Felix Kaufmann’s journal article locates Kant’s importance for jurisprudence in a method rather than in his substantive legal doctrines. Its argument proceeds from a critique of sociological definitions of law to an analysis of legal propositions, their validity, and their unity within a legal order. Kaufmann presents Kelsen’s pure theory of law as the realization of a Kantian demand for methodological purity. A concluding note identifies the essay as a sketch of results developed in Kaufmann’s own Logik und Rechtswissenschaft and Die Kriterien des Rechtes.
The opening distinguishes a thinker’s particular conclusions from the continuing productivity of the method that made them possible. Kant’s principles may enable discoveries incompatible with Kant’s own positions. Accordingly, Kaufmann declines to trace Kant’s entire influence through German idealism and nineteenth-century jurisprudence. He instead begins with contemporary legal theory, explicitly selecting the theory he regards as correct rather than distilling a consensus from competing doctrines. This turns intellectual history into a methodological inquiry: what constitutes the distinctive object of legal science?
Kaufmann first reconstructs the attraction of an empirical answer. Law appears within communal life as a system of duties and powers that restrains arbitrary conduct and makes mutual expectations reliable. Somlo’s account of law through a supreme, comprehensive, enduring, ordinarily obeyed power exemplifies the attempt to define law by the conditions of its emergence and persistence. Whether priority falls on coercive power or psychological recognition makes little difference: both explain social facts rather than identify the jurist’s object.
Was den Juristen allein zu beschäftigen hat, ist der Inhalt von Rechtssätzen; was dem Rechtstheoretiker als Forschungsobjekt vorliegt, ist die Form der Rechtssätze und ihr Zusammenhang in der Rechtsordnung.
English translation: What alone must concern the jurist is the content of legal propositions; what the legal theorist has as an object of inquiry is the form of legal propositions and their interconnection within the legal order.
This division gives the Kantian question—how jurisprudence is possible as a science—its precise force. The task is to establish the categorical forms of legal cognition, not the circumstances in which law becomes socially effective. Kaufmann endorses Stammler’s demand that systematic clarification precede genetic investigation, while withholding agreement with Stammler’s execution of that programme.
Starting from actual juridical reasoning, Kaufmann argues that a legal proposition neither asserts that an offence occurs nor predicts that punishment follows. Its meaning establishes what ought to happen under specified conditions, independently of legislative purposes and expectations about enforcement. A norm is thus a value assertion concerning conduct. The legal proposition connects negatively valued conduct with a positively prescribed response directed toward the same person. Its basic form is a sanctioned norm, or double norm: someone ought to act in a specified way; if that person does not, a specified response toward that person ought to follow.
The concepts of person, conduct, and ought form the juridical categories from which more complex legal concepts must be generated through logical combinations. Crucially, sanction does not mean an empirically experienced evil. Imprisonment remains legally prescribed whether the prisoner experiences it as deprivation or comfortable provision. Deterrence belongs to political purpose, not to the proposition’s juridical meaning.
Aus den eben angeführten Gründen hat auch der Begriff des Zwanges keinen Platz in einer reinen Rechtslehre.
English translation: For the reasons just stated, the concept of coercion likewise has no place in a pure theory of law.
The exclusion of coercion sharpens Kaufmann’s separation of normative structure from social explanation. That distinction becomes decisive when he turns to validity. Natural laws can be tested against events; norms cannot be verified through physical or psychological facts. Neither general approval nor habitual obedience establishes that something ought to be done. Although value assertions purport to concern objective values independent of emotional acts, Kaufmann denies that their truth can be conclusively verified.
Daher ist die Geltung von Wertaussagen (Normen) nur wieder aus Wertaussagen erschließbar, die oberste Wertaussage aber, die „Wertquelle“, muß als Grundwerthypothese (Grundnorm) jenseits aller weiteren Beglaubigungsfähigkeit und -bedürftigkeit angenommen werden.
English translation: Consequently, the validity of value assertions (norms) can be inferred only from further value assertions; the highest value assertion, however, the “source of value,” must be assumed as a fundamental value hypothesis (basic norm), beyond any further possibility or need of authentication.
The basic norm determines the source of legal authority without identifying it with the greatest concentration of actual power. Facts nevertheless orient the selection of a normative construction: one seeks an order through which observed norms can be understood as valid. This is categorically different from equating validity with obedience. Kaufmann treats the choice between a state constitution and an international-law constitution as a question of scientific expediency, with the latter gaining significance as international law develops.
Once the basic norm is fixed, legal theory examines relations of authorization. Kaufmann’s example of a servant successively referred to further commanders shows that obedience to the final instruction can satisfy the original command without that instruction being logically contained in it. Legal hierarchy is therefore a structure of delegation, not simply deduction.
Die Gesamtheit der durch eine einheitliche Grundnorm verbundenen Rechtsnorm heißt Rechtsordnung; sie ist identisch mit dem Staate im juristischen Sinne, und wenn man diesen häufig als Träger, Garanten, Quelle des Rechtes bezeichnet, so ist hierin nichts anderes gelegen, als eine der in der Geschichte der Philosophie und der Wissenschaften sattsam bekannten Hypostasierungen, die zu einer scheinbaren Verdoppelung des Untersuchungsgegenstandes führen.
English translation: The totality of legal norms connected by a single basic norm is called the legal order; it is identical with the state in the juridical sense, and when the state is frequently described as the bearer, guarantor, or source of law, this amounts to nothing other than one of those hypostatizations sufficiently familiar from the history of philosophy and the sciences, which lead to an apparent duplication of the object of inquiry.
Identifying state and legal order removes a supposed entity standing “behind” law. Kaufmann credits Kelsen with consistently pursuing this methodological purification. Against Erich Kaufmann’s demand for intuitively apprehensible and lived values, the conclusion insists that science’s governing value is truth. Kant’s legacy lies in disciplined conceptual limitation: separating juridical validity from efficacy, authorization from logical implication, and scientific inquiry from political aspiration.
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