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History and Theory 53 (October 2014), 435-450 © Wesleyan University 2014 ISSN: 0018-2656

DOI: 10.1111/hith.10723

DEBATING MODERNITY AS SECULAR RELIGION:


HANS KELSEN’S FUTILE EXCHANGE WITH ERIC VOEGELIN1

Secular Religion: A Polemic against the Misinterpretation of Modern Social


Philosophy, Science and Politics as “New Religions.” By Hans Kelsen. Dor-
drecht: Springer, 2012. Pp. 307.

ABSTRACT

This article reviews Hans Kelsen’s mysterious and recently published last book, contex-
tualizing it with reference to the little known dialogue between Kelsen and Eric Voege-
lin. The confrontation between Kelsen and Voegelin, two of the most illustrious émigré
scholars who found a new home in America, is important to revisit because it touches
upon several axes of debate of crucial importance to postwar intellectual history: the reli-
gion–secularity debate, the positivist–antipositivist debates, and the controversy that also
led to the famous Voegelin–Arendt debate: how to read the horrors of totalitarianism into
a historical trajectory of modernity. Although the Kelsen–Voegelin exchange ended in
failure and bitterness, its substance goes to the heart of modern intellectual history.

Keywords: neo-Kantianism, modernity, political religion, positivism, secularity, totalitari-


anism

It is well known that some of the most important theoretical, philosophical, and
historical debates during the twentieth century developed as reflections on the
horrors of the two World Wars and how to understand the emergence of totali-
tarianism. It is equally well known that the most important thinkers who engaged
in these debates had lived through events relating very directly to the drama and
suffering of the wars. Many escaped the horrors of Nazism and not a few resettled
in America, either because of their Jewish background and/or their critical writ-
ings. It would be wrong to say that these thinkers shared a theoretical or political
orientation; quite the contrary, they often disagreed deeply on the nature and his-
torical explanation of totalitarianism, and on how to prevent its possible return, as
recently discussed by Peter Baehr in his introduction to the now fully published
exchange between Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin in the early 1950s.2 What
they did share was an experiential background and to some extent also participa-
tion in a set of European intellectual traditions and debates as they had developed
during the first half of the century. Perhaps more important, what they shared was
a rooting in intellectual traditions and worldviews, forming part of existing politi-

1. I would like to thank Arpad Szakolczai, Lisbeth Christoffersen, and colleagues from the GERG
research group at Roskilde University for invaluable comments on the first version of this article.
Merits are shared, but responsibility remains mine.
2. Peter Baehr, “Debating Totalitarianism: An Exchange of Letters between Hannah Arendt and
Eric Voegelin,” History and Theory 51, no. 3 (2012), 364-380.
436 Bjørn thomassen

cal realities that would suddenly collapse and disappear as the taken-for-granted
background of their lives and work. This no doubt represented an existential
and intellectual tension: how to think back and try to comprehend the incompre-
hensible, drawing on an intellectual toolkit that had somehow developed inside
those very political realities where the seeds of destruction had found fertile
ground? How to reconcile thought and reality? The extremeness of the situation
brought a tension and vividness into their analysis and writing. It also injected a
personal investment and presentness into intellectual endeavor that we can hardly
even grasp today, despite (or perhaps even because of) the still ruling fashion of
reflexivity, and the by now established use of the I-form of writing. One should
never long for a war and wholesale civilizational collapse. But the long moment
of intellectual history that followed World War II still peaks above us.
The so far almost unknown and to some extent “hidden” dialogue between
Hans Kelsen (1881–1973), one of the twentieth century’s no doubt most influ-
ential academics, and his former student Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) must be
situated within this larger figuration (to use the term of Norbert Elias, another
World War II survivor). With the publication of Hans Kelsen’s last book,
Secular Religion: A Polemic against the Misinterpretation of Modern Social
Philosophy, Science and Politics as “New Religions,” Springer Verlag (with
permission of the Kelsen Estate), has provided us with a precious document
and insight into Kelsen’s continuous struggle to defend his positivist principles,
and well beyond the field of legal studies. They have also provided us with new
insight into Kelsen’s very charged confrontation with Voegelin, and how much
this dialogue—which, in contrast to the Arendt–Voegelin dialogue, never found
any public expression—actually meant to Kelsen. The book in question is not a
radical critique of just Voegelin, but it is meaningful to privilege Voegelin as the
opponent against whom Kelsen came to formulate his arguments. For that reason
alone, this book deserves attention: it represents a final piece of documentation
that closes a human and intellectual encounter that ended in failure, a failure with
consequences.
The confrontation and disagreement between Kelsen and Voegelin, two of the
most illustrious émigré scholars who found a new home in America, is impor-
tant to revisit because it touches upon several axes of debate crucial to postwar
intellectual history: the religion–secularity debate (was it religion or the lack or
perversion of religion that had underpinned twentieth-century political extrem-
ism?); the positivist–antipositivist debates, which were revived in America
during the 1950s, due in large part to the arrival of European scholars; and the
more explicitly political and ideological controversies that pitted liberal versus
conservative and socialist orientations against each other as diverging answers to
ways out of the crisis—although on the latter point, it must of course be stressed
how both thinkers kept a distance from ideologies, and Voegelin vehemently so;
Kelsen always considered membership in a political party incompatible with his
scientific ethos.3 The controversy between the two thinkers also points to the

3. Clemens Jabloner, “Kelsen and His Circle: The Viennese Years,” European Journal of Inter-
national Law 9, no. 2 (1998), 376.
DEBATING MODERNITY AS SECULAR RELIGION 437
question that led to the famous Voegelin–Arendt debate: how to read the horrors
of totalitarianism into a historical trajectory of modernity.
Kelsen stayed within an Enlightenment framework of understanding, iden-
tifying deviations from modern positivism as a regression back to the Middle
Ages; he insisted on the Kantian reading of modernity as coming to maturity via
reason, and was one of the most influential academics to revive neo-Kantianism
throughout the twentieth century, putting his stamp on intellectual life. Voegelin
went in the opposite direction. He belongs to a selective handful of scholars who
ruptured radically with normally accepted approaches to modernity, seeking to
place the present in a long-term historical framework that Karl Jaspers (from the
depths of his World War II exile) had conceptualized as the “axial age.” The aim
of this review essay is not only to rehearse what Kelsen actually wrote in this, his
last book (important in and by itself), but also to contextualize his argument. This
must involve a consideration of the Kelsen–Voegelin relationship and intellectual
debates as they developed in Europe prior to World War II.

ON THE PUBLICATION OF AN UNPUBLISHED BOOK

The book in question is one that its author did not want to see published. In 1964
Kelsen left the project fully written, prefaced, and dated, and with galley proofs
done—and never returned to it. Why? It was not simply a question of old age
fatigue or sudden death; Kelsen lived nine full years after his decision in 1964.
Had the matter concerned minor details to be worked out, Kelsen could have
bought himself more time. The mystery goes even further back, to the 125-page
review that Kelsen had typed on Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics (1952)
and which he also never published (it was published in 2004 by Ontos4). Instead,
he continued to work on his critique and incorporated it into a longer discussion
that inserts Voegelin as the main representative of a larger “school” of theologiz-
ing thinkers—the unpublished book reviewed here. So after retirement in 1952,
and upon publication of his wildly influential book, Principles of International
Law, Kelsen dedicated much of his remaining lifetime “dealing with Voegelin”—
without ever publishing a word of it.
To publish a book against authorial intentions, with fifty years delay, requires
us to ask what brought Kelsen to his decision. In their brief editorial remarks
(xi-xv), Kelsen experts Clemens Jabloner, Klaus Zeleny, and Gerhard Donhauser
provide the following possible reasons. With respect to Kelsen’s nonpublication
of his 1954 review of Voegelin’s New Science it is possible that Kelsen feared
being catalogued as a Marxist, for Kelsen here defends Marx’s critique of reli-
gion. During the years of McCarthyism, any such accusation could have been
devastating, and Kelsen was known to have “social-democratic” sympathies.
However, if this were still the main problem in 1964, Kelsen could simply have
removed chapter 10 on Marx (who is not discussed elsewhere). With respect
to the 1964 publication, the editors refer to the claim made by Rudolf Aladár

4. Hans Kelsen, Hans Kelsen’s Reply to Eric Voegelin’s “New Science of Politics.” A Contribution
to the Critique of Ideology, ed. A. Eckhart (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2004), 376.
438 Bjørn thomassen

Métall (Kelsen’s student and assistant) in his Kelsen biography,5 that although
in this work Kelsen argues that no concept of religion could go without an idea
of a personal god, Kelsen later came to attach value to Huxley’s and Russell’s
claims that religious feelings were possible without any metaphysical belief in a
god (xiii). If this is so, it would have brought Kelsen closer to Voegelin’s posi-
tion. Whether or not Kelsen underwent such a change of position (and with such
an abrupt consequence), the editors would still have done well to include in their
introductory remarks a consideration of what Voegelin scholars would have been
able to add to the discussion. Voegelin’s New Science did not discuss Kelsen at
all. We clearly need to understand better what triggered Kelsen’s obsession with
Voegelin.

THE BOOK: WHAT IT SAYS

In the book Kelsen vehemently opposes any attempt to discredit modern science
and social philosophy as failed religion. The word “opposes” should be taken
literally. Kelsen is not offering an alternative epistemology or metaphysics: his
book is written as an against, and as a polemic. For him, science must remain
within its bounds, and here one can start by quoting the last two sentences of the
book: “Science can only describe and explain; it cannot justify reality. It has the
immanent tendency to be independent of politics, and, as a rational and objec-
tive cognition of reality, cannot presuppose in the description and explanation of
its object the existence of a transcendent authority beyond any possible human
experience” (271). Kelsen insists that one of the hallmarks of modern science
was to liberate itself from a theologically determined ground of reasoning, or,
as he says in the preface, “If any criterion distinguishes modern times from the
Middle Ages it is—in Western Civilization—the existence of objective and inde-
pendent science” (4). Kelsen’s own system of “pure law” was developed out of
this positivist spirit. Kelsen wants to combat a retrogression of science back to
metaphysics and theology. Kelsen is not just aiming at deconstructing some cur-
rents of thought here and there; the threat is all-pervasive: “The literature against
which this book is written seriously endangers the existence of an objective and
independent science and therefore the spirit of modern times.” Thus the stakes
could not be higher.
The book is straightforward in its build-up. The introduction briefly identifies
the most prominent authors who argue that “faith” is lurking behind the motivat-
ing forces and epistemologies of modernist “reason,” a long list that starts with
Fritz Gerlich and ends with Voegelin, Oswald Spengler, Karl Löwith, and Hans
Jonas. Voegelin is early on identified as “one of the most conspicuous representa-
tives of this school of thought” (13). Chapter 1, “The Search for Parallelisms and
Its Dangers,” starts out with a brief discussion of the Politische Theologie of Carl
Schmitt, Kelsen’s historical arch-enemy (17-19). However, Schmitt is not dis-
cussed any further, whereas Voegelin’s name returns again and again. The intro-
duction and first chapter discuss these theologizing theories in an overall way,

5. Rudolf A. Métall, Hans Kelsen: Leben und Werk (Vienna: Deuticke Verlag, 1969).
DEBATING MODERNITY AS SECULAR RELIGION 439
pointing out the similarities among Antonin Sertillanges, Henri de Lubac, Martin
Buber, Rudolf Bultmann, Étienne Gilson, Karl Jaspers, Löwith, Ernst Cassirer,
Raymond Aron, Jacob Talmon, Arnold Toynbee, Crane Brinton, Jonas, Jacob
Taubes, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, and Voegelin. This “school of thought” is
united by its insistence that modernity is somehow a “secular religion” or “secu-
lar eschatology,” terms whose validity Kelsen vehemently denies. For Kelsen,
the notion of “secular religion” is simply a contradiction in terms: “a ‘secular
religion’ is a dereligionized religion, which means no religion at all” (21). Kelsen
thus wants to restore modern thinking by taking it for what it is, and what it says.
He is mockingly ironic and sarcastic about all these attempts to read religion into
the “hidden” structures of modernity. The book is close in spirit to Hans Blumen-
berg’s attack on Löwith in his defense of the “legitimacy of the modern age.”6
The rest of the chapters discuss particular aspects of that general position.
Chapter 2 is an attack on Brinton and Voegelin and the idea that modernist doc-
trines of progress represent an eschatology. Chapter 3 is a scathing attack on the
idea that Joachim of Flora’s and Augustine’s theologies of history fundamentally
shaped the way in which Western political societies interpret the meaning of their
existence, as Voegelin had argued. Here, as in chapter 4, Kelsen categorically
rejects Voegelin’s diagnosis of modernity as being Gnostic; and, quite important,
he traces back those Gnostic tendencies, not to secular ideologies, but to their
own religious or philosophical sources. Chapter 5 comes to the rescue of Hobbes
against Voegelin’s theologizing reading. Chapter 6 broadly defends Enlighten-
ment philosophy against the theologizing analyses of Ernst Cassirer, Charles
Frankel, Brinton, and Voegelin. Chapter 7 liberates Hume’s empiricism and
Kant’s transcendentalism from Sertillanges’s theologization. Chapter 8 reposi-
tions Henri de Saint-Simon and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as truly secular and
atheist moderns, against the theologizing of Löwith and Lubac. Chapter 9 insists
that Auguste Comte was indeed modernly positivist and well above theology,
contrary to what Jacques Maritain, Löwith, and Voegelin had tried to demon-
strate. Chapter 10 liberates Marx from the repeated claims of Fritz Gerlich, Aron,
Brinton, and Voegelin that Marxism can be understood as a kind of messianic,
eschatological secular religion. To the contrary, Marx was a prototype secular
modern. Chapter 11 does the same job for Nietzsche, now in opposition mostly
to Jaspers and Voegelin. Nietzsche was what he said: an Antichrist; for him there
was no God. Chapter 12 lifts Nietzsche out of Heidegger’s analytical embrace,
which famously saw Nietzsche as the “last metaphysician.” Chapter 13 comes to
the rescue of modern science as such, against the analysis of Jonas, Voegelin, and
Brinton, and chapter 14 argues similarly with regard to modern politics, whose
revolutionary appeal Voegelin had wrongly analyzed as Gnosticism. The conclu-
sion consists of three paragraphs in which Kelsen underlines the seriousness of
the challenge of the “school of thought” that he has just “stigmatized” (his word,
271), and which must be eradicated. The alternative is a return to the Middle
Ages, which, to Kelsen, evidently was not a terribly nice place or time to live in.

6. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
440 Bjørn thomassen

READING THE BOOK TODAY: HOW AND WHY?

This book certainly deserves to be read and discussed, but perhaps not exactly
for the reasons stated by the editors. It is somewhat difficult to see how Kelsen’s
discussion throws new light on contemporary debates on “de-secularization.”
Kelsen’s analysis is monolithic, moderno-centric, black and white: “History may
be interpreted in two fundamentally different ways. One is to regard the evolution
of mankind as the realization of the will of man, the other as the realization of the
will of God. One is philosophy of history; the other is theology of history” (20).
Even contemporary (post-)Marxists would be quite willing to accept that Marx’s
reading of universal evolution was teleological/eschatological to the maximum.
Does this mean that Marx was “simply” a theologian in socialist disguise? Of
course not. But none of the authors that Kelsen discusses made use of such sim-
plistic reductionism, and against the penetrating analytical depth represented by
thinkers from Aron to Jonas, up to Heidegger, Jaspers and Voegelin, it is Kelsen’s
one-sided analysis that pales in its own rigidity.
The analysis presented by Kelsen involves Western thought back to the
Enlightenment and beyond, targeting authors writing throughout the first half of
the twentieth century, but the main bulk of literature that Kelsen takes to court
was written in the immediate postwar period when it had become clear to any
sensitive mind that beneath modern reason and rationality, something else was
lurking, showing its ugly face, within that very idiom of “progress,” purity, and
order that Kelsen refuses to open to questioning, stubbornly holding it up as a
bulwark against “theology.” Seen as such, the book testifies to an extreme lack
of historical and conceptual reflexivity.
But the book is hugely interesting to read for a series other reasons. In his
early youth Kelsen had taken much interest in literature and philosophy.7 These
late writings do throw new light on his life-work, how he considered his own
role and legacy, and how important this “battle” against theologizing was for
him. They also indicate that Kelsen’s relationship to religion was complex and
multi-layered8 and perhaps unresolved. They also show how much Voegelin actu-
ally meant to Kelsen. But why? And why, in the first place, did the two thinkers
resume contact after so many years? And why did their exchange turn out to be so
utterly futile? These questions, much more than the actual substance of Kelsen’s
book, merit our attention today. So let us proceed by stepping backwards.

7. Kelsen’s first publication was in fact Die Staatslehre des Dante Alighieri. It would be wrong to
call this a “religious” book, but it interestingly takes us right to the heart of those “Middle Ages” that
Kelsen says modernity has left behind. Significantly, Kelsen here contextualizes Dante’s life-work
by discussing the struggle between Pope and Emperor. See Hans Kelsen, Die staatslehre des Dante
Alighieri (Vienna and Leipzig: Deuticke Verlag, 1905).
8. On this “other” Kelsen, see Hans Gustafsson, “Den andre Kelsen,” Retfaerd, 71, no. 18 (1995),
3-18.
DEBATING MODERNITY AS SECULAR RELIGION 441

VOEGELIN’S CHALLENGE AND THE EXCHANGE


OF LETTERS THAT PRECEDED KELSEN’S BOOK

It was to a large extent Voegelin’s challenge that animated the entire enterprise
behind Kelsen’s last writings, and somehow it was intimately related to his
own life and work. As Kelsen saw it, Voegelin was unjustly lumping together
scientific positivism and political totalitarianism as part of modernity’s Gnostic
character. Kelsen was indeed one of the century’s most prominent defenders of
scientific rationality and legal positivism—this was his hallmark—but he was
also a European of Jewish-Germanic background who had survived Nazism.9 He
took it personally for very good reasons.
Kelsen and Voegelin had developed two very different approaches to the legal,
social, and political sciences, but both thinkers also belonged to that group of
prominent Central European thinkers who came to shape American academic
life, and who had the European World Wars as their founding experiences.
Kelsen left Vienna for a position in Cologne in 1930. He had been dismissed from
the Austrian Constitutional Court the same year.10 With the onset of Nazism,
Kelsen escaped to Geneva in 1933, and then to the States in 1940—shortly after
Voegelin, who in 1938 had just barely escaped the clutches of the Nazis, similarly
ending up in Switzerland with his wife as political refugees, before making it
to America. They both became American citizens (Voegelin in 1944; Kelsen in
1945); they both had an ambitious project of “restoring” science; and they both
saw in America an opportunity to implement their approach.
After the Vienna years, Voegelin and Kelsen lost contact with each other.
Voegelin and Kelsen never met in the States, not even when they both lived in
California.11 Voegelin first wrote to Kelsen toward the end of 1953 (this letter
has been lost; it is not in the Voegelin archive), with a copy of one of his recent
essays, on “The Oxford Political Philosophers.”12 Kelsen answered Voegelin in
a letter dated January 26, 1954. The correspondence was in German. Why did

9. Kelsen openly accuses Voegelin (most explicitly on page 83) of propagandizing the position
of the Catholic Church, designating anything hostile to its doctrines as “Gnosticism.” Kelsen is also
critical of Voegelin’s interpretation of Jewish sources. Religious sentiments are never mentioned
explicitly, but they can be felt beneath the surface. Voegelin was not in any technical sense Catholic.
Kelsen converted to Catholicism (in 1905) in order to avoid integration problems, before he converted
to Protestantism in 1912.
10. The reason behind his dismissal goes some way toward contributing to an understanding of
Kelsen’s personal bitterness toward “religious thought”: Austria’s administrative authorities had
permitted remarriage, but the lower courts considered these dispensations invalid. Led by Kelsen, the
Constitutional Court overturned these rulings, but the Christian Social Party got the final say. Kelsen
was dismissed and became the object of political attacks. In other words, it was a legal struggle over
rational versus religiously inspired ethics that drove Kelsen, author of the constitution, into permanent
exile.
11. See the statement by Tilo Schabert in Voegelin Recollected: Conversations on a Life, ed. Barry
Cooper and Jodi Bruhn (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 239.
12. See Barry Cooper, “Appendix: Voegelin, Kelsen and the New Science of Politics,” in Begin-
ning the Quest: Law and Politics in the Early Work of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Mis-
souri Press, 2009), 22.
442 Bjørn thomassen

Voegelin write to Kelsen? It was quite a crucial period in American intellectual


life, where positivist, quantitative approaches were gaining ground across the
board, much to Voegelin’s disappointment. Since they were both emigré intel-
lectuals with a shared background, Voegelin may have heard about Kelsen’s criti-
cal engagement with his work. It was a precarious period for Voegelin; he had
abandoned his massive material gathered for the history of political ideas, which
was supposed to be his ticket into American academia. His employment situation
was uncertain, and a public critique from Kelsen, his mentor from Austria, was
therefore no minor issue. Kelsen was a legal advisor to the UN, and was widely
considered the world’s leading jurist. From 1945–52 (until his retirement) Kelsen
was a full professor in the Department of Political Science at Berkeley. Had they
been on good terms, Kelsen would have been the natural referee for Voegelin
regarding any decisive employment or publication matter, but such was not the
case.
Kelsen replied to Voegelin’s initial letter by saying that he had just finished
The New Science of Politics and that Voegelin must consider him an “agent of
destructive positivism” and worse, an out-and-out Gnostic. From Kelsen’s stand-
point Voegelin had “erred, and strayed . . . like lost sheep.”13 Voegelin replied
with polite formality and said that he would like to clear up “a misunderstand-
ing that necessarily and improperly clouds relations with a man to whom I owe
as much as I do to you.” Voegelin’s letter to Kelsen, dated February 10, 1954,
is in fact significant testimony to Voegelin’s maturing thought. Voegelin starts
by expressing his immense gratitude toward Kelsen, and his happiness that they
have now resumed contact. He then moves on to state his sadness about the tone
and content of Kelsen’s last letter, where Kelsen violently rebukes Voegelin’s
approach. “We have both grown older, and I have found my own theoretical
position.”14 Voegelin writes that Kelsen can be as destructive as he likes: “I do
not intend to convince you of the critical rationality of this enterprise.” Voegelin
sketches the differences between Kelsen’s “dogmatic assertion” that there were
no legal problems outside the pure theory of law that admit of scientific treatment
and Voegelin’s view that the metaphysical “pseudo-problems” were in fact “sub-
stantial and real.” For Kelsen, Voegelin’s analysis dealt with “unreal problems”;
Kelsen was telling Voegelin that his entire undertaking was a kind of no-thing, an
utter waste of time. It is the harshest critique one could possibly imagine from a
former Doktorvater: not that you are in the wrong, but that you are wasting your
own and everyone else’s time. It must have hurt Voegelin, who was struggling
to give direction to his work. Kelsen was not going to stop him, “because I am
of the opinion that these problems are real and very important, you will certainly
understand that we are of divergent opinions in the evaluation of your destructive
intention.” 
As to the question of Gnosticism, Voegelin—and this is significant—tries
to let Kelsen off the hook: “You are most definitively no ‘Gnostic.’” Voegelin

13. Ironically, Kelsen here uses deeply religious imagery, drawing on the Book of Common
Prayer.
14. Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1950–1984, volume 30 of the Collected Works of
Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 207.
DEBATING MODERNITY AS SECULAR RELIGION 443
assured Kelsen that the purity of his metaphysical agnosticism ensured that he
never attempted to “fill the vacuum of transcendence” with any immanent type
of gnosis—unlike both Cassirer and Husserl, who did so by creating positivistic
philosophies of history. Voegelin ended on a conciliatory note: “if you reconsider
your misguided student, you might consider that the best students are not neces-
sarily those who swear in verbamagistri and remain inside the ‘school’ but per-
haps rather those who studied so thoroughly at school that they free themselves
from it and can go their own way.”
Kelsen replied on February 27, and included an essay on “Greekness,” in
response to Voegelin’s “The World of Homer.” The tone is tense; Kelsen
expresses respect for Voegelin’s work and calls it “tragic” that they can speak
only as opponents. Kelsen also anticipates his critique of New Science, and offers
Voegelin the chance to respond. On March 7 Voegelin writes back to Kelsen,
expressing gratitude that Kelsen has taken the time to engage so thoroughly with
his work, especially since it was “the first time, as far as I know, that you have
made any formal comment of any of my works.”15 Voegelin included a short
commentary on Kelsen’s own treatise, “What is Justice?” Voegelin does not
want to approach Kelsen’s work from within its “internal logic,” which is indeed
“pure” and coherent. What he wants to address are the premises of Kelsen’s entire
argument. “The search instrument is the soul of the seeker. We do not operate
here in a realm of normative principles but in an empirically verifiable realm of
being.”16
Voegelin’s letters show that he is now able to position his critique of Kelsen
within the Gnostic diagnosis he was then elaborating—only that, at the same
time, he explicitly places Kelsen’s neo-Kantianism at a safe distance from Gnos-
ticism; a self-imposed double-bind we shall return to in the conclusion. Voegelin
never responded substantively to Kelsen’s critique of New Science of Politics,
and Kelsen withheld the publication. And thus the case was closed for Voegelin
in 1954, although evidently enough not for Kelsen, who spent the next ten years
gathering intellectual ammunition with which to publicly stigmatize Voegelin.
But to make further sense of it all, we need to take one step further back, revisit-
ing what Voegelin had actually written about Kelsen prior to World War II.

THE EARLY VOEGELIN–KELSEN DEBATE IN VIENNA:


LAW, OBJECTIVITY, AND “PURITY”

Although it was not until 1954 that Voegelin and Kelsen started to exchange
letters, the Kelsen–Voegelin debate goes back to the 1920s and 30s and their
shared Vienna background.17 Kelsen was Voegelin’s Doktorvater, a crucial fig-

15. Ibid., 214. One may read more than a touch of irony into Voegelin’s tone here: why this
confrontation now?
16. Ibid., 216. Voegelin also uses the occasion to correct some quite serious errors of interpretation
concerning Kelsen’s reading of several of the Christian texts. For instance, in John 18, Jesus talks
about truth, not justice (as Kelsen had interpreted it), and John (18:37) seems misquoted.
17. For further detail, see, in particular, Jürgen Gebhardt, “Editor’s Introduction: Eric Voegelin,
the Early Years,” in Selected Correspondence, 1924–1949, volume 30 of the Collected Works of Eric
Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press 2009), 1-64.
444 Bjørn thomassen

ure for Voegelin’s personal and intellectual development. Voegelin’s early work
belonged to the Staatslehre tradition, which had Kelsen as its main reference
point. Voegelin’s first 1922 publication was on sociology outside Germany and
was a straightforward application of Kelsen’s legal positivism. The article helped
him in obtaining an assistantship with Kelsen in 1923. However, in subsequent
publications, starting from his 1924 publication “The Pure Theory of Law and
State,” Voegelin started to express reservations about Kelsen’s neo-Kantian
methodology, arguing for the need for a “reconstruction of political science,”
where the emphasis is not on formal norms, but rather on the underlying mean-
ingful symbols of community life, whose knowledge requires historical and not
purely formal analysis.
It was not a sudden change of outlook. Voegelin was also influenced by Oth-
mar Spann, who became his second thesis advisor. Spann regarded Kelsen as a
main enemy of sociology, blocking off anything vital or relevant to actual analy-
sis of social phenomena. Voegelin was following these debates for and against
neo-Kantianism, and eventually started to regard Kelsen’s approach as untenable.
Voegelin’s Rockefeller grant and subsequent trip to America (1924–26) played a
huge role in his intellectual formation. Voegelin became inspired by American-
style pragmatism, insisting on concrete events, which he came to prefer over the
Germanic-style “closed” theoretical systems, abstracted from empirical reality.
Voegelin realized that Kelsen’s Staatslehre was not at all a universal theory of
law. Voegelin’s positivism was further shaken when he encountered the ideas of
George Santayana and Alfred North Whitehead. Voegelin also took much inspi-
ration from Carl Schmitt.
Voegelin’s departure from Kelsen unfolded in several steps. In 1930 Voegelin
published “The Unity of the Law and the Social Structure of Meaning Called
State,”18 where he employed a Weberian approach to address the question of
meaning outside the framework that Kelsen had laid out and which had become
quite dominant in Austria. One apparently minor publication must be mentioned
here: Voegelin’s paper on Kant, published on the occasion of the Festschrift
for Kelsen’s fiftieth birthday in 1931.19 Any dissenting voice in the context of
a Festschrift requires a mixture of courage and naivety; yet Voegelin’s article
starts out against the spirit of Kelsenian “pure theory,” emphasizing the concrete,
real, experiential basis of “ought”: one must return to the anthropological bases
of “ought.” This can happen via Kant, but again, only by overcoming Kant. The
anthropological basis of Kant’s philosophy is fundamentally flawed, and contem-
porary neo-Kantian currents are only bringing these flaws into full light. A risky
“tribute” to Kelsen indeed!
Voegelin read Kant as attempting to replace the fabric of social life with the
artificial constructs of a utopian cosmopolitan order, calling for an abstract moral
obligation, an “ought” without foundation in the concreteness of human life.
Voegelin ends with an assessment that points to the “extraordinary poverty of
Kant’s image of man and society,” which lacks corporality, history, or political

18. Eric Voegelin, Published Essays, volume 8 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Colum-
bia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 89ff.
19. Voegelin’s essay is reprinted in ibid.
DEBATING MODERNITY AS SECULAR RELIGION 445
reality, manages to throw out with a “derogatory gesture” the entire sensuous exis-
tence, and even takes the liberty of contrasting it with his own, presumably authen-
tic self, which is nothing but a “nearly empty core of existence,”20 a vacuum onto
which a “system” of pure principles is built. Instead of purification, says Voegelin,
one should rather talk about “evacuation.”21 This leaves us with only one possible
conclusion: In Voegelin’s later terminology, Kant fully qualifies as a modern-day
Gnostic; and neo-Kantianism, as it returned very much to the core of European
intellectual traditions via Kelsen in Vienna, and later in America, only worsened
matters. The surprising fact is that Voegelin would never say so.
Voegelin’s publications on the idea of race and on national socialism—for
example, an analysis of what he then called “political ideas”—represented a new
departure for Voegelin. In Race and State, Voegelin starts by placing his study
within a tradition of “Staatslehre,” but then moves on to establish this field of
study from the renewed ground of philosophical anthropology.22 Voegelin links
the existence of legal norms to human experiences, pushing toward a new kind
of analysis of the existential experiences that make regulation of institutions (like
family or property) possible and necessary. Voegelin indicates that the British
and American common-law traditions have more to offer here. Voegelin seeks to
bring legal analysis back to the very fundamental historical structuring of notions
like “person,” “body,” and “society”; he not only brings legal theory into contact
with history and society, he seeks to ground legal theory in existential experience.
For Voegelin, “law” is not a field of investigation that can be rendered meaning-
ful if detached from sociology and philosophy. And one cannot stretch infinitely
the principles of law outwards to other phenomena like the “state,” which has a
life beyond the formal text that seeks to define its legitimacy and modus operan-
dum. So Voegelin “understands” Kelsen, but he also embraces his view within
that larger “metaphysical” framework that Kelsen abhors.
Voegelin identifies Kelsen early on in his exposition: “The systematic problem
of the prevailing Staatslehre can be seen most clearly in Hans Kelsen’s work.”23
Voegelin argues how Kelsen’s theory cuts off legal analysis from the roots of
human nature: “the ‘normative sphere’ is accepted as a reality without pointing
to its origin in man.”24 Voegelin continued this line of analysis in his book, which
traced “The History of the Race Idea,”25 published the same year with the famous
opening line, “The knowledge of man is out of joint.”
20. Ibid., 224, here as quoted by Arpad Szakolczai, “Eric Voegelin and neo-Kantianism: Early
Formative Experience or Late Entrapment?,” in Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition: Explo-
rations in Modern Political Thought, ed. L. Trepanier and S. MacGuire (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 2011), 235.
21. Just as neo-Kantianism was establishing itself in Vienna and beyond in the early twentieth
century, so was Freudianism, basing itself upon “anthropological principles” that are in fact just as
empty, reductive, and problematic as in the Kantian tradition. Besides Kant, Kelsen took much inspi-
ration from Freud in his approach to human nature. See Clemens Jabloner, “Kelsen and his Circle:
The Viennese Years,” European Journal of International Law 9 (1998), 368-385.
22. Eric Voegelin, Race and State, volume 2 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1997), 2.
23. Ibid., 6.
24. Ibid., 7.
25. Eric Voegelin, The History of the Race Idea, volume 3 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997).
446 Bjørn thomassen

In 1934, Kelsen published his “Pure Theory of Law” (Reine Rechtslehre), in


which he vigorously argued that basic norms (grundnorm) are binding and hold
authority, but do not refer to any superhuman principle or source of authority.
Those norms are the ground, but the ground is unanchored and must remain so: it
simply is, like a Kantian ding an sich. In 1936 Voegelin wrote The Authoritarian
State: An Essay on the Problem of the Austrian State. This work is no doubt one
of Voegelin’s most important Vienna publications. Part I of The Authoritarian
State discusses “authoritarian” and “total” as symbols with reference to state
theory and constitutional law. Characteristic of Voegelin’s developing analysis
of political language, he sees such terms as symbols of ideological self-interpre-
tation, rather than a “theory” of the state. Part II discusses the specific situation
of the founding of the Austrian state. It was Kelsen who had drafted the Austrian
Constitution enacted in 1920. Part III is an analysis of political events in Austria
in the 1930s, leading to the authoritarian constitution of 1934. It opens with a
fifty-page-long discussion of Hans Kelsen. This is a key reading for understand-
ing the Kelsen–Voegelin dialogue that emerged in the 1950s.
Voegelin’s critique here goes to the heart of Kelsen’s entire epistemology,
identified as a “positivistic metaphysics,” a “metaphysics of progress.” It repre-
sents “not only Voegelin’s radical departure from his former teacher’s theory but
also his definitive break with neo-Kantian epistemology in general,” the book’s
“theoretical heart.”26 Taking off from the 1931 Kant article, it charges Kelsen
with ignoring the content of human life, thus disregarding the necessary socio-
logical and anthropological foundations of any political theory, and of similarly
ignoring the question of preconstituted meaning. Kelsen’s “purification” ends up
by “constructing” a world of its own, by forcing the formal logic of the natural
sciences and its categorizations onto the human life-world, “cutting off” any-
thing that is alien to its construct, installing a kind of “frageverbot,”27 Kelsen’s
purification ends up in an absurdity: the very reality of that which is meant to be
explained is eliminated from its theory.28
In his Autobiographical Reflections,29 Voegelin would himself identify this
work as his first serious attempt to unearth the problematic nature of political
ideologies. It is by working out the limits of Kelsen’s approach that Voegelin

26. See editorial comments by G. Weiss, The Authoritarian State: An Essay on the Problem of the
Austrian State, volume 4 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 1999), 3.
27. This is a significant notion that Voegelin would take up later, although—and this must be
noted—never again with reference to Kelsen; in “Science, Politics and Gnosticism,” in Modernity
without Restraint, volume 5 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 2000), Voegelin discusses the systematic question-prohibition in Marx, Hegel, and
Comte.
28. See, for example, Voegelin’s section entitled, “Eliminating the Reality of the State from
the Object of the Theory of the State,” in The Authoritarian State: An Essay on the Problem of the
Austrian State, volume 4 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 1999), 179-180. Voegelin’s book on Austria only appeared in print in 1997. Günther Wink­
ler’s foreword to that publication, which reviews the Kelsen–Voegelin debates and their personal
relationship, would have served equally well for this Springer publication: Günther Winkler, “Geleit-
wort,” in Eric Voegelin, Der autoritäre Staat (Vienna: Springer 1997).
29. Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections with a Voegelin Glossary and Cumulative Index,
volume 34 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006).
DEBATING MODERNITY AS SECULAR RELIGION 447
starts to identify his own. Voegelin defines Kelsen’s work as “purifying,” in the
sense that the systematic way in which it exposes theories of “pure law” repre-
sents a new opening, rendering visible the problematic nature of legal positivism,
pointing—unwillingly and contrary to the author’s self-understanding—toward
the need for renewal. There is every reason to read several layers of meaning into
the notion of “purity” and puritanism, a central theme in his analysis of gnostic
politics. Without reference to these earlier debates we cannot fully understand
Kelsen’s 1964 (non)book. For Kelsen was right: Voegelin’s attempt at restoring
political science was written against that “destructive positivism” that Kelsen
represented and incarnated. Let us now return to the 1964 book and revisit some
of its central arguments.

POLITICAL THEOLOGY AND THE NATURE OF TOTALITARIANISM

A major underlying issue in the “debate” concerned the roots of totalitarianism.


Kelsen’s book has now been published with the editorial claim (repeated on the
back cover) that Kelsen demonstrates “convincingly” that “any ‘new’ theologiza-
tion holds the danger of totalitarianism.” And this is no minor matter.
How can Kelsen charge Voegelin’s approach with leading to totalitarianism
if Voegelin’s entire work sought to understand the nature of such systems and
avoid the danger that they represent? The term “political theology” was famously
popularized by Kelsen’s main opponent, Carl Schmitt, prior to World War II, and
Schmitt came to embrace Nazism. However, only a superficial reading of Voege-
lin would allow one to place him in that camp. He had from the late 1930s become
quite skeptical about the very term “religion,” and after “Political Religions”30
from 1938 he would abandon “religion” and “political religion” as analytical
terms. He was not attacking positivist science with “religion” as his ammunition.
Rather, in his work as it developed after the war, Voegelin was insisting on the
irreducibility of human experiences and on our participation in the “mystery of
being” as ordering experiences that do relate to how we engage political thought
and reality. Voegelin argued that a recognition of the principle of transcendence
underlying human existence is what makes a healthy separation and “division
of labor” between politics and religion possible. The loss of this recognition, in
contrast, leads to a dismissal of the transcendental realm, dangerously re-injected
into ersatz religions like Communism and Nazism, and blind belief in positivist
science. Voegelin’s disagreement with Kelsen had everything to do with the con-
crete threat of totalitarianism. It was the onslaught of totalitarian regimes and his
experience of National Socialism that made it evident to him that “Europe had no
conceptual tools with which to grasp the horror that was upon her.”31 Voegelin’s
entire political theory was an attempt to recover such tools.
It is beyond dispute that Kelsen’s work has been hugely influential in legal
studies and constitutional traditions. But Kelsen’s position is hardly a valuable
vantage point for our understanding of totalitarianism and, even more fundamen-

30. Eric Voegelin, Modernity without Restraint, volume 5 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000).
31. As he put it in “Science, Politics and Gnosticism,” 252.
448 Bjørn thomassen

tally, its relationship to modernity. And it seems quite evident that Voegelin, on
this point, did not really consider Kelsen an important conversation partner at
all. And maybe Kelsen, still on this point, started to doubt his own conclusions?
If we have to understand Kelsen’s last book by reading it backwards, we per-
haps also have to understand its nonpublication by reading Voegelin forwards.
Voegelin’s position was not static during the long period in which Kelsen worked
on this book. Kelsen’s entire discussion of Voegelin refers to two works only,
New Science of Politics and (much less so) “Science, Politics and Gnosticism”
(which appeared in German in 1959). New Science of Politics indeed gave his
project new direction—but it simply cannot be read as a final statement. New
Science represents a transition toward a new perspective that he would start
to unfold within the planned series entitled Order and History. The first three
volumes, Israel and Revelation, The World of the Polis, and Plato and Aristotle,
appeared in rapid succession in 1956 and 1957 and focused on the evocations
of order in the ancient Near East and Greece. In these works, Voegelin is not
simply telling a “Christian” tale (which to some extent might be said of New Sci-
ence—Kelsen is not entirely wrong here). Something else was at stake. Kelsen
does not mention these works with a single word. To the extent that this book is
framed and motivated by a critique of Voegelin, it corresponds to an attempt to
criticize Marx’s theory of capitalism without any mention of Das Kapital. Kelsen
scholars will be able to correct me, but I would suggest at least the possibility
that Kelsen recognized this, and that he therefore preferred not to publish what
has now been published.

ON THE CONSEQUENCES OF A FUTILE EXCHANGE OF VIEWS AND WHY IT


ALL STILL MATTERS: VOEGELIN, KELSEN, AND NEO-KANTIANISM

Part of Kelsen’s perplexity about Voegelin’s diagnosis of modernity as a “Gnos-


tic revolution” is in fact justified: What is Voegelin actually saying? When and
how did the decisive deformation or “derailment” toward modern Gnosticism
take place? Who were the “carriers” of the Gnostic vision, and how and where
did they implement that vision? Kelsen’s question marks could have provoked a
more thoughtful answer also from Voegelin, as he was in these years developing
his volumes on Order and History. This includes the very nature of the Gnos-
tic experience underpinning modernity, and how this kind of experience could
perhaps not be entirely disentangled from either the axial age period nor from
Christianity itself. Kelsen’s critique in chapter III of Secular Religion, “Joachim
of Flora’s and St. Augustine’s Theologies of History” is a case in point. Kelsen
discusses Voegelin’s view on Gnostic experience as the core of re-divinization of
society, as people who fall into these experiences “divinize themselves by substi-
tuting more massive modes of participation in divinity for Faith in the Christian
sense” (the quote is Voegelin’s); but, Kelsen says,
“this more massive mode of participating in divinity,” this “expansion of the soul to the
point where God is drawn into the existence of man” which, according to Voegelin, is
an essential element of Gnostic experience, can hardly be distinguished from what he,
in another connection [Kelsen here refers to a passage in The New Science of Politics],
DEBATING MODERNITY AS SECULAR RELIGION 449
describes as the experience of man to “be open toward transcendental reality,” the open-
ing of man’s “psyche to the truth of God,” the fact that man “discovers his own psyche
as the instrument for experiencing transcendence” (the quoted parts—in the original—are
Voegelin quotes). (62)

When Voegelin identifies a historical discovery of a “true order” of the human


psyche by philosophers and religious founders between 800–300 bc, where the
soul comes to be seen as “the region in which transcendence is experienced”
(again Voegelin’s expression), then one could well argue that “This experience
is an immanentization of the transcendental; and, if Gnostic experience consists
in ‘the expansion of the soul to the point where God is drawn into the existence
of man,’ then Gnosticism, too, is in possession of the truth of the soul; and there
can be no better guarantee of this truth than Gnosticism” (63).
When Kelsen says that “an essential function of Christianity is the radical
divinization of the world in general, and humanity or society in particular” (fn.
245, 71), he does identify a problematic that came to represent an unresolved
tension in much of Voegelin’s mature work: does not self-divinization exist as an
element within those axial traditions that Voegelin wanted to posit as protective
devices against Gnosticism? Here Voegelin shied away.
But it also seems that the entire exchange went off-track in another quite
fatal way, and this has to do with the fact that Voegelin had probably not been
entirely “honest” and had in fact misled Kelsen—but also himself—in his quite
significant letter-response to Kelsen dated February 10, 1954. Kelsen had writ-
ten that he was well aware that he was an out and out Gnostic. Kelsen came to
see Voegelin’s entire analysis as involving a critique of him, and for very good
reasons, for so it was—and Voegelin should have stood by it. Voegelin replied to
Kelsen that surely he was no Gnostic. Maybe he did not want to enter into a too
violent polemic with his former mentor (however, if Voegelin had attempted to
appease Kelsen, evidently almost the opposite happened). But the main point is
probably that Voegelin was substantially unclear about how to situate Kelsen—
and neo-Kantianism writ large—within his Gnostic diagnosis.
The exchange was therefore not only futile, as it led to no mutual recognition
and stimulation of thought; it was positively damaging. The already nonexis-
tent personal relationship not only broke in a final way, but evidently produced
hugely negative feelings in both. Voegelin would refer back to the whole thing
as a rather sad affair, something he would have rather done without.32 Kelsen
would after 1954 spend much of his energies trying to combat a ghost, without
ever questioning his own assumptions—only then to withdraw all his destructive
efforts. It is in fact not exactly the best possible way to end a glorious career: to
spend much of your entire post-retirement period of life in producing a vehement,
destructive attack against one of your own former students and his “allies.” But
this is exactly what happened.
Voegelin, on his part, saw nothing whatsoever in Kelsen’s observations
that should lead him to reconsider part of his assumptions. As argued in more
detail by Arpad Szakolczai,33 Voegelin failed to use the exchange to posit neo-
32. See the statement by Schabert in Cooper and Jodi Bruhn, eds., Voegelin Recollected, 240.
33. Arpad Szakolczai, “Eric Voegelin and Neo-Kantianism: Early Formative Experience or Late
Entrapment?,” in Trepanier and MacGuire, eds., Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition.
450 Bjørn thomassen

Kantianism within his interpretive framework of modernity. By situating Kelsen


outside it, he had safeguarded for critical analysis the perhaps most influential
intellectualism that had come to dominate modern science: a mostly self-created
entrapment. This had the serious drawback that Voegelin would somehow fail to
tackle his own intellectual heritage: how could Voegelin’s own work be situated
with respect to his diagnostic effort? As Stefan Rossbach has noted, with refer-
ence to Voegelin’s presumption of his “personal immunity,” this “corresponds
to the philosopher’s unwillingness/inability to contemplate the possibility that
his own thought could be a symptom of the very disease he had diagnosed in his
social environment.”34
After the end of the Cold War and the demise of utopian political ideologies,
it has often been argued that Voegelin’s analysis has become outdated. This view
would have seemed much less plausible had Voegelin more explicitly tackled
neo-Kantianism and all its twentieth-century intellectual heirs in his mature work,
from rational choice theory, to analytical philosophy, to social constructivism
and all the varieties of methodological purism that actually came to dominate
that American political science in which he had initially seen the possibilities of
a recovery. The Kelsen–Voegelin dialogue was between two European thinkers,
but their primary audience was the American one.35 In a way, Kelsen and Voege-
lin were rehearsing the Central European Methodenstreit with fifty years delay
in postwar America. It is easy to say now, but if Voegelin had wanted something
out of the exchange with Kelsen, he should have been just as honest and trans-
parent as he had been in his publications from the 1930s: neo-Kantianism in the
Kelsenian interpretation was Gnostic at its very core, and “Yes, Hans Kelsen, as
much as I appreciate you as a person and former mentor, it is this confrontation
that we need to have—in public.” For it concerns, indeed, the very stamping of
modern intellectual life and the “spirit of modern times” that was taking shape in
that crucial period of paradigm formation, the contours of which we still live and
think with today—or try to break free from.
Bjørn Thomassen

Roskilde University,
Denmark

34. Stefan Rossbach, “Understanding in Quest of Faith: The Central Problem in Eric Voegelin’s
Philosophy,” in Politics and Apocalypse, ed. Robert Hamerton-Kelly (East Lansing: Michigan State
University Press, 2007), 133.
35. Kelsen wrote his long review of Voegelin’s New Science in English. It was translated into
German only much later.
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