“Professor Kelsen’s Amazing Disappearing Act”

Abstract

Why is Hans Kelsen, perhaps the mid-twentieth century’s most significant continental European liberal political and legal thinker, now an intellectual nonentity among US political scientists? Kelsen (1881–1973) arrived in the United States in 1940, and thus spent over three decades of his long and impressive career there. Unlike many other academic refugees, he was already a famous figure upon his arrival, and within a few years was able to establish himself at one of the country’s leading universities, the University of California (Berkeley), in the Political Science Department, where he held his only permanent position in the United States until his retirement in 1953.1 Many of Kelsen’s publications in the immediate post-war years appeared in the discipline’s pre-eminent publications (e.g. the American Political Science Review). Addressing democratic theory, the status of natural law, and the proper relationship between science and politics, they spoke directly to topics of broad interest to political scientists, and especially political theorists.