Educated in Vienna, he began a career in political journalism with the publication Hlas (The Voice), edited by Vavro Šrobár.

[3] He lived in Prague for most of the First World War and was involved with the Maffie, an underground operation of the Czechoslovak National Council in the Czech and Slovak lands.

After the war he joined the Revolutionary National Assembly and worked to organise Slovak schools following the establishment of Czechoslovakia.

He represented the Republican Party of Farmers and Peasants in the Czechoslovak National Assembly as a deputy between 1925 and 1935 and subsequently as a senator from 1935 to 1939.

[4] In his academic career Štefánek was a follower of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the sociologist and philosopher who went on to be the founder and first President of Czechoslovakia.