People and State in Edith Stein’s An Investigation Concerning the State

Abstract

The emergence of new forms of cultural identity-based nationalism and tensions surrounding both states and the peoples that compose them highlights the importance of a deep understanding of the concepts of state, people, and how they are related. It is for this reason that the German-Jewish phenomenologist Edith Stein’s work Eine Untersuchung über den Staat (An Investigation Concerning the State) is analyzed. In this book, the claim of a people being a community, whose spiritual center emanates its own distinctive culture that expresses its specific character, is justified. This people’s community tends toward a state-based organization, as the state’s sovereignty and objective and legal structure ensure the stability required for its spiritual growth. Nevertheless, a people may subsist without a state. Conversely, the existence of the state is predicated on a foundation based on a people. Without them, its existence is tenuous. Hence, the people has a value of its own, with the state at its service.