What is a Country?

notes
llm
What defines a country, and exploration and LLM comparison.
Author

Stephen J. Mildenhall

Published

2025-11-20

Modified

2025-11-20

November the 20th already! Where has the year gone? I’ve been reading Helen Thompson’s wonderful book Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century (OUP, 2022). The book has widened my perspective on several issues in global politics and economics, including the role of oil, without which it is impossible to understand international affairs in the 20th century, and an more global explanation of the global financial crisis of 2008 that de-emphasizes US subprime and instead highlights China’s trade surplus and the Eurodollar money market. Helen also has some fascinating things to say about the concept and roles of a country.

Yesterday, Google announced Gemini 3 the latest iteration of its large language model. See Figure 1 for how I’m sure Sundar Pichai did not want it characterized!

Figure 1: Old media comments on new technology. Headline from Metro, a free London newspaper, that I found on the underground yesterday.

This post explores the question “What is a Country?” It starts by providing a human answer, though one shamelessly based on the LLM output. Then it compares the raw answers I got from GPT and Gemini from three prompts, a project that neatly ties together my reading and the Gemini announcement. Next, I provide some human comments on the two sets of responses, Section 3. GPT failed to provide a good answer to a purely mechanical question asking it to extract references and sort into a table, and show how each reference was used—where Gemini was successful. Gemini also taught me a new word: cadastre (n) A register of property to serve as a basis of proportional taxation, a Domesday Book. Let’s start with my human answer.

What is a Country?

Countries are human constructs that evolve over time, often anchored in elaborate creation myths. Historically, they grew from the top down: an elite consolidates control over resources and surplus production (made possible by the agrarian revolution), builds bureaucratic systems to administer taxation, and wages war to expand or defend territory. Surplus extraction and war beget taxation begets money, law, record-keeping, and a constant debate over winners and losers. In modern settings, monetary systems create complex financial structures and the need for a lender of last resort, binding financial power to political authority. Control rests on a monopoly of violence. Geography can define natural borders for islands, whereas boundaries within large landmasses are political assertions. Shared history, language, and culture help legitimize elite authority and frame obligations to that elite as obligations to fellow citizens.

With the rise of democratic governance, the “will of the people” requires clear boundaries between those inside and outside the political community. The state—effectively the governing elite and “haves”—offers protection (including social security) to the “have nots” in exchange for the right to govern, often to their own benefit. Today, a country is a geographic space controlled through organized force, able to set and enforce laws, levy taxes, issue the money used to pay those taxes (a Roman innovation), defend its borders, and secure recognition from other states. It provides protection and stability (the Social Contract) in return for the explicit (votes) or implicit (avoidance of revolt) consent of its citizens, with the balance shaped by its level of democracy.

This framing overlaps with the concepts in the debate about development between geography (Diamond), institutions (Acemoglu and Robinson), and culture (Landes), as discussed in my post Geography, Institutions, and Culture.

Comparison of GPT and Gemini

This post presents answers to four questions given by two different models, GPT5.1 and Gemini 3 Thinking. It follows the same pattern as my previous comparisons: Sublime Text projects, Why Buy Insurance, Hosting Documentation on GitHub, Defining Bullshit, Science and Pseudo-science, Energy Intensity of Internet Traffic, and Potted Measure Theory.

The comparison is based on three question. The first asks for a summary of different approaches to the question “What is a country?” phrased in a guided but open-ended way. The second prompts for more details on Financial and Helen Thompson’s approaches. The final question asks for a simple tabular summary of the discussion.

Question 1

What is a country? Pls answer from sociological, political, anthropological, historical, philosophical perspectives - and any others ive missed. For each outline the main themes and ideas and reference the seminal works.

Question 2

Let’s add a financial monetary dimension, cause I think that’s particularly relevant with their EU and the euros zone. Also, Helen Thompson has some interesting things to say about the need for boundaries around the country that operates as a democracy. Perhaps you can add some comment on that too. Just the incremental output no need to replay whats already done.

Question 1

Pls create a markdown table summarizing all the perspectives

Comments

The answers are presented verbatim and separated by horizontal lines. No other editing applied. I am not qualified to comment on the quality of the answers; I am trying to learn about the topic, that’s why I’m asking! Therefore, my comments are more structural than semantic.

