The Kelsen-Voegelin Controversies

In response to the personal request by the editor of a planned commemorative volume on the life and work of the internationally known legal scholar Hans Kelsen, I wrote this article on the relationship between the teacher Kelsen and one of his most famous students at the University of Vienna, Eric Voegelin. Though the editor failed in completing and publishing the volume, he had persuaded me, despite my reluctance, to contribute a piece and to focus on the personal, intellectual, and political tensions between the two men. The editor’s major argument was that as a PhD student of Voegelin at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich (1967), who followed him as a Junior Fellow in 1969 to the Hoover Institution at Stanford, I was well qualified to write about this topic. He did not accept my argument that I had not known Kelsen or his publications. My close intellectual relationship to Voegelin and the various articles and essays I had written about him in German and English made him insist in many phone calls and letters that I should write the article on Kelsen and Voegelin. – MH

*Professor Hans Kelsen had been in 1921 the co-advisor of Voegelin’s PhD project at the University of Vienna.

In 1928, he wrote a recommendation in support of Voegelin’s application for the venia legendi, the right to teach at the University of Vienna, the so-called Habilitation, which is often called in non-German speaking countries the second dissertation. Though he praised “the extraordinary many-sidedness of his interests,” he refused, as Juergen Gebhardt has pointed out in the introduction to a correspondence volume in Voegelin’s Collected Works, to support Voegelin’s request for a broad job description that included, in the sense of a contemporary understanding of the social sciences, political science, and sociology (Gebhardt, 2009: 12). In another part of the evaluation, he added a comment on Voegelin’s critical assessment of the missing political dimension of Staatslehre, and the first signs of the beginning distancing became visible: “Here is not the place to enter into a critique of Voegelin’s train of thought. In any case his attempt is very interesting and a most valuable scholarly contribution. It is among the most meaningful endeavors in the direction of a non-juridical Staatslehre that has been undertaken up to this time” (Gebhardt, 2009: 676-682). Despite this praise, the final venia legendi that was granted after a colloquium and a lecture and being registered by the Ministry of Culture did not include Voegelin’s desire to also teach courses in “non-juridical Staatslehre.” Kelsen’s veto prevented that. Yet Voegelin’s wish was granted in 1931 after Kelsen had left in 1930 Vienna and moved to Cologne.

The personal connections between the two men were obviously not very close after Kelsen’s refusal to grant Voegelin the extended job description. Accepting in 1930 the professorship at the University of Cologne and leaving Germany for Geneva, after the Nazis came to power in 1933, and then in 1936 Prague, the geographic distance between them did not improve their personal communication. The collapse of the Republic of Austria in 1933/34, for which Kelsen had drafted the constitution in 1920, and Austria becoming an authoritarian state, added to their estrangement. Voegelin published a book on the events, under the title The Authoritarian State. It is not known whether they communicated with each other after Austria became annexed in 1938 by Nazi-Germany and both men emigrated under challenging personal circumstances from different countries to the USA, Voegelin in 1938 from Austria via Switzerland and Kelsen from Prague in 1940. During the many years, I had known Voegelin he never talked about his teacher. He mentioned though and praised Kelsen’s Reine Rechtslehre (Pure Theory of Law) in lectures in Munich, but he never talked about his personal life experiences with his students and assistants. When he had moved with his wife Lissy 1969 permanently to Stanford and became a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, they visited Kelsen once in Berkeley.

