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This chapter analyses changes in political discourse around the ideas of the state and the nation in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that gave rise to the fantasy of nation/state congruency. The chapter focuses on the Abbé Sieyès, Johann Gottfried von Herder and the intellectual-political Romantic movement. Contra existing interpretations of Sieyès and modernity as the fusion of state and nation, this chapter argues that what Sieyès and others produce is not a new state theory as modality of unity, but of society that from now on will constantly self-refer and engage with its own being/becoming through the idea of congruency, albeit in myriad forms and through various methods of rationalisation and legitimation.