Inama-Sternegg’s journal article develops an organic conception of the state: political institutions arise within social life, and their legitimate scope grows with the relationships they organize. The supplied text includes both “I. Der Rechtsstaat und seine Gesetzgebung,” and “II. Die natürlichen Grenzen des wirthschaftlichen und staatlichen Lebens.” The first section derives legislation and constitutional participation from the development of legal consciousness; the second argues that economic and political territories tend toward coincidence. Together they make the state neither a mere apparatus protecting isolated individuals nor an authority entitled to absorb their personalities.
The opening defends the disputed term Rechtsstaat. Its importance lies in recognizing law as the state’s animating principle, rather than an external constraint or incidental function. Inama-Sternegg grounds this relationship in human sociability. Self-interest can achieve its purposes only through association, while conscious organization depends on recognition of “mine and thine.” Society therefore cannot be explained as a deliberate combination of originally independent human atoms. Association precedes reflective understanding:
Erst wenn der Instinkt die Menschen zusammengeführt hat, und so die erste menschliche Gesellschaft in primitiver Form besteht, beginnt die menschliche Geistesthätigkeit der Erkenntniß dieses Verhältnisses und auf Grund dieser Erkenntniß die bewußte Organisation.
English translation: Only when instinct has brought people together, and the first human society thus exists in primitive form, does the human intellectual activity of understanding this relationship begin, and, on the basis of this understanding, conscious organization.
This developmental sequence makes needs the measure of institutional growth. Early associations remain small because their members’ requirements are limited; expanding needs connect previously separate circles, initially through economic intercourse and subsequently through legal organization. The family is proposed as the earliest association, though the author explicitly concedes that this hypothesis lacks compelling proof. Ethical kinship rules themselves develop historically rather than supplying an already complete foundation. Tribe, people, and territorial state emerge through enlarging communities of need. A world society and corresponding world state remain conceivable, but only as exceedingly distant possibilities.
Legal consciousness similarly moves from particular disputes toward general rules. Judicial decisions precede comprehensive legislation; private law develops before public law; smaller associations organize their affairs before their relationship to the state becomes explicit. Initially, princes, nobility, and clergy possess the intelligence and power necessary to formulate law. Professional officials and jurists subsequently mediate broader participation. Constitutional government appears when the people acquire both the capacity and the right to participate in legal formation. Its completion requires participation in governing external as well as internal relations, irrespective of the form of the headship.
The normative force of this history depends on a strong identification of law with morality. Both concern human perfection within earthly society. Religion, directed toward life after death, progressively withdraws from its constitutive political role into inward life; this differentiation need not produce conflict between religious and moral principles. Because law expresses the ethical consciousness of society, legitimate legislation must originate from that same collective source:
Diese Form ist aber das Gesetz, und damit das Gesetz der wahre Ausdruck des Rechtsbewußtseyns sey, ist es nothwendig, daß das Gesetz den nämlichen Ursprung und die nämliche Quelle habe wie das Recht selbst.
English translation: This form, however, is statute, and for statute to be the true expression of legal consciousness, it is necessary that statute have the same origin and the same source as law itself.
Legislation by only a fraction of society cannot adequately express the whole. Yet collective authorship does not justify unlimited interference. The modern social Rechtsstaat surpasses both Kant’s allegedly atomistic protective state and the ancient Greek subordination of personality to political purposes. Its legislation encompasses relations among individuals, associations, and states, but its governing criterion is freedom:
Das oberste Princip des Rechtsstaates ist die Freiheit.
English translation: The supreme principle of the constitutional state is freedom.
Restriction becomes legitimate where one person’s freedom obstructs or endangers another’s. Comprehensive legal organization is thus presented as reconciling personality with collective obligation, not extinguishing individuality. The author also qualifies his ideal historically: the Rechtsstaat is the appropriate goal of the present developmental stage, not an absolutely best constitution for every people and age.
Section II gives this organic argument a territorial and economic dimension. Economic activity requires legal security, while political independence requires an economic basis capable of sustaining the community’s needs. Inama-Sternegg treats their convergence as a developmental tendency, despite historical departures from it. His appeal to natural laws includes both external physical conditions and regularities of human mental life; civilization increasingly enables the latter to overcome the former.
The extended example of the Germanic Markgenossenschaft illustrates economic and political organization sharing a boundary. Common resources, preferential provision for members, export restrictions, and jurisdiction sustained an internally integrated community. Its dissolution resulted from expanding needs, urban industry, capital formation, and monetary exchange: closure did not simply disappear but shifted toward larger units. This example supplies the historical bridge between household cooperation and territorial statehood.
Neither mountains and rivers nor shared language, custom, and nationality sufficiently determine state boundaries. Nationality may itself result from political union. Economic circles instead organize themselves around markets according to the urgency of needs and the security, cost, and distance of exchange. Common law makes movement within a state especially secure, while dependence on foreign supplies exposes essential consumption to political disruption. The author accordingly minimizes the practical reach of a world economy, largely assigning international provision to luxury needs.
Vollständige Harmonie von Wirthschaft und Staat, Solidarität des Gebietes und der Interessen, das sind die Resultate dieser Erörterung.
English translation: Complete harmony between economy and state, solidarity of territory and interests: these are the results of this discussion.
The article’s significance lies in joining participatory legislation to an economically grounded account of political territory. Its central tension is equally revealing: freedom and expanding association coexist with a strong presumption that secure social development requires bounded, economically independent political communities.
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