Ukrainian attorney and advocate Volodymir Starosolsky on the nation and national state

The urgency of the problem mentioned in the heading lies in the growing interest in the “national side” of the problem of understanding the experience of becoming a Ukrainian state, in particular, in the ideological dimension: the formation of the Ukrainian (political) nation, the origins and evolution of the ideas of the Ukrainian national statehood, the views of scientists-researchers of the Ukrainian “national problematics”. The purpose of the article is to draw attention to the problems of studying the nation and the nation state in the Ukrainian legal thought of the early twentieth century; without claiming empirical exhaustiveness, consider V. Starosolsky's views on the nation and nation state. The methodological basis, prepared at the intersection of theory and philosophy of law and political science, scientific intelligence is a dialectical method of knowledge of socio-political and legal phenomena and processes, which allows them to consider their development and interconnection. And the main means of understanding the content of V. Starosolsky's works was hermeneutic method, he contributed to the knowledge of the features of the scientist's research approach to the nation, to clarify the views of the researcher on its nature and relation to the (national) state. It is alleged that Vladimir Starosolsky, a well-known Ukrainian lawyer and public figure in the interwar Galicia, was, above all, an outstanding scientist-national scientist, author of the original concept of building Ukrainian statehood, which was based on the combination of national and social class factors in the process of statehood. It is emphasized that, as a scientist, V. Starosolsky was one of the first among Ukrainians to refute the thesis that the nation is a community built solely on the basis of a set of common so-called. “Objective” traits are important but not determinative in the formation of a nation. Instead, politeness was considered an essential criterion for a nation. The thesis is argued that, for V. Starosolsky, the nation is, above all, a psycho-political community, that is, the nation manifests itself primarily in the struggle for its own (national) state. It is emphasized that V. Starosolsky was the first in national science to thoroughly study the issue of the nation as the content of the nation-state.