  • Gemini question 1: added a legal perspective. Included themes and references as requested; included summary table. Two references per domain. Offered a game theoretic follow up. Confusingly, started with a “focus”, unclear how that differs from themes.
  • Gemini question 2: highlights the importance of tax. Provided link to video of Thompson discussing her book.
  • Gemini question 3: provided link to export to sheets. Amusingly, asked if I wanted an actuarial perspective!
  • GPT question 1: added economics, international relations, legal, geographic, and psychological perspectives; stuck to requested theme and references format; deeper reference list, offering two to five works per domain.
  • GPT question 2: good to see MMT referenced.
  • GPT question 3: quoted the table for easier cut and paste.

As a meta test and question, I asked both models to strip out all the references, and compile into a table showing how they were used. Section 10 shows the results and considerable overlap. GPT failed to categorize the references; Gemini succeeded.

Finally, the banner map image, produced by MidJourney, shows their technology lagging. I find it much harder to use, lacking the conversational “move this here and that there” chat bot interaction. It was very hard to obtain a Peter’s projection map, even with a reference image. The crappy Mercator projection, a cartographic abomination, must be very strong in the training data!

Gemini: Answer 1

Here is an analysis of the concept of a “country” through the requested academic lenses.

1. Political Science: The State

Focus: Power, sovereignty, and institutions. In this view, a country is a State: a centralized political organization that imposes order over a territory. It is defined by its ability to maintain control and defend its sovereignty against internal and external threats.

  • Key Themes:
    • Monopoly on Violence: The state is the only entity within a territory permitted to use physical force (police, military).
    • Westphalian Sovereignty: The principle that states have exclusive control over their domestic affairs without external intervention.
    • The Social Contract: The theoretical agreement where individuals surrender some freedoms to the state in exchange for protection and order.
  • Seminal Works:
    • Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation (1919): Defines the state as the entity that possesses a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.”
    • Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651): Argues for a strong central authority to prevent the “war of all against all.”

2. Sociology: The Nation

Focus: Group identity, cohesion, and social constructs. Sociology often distinguishes the State (machinery) from the Nation (people). A “country” is often a Nation-State, a conflation of cultural identity with political boundaries.

  • Key Themes:
    • Imagined Communities: A nation is socially constructed; members will never know most of their peers, yet they feel a deep communion.
    • Nationalism: The ideological movement that draws boundaries between “us” and “them,” often based on language, religion, or shared history.
    • Civil Religion: The implicit religious values of a nation, expressed through rituals (anthems, flag raising) and symbols.
  • Seminal Works:
    • Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983): Explores how print capitalism facilitated the creation of national consciousness.
    • Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (1983): Argues that nationalism is a product of industrial society requiring a homogenized culture.

4. History: The Product of Conflict

Focus: Evolution, contingency, and war. History views a country not as a static entity but as the result of centuries of centralization and resource extraction.

  • Key Themes:
    • War Making: The need to fund wars forced rulers to build bureaucracies, tax systems, and borders, effectively creating the modern state.
    • Consolidation: The move from loose empires and city-states to territorially defined nation-states.
  • Seminal Works:
    • Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States (1990): Famous for the thesis: “War made the state, and the state made war.”

5. Anthropology: The Bureaucratic Ritual

Focus: Culture, borders, and “legibility.” Anthropologists look at how the abstract concept of “country” is made real in daily life through bureaucracy, borders, and classification.

  • Key Themes:
    • Legibility: How states simplify complex societies (surnames, cadastral maps, census) to manage and tax them.
    • Boundary Maintenance: How ethnic and national boundaries are maintained through interaction and exclusion rather than isolation.
  • Seminal Works:
    • James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (1998): Analyzes how governments attempt to make society “legible” and the failures that result from high-modernist planning.
    • Fredrik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969): Shifted focus from the cultural “stuff” inside the group to the boundary itself.

6. Philosophy: The Ethical Boundary

Focus: Justice, morality, and cosmopolitanism. Philosophy asks why a country should exist and what moral weight borders should carry.

