Original title: Die Entstehung des Staates als Vorgang der Säkularisation
Edited by Carlos Pérez Crespo

In the debate held in 2004 by Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger at the Catholic Academy of Bavaria, the theses of the jurist Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde on the legitimation of the liberal rule of law acquired a renewed relevance. At the center of the discussion was the interpretation of the "Böckenförde paradox" (known as Diktum) on the configuration of the modern state through a process intrinsically linked to the secularization of religious power.

Böckenförde argues that the modern state emerges as a creation rooted in the historical and cultural development of European civilization. Rather than being an organ of the monopoly of violence, the State is constituted as an "order of freedom." This evolution makes unthinkable both a reversal of secularization and a confessional state, in which freedom of belief would be suppressed.

This edition, the first in Spanish of Böckenförde's essay, is completed with a conversation in which he reveals aspects of the personality and legal thought of Carl Schmitt, of whom he is considered his "liberal disciple".