Hans Kelsen, Eric Voegelin e a Democracia

Abstract

The present work aims to investigate the reasons that led Hans Kelsen to write his harsh criticism of Eric Voegelin's The New Science of Politics in a text that was published posthumously. The problem is to know to what extent the theory of democracy explains these criticisms, if at all. The hypothesis is defended that, despite the general complexity of the considerations and the thematic variety of the subjects, the general motive for this criticism can be understood as a concern for the concept – the essence – and the defense – the value – of democracy, as an idea and a political project. To corroborate this hypothesis, a bibliographic review, understood as a review of published documents (books, articles and correspondence), was carried out, and the study method used in this investigation can generally be called empathetic-comprehensive interpretation. The investigation was structured in four chapters: in the first, an attempt was made to understand the formation and discrepancies between the positions of the authors studied in the face of the constitutional transformations of the first Austrian republic; in the second, we aimed to establish a general contrast between the authors' positions on the issue of nationalism, understood as a political principle that requires congruence between the people and the State; in the third, it was necessary acertained how to study the opposition between the authors' positions in the field of epistemology, specifically in a discussion around the concepts of method and positivism; finally, in the last chapter, the efforts of the previous chapters were synthesized to demonstrate how, behind a discussion about the meaning of political representation, there was hidden a serious disagreement regarding the concept and the project of democracy; this last chapter also investigates the relationship between political representation and truth as the ultimate expression of this disagreement. In general, one can to conclude that, in view of the investigation efforts, it was possible to corroborate the working hypothesis in some capacity.