Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer

Vol. 13 No. 15 (2) (2018)

Articles

Philosophical–Legal Analysis of Hans Kelsen’s “Pure Science of Law”

DOI: https://doi.org/10.32084/bsawp.5083  [Google Scholar]
Published: 2018-12-31

Abstract

“Return to positivism” is made by Kelsen in his interpretation of the objective existence of law due to his a priori departure from the rational knowledge of “God” (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Saint Thomas Aquinas) as the supreme lawgiver. At the same time, he supports such subjectivist and at the same time relativistic directions of thought, such as Hegel’s absolute idealism or socialistcommunist materialism of Marx and Engels. Consequently, he rejects the classical science of natural law as objective, universal and absolutely binding every human being in understanding, establishing and interpreting law in human communities organized in states. Cicero calls them “initium juris” of all constituted law. Paradoxically, therefore, Kelsen’s “theory of law” sounds “pure”, since apart from being addicted to these trends, he additionally depends in a formal and material sense on Darwin’s materialistic theory of evolution, Kant’s idealist transcendental philosophy and Comte’s naturalist positivism. The result of this process is Kelsen’s positivist postulate of the total isolation of “pure law science” from natural and supernatural “ethics and theology”. The objective and real ordo entis is transformed into a completely subjectivized ordo mentis, and the order of good and justice as the goals and effects of righteousness is changed into the “order of interests”, which is governed by the uncontrollable playfulness of the stronger in the state. Kelsen’s positive promise of the liberation of humanity and law from the “ideology” of “traditional science about law” becomes one of the most dangerous intellectual trends of the twentieth and twenty-first century, which should be overcome for the objective good and objective justice of modern generations of people.

References

  1. Guz, Tadeusz. 2007. „Rechtsphilosophische Analyse von Hans Kelsens Reiner Rechtslehre.” W Historia magistra vitae. Księga jubileuszowa ku czci Profesora Jerzego Flagi, red. Antoni Dębiński, Stanisław Wrzosek, Katarzyna Maćkowska, i Małgorzata Kruszewska–Gagoś, 463-86. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL. [Google Scholar]
  2. Kelsen, Hans. 1934 Reine Rechtslehre. Einleitung in die rechtswissenschaftliche Problematik. 2. Neudruck der 1. Auflage. Leipzig–Wien: Franz Deuticke. [Google Scholar]

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.