Hans Kelsen and Peace through Mental Health

Managing the war within. Robert Schuett argues that peace demands we live democracy not just politically, but psychologically.

The idea of fostering peace through mental health is not new. Wherever the causes of war have been located in the nature and behaviour of human beings, individually or collectively, one of the enduring prescriptions, especially from psychologists, has been to steer moral psychology towards health, mental well-being, and, by extension, peace. “No peace without mental health” was the clear-eyed assertion of an expert group meeting in London in 1948.

Though long-standing and widespread, the notion that peace might be achieved simply by making You and Me less selfish, less aggressive, less foolish—in short, less of what the American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan once called a “cracked vessel”—must strike political and international relations thinkers as naïve, if not outright absurd. Indeed, much of Kenneth N. Waltz’s classic 1959 internatinal realtions theory text, Man, the State, and War, stands as a systematic and, it must be said, powerful demolition of precisely that idea.

Hans Kelsen, one of the best jurists of the twentieth century, would have certainly agreed.

Born in 1881 in Prague—then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—with roots in Brody, a once-thriving free-trade city in Galicia (then Austria–Poland, now Western Ukraine’s Lviv Oblast), Kelsen repeatedly insisted that the fundamental cause of war is international anarchy. 

Accordingly, Kelsen argued from first to last that peace could only be secured by pacifying international relations through binding international law, that is, law backed by centralised coercive power. In effect, a kind of international Leviathan—one capable of keeping states and nations in check. Without a “peace through law,” Kelsen warned, there would always be blood.

That Kelsen repeatedly and passionately argued for ever-greater centralisation of international law—dismissing the liberal hope for peace through commerce, as well as the realist faith in peace through a balance of power—does not make him a naïve idealist. On the contrary, he strikes me as one of the most subtle human nature realists in modern legal and political thought.

However, there is something quite peculiar about Kelsen: an intellectual thread that remains as relevant today as ever, centred on human and group psychology.

Kelsen was acutely aware of the emerging insights of psychoanalysis. As early as his twenties, he discussed cutting-edge developments in psychology with his friend Otto Weininger. Likely at the invitation of Hanns Sachs, he attended Freud’s Wednesday evening gatherings at Berggasse 19, where a select circle of doctors, intellectuals, and laypersons explored questions of neuropathology. In 1911, the same year he completed his Habilitation in law, Kelsen joined the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Kelsen was a Freudian.

He understood, perhaps more than most, what Freud really meant, and crucially, Kelsen returned time and again to the question of how what we now call mental health shapes the character of political regimes—democracy or autocracy, peace or war.

For Kelsen, democracy is best understood in terms of four core values: pluralism, constitutionalism, relativism, and proceduralism. It is not, as the Schmittians would have us believe, the product of some naïve formalism. Instead, it is a realistic response to the political challenges of his time—and to the enduring power struggles he saw play out in political communities past, present, and future.

Put starkly, democracy is a matter of choice, but one born of necessity, grounded in a deeply textured realism about both human nature and political life. As Kelsen warned: “The question on which natural law focuses is the eternal question of what stands behind the positive law. And whoever seeks the answer will find, I fear, neither an absolute metaphysical truth nor the absolute justice of natural law. Who lifts the veil and does not shut his eyes will find staring at him the Gorgon head of power.”

Ever the political realist, Kelsen wrote in his 1937 essay “Wissenschaft und Demokratie” (Science and Democracy), published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Switzerland’s leading daily, that nearly everything in the political realm tends to devolve into a kind of Schmittian friend–foe dynamic. And yet, crucially, it doesn’t have to be that way.

What Kelsen argues—drawing on Freud’s view that individual and social psychology are ultimately one and the same—is that what truly matters is how You and Me manage our innermost instincts, drives, and ambitions.

Make no mistake: there is a Darwinian streak in Kelsen when he writes that “our behaviour is not very different from that of animals. The big fish swallow the small ones, in the kingdom of animals as in that of men.” At times, he even sounds Nietzschean, especially when addressing the “will to power within the individual.” What idealists ignore, according to Kelsen, is “the innate urge to aggression in men.”

However, You and Me are not powerless when it comes to confronting, well, You and Me.

In his remarkable 1955 essay “Foundations of Democracy,” published in Ethics, Kelsen argues that there are, in essence, two types of personality—each corresponding to a different kind of political system:

One is marked by an “exaggerated ego-consciousness,” in which the individual is incapable of recognising the “fellow-man” as another ego with legitimate claims to pursue their own life. The other, which Kelsen terms the “democratic type of personality,” is defined by the recognition of the You—of others in society and political community—and by a commitment to balancing the aspirations of freedom and equality.

Balancing, in Freudian terms, the ambitions of the id with the societal demands of the super-ego—or, put differently, balancing You and Me—requires a healthy ego. This, in turn, implies the capacity for reason and the moral agency to choose between two political paths: an absolutist politics of friend versus foe, or a relativistic politics that acknowledges conflicting interests while striving for reasonable compromise through the rule of democratic law.

Where Kelsen leaves us no choice, however, is in the necessity of making that choice, and embedding it in the daily practices of democratic life and the conduct of foreign affairs. In a world once again gripped by polarisation, populism, strongmen, and the steady erosion of democratic norms—both at home and in international society—Kelsen’s message could hardly be more urgent.

If democracy is not merely a system of rules but a form of life shaped by the psychological maturity of its citizens, then the work of mental health is not ancillary to peace. Rather, it is foundational to all we pursue in political and international life.

The implications, then, are clear. Approaches like Mental Health in All Policies (MHIAP)—as recently put forward in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Paris Statement—are no magic bullet. But mental health cannot be siloed. It must be embedded across all areas of public policy: not just healthcare, but also education, housing, employment, justice, national security, and foreign affairs.

The very idea of achieving peace through mental resilience and well-being is not idealism. It is realism for the tension-ridden dynamics of power and justice in the twenty-first century.

Robert Schuett is co-founder and managing partner at STK Powerhouse, a global risk advisory firm. A former Defence civil servant, he also serves as Chairman of the Austrian Political Science Association and is a long-standing Honorary Fellow at Durham University.