  • Key Themes:
    • Particularism vs. Cosmopolitanism: Do we owe more to fellow citizens than to humans generally?
    • Self-Determination: The moral right of a “people” to govern themselves.
    • Distributive Justice: Whether wealth should be redistributed only within a country or globally.
  • Seminal Works:
    • John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (1999): Extends his theory of justice to the international realm, arguing for a society of peoples with specific duties to one another.
    • Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace (1795): Early framework for international federation and cosmopolitan right.

Summary of Perspectives

Perspective Core Concept Primary Question
Political Sovereignty Who has the monopoly on violence?
Sociological Identity How do strangers feel they belong to one group?
Legal Recognition Does it meet the criteria of the Montevideo Convention?
Historical Evolution How did war and taxation forge this entity?
Anthropological Legibility How does the state categorize and control its subjects?
Philosophical Ethics What moral justification exists for borders?

Would you like me to explore the Game Theoretic modeling of state stability and conflict (e.g., Schelling or Axelrod)?

Gemini: Answer 2

Here is the incremental analysis adding the financial and democratic-boundary dimensions.

7. Financial: The Monetary Sovereign

Focus: Currency issuance, central banking, and debt. From this perspective, a country is defined by Monetary Sovereignty (or Lex Monetae)—the exclusive legal power to issue and regulate a currency.

  • Key Themes:
    • Chartalism (The State Theory of Money): Money is not a commodity (like gold) but a creature of law. A “country” is an entity that can impose tax liabilities and declare what is acceptable to settle them.
    • The Eurozone Anomaly: The EU presents a unique challenge to this definition. Member states have retained political statehood but surrendered monetary sovereignty to the ECB. This separation of the “state” from the “money” creates structural tension, as they lack the mechanism to monetize debt during crises.
    • Optimum Currency Areas: The economic theory asking whether a region should share a currency. If a “country” (currency zone) lacks labor mobility or fiscal transfers, it may fail as a functional economic unit.
  • Seminal Works:
    • Georg Friedrich Knapp, The State Theory of Money (1905): The foundational text of Chartalism, arguing money is a “token” defined by the state.
    • Robert Mundell, A Theory of Optimum Currency Areas (1961): The framework used to analyze (and often criticize) the Eurozone’s design.

8. Political-Democratic: The “Hard Shell” (Helen Thompson)

Focus: The “demos,” boundaries, and stability. Helen Thompson argues that for a democracy to function, it requires a “hard shell” or clear boundary. Democracy relies on the “will of the people” (the demos), which implies a finite, defined group.

  • Key Themes:
    • The Democratic Container: Without a hard boundary defining who is a citizen and who is not, the social contract dissolves. If the state cannot control its borders (economic, physical, or energy flows), it cannot fulfill its promises to the electorate.
    • Disorder: Crises arise when these boundaries become porous. For example, the EU struggles because it attempts to be a democracy without a single “people,” while the US struggles as its domestic energy and financial boundaries clash with global commitments.
    • Fault Lines: The intersection of energy, finance, and democratic politics creates “fault lines” where the definition of the nation-state is most brittle.
  • Seminal Works:
    • Helen Thompson, Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century (2022): Argues that the crises of the 2020s are the result of western democracies ignoring the geopolitical and physical constraints of nationhood.

Re-evaluating “What is a Country?”

Adding these dimensions suggests that a Country is also: 1. A Tax-Driven Currency Zone: An area where a specific token is required to pay the sovereign. 2. A Democratic Container: A bounded physical space required to define a specific “people” for the purpose of representation.

Would you like me to analyze the “Crypto-State” concept (e.g., Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State) which attempts to unbundle these definitions?

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century | Helen Thompson This video features Helen Thompson summarizing her book Disorder, specifically addressing how the rupture of boundaries (financial, energy, and political) has destabilized the modern nation-state. http://googleusercontent.com/youtube_content/1

Gemini: Answer 3

Here is the summary of the discussed perspectives.

Summary of Perspectives on “What is a Country?”

