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The Legacy of John Austin's Jurisprudence pp 51–71Cite as

Austin, Kelsen, and the Model of Sovereignty: Notes on the History of Modern Legal Positivism

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Part of the book series: Law and Philosophy Library ((LAPS,volume 103))

Abstract

Hans Kelsen’s critique of John Austin has so far attracted little attention among legal theorists. This article argues that Kelsen’s attack on Austin anticipated the key elements of Hart’s rejection of the Austinian conception of law as sanction-backed sovereign command. At the same time, the way in which Kelsen presents his critique of Austin’s conception of sovereignty reveals important differences in purpose and intention between Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law and Hart’s legal theory. The Pure Theory of Law is animated by an ideal of legality that is alien to purely descriptive jurisprudential approaches in the Hartian tradition. The article concludes that this difference between Kelsen and Hart merits further exploration and that it might help to show that the Pure Theory of Law is still relevant to contemporary legal theory.

This paper is a slightly revised version of a paper that was published in the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence in vol. XXIV, no. 2. The author would like to thank the editor of the CJLJ, Prof. Richard Bronaugh, for his permission to republish the paper.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Hans Kelsen, “The Pure Theory of Law and Analytical Jurisprudence” in Hans Kelsen, What is Justice? Justice, Law, and Politics in the Mirror of Science. Collected Essays by Hans Kelsen (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1957) at 266; Hans Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, trans. by Anders Wedberg (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945) at 30–37, 62–64, 71–74, 77–83.

  2. 2.

    See Herbert L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (2nd ed.) ed. by Penelope A. Bulloch and Joseph Raz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) at 35–42.

  3. 3.

    See Stanley Paulson, “Introduction” in Hans Kelsen, Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory. A translation of the First Edition of the Reine Rechtslehre or Pure Theory of Law ed. by and trans. by Bonnie Litschewski Paulson and Stanley L. Paulson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) xvii at xlii.

  4. 4.

    Kelsen, “The Pure Theory” supra note 1 at 271.

  5. 5.

    See Kelsen, Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory, supra note 3 at 7–19.

  6. 6.

    Kelsen, “The Pure Theory” supra note 1 at 266.

  7. 7.

    John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined ed. by Wilfrid E. Rumble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) at 38.

  8. 8.

    See ibid. at 157–63.

  9. 9.

    See Hart, The Concept of Law, supra note 2 at 26–78.

  10. 10.

    See Kelsen, “The Pure Theory” supra note 1 at 272–4; Kelsen, General Theory, supra note 1 at 30–2.

  11. 11.

    See Austin, Province, supra note 7 at 22.

  12. 12.

    Hart, The Concept of Law, supra note 2 at 80–83.

  13. 13.

    Kelsen, General Theory, supra note 1 at 32.

  14. 14.

    See Hart, The Concept of Law, supra note 2 at 100–110.

  15. 15.

    See ibid. at 50–66.

  16. 16.

    Kelsen, General Theory, supra note 1 at 32.

  17. 17.

    See ibid. at 32.

  18. 18.

    See ibid. at 32–34.

  19. 19.

    See ibid. at 34–37.

  20. 20.

    See Kelsen, Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory, supra note 3 at 26–32; Kelsen, General Theory, supra note 1 at 30–58.

  21. 21.

    See for example Kelsen, General Theory, supra note 1 at 21–23; Hans Kelsen, Peace Through Law (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1944) at 3; Hans Kelsen, Principles of International Law (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1952) at 13–5, 17–8.

  22. 22.

    Kelsen, General Theory, supra note 1 at 61.

  23. 23.

    Ibid. at 60.

  24. 24.

    Austin, Province, supra note 7 at 22.

  25. 25.

    Kelsen, General Theory, supra note 1 at 62.

  26. 26.

    Austin, Province, supra note 7 at 21 defines command as follows: “If you express or intimate a wish that I shall do or forbear from some act, and if you will visit me with an evil in case I comply not with your wish, the expression or intimation of your wish is a command.”

  27. 27.

    See Kelsen, “The Pure Theory” supra note 1 at 275–76.

  28. 28.

    Kelsen, General Theory, supra note 1 at 36: “That is the authority of the law, above the individual persons who are commanded and who command. This idea that the binding force of the law emanates, not from any commanding human being, but from the impersonal anonymous ‘command’ as such, is expressed in the famous words non sub homine, sed sub lege.”

  29. 29.

    Kelsen, General Theory, supra note 1 at 60.

  30. 30.

    See Hart, The Concept of Law, supra note 2 at 35–42, and more recently Scott Shapiro, Legality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011) at 66–68.

  31. 31.

    See Kelsen, “The Pure Theory” supra note 1 at 274–76.

  32. 32.

    See Austin, Province, supra note 7 at 212.

  33. 33.

    Kelsen, “The Pure Theory” supra note 1 at 281.

  34. 34.

    See ibid. at 269–71. Kelsen offers an exhaustive discussion of the relation of the Pure Theory to the sociology of law and state in Hans Kelsen, Der soziologische und der juristische Staatsbegriff. Kritische Untersuchung des Verhältnisses von Staat und Recht (Tübingen, FRG: J.C.B. Mohr/ Paul Siebeck, 1928).

  35. 35.

    See Kelsen, “The Pure Theory” supra note 1 at 267–78; Kelsen, General Theory, supra note 1 at 30.

  36. 36.

    See Kelsen, General Theory, supra note 1 at 110–11; Kelsen, Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory, supra note 3 at 59–62.

  37. 37.

    See the discussion of Max Weber’s legal theory in Kelsen, Der soziologische und der juristische Staatsbegriff, supra note 34, at 156–70. For a (qualified) defence of Kelsen’s rejection of sociological jurisprudence see Joseph Raz, “The Purity of the Pure Theory” in Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law. Essays on Law and Morality (2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) at 293.

  38. 38.

    Kelsen, “The Pure Theory” supra note 1 at 281.

  39. 39.

    See Austin, Province, supra note 7 at 164–83, 211–23.

  40. 40.

    Kelsen, “The Pure Theory” supra note 1 at 281.

  41. 41.

    See ibid. at 278–83.

  42. 42.

    For a more detailed development of these themes see Kelsen, General Theory, supra note 1 at 181–207; Kelsen, Der soziologische und der juristische Staatsbegriff, supra note 34 at 114–204.

  43. 43.

    See Austin, Province, supra note 7 at 165–83.

  44. 44.

    See Kelsen, “The Pure Theory” supra note 1 at 280–1.

  45. 45.

    But see Hart, The Concept of Law, supra note 2 at 144–50.

  46. 46.

    Kelsen, “The Pure Theory” supra note 1 at 281: “One of the distinctive results of the Pure Theory of Law is its recognition that the coercive order which constitutes the political community we call ‘state’ is a legal order. What is usually called ‘the legal order of the state,’ or ‘the legal order set up by the state’ is the state itself.” See also Kelsen, Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory, supra note 3 at 97–106. For critical discussion of Kelsen’s thesis of the identity of law and state see Joseph Raz, “The Identity of Legal Systems” in Raz, The Authority of Law, supra note 37 at 97–102 and François Tanguay-Renaud, “The Intelligibility of Extralegal State Action: A General Lesson for Debates on Public Emergencies and Legality” (2010) 16 Legal Theory 161. A recent defence in Alexander Somek, “Stateless Law: Kelsen’s Conception and its Limits” (2006) 26 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 753.

  47. 47.

    See supra note 21.

  48. 48.

    John Locke, Two Treatises of Government ed. by Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) at 375.

  49. 49.

    See ibid. at 374–80.

  50. 50.

    Schmitt identified the view that all public authority must rest on legal authorization as the core tenet of liberal constitutionalism and emphatically rejected it. See Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory ed. by and trans. by Jeffrey Seitzer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008) at 62–66, 169–80.

  51. 51.

    It may be objected that the contrast I am trying to draw here is undermined by Kelsen’s view that the law formally authorizes even acts of state that constitute material violations of the law. See Stanley L. Paulson, “Material and Formal Authorization in Kelsen’s Pure Theory” (1980) 39 Cambridge Law Journal 172. For a reply see Lars Vinx, Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law. Legality and Legitimacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) at 78–100.

  52. 52.

    See Austin, Province, supra note 7 at 123–5, 171.

  53. 53.

    See Kelsen, “The Pure Theory” supra note 1 at 283–87.

  54. 54.

    Kelsen, Principles of International Law, supra note 21 at 18: “International law is law in the same sense as national law, provided that it is, in principle, possible to interpret the employment of force directed by one state against another either as sanction or as delict.” See also Kelsen, General Theory, supra note 1 at 328–41.

  55. 55.

    See Kelsen, General Theory, supra note 1 at 376–88; Kelsen, Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory, supra note 3 at 111–25.

  56. 56.

    See for a general account of Kelsen’s theory of international law that rightly stresses Kelsen’s sympathies for cosmopolitanism Jochen von Bernstorff, The Public International Law Theory of Hans Kelsen: Believing in Universal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  57. 57.

    See Kelsen, General Theory, supra note 1 at 388.

  58. 58.

    Kelsen, “The Pure Theory” supra note 1 at 284.

  59. 59.

    See Hans Kelsen, Das Problem der Souveränität und die Theorie des Völkerrechts. Beitrag zu einer Reinen Rechtslehre (Tübingen, FRG: J.C.B. Mohr/ Paul Siebeck, 1920) at 314–20.

  60. 60.

    Kelsen, “The Pure Theory” supra note 1 at 284.

  61. 61.

    See ibid. at 284–85.

  62. 62.

    See for important criticisms: Herbert L. A. Hart, “Kelsen’s Doctrine of the Unity of Law” in H. L. A. Hart, Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) at 309; Joseph Raz, The Concept of Legal System. An Introduction to the Theory of Legal System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) at 95–109. A qualified defence of Kelsen’s monism is offered in Vinx, Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law , supra note 51.

  63. 63.

    See Kelsen, “The Pure Theory” supra note 1 at 267–68.

  64. 64.

    See Kelsen, Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory, supra note 3 at 111–12.

  65. 65.

    See ibid. at 59–63.

  66. 66.

    This point is made explicit in Kelsen, Das Problem der Souveränität, supra note 59 at 85–101.

  67. 67.

    Kelsen, “The Pure Theory” supra note 1 at 287.

  68. 68.

    See for example Joseph Raz, “The Rule of Law and Its Virtue” in Raz, The Authority of Law, supra note 37, 210; Hart, The Concept of Law, supra note 2 at 203–07.

  69. 69.

    See Hersh Lauterpacht, “Kelsen’s Pure Science of Law” in Modern Theories of Law ed. by W. Ivor Jennings (London: Oxford University Press, 1933) at 105; Vinx, Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law, supra note 51.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

    Lars Vinx

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  1. Law School, UCL, Bentham House, Endsleigh Gardens, London, WC1 0EG, United Kingdom

    Michael Freeman

  2. Engelska parken, Thunbergsv. 3 H, Uppsala, 751 26, Sweden

    Patricia Mindus

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Vinx, L. (2013). Austin, Kelsen, and the Model of Sovereignty: Notes on the History of Modern Legal Positivism. In: Freeman, M., Mindus, P. (eds) The Legacy of John Austin's Jurisprudence. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 103. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4830-9_4

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