This personal distance between the two men had a reason. Kelsen had sent Voegelin in 1954 as he was still teaching at LSU in Baton Rouge a 125-page devastating typescript critique of his book The New Science of Politics (1952). Voegelin was shocked about the tone and content of the review, even though he opened his response letter with a statement that sounded more like a typical flowery Viennese gesture. He wrote: “The mere fact of your letter has given me great pleasure — I have very few from you, much to my regret.” In his response Voegelin sums up all the things that he learned from his teacher and praises the impact on his intellectual and scholarly life. But I want to quote the last part of the passage in its entirety because it says a lot about the relationship between the two. Voegelin wrote: “If much of what I do you disagree with, let your imagination turn for one second from us to the stage of philosophia perennis and consider what happened to poor Plato with his Aristotle. And if you then look again on your misguided student, you might consider that the best students are not necessarily those who swear in verba magistri and remain in the ‘shell,’ but perhaps rather those who studied so thoroughly at school that they free themselves from it and can go their own way” (Hollweck, 2007: 207-209).

This comparison of their relationship with that of Plato and Aristotle is fascinating. After all, Aristotle did not attack Plato directly but encoded the criticism of his teacher by harshly critiquing ‘Socrates’ in Book II of his Politics for designing the paradigmatic polis in theory and forgetting that all poleis are defined by the plurality and diversity of interests. When Voegelin mentions Aristotle’s mystifying attack on his teacher to allude to their relationship it is not clear why he brought it up in this context. After all, he must have known that Aristotle was wrong, because Plato’s ‘Socrates’ reminds the gathered group in the Republic again and again that the paradigm is one in theory only and should not be attempted to become actualized. Despite what Kelsen (and his editor Arnold) may have wrongly thought about Plato, the teacher of Aristotle was as much a realist as his student.

Voegelin suggested an answer about the non-publication of the review in his Autobiographical Reflections (1989). These reflections were based on extended interviews that Ellis Sandoz had conducted with him about his intellectual life in the summer of 1973 in Stanford. Voegelin makes a reference to his book The Authoritarian State. An Essay on the Problem of the Austrian State (1936), in which he criticizes Kelsen’s understanding of politics, rejecting his reduction of politics to the norms of the legal nomenclature of the state and adds: “My relationship with Kelsen was never the same after that.” Yet Voegelin explained Kelsen’s decision to not publish the review. Let me add what he told Sandoz: “…Kelsen’s critique was never published, perhaps because I conveyed to him directly through a letter in cautious form, and through common friends more outspokenly, that his understanding of the historical and philosophical problems involved in the matter was inadequate and a publication would damage his prestige rather than mine” (Sandoz, 1989: 53).

The German editor of the review, Eckhart Arnold, has no evidence to prove Voegelin’s assertion wrong but engages in his defense of Kelsen in speculations of his own about the silence. For him, it seems probable that Kelsen wanted to incorporate the review in a “more comprehensive discussion of neo-metaphysical teachings” (Kelsen, 2004: 116). Well, Kelsen did not publish the review or a major work on neo-metaphysical thinking. He remained silent about his critique until his death in 1973. The review was published in 2004 by Arnold with a rather polemical ‘Afterword.’ Voegelin never mentioned the review in any of his publications during his lifetime either. Sandoz’ interviews were published in 1989 four years after Voegelin’s death in 1985. After all, it may be possible that both men recognized as the result of this confrontation in 1954 that both their reputations were at stake. Kelsen was born in 1881 and therefore twenty years older than Voegelin. He was certainly not only better known in the USA but had a growing international reputation. Whereas he was a full professor at UC Berkeley, Voegelin was a professor at the less renowned LSU in Baton Rouge. Voegelin had at that time published only one book in English, namely The New Science of Politics, and the cover story in Time-Magazine about the book in 1953 did not sit well with some members of the intellectual and academic elites because it was seen as providing intellectual ammunition in the Cold War. Yet he was in the process of writing his major work, namely Order & History, whose first three volumes appeared in 1956 and 1957. So, both men had reasons to remain silent about their fundamental disagreements.

