Pure Theory of Law - International and National Law

International and National Law

Identification of law as characteristically coercive is more difficult with public international law, but Kelsen finds sufficient sanctions.

As to the relation between public international law and national law, however, his position changed dramatically. In the first edition of Reine Rechtslehre, 1934, like many liberal contemporaries he was an internationalist monist: he looked to public international law as global law, subsuming all national or state legal orders. This had the happy consequence that, in its contemporary application, the universality of the Pure Theory (and Kelsen insisted that only universal truths could be 'scientific') would coincide with that of predominantly global law.

By the end of World War II, however, he gave up on this aspiration as unrealistic and, with evident reluctance, accepted a sort of optional monism. He found equally tenable the view that the public international legal order is supremely valid and the view that each national or state legal order is - for itself, in a kind of 'solipsism' - supremely valid. The story of the 'basic norm' might be read as a battle to come to terms with the 'solipsist' option. Kelsen needed not to adopt such solipsism but to provide an account of it.