Hazony’s many references to the Bible are well chosen. Few national stories are as widely known. Most of history details the growth, exploits and subsequent decline of empires. Imperial stories span continents and touch many different peoples. National histories tend to be localised and parochial. Outsiders typically find them far less interesting — and for good reason. Many of the critiques of nationalism are well founded: Nationalists are parochial. Their interests are localised. They’re content to accept behaviour among other nations that they consider unacceptable for their own. They assume responsibility for their own co-nationals without feeling remotely responsible for the plight of others. They believe that charity begins at home, and favour those to whom they feel kinship even if others can demonstrate a greater need. They balk at international laws that conflict with their own. They’re more interested in preserving their own right to do things their own way than in adopting universal norms and standards. They’re even OK setting up a rights-based democracy for their own people while living peacefully with authoritarian neighbours. Terrible, thoughtless, cold people, those nationalists.

Yet Hazony still insists that nationalism is a virtue. Note carefully his choice of titles. A book on “the virtues” of nationalism would characterise nationalism as an approach with many upsides. That book is not this book — though Hazony does include ample material about those upsides. No, to Hazony, nationalism itself is “a virtue”.

Philosophers and theologians like to enumerate virtues — characteristics that make people good people and societies good societies. The “Seven Contrary Virtues” were a seventh-century formulation of specific defences against Pope Gregory’s “Seven Deadly Sins”: humility to counter pride, kindness to counter envy, abstinence to counter gluttony, chastity to counter lust, patience to counter anger, liberality to counter greed, and diligence to counter sloth.

Hazony sees nationalism as a virtue in precisely that sense; it is the counter to the deadly sin of imperialism. And it is indeed a virtue because for all its faults, “a principled standpoint that regards the world as governed best when nations are able to chart their own independent course, cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference” is the only way to allow us all to be comfortable in our own skins while happily enabling others to live and let live.

There, in a nutshell, is the virtue of nationalism.