Int J Semiot Law (2013) 26:241–245

DOI 10.1007/s11196-012-9306-5

BOOK REVIEW

Hans Kelsen: Secular Religion

Springer, Berlin, 2012

Massimo Leone

Published online: 30 December 2012

Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012

Hans Kelsen’s book Secular Religion appears posthumously after tormented

editorial vicissitudes. In 1964, the author received the last galleys from the
University of California Press, with the same title that the present book bears, but
decided to withdraw the manuscript. He even paid a large sum to the publisher as a
reimbursement. In 1979, 6 years after Kelsen’s death, the Hans Kelsen-Institut
examined the question whether the manuscript should be published although the
author’s intentions on this matter were evidently against it. The examination met a
negative answer both that year and in 1989, when the issue was raised again.
Finally, in 2008, the board of trustees of the Hans Kelsen-Institut reached a
favorable conclusion as regards whether to turn the manuscript into a publication,
which therefore became the present book, published by Springer.
It was, according to this reviewer, a wise decision. Thoughts and words live well
beyond their empirical author’s death, and acquire new relevance and meanings
depending on the novel sociocultural contexts in which they are received, read, and
interpreted. The reasons that might have convinced Hans Kelsen to withdraw the
manuscript might not hold anymore: they are concisely exposed by Clemens
Jabloner, Klaus Zeleny, and Gerhard Donhauser, editors of the book (together with
Robert Walter), in the ‘‘Editorial remarks’’ (pp. XI–XV). The reasons for which
Secular Religion has become topical again almost 50 years after its first submission
are evoked by Richard Potz in the ‘‘Introductionary Remarks [sic]’’ (pp. VII–X), but
become clearer through the reading of the text itself.
The title of the book, ‘‘Secular Religion’’ does not identify its subject as much as
its target. As the subtitle clarifies, ‘‘A Polemic against the Misinterpretation of
Modern Social Philosophy, Science, and Politics as ‘New Religions’’’, the book’s
arguments, construction, and style are ardently directed against a single objective,

M. Leone (&)
University of Turin, Turin, Italy
e-mail: massimo.leone@unito.it
URL: http://unito.academia.edu/MassimoLeone

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which the title denominates and the following chapters evoke, describe, and analyze
in detail: the idea, which also gives rise to a cultural trend, of ‘secular religion’, an
idea that Kelsen detects in several prominent publications of his time—as well as in
their references—dissects with masterly skillfulness, and systematically refutes.
What is this idea, then?
In a nutshell, the intellectual tendency against which Kelsen levels his criticism is
that which interprets the ‘secular’, lay, atheist, or even anti-religious systems of
thought of the past and the present, be they in the philosophical, social, political, or
even scientific arena, as—mostly unconsciously—underlain by a religious, spiritual,
theist, or even pro-religious intellectual framework. The thirteen chapters plus
conclusion that follow the introduction articulate and substantiate this stand: several
modern and contemporary philosophers and historians of philosophy have,
according to Kelsen’s view, elaborated complex but ultimately fallacious arguments
in order to demonstrate that what the current episteme commonly identifies as
‘secular thought’ actually is an expression of ‘secular religion’; a discourse that,
through different genres, theoretical frameworks, and authors, in fact represents
and reproduces always the same ideological scheme: the production of a system
of thought (and action) that, under the travesty of rejecting any immixture of
references to transcendence with immanent matters, vehicles the idea itself of
transcendence in the most surreptitious manner.
Kelsen reacts against this intellectual current by showing its essentially rhetorical
nature, and by denouncing its hidden intentions: blurring the theoretical discrim-
ination between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ in order to advocate the return of—
and to—a theological episteme, in philosophy, politics, society, and even science.
If secular thinking is actually a spurious manifestation of the religious one, which
adopts the theoretical and discursive forms of transcendence only in order to deviate
them toward the uncritical assertion of an intellectual, political, social, or even
scientific mindset, then the main goal of philosophers and historians of philosophy is
to detect these rhetorical strategies, and uncover, criticize, and eventually subvert
them in favor of the emergence of a properly theological and transcendent
Weltanschauung. Adverse to such intellectual twist, Kelsen denounces that it is
nothing but a trick, and that the rhetoric to be detected, uncovered, criticized, and
subverted is actually that of those who wish to contaminate the secularity of the
philosophical, political, social, and even scientific discourse through such tortuous
reframing of its historical origins, sociocultural developments, and hermeneutic
legacy.
Kelsen’s polemical target though is not only an idea, or an ideology, but also a
series of scholars who, through their works, substantiated this intellectual trend.
Among these, one stands out for his prominence: mentioned as the polemical
addressee of the book in its very first pages, he remains a central albeit negative
reference of all the subsequent argumentation until the very conclusion: Hans
Kelsen’s former disciple Eric Voegelin. Already in the introduction, Kelsen
identifies him as the most significant figure in the intellectual trend that the book is
about to criticize, but at the same time qualifies him as ‘‘outstanding’’: ‘‘One of the
most conspicuous representatives of this school of thought is the outstanding
political scientist Eric Voegelin, professor at the University of Munich. Under the

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influence of Löwith, Jonas, and Taubes, this author, in attempting to lay the
foundations of a ‘new science of politics’, which ‘must at the same time be a theory
of history’ declares the nature of modernity to be Gnosticism. He characterizes as
Gnosticism the humanistic and encyclopedic periodization of history, Hegel’s
spiritualistic and Marx’s materialistic philosophy of history, Feuerbach’s critique of
religion, Nietzsche’s philosophy of the superman; but also Comte’s positivism, the
ideologies of the Russian Caesaropapism, the political theories of bolshevism and
National Socialism, and even modern scientism. Gnostic politicians are, according
to this new science of politics, Ivan the Terrible, but also Lenin, Hitler, but also the
democratic opponents of communism and National Socialism, especially those who,
like President Woodrow Wilson, advocate the abolition of war through an
international organization.’’ (pp. 13–14).
The reference is, of course, to Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics: an
Introduction. Whoever is familiar with Voegelin’s intellectual and argumentative
style knows that his thought emerges from an exceptionally rich background of
cultural references, as well as from the propensity to elaborate novel conceptualiza-
tions of traditional notions. Wishing to demolish such monumental intellectual
effort, Kelsen has no other choice than building an even more monumental framework,
in which all the elements of Voegelin’s grandiose intellectual construction are
patiently and inexorably identified, singled out, analyzed, and found and demonstrated
as fallacious.
Kelsen’s Secular Religion, indeed, is a polemical work, but is not a pamphlet. On
the contrary, its editorial genealogy as critical review is well evident in the marks of
genre that characterize the text. Kelsen reads Voegelin, of course, but then he also
re-reads and re-interpret Voegelin’s primary sources; he reads and criticizes the
secondary sources upon which Voegelin’s thought rests, in a gigantic intellectual
effort where Voegelin’s every argument and rhetorical move are entomologically
dissected, pondered, and implacably refuted. Bibliographies are examined, trans-
lations of ancient and modern texts checked and corrected, unexplored interpretative
paths uncovered, hermeneutic fallacies denounced, in a tour de force that
systematically unfolds through the thirteen incredibly dense chapters of Secular
Religion.
After the first two chapters, bearing the accent on methodological and her-
meneutical issues that are transversal to all the following sections (respectively, the
issue of the methodology of finding intellectual parallelisms and that of articulating
semantic distinctions among concepts—in particular those of ‘progress’ and
‘eschatology’, central in the whole anti-Voegelin polemics), the subsequent eleven
chapters focus on specific instances of ‘secular religion’, an expression first coined
by J.L. Talmon, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in order to
stigmatize the ‘‘political Messianism’’ of bolshevism (The Rise of Totalitarian
Democracy, Boston, 1952). For each of these instances (‘‘Joachim of Flora and
St. Augustine’s Theologies of History’’; ‘‘Gnosticism’’; ‘‘Hobbes’s Leviathan’’;
‘‘The Philosophy of the Enlightenment’’; ‘‘Hume’s Empiricism and Kant’s
Transcendental Philosophy’’; ‘‘Saint-Simon’s ‘New Religion’ and Proudhon’s
Social Theory’’; ‘‘Comte’s Positive Philosophy’’; ‘‘Marx’s Economic Interpretation
of History’’; ‘‘Nietzsche the Christian’’; ‘‘Nietzsche the Metaphysician’’; ‘‘Modern

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Science’’; ‘‘Modern Politics’’), Kelsen retraces the intellectual genealogy of

Voegelin’s approach (the theories of culture of Fritz Gerlich, Ernst Cassirer, Carl
L. Becker, Charles Frankel, Karl Löwith, A.G. Sertillanges, Reinhold Niebuhr,
Rudolf Bultmann, Arnold J. Toynbee, Etienne Gilson, Raymond Aron, Crane
Brinton, and Jakob Taubes) and confronts the whole of its ramifications with
astonishing meticulousness.
It is impossible to render the details of such monumental enterprise, nor is it the
reviewer’s task to gauge its pragmatic efficacy. Assessing the diatribe between
Voegelin and Kelsen would require the construction of a third level of analysis,
whose spectrum of background knowledge few scholars nowadays would be able to
master. However, a few considerations must conclude the present review. On the
one hand, the thoughtful reading of Secular Religion confirms the fear that, with
characteristic lucidity, understatement, but also customary technique of criticism
anticipation, Kelsen himself voices in the conclusion of the work: isn’t such a
spectacular display of critical and polemical skills somewhat disproportionate to
the polemical target, running the communicative risk of actually inadvertently
advertising for the ideological trends that were meant to be criticized? Is a certain
nervousness to be detected in such a muscular approach, one that betrays not only
the subtext of some personal issues but also a political and perhaps also self-
conscious nervousness?
As regards the first kind of nervousness, the political agenda that looms over
Kelsen’s arguments and that is explicitly evoked in the conclusion—a sort of lucid
but passionate defense of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administrations, conducted with
the sophisticate discursive weapons of the history and theory of philosophy against
the accusations that Voegelin had leveled at such administrations by means of
similar weapons—one must admit that Kelsen’s polemical fervor sounds inevitably
dated, as the protagonists of such diatribe are now out of the political arena and
rather in the forum of historical reconstruction and debate. The same goes for
Kelsen’s and Voegelin’s quite indirect stands toward the reference to communism
in the political rhetoric of 1950s and 1960s US academia. In this case too, the
teleological background of Kelsen’s argumentation emanates a sort of antiquarian
flavor.
On the other hand, though, other aspects of Secular Religion vividly demonstrate
the urgency of its publication today. First of all, Kelsen’s polemical discourse offers
a lesson of style. Few scholars nowadays would have the time, energy, and
intelligence to compose such a masterpiece of refutation without ever indulging in
rhetorical shortcuts but actually embracing, with no discounts, the enormous
responsibility of receiving, pondering, and assessing ideas. One might not agree
with Kelsen’s conclusions, and even detect, in his arguments, what has been defined
above a ‘self-conscious nervousness’, the rather unavowable back-thought that also
the criticism of the concept of ‘secular religion’, in order to turn convincing, has to
adopt the proselytizing tone of self-assuredness that is typical of non-secular
discourses.
However, one cannot, and must not, overlook that beyond being a lesson about a
certain semantic conception of the distinction between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’,
Kelsen’s discourse imparts a lesson of style. Although one might not be able to take

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sides with Veogelin or Kelsen, one must admit that their divergence is also, and
perhaps primarily, a matter of discursive style: an almost entomological obsession
with the precision of distinction, a radical disapproval of every preposterous
conceptual blurring, one the one hand; the temptation of an ecstatic argumentative
style, oblivious and actually contemptuous of the imperative of distinctions, on the
other hand.
Secular Religion demonstrates, again more through its argumentative style than
through its actual contents—or better said, through an argumentative style that is the
most compelling of contents—that embracing either of these attitudes is not only an
epistemological or methodological matter. It is, to a large extent, a determination
that gives rise to a form of life, or even to a certain ontological conception.
Imagining an ontology where transcendence inevitably mingles with immanence,
through a series of ‘contaminations’ that only the hypocrisy of ‘secular religions’ is
prone to conceal; or imagining, on the contrary, an ontology where the intellectual
effort of man, that is also an effort of word and expression, keeps this blurring at
bay, is not a minor choice. The urgency of such dichotomy does not have any
antiquarian taste at all. It is, mutatis mutandis, one of the oldest struggles of
humanity; yet, it is one that keeps resurging under different guises, last but not least
that of present-day religious fundamentalism and its anti- or pseudo-scientific
discourse.
Confronted with such challenge in every aspect of contemporary life and society,
the reader of Kelsen’s Secular Religion will not find a solution. Some will be
relieved by the masterly dissections that the book provides, believing that they
efficaciously perform a re-ordering of the world; others, on the contrary, seduced by
hypotheses of re-enchantment, will find discrepant ways to imagine a contact
between immanence and transcendence. This is, indeed, perhaps both the limit and
the glory of Kelsen’s book: the limit of not understanding that such opposite forms
of life might, in the end, be unable to appreciate each other’s arguments, since forms
of life also entail the legitimacy or the illegitimacy of styles of argumentation;
however, and paradoxically at the same time, the glory of the deeply humanistic
conviction, exuding from Secular Religion at every sentence, that after all there is
no barrier between human epistemes that cannot be overcome by a supreme effort of
intellect and language.
This is why, although of course the word and the paradigm of semiotics are never
mentioned in the book, Secular Religion is a work that should deeply interest
semioticians in general, and in particular semioticians of culture, law, and religion.
Secular Religion is, deep down, a work about competing semiotic ideologies, about
conflicting ways of constructing the semantics—and the consequent pragmatics—of
the division between immanent and transcendent ontologies.
The book is unfortunately marred by an excessive number of typos that contrast
with the precision of Kelsen’s argumentation.

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