The basic norm and democracy in Hans Kelsen's legal and political theory

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 32, Issue 5, 2006, Pages 573-599

  Kalyvas, Andreas ^a  

^a NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH   (United States)

Author keywords

basic norm; constitutional making; constitu ere; democracy; Hannah Arendt; Hans Kelsen; immanent norm

Indexed keywords

EID: 43249173852     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453706064898     Document Type: Article

References (163)

1. Hans Kelsen, ‘Professor Stone and the Pure Theory of Law’, Stanford Law Review 17 (July 1965): 1143.
2. Hans Kelsen, ‘On the Basic Norm’, California Law Review 47(1) (1959): 107.
3. Hans Kelsen, ‘Science and Politics’, in What is Justice? Justice, Law, and Politics in the Mirror of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 364;
4. Hans Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, trans. A. Wedberg (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945), pp. 405, 437–8.
5. Hans Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, trans. M. Knight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 50, n. 23.
6. Kelsen, ‘Science and Politics’, p. 361.
7. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, pp. 437, 401.
8. Tony Honoré, ‘The Basic Norm of Society’, in Normativity and Norms: Critical Perspectives on Kelsenian Themes, ed. Stanley L. Paulson and Bonnie Litschewski Paulson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 90.
9. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, p. 401.
10. See also William Ebenstein, ‘The Pure Theory of Law: Demythologizing Legal Thought’, in Essays in Honor of Hans Kelsen, ed. The California Law Review (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 639–41.
11. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, p. 438.
12. Hans Kelsen, ‘Law, State, and Justice in the Pure Theory of Law’, in What is Justice? Justice, Law, and Politics in the Mirror of Science, p. 294
13. and Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, p. 438.
14. Kelsen, ‘Science and Politics’, pp. 350, 355.
15. Hans Kelsen, Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory, trans. B. L. Paulson and S. L. Paulson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 56–8;
16. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, pp. 198–205;
17. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, pp. 115–19, 395, 405, 436–8;
18. Hans Kelsen, ‘Value Judgments in the Science of Law’, in What is Justice? Justice, Law, and Politics in the Mirror of Science, pp. 223–5;
19. Hans Kelsen, Théorie Générale des Normes, trans. O. Beaud and F. Malkani (Paris: PUF, 1996), p. 344.
20. Julius Stone, ‘Mystery and Mystique in the Basic Norm’, The Modern Law Review 26(1) (1963): 34–59;
21. Graham Hughes, ‘Validity and the Basic Norm’, in Essays in Honor of Hans Kelsen, pp. 695–714;
22. Joseph Raz, ‘Kelsen's Theory of the Basic Norm’, in The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 122–45;
23. Stanley L. Paulson, ‘On the Early Development of the Basic Norm’, in Law, Life, and the Image of Man: Modes of Thought in Modern Legal Theory: Festschrift for Jan M. Broekman, ed. Frank Fleerackers, Evert van Leeuwen, and Bert van Roermund (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997), pp. 217–30;
24. Honoré, ‘The Basic Norm of Society’, pp. 89–112;
25. Geert Edel, ‘The Hypothesis of the Basic Norm: Hans Kelsen and Hermann Cohen’, in Normativity and Norms, pp. 195–220;
26. Gerhard Luf, ‘On the Transcendental Import of Kelsen's Basic Norm’, Normativity and Norms, pp. 221–33.
27. Julius Cohen, ‘The Political Element in Legal Theory: a Look at Kelsen's Pure Theory’, The Yale Law Journal 88(1) (1978): 1–38;
28. Henry Janzen, ‘Kelsen's Theory of Law’, The American Political Science Review 31(2) (1937): 210.
29. Kelsen, ‘Science and Politics’, p. 365.
30. Frank Michelman, Brennan and Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 48.
31. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, p. 114.
32. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, p. 71;
33. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, p. 124;
34. Hans Kelsen, ‘Foundations of Democracy’, Ethics 66 (1955): 3;
35. Kelsen, ‘Science and Politics’, p. 365.
36. Kelsen, ‘Value Judgments in the Science of Law’, p. 221;
37. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, p. 399.
38. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, pp. 19–20, 193.
39. Joseph Raz, ‘The Purity of the Pure Theory of Law’, in Essays on Kelsen, ed. Richard Tur and William Twining (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 79–97.
40. See the renowned chapter, ‘The Law as a Normative Coercive Order; Legal Community and Gang of Robbers’, in Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law, pp. 44–50.
41. Kelsen, ‘Science and Politics’, p. 364;
42. Kelsen, Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory, pp. 55–6, 63–4.
43. Hans Kelsen, Allgemeine Staatslehre (Vienna: Nachdruck, 1993), pp. 99, 104, 338. For an illuminating discussion of the basic norm in Kelsen's early writings, see Paulson's ‘On the Early Development of the Grundnorm’, pp. 217–30.
