 According to Stein, the state cannot be grounded in either “society” or in “community” alone. Unlike societies or associations, a state cannot be brought into existence by any act of collective intentionality or “volition”. Political entities, founded solely on such rational associations, would at best be “artificial” quasi-states, permanently in danger of dissolving, like the artificial territories drawn up on maps of colonial powers (1925: 81[107]). Stein aims to show that states will be “peculiarly hollow and schematic” if they are not in some sense or another grounded in communal forms of living together (1925: 32[37]). However, no “community of the people”—be it an ethnically defined “people” or “folk” or some other cultural community founded on shared values or languages—is a necessary or sufficient condition to constitute a state either. Accordingly, Stein argues both against classical contractualism à la Rousseau, Locke or Hobbes (1925: 40[51]), that asserts a rational but decisionist creation of the state (Schöpfung kraft eines Willküraktes), and against traditionalist conceptions of some organic emergence of a state. For Stein, there is no “either-or” here: though states may be factually “grounded” in a community or a society, statehood is not constituted by either (1925: 7–9[4–6]). The “gravitational force [of a state] rests on its own” (1925: 81[108]). Less metaphorically, a state constitutes itself by its own sovereign act