The second to last time the two men met was at a scholarly event in August 1962 in Salzburg, a symposium organized by a former assistant of Voegelin in Munich and then professor of political science at the University of Salzburg, Franz-Martin Schmoelz.  The fact that Schmoelz who had a very engaging personality and was also a member of the Dominican Order may have helped to persuade the two men to participate in the symposium on “Natural Right and Political Theory”. Kelsen gave the first presentation on “The Foundation of Natural Law” (Die Grundlage der Naturrechtslehre) and Voegelin the second one on “The Right by Nature” (Das Rechte von Natur). The reports about this encounter indicated that no rhetorical fireworks were set off by either one of them. The Austrian social charm that both men had internalized in the years of their lives in Vienna prevailed throughout the three-day symposium.

Controversy No. 1:  Austria’s Authoritarian State

When thinking about the two German-speaking societies after the end of WWI, both were confronted with the collapse of their respective imperial order. The dissolution of the multi-ethnic Austrian-Hungarian Empire into many ethnically based nation states created a political vacuum in Austria itself that saw its power reduced to a mini-state. A large group of German-Austrian nationalists were longing for the restoration of the German Federation that had been terminated by the Prussian victory in 1866 in the battle of Koeniggraez or they were pleading for a kind of unification with Germany. The situation in Germany was different despite territorial losses in the North and the West. In response to violent confrontations in the streets of Berlin between right-wing military groups and communists, the parliament in Berlin reconvened in 1919 as a constitutional convention in the Thuringian city of Weimar and designed and adopted a constitution that lasted until 1933 when it became effectively undermined by emergency decrees issued by the ailing and senile President Hindenburg and finally, after his death, supplanted by the Nazi state.

Hans Kelsen had been drafted during WWI into the Austrian army yet worked through the entire period as a lawyer in the military and finally as an assistant to the war minister, Stoeger-Steiner. In October 1918 he was charged with the planning for the expected reform of the constitutional structure of the empire and the post-war role of the Habsburg dynasty. In that October he wrote a memorandum that dealt with the future role of the monarchy in a situation where many ethnic nationalities of the empire were already planning their respective independence moves, which became reality after the armistice of November 4. His memorandum was read by the emperor and his advisors. He was put in a position to anticipate the need of a constitutional document for the transformation of the empire into a post-war Austrian democratic republic. Despite his lower middle-class and Jewish background and all the challenges he had to face in this social status and class conscious, anti-Semitic environment, he suddenly found himself confronted with the challenge to design a constitution (Sattler, 1972: 100-122). This preliminary text, which was primarily written by Kelsen, became the basis of the post-war republic until 1933/34 and was reintroduced in 1945 as the constitution for the post-WWII republic.

Kelsen was a legal scholar and received his venia legendi at the Vienna University after completing his Habilitation in 1911. He continued teaching law and legal philosophy at the university even while he was drafted and functioning as a lawyer within the military. He stayed during the war in Vienna. Being a legal scholar, he was not interested including in his understanding of the legal norm structure of the state the political reality that was imploding at that time the traditional understanding of order. The kind of Staatslehre he was occasionally teaching had nothing to do, as the misleading translation suggests, with political theory. Politics was by definition of the Staatslehre an alien territory. The division between state and civil society that Hegel had introduced in his lectures on the Philosophy of Right in the early 1820s at the University of Berlin, privileging the state with the maintenance of political order, formed the backdrop for this primarily German, yet hegemonic thinking about politics. This thinking became a hegemonic discourse in large sections of the world, not the least because Marx and Engels adopted it, even if they turned it upside down by politically re-empowering civil society.

When Voegelin left Europe on his extended journey to the United States from 1924-26, he discovered a radically different understanding of politics in which the structure of the state and its norms were seen as being dimensions of the constitutional government. Whether Kelsen noticed that American influence in Voegelin’s thinking, I do not know, though he must have read his first book Ueber die Form des Amerikanischen Geistes (On the Form of the American Spirit), which was published in the year of the Habilitation and was part of the submitted published material, though he did not mention his teacher in the book. Kelsen’s remark in the venia legendi recommendation of 1928 about “the most meaningful endeavors in the direction of non-juridical Staatslehre that has been undertaken up to this time” seems to indicate that. The Voegelin who had published the book about his discoveries of intellectual territories in the USA that had been unknown to him was not any longer the PhD-student of the legal scholar who in 1919-20 wrote the constitution that came more and more under political attack in the late 1920s and early 1930s and was finally overthrown by forces that existed and operated outside the norms of Kelsen’s legal universe.

In a 1931 review of Carl Schmitt’s “Verfassungslehre” (1928), Voegelin refers to Schmitt’s “criticism of Kelsen’s theory of law, which appears to me to be important as a principled counterformulation to the neo-Kantian principle of methodological purity.” He continues: “The application of the principle of methodological purity to the sphere of human science (Geisteswissenschaft) such as political theory is in my opinion not feasible, because the field that ought to serve as the subject matter of scientific research constitutes itself outside the context established by science.” Voegelin continues quoting Schmitt’s arguments against the “pure theory of law”, yet he refuses to abandon his teacher’s theoretical achievements and concludes that Schmitt has not succeeded “to develop a valid and systematic political theory” (Cooper, 2001: 44). However, he recognizes something in Schmitt’s approach that seems intellectually appealing to him when he writes: “Schmitt does not approach the problems of the state as an external observer but is himself active within the state as a creator of political ideas. His scientific judgments are not the statements of a neo-Kantian subject of cognition who objectively transcends his subject matter but rather are investigations of meaning from a perspective within political reality. Schmitt stands within the world of constitutional-political ideas of the nineteenth century, just as the main object of his investigation, the Weimar constitution, stands within as well. He takes the constitution as it is and works within a realm of ideas in which he, as much as the constitution, is enclosed” (Cooper: 2001: 63).

Whatever made Voegelin come to this interpretive conclusion, it indicated not only his appreciation of Schmitt’s departure from German state-centric thinking about politics – something Leo Strauss would repeat one year later, before going into exile, with his surprisingly positive review of Schmitt’s Der Begriff des Politischen (The Concept of the Political) – but it also pointed into his own future when he began to critically analyze the self-interpretive meaning narratives of societies and civilizations.

Voegelin had liberated himself from the constraints of seeing the state and its legal structure of norms as the center of action. Yet his notion of politics at that time was still burdened by an understanding of a stratified order that he was suggesting as a model when working in the early 1930s on the manuscript of the unpublished “Herrschaftslehre” that Peter Opitz published in 2007 (Opitz, 2007: 52). And he never completely resolved his strange inability to embrace a notion of politics that came close to what historians like Josiah Ober have recovered as the real world of the polis (Ober, 2015). He makes references to the size of the polis as the only manageable unit of politics in talks in the 1960s, but this polis is not the historical Athens historians have rediscovered in the last two decades.

He makes already in the short introduction to The Authoritarian State clear where he is coming from and planning to go: “Every work of this kind depends on a belief in the myth of knowledge. And the theoretical mind that reads it will primarily follow the dramatic exchange between the theoretician and reality, an exchange animated by that myth. He will want to know whether the struggle for the transformation of reality into truth ended in victory or defeat. The sentences of this book have been formed with this theoretical mind as the ideal reader” (Weiss, 1989: 49). Kelsen was certainly not that ‘ideal reader’ and whether the Austrian historian Erika Weinzierl, who wrote the historical introduction to the American translation of the volume in Voegelin’s Collected Works, was that ‘sympathetic mind’ is not clear either. At one point, she remarks: “That the highly gifted conservative Voegelin at the age of thirty-five made the same mistake as many equally honorable enemies of National Socialism and tried to rob Peter to pay Paul, replacing one evil with another, is easier to see for later generations than it was for contemporaries. Nonetheless, this should not be concealed in a critical commentary. After all, under certain circumstances yesterday’s mistakes can become those of tomorrow” (Weiss, 1989: 29-30). Writing that warning in 1999 about the temptations Voegelin was confronted with in the early 1930s in Austria and giving partially into them, as Weinzierl suggests, with the book she is historically introducing. When reading her warning again in 2020 when authoritarian temptations become actualized in some parts of Europe and the US as well, is more than sobering (Henningsen, 2006: 22-38).

These critical comments about Voegelin’s limited notion of politics at that critical time in Germany, do not take anything away from the substance of his critique of Kelsen’s understanding of politics. Yet Weinzierl’s reminder about Kelsen’s teaching is important as is the obvious fact that his  Jewish background prevented him from engaging in any of the corrective interventions Voegelin was hinting at: “Thus, he was the Vienna professor of the entire period between the wars to devote a whole series  of courses exclusively to democracy, which he still defended passionately in 1932 when he had already been teaching for two years at the University of Cologne” ( Weiss, 1989: 13). This information about him teaching courses about democracy reveals something about Kelsen’s courage and convictions, but it does not add much to his understanding of politics. After all, he spelled out in a book that he first published in 1920 and then republished in a revised version in 1929 a rather peculiar concept of the people: “If the unity of the People must be understood as a unity of human acts normatively regulated by the legal order, then the People is unified only as an object of rule in this normative sphere, where ‘rule’ is defined as a normative bond or as the subjection to norms” (Kelsen, 2013: 36). This juridical reduction of politics becomes the target of Voegelin’s critique.

Kelsen’s constitution of 1920 was a document without a preamble that would have identified the new legitimating entity replacing the Habsburg dynasty after its abdication. The Austrian people did not become invoked as the new sovereign, as happened, for example, in the preamble to the American constitution of 1789, “We the People.” Voegelin writes: “… a state was ‘established’…, which had neither a Staatsvolk in the sense of a political people with a will to the existence of the state nor any state leadership that could claim to be the author or creator of the state” (Weiss, 1989: 159). He blamed the following troubled history of the republic on this legally patched-up document that was basically conceived by Kelsen. He writes: “The history of the republic after 1920 was prefigured in the founding period: it was fulfilled in the various attempts to realize the decisions suspended during the founding.” He mentions attempts of joining the German Reich and creating a Danube confederation and sums it up in a politically very persuasive statement: “The nonexistence of a national people expressed itself in the Social Democrats’ politics of class struggle and in the conflicts between a party organization and the state, which were pushed to the point of civil war.” Yet the following remarks seem to confirm Weinzierl’s suspicion that the ‘young scholar’ was moving into the dangerous territory where the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis had already staked out their claims for a new order.  He wrote: “Finally, the beginnings of an Austrian national consciousness showed itself in the militia movement (Heimwehr), which had its first, though still weak, success in the constitutional amendment of 1929, and since the German revolution, in the movement for the establishment of an authoritarian and corporate Austrian state” (Weiss, 1989: 159).

He discusses doctrinal statements by Mussolini and German jurists with close Nazi ties in order to substantiate what, according to him, characterized the Austrian “Staatsproblem”, to which the subtitle of his book referred. He shows the parallelism of the two radical revolutions, in Italy in 1922 and in Germany in 1933, but insists on a major difference: “Surely…the construct of both situations demonstrates the same elements: the political formation of a Volk through a leader and a movement, both of them utilizing the state apparatus for this purpose. But the shifts in emphasis remain in force: in the Italian system, the primacy of the state; in the German system, the primacy of the Volk” (Weiss, 1989: 77-79). He adds to the comparison the French ideas of race to substantiate the compactness of a non-juridical understanding of politics he wants to critically confront Kelsen with.

Voegelin reproduces some of the arguments he had developed in great detail in one of the two race books he published in 1933, Race and State. Yet reading these arguments in the context of the critique of Kelsen’s juridically reductionist understanding of politics makes the criticized Kelsen look better than the critic because he stays away from the race discourse. Quoting French theorists, Voegelin comes to the conclusion that their theories of the nation are comparable to German speculations on the topic: “This theory of the nation is closely akin to the German theories. Blood and soil as the foundations of völkisch existence; a racial core that determines the physical and mental character of the nation; that predominates even in the mixed-race groups and shapes the foreign elements according to its own image, physically and mentally; a racial policy intent on determining which foreign nationalities are to be admitted because on average they more closely resemble the French racial core than others…” (Weiss, 1989: 84). Yet Voegelin praises the French historical success of assimilating all kinds of people from the Greco-Roman and Mediterranean space. He recognizes that “there is a French race theory and even a very distinct race consciousness in this theory, when it comes to the homogeneity of the racial core as the basis for the unity of the nation as a spiritual entity, theory and consciousness nevertheless occupy a position very different from the one they have in German political thought. French race theory is realistic – it recognizes the real connection between racial structure and the higher stage of intellectual and political elements of ethnic and national existence, but it does not elevate these elements to the symbolic and ideological level. There is a knowledge of the significance of blood, but no myth of blood” (Weiss, 1989: 85). His excursion into this symbolic danger zone, while writing his book, stops where the ideologues take over and begin to execute policies that are based on the fundamentalist application of ‘blood and soil’ arguments for the purpose of the improvement and cleansing of the German body politic.

The core of Voegelin’s critique of Kelsen was that he failed to understand that the political vacuum that had emerged after the dissolution of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in 1918 could not simply be filled with a normative legal document.  “The absence of a political people, a demos, that might have been able to establish the state as a democracy can be documented in the history of the founding of the republic” (Weiss, 1989: 151). He actually went so far – and it is not clear whether it was meant ironically, sarcastically or descriptively — to write: “Because of the empirical truth content of the theory when it is applied to the Austrian case and because of the influence of its originator, Kelsen, on the structure and interpretation of the constitution of 1920, the pure theory of law gained significance in Austrian constitutional history that went far beyond its objective content” (Weiss, 1989: 163). In a way, Kelsen becomes identified by Voegelin as Austria’s symbolic deus ex machina, who by strokes of his pen filled a gaping political hole with a constitutional fiction.

According to Kelsen’s substitution of politics by the state “all questions of the constitution of reality fall away. In other words, when the object state is identified with the ‘law’, not only do all other objects disappear from the total phenomenon of the state, but the law as context of reality constituted prior to science also vanishes from the subject matter of the theory of the state.” This radical critique culminates in the indictment of Kelsen as “a positivist in the narrower sense of the term that describes a thinker…who in particular considers all intellectual significations and acts mere ideologies concealing the satisfaction of ‘natural’ needs.” Voegelin claims that Kelsen must have seen the illogical consequences of dismissing all normative attributions of the law as being ideological yet accepted it as part of his “positivist metaphysics” (Weiss, 1989: 174).

Whether Kelsen waited intentionally almost 17 years until Voegelin published his book, The New Science of Politics in 1952, to get back at his student’s epistemological attack against the positivism of the teacher he did not mention. But the controlled anger of the 125 pages he sent Voegelin in 1954 at LSU seemed to indicate that the rebuttal was more than the reaction of an irritated casual reader. After all, Voegelin had with his book, The Authoritarian State (1936), indirectly provided the intellectual cover for the dismantlement of the republican order that was based on Kelsen’s constitution. Voegelin was not responsible for the destruction of Kelsen’s flawed constitutional design, political forces beyond his influence accomplished that in a civil war like situation. But he had articulated arguments that appeared to justify the overthrow of the order and the dissolution of the parliament. Voegelin realized relatively fast that the authoritarian state was no answer to the looming fascist threats that were in power in Italy and Germany; after all, the German troops crossed the Austrian border in April 1938.

He had begun after 1936 to write the essay on The Political Religions, in which he developed the theory that the mass movements that had come to power in the Soviet Union in 1917, in Italy in 1922 and in Germany in 1933 were substitute religions with deep historical roots in European culture. The essay was still printed in Vienna but with almost no possibility of distribution. A second edition was published in 1939 by Bermann-Fischer in Stockholm with a preface, in which Voegelin responded to the critical complaint of some readers, Thomas Mann among them, “for presenting my case in such an overly objective manner that it actually seemed to support these conceptions of the world and movements, in particular National Socialism, which it was intended to oppose.” He wrote this preface already in Cambridge/ Mass., Christmas 1938, and warned against taking National Socialism too lightly: “Resistance against a satanical substance that is not only morally but also religiously evil can only be derived from an equally strong, religiously good force. One cannot fight a satanical force with morality and humanity alone.” He repeats his main argument at the end of the essay when he writes: “…my representation would not be good if it gave rise to the impression that we are concerned with merely a morally inferior, dumb, barbaric, contemptible matter. That I don’t consider the force of evil to be a force of good will be clearly evident to all readers of this treatise who are open to religious questions” (Henningsen, 2000: 24).

Yet, that was not the end of Voegelin’s response. Peter Opitz published in 2007 in Germany in the series Periagoge a new edition of the text with the deleted passages from the original preface to the Stockholm edition. In this version, Voegelin added, after the violent anti-Semitic events of the Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany on November 9, 1938, a recommendation to the persecuted Jews of Europe (Opitz, 2007: 146). Since the Nazis had removed Jews from the protection of the legal order, turned them into outcasts, they could rightly behave accordingly, namely assassinate Nazis wherever they could find one. On advice by the publisher and friends like Alfred Schuetz, he removed these provocative passages because he was persuaded that they may lead to further killings by the Nazis and turning him into a target himself.

Controversy No. 2: The New Science of Politics

When Kelsen started reading The New Science of Politics (1953) he was unaware that this book, which were the Walgreen lectures Voegelin had given in 1951 at the University of Chicago, was the theoretically condensed version of a monumental History of Political Ideas that Voegelin had been working on throughout WWII. The eight volumes of this history were all posthumously published in his Collected Works. The titles could have helped Kelsen to come to terms with his agnostic prejudices because they would have informed him about Voegelin’s universal knowledge interests that did not recognize immanent meaning boundaries. Volume I covered, e.g., Hellenism, Rome, and Early Christianity and Volume VIII treated Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man. Yet whether the eight volumes of the History of Political Ideas and the following five volumes of Order & History would have motivated Kelsen to question his self-imposed neo-Kantian inquiry limits, is rather questionable.

The first three volumes of Order & History were published in 1956/1957. When Peter Opitz, who had received his PhD with a dissertation on Laotzu in Munich in 1966 and was on a research fellowship at Berkeley, visited Kelsen in 1967, the most memorable statement he can remember from that meeting was Kelsen’s question: “Does Voegelin still have that direct connection to God?” Since he asked Opitz the question in German, let me report the original quotation Opitz recently mentioned to me: “Hat Voegelin noch immer diesen direkten Draht zum lieben Gott?” The dismissive sarcasm that was implied in this question suggests that Kelsen had not looked at the published volumes of Order & History and was not interested in breaking out of his self-imposed refusal of questioning his positivistic epistemological premises.

Kelsen was a well-read, multilingual and highly educated scholar of the traditional European type. Reading, for example, his Salzburg paper on natural right from 1962 and the detailed footnotes provides a glimpse at this German academic background he shared with Voegelin. Like Voegelin he did not care whether his readers or sometimes even listeners understood more than one language, which was the rule in monolinguistic America, they would arrogantly quote citations in their original languages. The Salzburg references in Kelsen’s paper are in Greek, Latin, German, English, very often without even the help of a translation. What is extraordinary about these occasionally long quotations by, e.g., Aristotle and Thomas, is that they leave nothing out, provide the whole experiential and existential context but become immediately filtered through the neo-Kantian positivistic truth control. Any references to experiences of transcendence that ground their reflections of reality become marked as being illegitimate value judgements. This purge of the authentic symbolic meaning narratives that were the result of the Aristotelian or Thomistic or any other truth quests in the history of Western and all other civilizations lets only skeletal fragments of their original arguments survive. In a way, that’s also the core approach of the critique of The New Science of Politics by Kelsen that becomes programmatically affirmed in the ideological afterword by the editor of the book, Arnold.

