On the Writings of Hans Kelsen

It was about two million years ago when human beings were separated from apes, and it was more than two hundred thousand years ago when homo sapiens appeared on the earth.  To try to give an overview of the history of human thought seems to be an outragous attempt, which Kelsen made.  Such an attempt must have a simple scheme in order to have a comprehensive grasp of the ideas of the innumerable people within the long history.  His work Vergeltung und Kausalitaet (1941) is the product of such an endeavor.

Kelsen's scheme was his own version of Kant-like theory of categories, in which "primitive" peoples had only one category: the normative principle of retribution (revenge for injury, return for kindness, punishment for crime, and reward for socially desirable acts). "Primitives" see in everything a soul (anima), which is its normative subject.   Souls behave with each other according to the principle of retribution.   Disasters (deluge, pestilence etc.) are divine punishments for which acts of penitence are required.  Before entering a forest, a ritual to get the permission of its daemons or gods is necessary (otherwise, evil consequences would follow).  

In later times, another category was introduced into the human thought: the principle of causality.  Indeed, the introduction occurred at the specific time and place in the human history.  It was in the 5th century BCE in Greece.    Heraclitus taught  that the sun does not overstep its track because of the fear of the punishment by the Goddess of Vengeance.    Such an idea is within the framework of the principle of retribution.    It was Democritus who formulated the principle of causality free from the idea of retribution.  Kelsen pursued the development of modern physics and philosophy in which Hume and Heisenberg criticized or modified the concept of the strict causality.  He concluded the book with a suggestion at an emergence of future humanity who will have only one category: causality.  Such a mankind might correspond to Freudian version of a future mankind without superego.

In my view, the "primitive" mankind must have had some primitive concept of causality according to which they used and improved tools.  Mankind without the concept of causality cannot survive in this world.    In any case, however, Kelsen's hypothesis that fundamental dogmas of myths and religions (soul belief, heaven and hell, or the Jewish eschatology of the Messianic Empire) are the consequences of the principle of retribution seems to be right.

He is, in a sense, a descendant of William Ockham who tried to eliminate the concept of substance from philosophy.  As his studies of the history of ideas consist in the separation of normative contents from pathological elements of personification and reification in mythical, religious and metaphysical thinking, his jurisprudence consists in the separation of legal norms within the legal concepts and argumentations. In his first major work Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre, he tried to eliminate the personal concept "state" and reduced it into legal norms.  Later he called his state theory as Staatslehre ohne Staat (a state theory in which the state does not exist).  As a follower of the Enlightenment tradition, his objective is the freedom from myths.   He tried to lay bare the myths about jurisprudence which is believed to be able to solve any human conflict.  

His critique of Marxism also consists in the separation of science and myth within Marxism.  His described the history of German social democracy in terms of de-mythification process.  Lenin and Stalin reversed the trend, he observed.

After his critical endeavor for de-mythification, his positive political standpoint remains: the liberal democracy.  He was one of very few political thinkers who were consistently true to democratic ideals during the Weimar and Nazi period.  In his autobiography, which was rediscovered several years ago, we can see the fate of a liberal in the first half of the twentieth century and of a life in the midst of the Jewish problems at that time.

A generation ago, the Bokutaku-sha publishing company published ten-volume Selections from Kelsen.  And now, we finished the six-volume Writings of Kelsen ("Democracy," "Marxism," "Natural Law Doctrine and Legal Positivism," "Jurisprudence," and "Myth and Religion"),  in which all the translations from the Bokutaku-sha version were incorporated.   In addition to these, we added several articles to each volume.    By this, we intend to offer the readers the opportunity to see the intellectual universe of a thinker with vast areas of interest.  

To the last volume ("Myth and Religion"), we added an index of names out of the six volumes and the Autobiography,  with the names referred to in the translators' comments and in the biographical data.  In this index more than 1200 names are collected.  We suppose that 100 page index of names is unprecedented in the Japanese publishing history.  I hope readers tolerate the incompleteness in the biographical data.  These persons in the index are the stars in the intellectual universe of a thinker.