44. Kelsen, ‘On the Basic Norm’, p. 109.
45. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, p. 111.
46. Hans Kelsen, ‘Why Should the Law be Obeyed?’, in What is Justice? Justice, Law, and Politics in the Mirror of Science, pp. 262–3.
47. Kelsen, Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory, p. 58;
48. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, p. 116;
49. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, p. 202.
50. See Stanley L. Paulson, ‘The Neo-Kantian Dimension of Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 12(3) (Autumn 1992): 324–8.
51. For a different approach, see Stefan Hammer, ‘A Neo-Kantian Theory of Legal Knowledge in Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law?’, in Normativity and Norms, pp. 177–94.
52. Kelsen, ‘Science and Politics’, p. 364.
53. H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 245.
54. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, pp. 115–16, 405–6;
55. Kelsen, ‘Science and Politics’, pp. 359–60;
56. Kelsen, Théorie Générale des Normes, p. 343.
57. Kelsen, Allgemeine Staatslehre, p. 99.
58. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, p. 199.
59. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, pp. 367, 396, 405–6;
60. Kelsen, ‘Value Judgments in the Science of Law’, p. 223;
61. Kelsen, Théorie Générale des Normes, p. 345.
62. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, p. 204.
63. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, pp. 111–13, 116, 436.
64. Kelsen, Théorie Générale des Normes, p. 343.
65. Kelsen, ‘On the Basic Norm’, p. 108.
66. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, pp. 121, 437.
67. Carré de Malberg, Contribution à la Théorie Générale de l'État, vol. II (Paris: Librairie de la société du Recueil Sirey, 1922), p. 494.
68. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth, Mx and New York: Penguin Books, 1963), pp. 183–4.
69. For a similar point, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Declarations of Independence’, New Political Science 15 (1986): 7–15.
70. For an insightful comparative discussion of Arendt and Derrida related to the perplexities of foundations, see Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 86–109.
71. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundations of Authority”’, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 6.
72. As Arendt perceptively put it in her discussion of the French Revolution, the ‘authority … of the new power, the pouvoir constitué … could not be guaranteed by the Constituent Assembly, the pouvoir constituant, because the power of the Assembly itself was not constitutional and could never be constitutional since it was prior to the constitution itself’; Arendt, On Revolution, p. 163. For a detailed discussion of this problem, set against Derrida's and Honig's versions of the perplexities of foundations, see David Ingram, ‘Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Trial of (Post) Modernity or the Tale of the Two Revolutions’, in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohl (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996): 221–50.
73. For an exposition of the constituent paradox, see Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘Collective Identity and Constitutional Power’, in The Presence of the Past (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 12–13;
74. Frank Michelman, ‘Constitutional Authorship’, in Constitutionalism: Philosophical Foundations, ed. Larry Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 77.
75. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, pp. 9–10;
76. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, p. 445.
77. Claude Klein, Théorie et pratique du pouvoir constituant (Paris: PUF, 1996), pp. 192–9.
78. Edel, ‘The Hypothesis of the Basic Norm’, p. 217.
79. In a mode, highly reminiscent of a realist approach, Kelsen argued that ‘every legal order which has the degree of effectiveness necessary to make it positive is more or less a compromise between conflicting interest-groups in their struggle for power, in their antagonistic tendencies to determine the content of the social order. This struggle for power invariably presents itself as a struggle for “justice”; all the fighting groups use the ideology of “natural law.” They never represent the interests that they seek to realize as mere group-interests, but as the “true,” the “common,” the “general” interest. The result of this struggle determines the temporary content of the legal order’; Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, pp. 438–9, 117.
80. Kelsen, Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory, p. 57;
81. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, p. 396.
82. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, p. 217;
83. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, p. 436.
84. Kelsen, Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory, p. 57.
