Hans Kelsen on constitutional democracy: genesis, theory, legacies

This review assesses Hans Kelsen on Constitutional Democracy: Genesis, Theory, Legacies, edited by Sandrine Baume and David Ragazzoni, as the most substantial English-language treatment to date of Kelsen's democratic theory. It situates the volume within the historiography that long confined Kelsen's Anglophone reception to the pure theory of law, and traces how the collection's three-part structure — genesis, theory, legacies — builds a case for reading Kelsen's proceduralism, constitutional review, and critique of sovereignty as facets of a single intellectual project rather than separate specialisms. The review highlights the strongest contributions (notably Vinx and Dyzenhaus) at the junction of legal and political theory, while noting that the volume's treatment of Kelsen's international thought remains underdeveloped relative to its ambitions, and that the mechanism of democratic compromise it relies on is left normatively under-explained by several contributors. It concludes that the book successfully revises the caricature of Kelsen as an apolitical formalist and secures his place among the major democratic theorists of the twentieth century, while noting that its account of Kelsen's cosmopolitan and international legal thought remains a preface rather than a fully worked-out argument.