State, law and religion in Edith Stein's thought

This article presents a paradox in the thought of Edith Stein between her attitudes in relation to the state/law problem and her vision of religion. I seek to explain the paradox through the study of the Theory of the State and Sovereignty. In this regard, basing herself on classical authors, Edith Stein disagrees with the great jurists of her time who did not always recognise the priority of the concept of sovereignty. The examination of the relationship between the State and law breaks new ground within her phenomenological position, by, on the one hand, defending a strong concept of sovereignty of the State seen as a legal a priori while on the other hand stating that the State doesn't relate to spiritual values. This leads us to propose a particular view of the semiotic processes relevant to the relation between law/state and religion, illuminating the semantic-pragmatic factors which prompted Stein towards the above contradiction. © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers.