Hans Kelsen’s Political Theology
Science, Pantheism, and Democracy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15203/ozp.3787.vol51iss3Schlagwörter:
Hans Kelsen, Political Theology, Democracy, Relativism, ScienceAbstract
This article argues that the field of political theology should pay greater attention to Hans Kelsen. Kelsen developed a unique, epistemological form of political theology. For Kelsen, a subject’s beliefs about what is knowable determines the form of theology and jurisprudence both. He argued that subscribing to a modern scientific epistemology led one to embrace a pantheist theology and democracy. Drawing on the structural analogy between theology and jurisprudence, Kelsen offered an alternative theory of democratic legitimacy. He argued that pantheism’s immanent conception of the divine, of truth and right, is a model for understanding democratic legitimacy. Democratic proceduralism is valid because it generates valid law relatively and immanently, not absolutely and transcendently.
Downloads
Veröffentlicht
Ausgabe
Rubrik
Lizenz
Copyright (c) 2022 Ben Schupmann
Dieses Werk steht unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 3.0 International.
The OZP is the authorized publication of the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Politikwissenschaft (ÖGPW, Austrian Political Science Association)
The author of an article (in case of multiple authors: the corresponding author, responsible for releasing this material on behalf of any and all co-authors) accepted to be published in the OZP hereby acknowledges the following Copyright Notice:
- The author retains the copyright to the article.
- It is the responsibility of the author, not of the OZP, to obtain permission to use any previously published and/or copyrighted material.
- Publication of a submitted text is dependent on positive results from the peer reviewing. In such a case, the OZP editors have the right to publish the text.
- In case of publication, the article will be assigned a DOI (digital object identifier) number.
- The author agrees to abide by an open access Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY-SA) license. The license permits any user to download, print out, extract, reuse, archive, and distribute the article under the same license, as long as appropriate credit is given to the author and source.
- The license ensures that the author’s article will be available as widely as possible and that the article can be included in any scientific archive. In order to facilitate distribution, the author agrees that the article, once published, will be submitted to various abstracting, indexing and archiving services as selected by the OZP.
- In addition, the author is encouraged to self-archive the article, once published, with reference to the place of the first publication.
- After the contribution appears in the OZP, it is still possible to publish it elsewhere with reference to the place of the first publication.
- The finished article, if published, will include a correspondence address (both postal and email) of the author.
- If written under the auspices of a grant from one or more funding agencies, such as FWF (Austrian Science Fund), ERC (European Research Council), and Horizon 2020 (EU Framework Programme), an article accepted for publication has to be deposited in an Open Access archive. The OZP’s archiving policy is compliant with these provisions. (In case the article derives on funding from a different source, the author is responsible to check compliance of provisions.)
