The people, however, is never politically active as a whole, but only through those who embody its will.  The true will of a people can never be determined by a majority vote.  It can only display itself in men and in movements, and history will decide whether these men or movements could rightly claim to be the representatives of the people’s will.[21]

Every identification of the state with the people is false from a legal and untenable from a political standpoint ...  The state is the law-forming organization and the law serves the inner order of the community; the people is the politically active organism and politics serve the outward maintenance of the community ...  But law receives its character from the people and politics must reckon with the state as the first and most important factor.[22]

The “nation” is the product of this interplay and balance between the state and the people.  The original and vital force of the people, through the organization of the state, realizes itself fully in the unified communal life of the nation: 

The nation is the complete agreement between organism and organization, the perfect formation of a naturally grown being. ... Nationalism is nothing more than the outwardly directed striving to maintain this inner unity of people and state, and socialism is the inwardly directed striving for the same end.[23]

Dr. Herbert Scurla, Government Councilor and Reich’s Minister for Science, Education, and Folk Culture, in a pamphlet entitled Die Grundgedanken des Nationalsozialismus und das Ausland (Basic Principles of National Socialism With Special Reference to Foreign Countries), also emphasizes the importance of the Volk in the National Socialist state.  Dr. Scurla points out that National Socialism does not view the nation in the domocratic sense of a community to which the individual may voluntarily adhere.

The central field of force of the National Socialist consciousness is rather the folk, and this folk is in no case mere individual aggregation, i.e., collectivity as sum of the individuals, but as a unity with a peculiar two-sidedness, at the same time “essential totality” (M.H.  Boehm).  The folk is both a living creature and a spiritual configuration, in which the individuals are included through common racial conditioning, in blood and spirit.  It is that force which works on the individual directly “from within or from the side like a common degree of temperature” (Kjellen) and which collects into the folk whatever according to blood and spirit belongs to it.  This folk, point of departure and goal at the same time, is, in the National Socialist world-view, not only the field of force for political order, but as well the central factor of the entire world-picture.  Neither individuals, as the epoch of enlightenment envisaged, nor states, as in the system of the dynastic and national state