rather than a random population.

This is why the category‑error objection fails. When we ask “What is a nation?” we are not asking about a legal fiction or a conceptual abstraction. We are asking about an actuality—an entity that exists in the world, extended over a domain of space and time, with a demonstrable connection among its members.

And this is where my communitarian argument emerges. Liberalism tends to treat nations as abstractions: voluntary associations, procedural units, or juridical constructs. It remains at the level of thought experiment. But communitarian politics begins from the opposite intuition—that nations are real, extended, coherent beings in the world, and that any serious political philosophy must start from their presence and coherence, not from abstraction.

Nations are not ideas. They are actualities. And political philosophy that ignores this fact will always misunderstand what a nation is.