Prepolitical Foundations of the State

Their Importance in Contemporary Societies

Abstract

This is an approximation to the Legal Thought of Joseph Ratzinger". It presents mainly the subject related to the prepolitical foundations of the Modern Constitutional State, specifically based on the analysis of the debate held in 2004 by the former cardinal of the Catholic Church, Joseph Ratzinger, and the renowned German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas. This debate is something innovative since these exponents of different philosophical positions synthesize their thoughts in an extraordinary way. The main result of this work is the finding of how an author, representative of religious thought, and another, representative of secular thought, having in principle different perspectives on the foundations of a modern constitutional state, come to agree that in practice the state needs fundamentals pre-political that even precede it so that a real state of law can be given. At last, and to link and reinforce the previous results, certain topics that are part of the aforementioned thesis are analyzed, but from an analysis based on | 123 a global perspective of the XXI Century of certain presuppositions of the contemporary democratic state.