Hans Kelsen Quotes on Politics
Hans Kelsen’s General Theory of Law and State (1945) and the late General Theory of Norms (1979, posthumous) extend the Pure Theory of Law into a systematic political philosophy of the modern state. The central commitment is that the state is not a substance distinct from its legal order but the personification of that order itself — a unity of normative attribution rather than a sociological organism — and the corresponding analysis of sovereignty, democracy, and the rule of law systematically resists the conflation of legal and political categories with the metaphysical and theological concepts of earlier political philosophy. The framework, integrating Kelsen’s parallel work on judicial review and his role as principal architect of the Austrian Constitution of 1920, shaped subsequent twentieth-century legal-political philosophy through Hart, the broader analytical tradition, and the modern constitutional-court institutions whose design Kelsen’s normativist framework helped underwrite.
Quotes
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Attributed to Hans Kelsen:
“Law is a system of norms, not a fact.”
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Attributed to Hans Kelsen:
“The validity of a norm rests on the validity of the higher norm that authorizes it.”
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Attributed to Hans Kelsen:
“Justice is an irrational ideal; legality is the social good we can pursue.”
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Attributed to Hans Kelsen:
“Democracy is the political system most consistent with the relativity of values.”
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Attributed to Hans Kelsen:
“International law presupposes a basic norm that obligates states to observe their treaties.”
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“General Theory of Law and State (1949), I. The Concept of Law, A. Law and Justice, a. Human Behavior as the Objects of Rules”
Law is an order of human behavior. An “order” is a system of rules. Law is not, as it is sometimes said, a rule. It is a set of rules having the kind of unity we understand by a system. It is impossible to grasp the nature of law if we limit our attention to the single isolated rule.