85. As early as 1926, Herman Heller had charged Kelsen with reintroducing facticity into legal theory from the back door and within the concept of the basic norm. See Herman Heller, ‘Die Krise der Staatslehre’, in Gesammelte Schrifften, ed. Fritz Borinski, Martin Drath, Gerhart Niemeyer, and Otto Stammer (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1992), pp. 23, 24. Two years later, Carl Schmitt repeated this criticism, by arguing that Kelsen's supposed derivation of the validity of the legal system from the Grundnorm was a ‘tautology of raw factuality’;
86. C. Schmitt, Verfassungslehre 1928 (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1928), pp. 8–9.
87. Franz Neumann, almost two decades later, criticized Kelsen's pure theory of law as nihilistic and decisionistic; see Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National-Socialism: 1933–1944 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1944), pp. 46–7.
88. Also see Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 238
89. and Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 45, 47, 48–56;
90. Lon L. Fuller, ‘Positivism and Fidelity to Law — a Reply to Professor Hart’, Harvard Law Review 71(4) (1958): 658–61;
91. Norberto Bobbio, Democracy and Dictatorship (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 86–8
92. Norberto Bobbio, ‘Kelsen et les sources du droit’, Archives de philosophie du droit 27 (1982): 135–45
93. and Norberto Bobbio, Essais de théorie du droit (Paris: Bruylant LGDJ, 1998), pp. 185–283;
94. Hughes, ‘Validity and the Basic Norm’;
95. Peter Caldwell, Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law: The Theory and Practice of Weimar Constitutionalism (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 50–1.
96. For an informed presentation of this debate, see Stanley L. Paulson, ‘Lon Fuller, Gustav, Radbruch, and the “Positivist Thesis”’, Law and Philosophy 13 (1994): 313–59.
97. This criticism of Kelsen's legal positivism has also been more recently reiterated by Habermas in Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. W. Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 87.
98. For this point, see Andrew Arato, Civil Society, Constitution, and Legitimacy (New York and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp. 229–30.
99. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, p. 91.
100. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, p. 279, 70–1, 279.
101. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, p. 284.
102. This distinction between autonomous and heteronomous lawmaking informs Kelsen's procedural definition of democracy as a method. Hans Kelsen, Vom Wesen und Wert der Democratie, 2nd edn (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1929), pp. 79–81;
103. Kelsen, ‘Foundations of Democracy’, pp. 3–4.
104. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, pp. 283–5;
105. Kelsen, ‘Foundations of Democracy’, pp. 26–33.
106. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, p. 401.
107. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, p. 279.
108. I take the distinction between ‘higher’ and ‘normal’ lawmaking from Bruce Ackerman. See Bruce Ackerman, ‘Neo-Federalism?’, in Constitutionalism and Democracy, ed. Jon Elster and Rune Slagstad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
109. Bruce Ackerman, ‘Constitutional Politics/Constitutional Law’, Yale Law Journal 99 (1989): pp. 453–546;
110. Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Foundations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991);
111. Bruce Ackerman, The Future of Liberal Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992);
112. Bruce Ackerman, ‘Higher Lawmaking’, in Responding to Imperfection. The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment, ed. Sanford Levinson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995);
113. Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Transformations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
114. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, pp. 131–2.
115. Raz, ‘Kelsen's Theory of the Basic Norm’, pp. 125–6.
116. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, p. 50.
117. Kelsen, Théorie Générale des Normes, pp. 105–6, 65–8, 106.
118. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, 218, n. 83.
119. Kelsen denounced the notion of consent based on a founding constituting contract as ‘one of the worst legal fictions invented by Roman jurists’. Instead, he claims that the recognition of the basic norm by objective, impartial, scientific profession of legal scientists is a more promising way to address the validity of constitutional foundations. Kelsen, ‘Law, State, and Justice in the Pure Theory of Law’, p. 291.
120. Kelsen, Allgemeine Staatslehre, p. 251.
121. Kelsen, ‘Foundations of Democracy’, p. 22.
122. Kelsen, ‘Why Should the Law be Obeyed?’, p. 262.
123. Also, see Raz for a penetrating critique of Kelsen's reference to a hypothetical legal person; Raz, ‘Kelsen's Theory of the Basic Norm’, pp. 141, 144–5.
124. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, p. 203.
