An Investigation Concerning the State

Stein's central claim is that the essence of the state lies in sovereignty, not in territory, ethnicity, nationhood, or even the promotion of justice or morality. These features may be found in existing states and some are desirable, but they do not belong to the state's a priori structure . The state is a social structure defined by its exclusive power to posit positive law and configure itself . She rejects the German Idealist view that the ethical idea of the state lies in the historical development of individual freedom. Freedom cannot 'develop,' she argues; it is either given or not, and can at best be secured by the state . The state's only ethical role is facilitating the formation of sensitivity to values and the creation of culture .

Stein distinguishes the state from the communities it serves. Values can only be attributed to underlying communities, not to the state itself, because values and the obligation to realize them can only be acknowledged in acts of feeling, and the state is incapable of feeling or acknowledgment . The state can act freely and remain a lawful state without giving any consideration to ethical norms . This does not mean state representatives cannot be moral agents—they can keep the state 'in touch' with the moral domain—but the state as such is not an ethical subject . The argument is a striking departure from traditions that treat the state as a moral person or the embodiment of ethical life.

The Investigation extends the social ontology Stein developed in On the Problem of Empathy (1917) and Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities (1922). Having analyzed how individuals apprehend other persons and form communities through shared intentions and values, Stein turns to the state as a distinct social structure . The state is not a community in her technical sense; it is a structure that can serve communities without being one. Antonio Calcagno's study of Stein's early social and political philosophy identifies these three works—Empathy, Philosophy of Psychology, and the Investigation—as a coherent body of phenomenological social theory produced during her years working with Husserl . The treatise on the state is the political culmination of that early project .

Stein wrote the treatise in 1925, and it was published in the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung in Halle . The first English translation, by Marianne Sawicki, was published by ICS Publications in Washington, D.C., in 2006 as volume 10 of The Collected Works of Edith Stein . The volume runs xxviii + 202 pages and includes Sawicki's editorial apparatus . A Spanish translation by José Luis Caballero Bono was published by Trotta in 2019 . The work was written in the early days of the Weimar Republic, shortly after the First World War, and it immediately preceded Stein's decision to be baptized on January 1, 1922—though the 1925 publication date suggests a more complex chronology .

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Stein's detailed analysis of state sovereignty and the rule of law contributes in an original way to later, very different attempts to clarify the concept of the state, particularly Carl Schmitt's definition of politics in terms of the state's unique sovereignty and Hannah Arendt's account of nation-states integrating pluralities into a single body politic through their sovereignty to establish and enforce law . But Stein's position diverges sharply from Schmitt's. For Schmitt, sovereignty is the power to decide on the exception; for Stein, sovereignty is the state's exclusive capacity to posit law and configure itself, and it is constrained by right relations that are more basic than any institution . The comparison is illuminating precisely because it shows how phenomenological ontology can yield a very different politics from decisionism.

A frequent misconception is that the Investigation is a 'pre-Catholic' work that must be read in light of her later conversion and Carmelite writings. In fact, the treatise contains Stein's first serious discussions of religious issues such as guilt, expiation, and freedom of conscience, and it was written just before her baptism . But it is not a theological work. Its method is phenomenological ontology, and its arguments about the state's structure, sovereignty, and law are independent of her later theological commitments. Reading it as a crypto-theological text misses its philosophical rigor and its place in the tradition of phenomenological political philosophy. It is a work of philosophy of law and social ontology, not a work of Catholic political theology.