Perspective Core Definition Key Themes & Ideas Seminal Works
Political Science The State Monopoly on Violence: Exclusive right to use force.
Sovereignty: Westphalian non-intervention.
Social Contract: Exchange of freedom for order.		 Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Sociology The Nation Imagined Communities: Connection with strangers via shared media/culture.
Nationalism: Boundaries based on culture/language.
Civil Religion: Symbols and rituals.		 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism
International Law Legal Entity Declarative: Population, territory, government, capacity for relations.
Constitutive: Recognition by other states.
Montevideo Convention: The formal criteria.		 Montevideo Convention (1933)
H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law
History Product of Conflict War Making: Centralization required to fund armies.
Consolidation: Move from empires to territorial states.
"War made the state."		 Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States
Anthropology Bureaucratic Ritual Legibility: Standardization (surnames, maps) to manage subjects.
Boundary Maintenance: Identity defined by exclusion at the borders.		 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State
Fredrik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries
Philosophy Ethical Boundary Cosmopolitanism vs. Particularism: Moral weight of borders.
Self-Determination: Right of a "people" to rule themselves.
Distributive Justice: Scope of wealth redistribution.		 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples
Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace
Financial Monetary Sovereign Chartalism: Money is a creature of law/tax.
Lex Monetae: Power to designate the settlement asset.
Optimum Currency Areas: Economic coherence of the zone.		 G.F. Knapp, The State Theory of Money
Robert Mundell, A Theory of Optimum Currency Areas
Political-Democratic The "Hard Shell" Democratic Container: Democracy requires a clear "Demos" (people).
Fault Lines: Tension between physical/energy needs and political desires.
Stability: Requires functional, non-porous boundaries.		 Helen Thompson, Disorder

Would you like me to provide the “Actuarial” perspective on a country—specifically looking at the state as a massive risk-pooling entity (Social Insurance) and the intergenerational mathematics involved?

GPT: Answer 1

Here is a concise, perspective-by-perspective map of what a country is, with core ideas and the seminal works typically cited in each field.

Sociology

Themes: collective identity, imagined cohesion, institutions that create social order. Definition tends to stress that a country is a socially constructed community that people believe themselves to belong to, maintained by shared symbols, narratives, and bureaucratic routines. Key works:

  • Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983) — nations as imagined political communities.
  • Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (1983) — industrialization drives the need for standardized culture.
  • Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (1893) — collective conscience as foundation of social cohesion.
  • Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (1985) — state power and surveillance as sources of national unity.

Political Science

Themes: sovereignty, territoriality, monopoly of legitimate force, international recognition, constitutions. Definition: a country is typically understood as a sovereign territorial state that exercises authority over a population with institutions capable of enforcing rules. Key works:

  • Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation (1919) — state as the entity claiming the monopoly on legitimate physical force.
  • Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States (1990) — states formed through war-making and capital extraction.
  • Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States (1990) — the modern international system recognizes sovereignty even without strong domestic capacity.
  • Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (1999) — sovereignty as a set of contested, negotiated practices.

Anthropology

Themes: ethnicity, kinship myths, symbols, ritual, boundaries between “us” and “them.” Definition: a country is a cultural and symbolic system that binds people through shared myths of origin, ritual practice, and narratives of belonging, often intertwined with state structures but not reducible to them. Key works:

  • Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) — thick description of cultural systems forming identity.
  • Fredrik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969) — group boundaries as socially maintained constructs.
  • Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (1983) — many national traditions are modern creations.
  • Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile (1995) — nationhood as a discourse embedded in stories of homeland and displacement.

History

Themes: state formation, dynastic rule, wars, bureaucratization, colonialism, modern nationalism. Definition: a country is historically contingent, emerging through specific processes of administrative centralization, war, and ideological projects (often 18th–20th century nationalism). Key works:

  • Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean (1949) — long-duration structures underlying polities.
  • Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (1990) — modern nations as products of 19th-century mass politics.
  • Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States (1990) — historical sociology of state formation.
  • Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974) — medieval to early-modern transitions toward modern states.

Philosophy

Themes: legitimacy, collective agency, social ontology, justice, self-determination. Definition: a country is a normative entity constituted by agreements, institutions, and shared intentions that give rise to political authority and obligations. Key works:

  • Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) — the state as the artificial person created by covenant.
  • John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689) — political community formed through consent.
  • John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (1999) — peoples as units of international justice, not merely states.
  • Margaret Gilbert, On Social Facts (1989) — plural subjects and collective intentionality.
  • Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1995) — institutional facts created by collective recognition.

Economics

Themes: property rights, institutions, resource extraction, public goods, comparative advantage. Definition: a country is an institutional container that shapes incentives, creates enforceable property rights, and facilitates markets and redistributions. Key works:

  • Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (1990) — institutions as determinants of economic development.
  • Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail (2012) — inclusive vs extractive institutions.