125. According to Carlos Miguel Herrera, Kelsen understood sovereignty to be a hypothetical concept too, a theoretical construction, which, like the constituent power, was a necessary logical presupposition for a juridical theory of the state. See his chapter ‘La souveraineté du dogme à l'hypothèse’, in Théorie juridique et politique chez Hans Kelsen (Paris: Éditions KIMÉ, 1997), pp. 115–18.
126. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, pp. 203–4.
127. Hans Kelsen, ‘Reichgesetz und Landesgesetz nach österreichischer Verfassung’, Archiv des öffentlichen Rechts 32 (1914): 217.
128. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, p. 395.
129. Kelsen, ‘Value Judgments in the Science of Law’, p. 224.
130. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, p. 117.
131. Kelsen, Vom Wesen und Wert der Democratie, p. 56, 13–4.
132. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, pp. 287–8, 288.
133. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, pp. 233–41.
134. Kelsen, Vom Wesen und Wert der Democratie, p. 20.
135. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 198, 199.
136. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 212.
137. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, p. 56.
138. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 212, 213.
139. With this argument, she further developed her more theoretical statement that ‘political power … is always limited power and since power and freedom in the sphere of human plurality are in fact synonyms, this means also that political freedom is always limited freedom’. Hannah Arendt, ‘Willing’, in The Life of the Mind (San Diego and New York: a Harvest Book, 1978), p. 201.
140. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 203;
141. Hannah Arendt, ‘What is Freedom?’, in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin Books, 1993), pp. 152–3, 152.
142. For the principle of justice, see Hannah Arendt, ‘Some Questions in Moral Philosophy’, Social Research 51(1–2) (1984): 741.
143. George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984), pp. 12–13.
144. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, p. 204
145. and Kelsen, Théorie Générale des Normes, pp. 343, 346.
146. Also, see Kelsen, Allgemeine Staatslehre, pp. 251–3.
147. As Olivier Beaud has incisively remarked, ‘It is, therefore, possible to analyze the constituent power from a Kelsian point of view. There is, in his eyes, an initial constituent act, founding of norms that invite us to take it into consideration in legal analysis. The originating constituent power, therefore, is not completely absent from Kelsen's œuvre, even if he rejects it.’ Olivier Beaud, La puissance de l'état (Paris: PUF, 1994), p. 213.
148. For the same reason, Stanley Paulson has described these late writings of Kelsen as belonging to a ‘voluntaristic period’ starting in 1960. ‘This late period,’ Paulson rightly argues, ‘is marked by the complete abandonment of the conceptual neo-Kantian apparatus. From now on, the juridical norm is presented as the meaning of an act of the will … In a word, in this late period, Kelsen joins traditional juridical positivism, in the version offered by the thinkers of the “will,” those same thinkers he had fought against for a long time’. For a similar point, see Bobbio, Essais de théorie du droit, p. 236;
149. Stanley L. Paulson, ‘Introduction’, in Théorie générale du droit et de l'État (Paris: Bruylant LGDJ, 1997), p. 7.
150. Kelsen, Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory, p. 106.
151. I discuss the constituent power in more details, in ‘Popular Sovereignty, Democracy, and the Constituent Power’, Constellations 12(2) (June 2005): 223–44.
152. For the notion of semantic normativity, see Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons, ‘Metaphysical Naturalism, Semantic Normativity, and Meta-Semantic Irrealism’, in Naturalism and Normativity, ed. Enrique Villanueva (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1993), pp. 180–204.
153. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 289.
154. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, ‘Die Verfassungsggebende Gewalt des Volkes — Ein Grenzbegriff des Verfassungsrechts’, in Staat, Verfassung, Democratie: Studien zur Verfassungstheorie und zum Verfassungsrecht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), pp. 11–12.
155. Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 1.
156. Carl J. Friedrich, Constitutional Government and Democracy: Theory and Practice in Europe and America (Boston, MA and New York: Ginn, 1950), p. 128.
157. James Madison, ‘Speech in the Federal Convention on Suffrage’, in Writings (New York: Library of America, 1999), p. 133.
158. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, pp. 21–2;
159. Kelsen, ‘Value Judgments in the Science of Law’, p. 210.
160. This argument builds on Saul A. Kripke's reasoning developed in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 37.
161. Also, see Paul Coates, ‘Kripke's Sceptical Paradox: Normativeness and Meaning’, Mind, new series 95 (1996): 77–80;
162. J. L. Zalabardo, ‘Kripke's Normativity Argument’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 27(4) (1997): 467–88.
163. Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, p. 10.