Many writers on heaven, from Philo of Alexandria onwards, are inclined to stress the intellectual delights of heaven. Philo seems to think that all the saved will be able to indulge in philosophy seminars, making heaven a kind of Oxford graduate college, like All Souls. My own favourite is the image of some medieval rabbis, who saw heaven as a vast, quiet, peaceful library, where books jumped down from the shelves when you nodded to them, and soft-footed librarians dispersed cooling mint drinks. There is a comparable vision of a scholarly heaven in the writings of Isaac Watts, though his paradise is more like the Royal Society, with the stress on scientific discoveries.Perhaps skip the mint drinks for a decent pot of tea, an amiable dog or goat or two, and the occasional interruption with news that the UC Debating Team - currently returning from exploits at the Easters comp in Melbourne - has had a good time.
Meanwhile in purgatory I'm reading a 25 page paper by Christoph Kletzer on 'The Role and Reception of the Work of Hans Kelsen in the United Kingdom', centred on HK's reception by Raz and Hart.
Kletzer comments that -
The one thing which puzzled me most when I first entered the British1 academic environment was the role played by Hans Kelsen: on the one hand Kelsen was held in the highest esteem, yet at the same time his work was very little known — apart from some loose commonplaces about the basic norm and the hierarchical structure of the law that is. On the one hand, most scholars agreed that Kelsen was the most profound legal thinker of the 20th century, yet at the same time I came against a firm consensus that Kelsen was so obviously wrong, that not much effort was needed to refute him. A few examples are regularly considered to suffice to show the absurdity of Kelsen's position. Kelsen was praised for the breath of his learning, yet he has had only a very superficial and limited impact on British legal thinking. His relevance is confined to legal philosophy understood in a very narrow sense. All of this seemed even more striking when considering the ease and depth with which fellow Austrian modernist thinkers like, say, Wittgenstein, Hayek or Popper, have been received in the United Kingdom.He argues that -
To be sure, the British indecisiveness about the qualities of Kelsen’s work cannot be explained entirely by reference to this work alone. Given the importance of Kelsen for Continental legal thought, we can only hope to understand the half-hearted reception of Kelsen in the United Kingdom if we look into the nature of British jurisprudence and legal science.
What is it, then, about British legal thought that has made the reception of Kelsen so troublesome? I think two factors are involved: one is the pronounced anti-theoretical slant of British jurisprudence and the other is the effect the re-invention of jurisprudence by Hart has had on this antiintellectual jurisprudential environment. Both factors worked against Kelsen. ...
There is a sense in which despite more than fifty years of debates, the reception of the work of Hans Kelsen in the United Kingdom has not yet begun. Whereas in other countries the influence of Kelsen may already be beyond its peak, in the United Kingdom the time for Kelsen is still ripe. Whereas the British Kelsen scholarship of the past eighty years might have missed precisely what is interesting and distinctive about Kelsen’s work, this scholarship has the virtue of at least having inscribed Kelsen into the margins of the re-invention of a tradition of jurisprudential learning which is still dominating the greater part of the English-speaking world. This allows reference to Kelsen without having to leave this tradition and will also facilitate a successive rectification of the image of the Pure Theory of Law in the United Kingdom and, more generally, in the English-speaking world.
why did Hart choose Austin and not Kelsen? Would we not require from any pretender to the throne of jurisprudence to take head on not some fusty writer of the early 19th century, but the ruling king of the discipline? Did he not make it very easy for himself by picking an author considered antiquated and a bit naive rather than someone contemporary and philosophically sophisticated like Kelsen?
Well, I guess the answer has to be ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Academically, a sincere and thorough engagement with Kelsen could have only made the Concept of Law a better, that is less limited book.
One can indeed detect something of a hermetic naivety in the way Hart frames the problem the Concept of Law, i.e. in the untested presuppositions, in its reliance on common sense in its methodological innocence. A fuller appreciation of the problems Kelsen engages with in his Pure Theory of law would certainly have helped here. Pedagogically and in terms of impact, however, an engagement with Kelsen might very well have turned the Concept of Law into a monster of an enterprise which no-one would had ever read.