International Relations

Themes: anarchy, sovereignty, diplomacy, recognition, borders. Definition: a country is a unit of the international system whose existence depends on both domestic statehood and external recognition. Key works:

  • Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (1979) — states as functionally similar units in an anarchic system.
  • Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (1977) — international society maintaining order through shared norms.
  • Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (1999) — states as social actors constructed by shared understandings.

Geography

Themes: boundaries, spatial organization, territoriality, natural vs political borders. Definition: a country is a bounded territorial space controlled and organized by political authority. Key works:

  • Peter Taylor, Political Geography (1985) — territoriality and state power.
  • John Agnew, Place and Politics (1987) — the modern territorial trap.

Psychology (national identity)

Themes: social identity theory, group cohesion, symbolic attachment to place. Definition: a country is a category people use for self-definition, status comparison, and group loyalty. Key works:

  • Tajfel and Turner, An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict (1979) — social identity theory.
  • Benedict Anderson again (imagined communities) is widely used here too.

Very short synthesis

Across fields, a country is:

  • a sovereign territorial state (political science, law),
  • a collective identity or imagined community (sociology, anthropology),
  • a historically contingent outcome of war, administration, and nationalism (history),
  • a normatively constituted institution (philosophy, law),
  • and a unit of strategic interaction (international relations).

If you want, I can turn this into a one-page table or expand any perspective.

GPT: Answer 2

Financial–Monetary Perspective

Themes: monetary sovereignty, fiscal capacity, lender-of-last-resort functions, and the alignment (or misalignment) between political and monetary boundaries. Definition: a country is, among other things, a jurisdiction that issues and controls its own currency, can tax in that currency, can borrow in it, and can mobilize fiscal–monetary tools to stabilize its economy. The monetary boundary is a constitutive part of statehood because it shapes what the government can promise and how it can survive crises. Key works and ideas:

  • Charles Goodhart, The Economics of Monetary Institutions and Goodhart’s Law — money is ultimately a creature of the state and its ability to tax.
  • Geoffrey Ingham, The Nature of Money (2004) — money as a social and political institution backed by state authority.
  • Perry Mehrling, The New Lombard Street (2011) — the central bank as dealer-of-last-resort linking monetary and financial stability.
  • Stephanie Kelton / Modern Monetary Theory — monetary sovereignty defined by the ability to issue a free-floating, nonconvertible currency.
  • Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital (1996, rev. 2008) — the constraints on national monetary autonomy under fixed and floating regimes.

Relevance to EU and the eurozone:

  • The euro severs the traditional alignment between country and currency issuer. States retain fiscal responsibilities but not full monetary sovereignty. This creates a structurally incomplete polity in which:

    • central bank (ECB) ≠ national treasuries;
    • fiscal capacity is national but lender-of-last-resort function is supranational;
    • democratic accountability resides nationally but key economic tools reside at the EU level.

  • This is the core argument of economists like Paul De Grauwe (Economics of Monetary Union) and political economists like Mark Blyth (Austerity).

Helen Thompson’s Argument: Democratic Boundaries

Themes: energy, geopolitics, democratic legitimacy, and the necessity of congruence between political decision-making and the territory subjected to its consequences. Summary:

  • In Disorder (2022) and earlier essays, Helen Thompson argues that democracy requires a bounded political community whose members share exposure to the same material risks (energy dependence, resource constraints, financial vulnerabilities) and whose institutions have jurisdiction over the tools needed to manage those risks.

  • A country, in this view, is the domain within which:

    • citizens vote on decisions that materially constrain each other;
    • the state can credibly act on those decisions (energy strategy, fiscal policy, border control, financial regulation);
    • the polity is not subject to external vetoes on core economic and security functions.

Implications for the eurozone:

  • Thompson sees the eurozone as misaligned: monetary decisions affecting democratic electorates are made by institutions not directly accountable to those electorates.
  • The absence of a unified fiscal authority means eurozone countries lack some of the tools needed to give democratic mandates practical effect.
  • This creates democratic fragility: a demos without full control of its economic levers.

If you want, I can now give a short synthetic paragraph on “what this means for the definition of a country today”, or expand the Thompson section further.

GPT: Answer 3

Here is a compact Markdown table summarizing all perspectives, including the added financial–monetary and Thompson points.

Perspective Core Themes / Definition Seminal Works / Key Thinkers
Sociology Countries as socially constructed communities held together by shared identity, symbols, narratives. Anderson; Gellner; Durkheim; Giddens
Political Science Sovereign territorial states with authority, institutions, and monopoly of legitimate force. Weber; Tilly; J. Krasner; R. H. Jackson
Anthropology Cultural systems rooted in myths of origin, ritual, symbols, and maintained boundaries. Geertz; Barth; Hobsbawm & Ranger; Malkki
History Products of specific historical processes: war, administration, nationalism, empires, revolutions. Hobsbawm; Tilly; Braudel; Perry Anderson
Philosophy Normative entities constituted by collective agreements, legitimacy, and political obligations. Hobbes; Locke; Rawls; Gilbert; Searle
Economics Institutional containers enabling property rights, markets, and development. Douglass North; Acemoglu & Robinson
International Relations Units of an anarchic international system, defined by recognition and diplomatic–military interaction. Waltz; Bull; Wendt
Legal Theory Legal persons defined by territory, population, government, and capacity for legal relations. Montevideo Convention; Kelsen; Hart
Geography Bounded territorial spaces organized by political authority and spatial control. Peter Taylor; John Agnew
Psychology Categories used for social identity, group attachment, and intergroup comparison. Tajfel & Turner; Anderson
Financial–Monetary Jurisdictions defined by control over currency issuance, taxation, fiscal capacity, and financial stability. Goodhart; Ingham; Mehrling; Eichengreen; MMT authors
Democratic Boundaries (Thompson) Countries as democratic communities that must align political decisions with material risks and institutional control; misalignment creates fragility. Helen Thompson (Disorder) and related essays

Comparison of References

Lastly, I asked both models to produce a table of the union of the references quoted with this prompt:

below is a blog post comparing LLMs. Pls make a list of all the references provided and put them in a table. For each reference state which sections it appeared in for GPT and Gemini. Thus the table will have three columns: reference (author, title) | GPT | Gemini and might show A. Author, Book Title | Sociology | Politics, History. See what I want?

BE IMPARTIAL IN YOUR ANSWER!!

Here are the tables they produced. Gemini followed the instructions

GPT’s Summary

GPT answered that it

Failed to cross reference with sections.

but didn’t explain further. Here is its table. To ease comparison, the author names have been re-formatted to Last, First name format to match Gemini (using the regex r"^\| ([\w .]+?) (\w+) –" to | \2, \1 –), and sorted alphabetically. Oddly,

GPT tabulates 42 references, 38 it provides, 15 from Gemini, and 11 that both use (check: \(|A\cup B| = |A| + |B| - |A \cap B| = 38 + 15 - 11 = 42\).)

Missed references to Jackson and Kasner, but included a reference to Helen Thompson’s video. I don’t understand the Hobbes Two Treaties comment, since GPT attributed it to Locke.

