Kelsen and Blumenberg: the Legitimacy of the Modern Age

The paper investigates the close intellectual relation between Hans Kelsen's legal positivism and Hans Blumenberg's philosophy of the modern age. It argues in line with both authors that secularisation theses, ie theses which claim that the conceptual inventory of modernity was but a secularised variant of formerly theological ideas, produce a fundamentally anti-modern outlook. It argues further that legal positivism, in order to make a comprehensive and consistent argument, has to rest on a rich understanding of history and ultimately has to provide a philosophy of its own intellectual history and a justification of the modern age.