The Theory of the State

Introduction

Snellman published “Läran om staten” in Stockholm in 1842, after his years of study in Germany. Written in Swedish in close connection with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, it treats the family, civil society and the state and understands the state as the realisation of a people’s ethical life. Its central idea is that a state rests on a national spirit, which becomes conscious of itself only through its own language, literature and education. For Finland, whose educated class wrote Swedish, this implied that Finnish had to become a language of culture. The book is the principal theoretical work of the Finnish national movement and of Nordic Hegelianism.

Connections

Builds on

• Elements of the Philosophy of Right1820 · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel