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Do Americans Owe Service to the Nation?
...Stengel is not merely urging people to do good deeds in an organized way, say, to join groups to teach poor kids to read or to clean up their communities. He is talking about service to the Nation.

But where do people get the idea that the Nation is something to be served? Despite Stengel’s invocation of the Founders, this is a profoundly un-American concept. It’s far more consistent with the European despotism of the first half of the twentieth century. You don’t have to look hard to find quotations by Mussolini (dare I mention Hitler?) about the duty of the individual to serve the Nation.

To call this idea un-American is no mere polemical device. It is a literal truth. Service to the Nation is a mystical notion. Its advocates reify the abstraction “nation” and call on us to sacrifice for it. This is not what most Americans thought at the time of the founding. In the classical liberal philosophy held by many people in the late eighteenth century (inspired by John Locke), “society,” “nation,” and “country” were concepts indicating people’s living together to enjoy life, liberty, and property in collective security. These were important conveniences that permitted individual persons to live fully as human beings. They were means, not ends in themselves. The Nation was not something to serve. An idea like that can get you killed in a far-off imperial war. ...