An Investigation Concerning the State

Prussia under Frederick the Great was a state in the fullest sense, and there was no single Prussian people for it to rest on. The Polish state was destroyed, and the Polish people survived it, perhaps more of a nation than before. Edith Stein set those two cases down in 1920 and 1921 to show that a state and a nation are different things, and that a theory of the state has to begin somewhere else. She had come to the question through practice. In November 1918, eleven days after the armistice, she helped found the Breslau branch of the liberal German Democratic Party and sat on its board of fifty; in January 1919 she gave campaign speeches urging women to join it. Her treatise removes most of what her contemporaries built the state on. A state, she argues, is a social body that gives itself its law and takes none from a power above it, and sovereignty is the one condition without which there is no state. The state does not begin in a contract among individuals, as the prevailing European theory held, though Stein grants that theory one truth: law can be made only by free persons. Sovereignty belongs neither to a monarch nor to the people. It belongs to the state itself, which lasts only while its subjects recognise it or can be made to do so. For the account of how a law comes to hold, Stein drew on Adolf Reinach, her teacher at Göttingen, who had analysed legal acts such as enactments and commands, and was killed in the war in 1917. The second part asks what a state is worth, and answers sparingly. The idea of the state promises nothing: a given state may protect life and thought, or destroy more of both than it fosters. A state cannot feel values; only the persons who act for it can. Where its claim to rule meets a believer's obedience to God, Stein finds no solution in principle, only practical settlements, and she denies the state any moral right to preserve itself by fighting religion. Edmund Husserl, whose assistant she had been, printed the treatise in 1925 in the seventh volume of his yearbook, the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung; its author had by then been a Catholic for three years. A critical German edition and an English translation followed in 2006.