Reference (author, title) GPT Gemini
Montevideo Convention (1933) ✓ ✓
Acemoglu & Robinson – Why Nations Fail ✓ —
Agnew, John – Place and Politics ✓ —
Anderson, Benedict – Imagined Communities ✓ ✓
Anderson, Perry – Lineages of the Absolutist State ✓ —
Barth, Fredrik – Ethnic Groups and Boundaries ✓ ✓
Blyth, Mark – Austerity ✓ —
Braudel, Fernand – The Mediterranean ✓ —
Bull, Hedley – The Anarchical Society ✓ —
De Grauwe, Paul – Economics of Monetary Union ✓ —
Durkheim, Émile – The Division of Labor in Society ✓ —
Eichengreen, Barry – Globalizing Capital ✓ —
Geertz, Clifford – The Interpretation of Cultures ✓ —
Gellner, Ernest – Nations and Nationalism ✓ ✓
Giddens, Anthony – The Nation-State and Violence ✓ —
Gilbert, Margaret – On Social Facts ✓ —
Goodhart, Charles – The Economics of Monetary Institutions ✓ —
Hart, H.L.A. – The Concept of Law ✓ ✓
Hobbes, Thomas – Leviathan ✓ ✓
Hobbes, Thomas – Two Treatises (Locke actually; GPT misattributed) ✓ —
Hobsbawm, Eric & Ranger, Terence – The Invention of Tradition ✓ —
Hobsbawm, Eric – Nations and Nationalism since 1780 ✓ —
Ingham, Geoffrey – The Nature of Money ✓ —
Kant, Immanuel – Perpetual Peace ✓ ✓
Kelsen, Hans – Pure Theory of Law ✓ —
Kelton, Stephanie – Modern Monetary Theory (general body) ✓ —
Knapp, Georg Friedrich – The State Theory of Money — ✓
Malkki, Liisa – Purity and Exile ✓ —
Mehrling, Perry – The New Lombard Street ✓ —
Mundell, Robert – A Theory of Optimum Currency Areas — ✓
North, Douglass – Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance ✓ —
Rawls, John – The Law of Peoples ✓ ✓
Scott, James C. – Seeing Like a State ✓ ✓
Searle, John – The Construction of Social Reality ✓ —
Tajfel & Turner – “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict” ✓ —
Taylor, Peter – Political Geography ✓ —
Thompson, Helen – Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century — ✓
Tilly, Charles – Coercion, Capital, and European States ✓ ✓
Video: Helen Thompson on Disorder (YouTube link) — ✓
Waltz, Kenneth – Theory of International Politics ✓ —
Weber, Max – Politics as a Vocation ✓ ✓
Wendt, Alexander – Social Theory of International Politics ✓ —

Gemini’s Summary

Authors already provided Last, First and sorted alphabetically. Removed bold from author name. 43 references, 39 GPT, 14 Gemini, 10 both (\(39 + 14 - 10=43\)). A spot-check did not find any errors. Includes Jackson and Kasner references, missing from GPT summary.

Reference (Author, Title/Concept) GPT Gemini
Montevideo Convention (1933) Legal Theory International Law
Acemoglu & Robinson, Why Nations Fail Economics
Agnew, John, Place and Politics Geography
Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities Sociology; Psychology Sociology
Anderson, Perry, Lineages of the Absolutist State History
Barth, Fredrik, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries Anthropology Anthropology
Blyth, Mark, Austerity Financial–Monetary
Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean History
Bull, Hedley, The Anarchical Society International Relations
De Grauwe, Paul, Economics of Monetary Union Financial–Monetary
Durkheim, Émile, The Division of Labor in Society Sociology
Eichengreen, Barry, Globalizing Capital Financial–Monetary
Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures Anthropology
Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism Sociology Sociology
Giddens, Anthony, The Nation-State and Violence Sociology
Gilbert, Margaret, On Social Facts Philosophy
Goodhart, Charles, The Economics of Monetary Institutions Financial–Monetary
Hart, H.L.A., The Concept of Law Legal Theory International Law
Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan Philosophy Political Science
Hobsbawm, Eric, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 History
Hobsbawm, Eric & Ranger, Terence, The Invention of Tradition Anthropology
Ingham, Geoffrey, The Nature of Money Financial–Monetary
Jackson, Robert H., Quasi-States Political Science
Kant, Immanuel, Perpetual Peace Philosophy
Kelsen, Hans, Pure Theory of Law Legal Theory
Kelton, Stephanie, Modern Monetary Theory Financial–Monetary
Knapp, Georg Friedrich, The State Theory of Money Financial
Krasner, Stephen, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy Political Science
Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government Philosophy
Malkki, Liisa, Purity and Exile Anthropology
Mehrling, Perry, The New Lombard Street Financial–Monetary
Mundell, Robert, A Theory of Optimum Currency Areas Financial
North, Douglass, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance Economics
Rawls, John, The Law of Peoples Philosophy Philosophy
Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State Anthropology
Searle, John, The Construction of Social Reality Philosophy
Tajfel & Turner, An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict Psychology
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Thompson, Helen, Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century Democratic Boundaries Political-Democratic
Tilly, Charles, Coercion, Capital, and European States Political Science; History History
Waltz, Kenneth, Theory of International Politics International Relations
Weber, Max, Politics as a Vocation Political Science Political Science
Wendt, Alexander, Social Theory of International Politics International Relations