Voegelin established his interpretative approach in The New Science of Politics in a way that went against the core of Kelsen’s epistemological self-understanding when he wrote: “…that a study of reality could qualify as scientific only if it used the methods of the natural sciences, that problems couched in other terms were illusionary problems, that in particular metaphysical questions which do not admit of answers by the methods of sciences of phenomena should not be asked, that realms of being which are not accessible to exploration by the model methods were irrelevant, and, in the extreme, that such realms of being did not exist” (Henningsen, 2000: 91). Since Voegelin’s entire work from the New Science (1952) to Vol. 5 of Order & History, which was posthumously published in 1987 under the title In Search of Order, was conceived and written in this spirit, there was never any intellectual reconciliation possible between the teacher and his student.

Kelsen’s unwillingness to transcend the procedural or institutional frame of democracy and cover the narratives of meaning that grounded their legitimation remained intact throughout his life. Even his courageous engagement in support of democracy in the early 1930s in lectures at the University of Cologne and then during the McCarthy era in the early 1950’s, when he became a target of Hoover’s FBI, did not make him reflect on the existential motivations for his engagement. The neo-Kantian prohibition of raising existential and metaphysical questions of meaning had immunized him against the truth quests his former student was pursuing in the major historical civilizations in his monumental comparative work Order & History, of which the first 3 volumes were published in 1956/57.

Unlike Kelsen, Voegelin was not participating in the post-McCarthy intellectual debates in the U.S. Kelsen’s anger about the New Science of Politics (1952) was probably heightened by a cover story in Time-Magazine on the book. This story made Voegelin a silent participant in the public debate, and it also contributed to his appeal among American conservatives, though he frequently rejected their approaches. But Voegelin left the U.S. in 1958 for Munich, where he founded the Institut fuer Politische Wissenschaften at the Ludwig-Maximilian Universitaet. Apart from occasional excursions into current debates, his major involvements in the intellectual life of West Germany were his Inaugural lecture in November 1958 on Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Henningsen, 2000). In that lecture, he attacked Marx’ anti-religious stance. The resonance to his semester long lecture in 1964 on Hitler and the Germans (Henningsen, 2006) was limited to the student audience since he did not publish the lectures. The book version was published for the first time in an English translation in 1999, the German edition appeared in 2006.

References:

Cooper, B (2001) Ed. Selected Book Reviews. E. Voegelin, The Collected Works, Vol. 13, Columbia/London, University of Missouri Press.

Gebhardt J (2009) Ed. Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. E. Voegelin, The Collected Works, Vol. 29, Columbia/London, University of Missouri Press.

Henningsen, M (2000) Modernity without Restraint.  E. Voegelin, The Collected Works, Vol. 5, Columbia/London, University of Missouri Press.

Henningsen, M (2006) Preface to Voegelin Hitler und die Deutschen. Munich: Fink Verlag.

Hollweck, Th (2007) Ed. Selected Correspondence, 1950-1984. E. Voegelin, The Collected Works Vol. 30, Columbia/London, University of Missouri Press.

Kelsen, H (2004) A New Science of Politics. Hans Kelsen’s Reply to Eric Voegelin’s ‘New Science of Politics. “A Contribution to the Critiques of Ideology”. Ed. E. Arnold. Frankfurt/Lancaster: Ontos Verlag.

Kelsen H (2013) The Essence and Value of Democracy. Eds. N.Urbinati/ C.I Accetti. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Ober, J (2015). The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press.

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