Hostility towards parties has never ceased; revisiting Hans Kelsen’s ideas is particularly significant today when critiques of parties are meeting the revival of the myth of People as One, which Kelsen devoted much of his work as a legal scholar and political theorist to opposing. Kelsen addressed the issue of parties at two significant historical moments when the constitutional government was succumbing to the assault of autocracy (Fascism and Nazism) and revolutionary experimentations (Bolshevism) and when parties regained momentum with the Cold War. These were two very different circumstances: in the former, the issue was opposing and resisting monocratic dictatorship; in the latter, the issue was defending party pluralism within liberal democracy itself. Kelsen never resorted to ‘militant democracy’ to protect democracy. The reason was both theoretical and empirical. As a ‘formalist’, Kelsen kept substantive politics out of procedural politics, which he considered normative or ‘not metaphysical’ because its task was channelling public doing and not achieving certain specific goals; the sole purpose of the rules of the game was the exercise and reproduction over time of political freedom. Therefore, pluralism, legal equality, and individual liberties were non-negotiable norms of democracy, whose process was based on the spirit of compromise and majority rule.

Contemporary constitutional theorists typically assume that a system of constitutional adjudication inevitably stands in tension with a majoritarian understanding of democracy. Kelsen’s influential defence of constitutional review, by contrast, goes along with an affirmation of a procedural and majoritarian understanding of democracy. Did Kelsen fail to spot the supposed conflict between constitutional review and democracy? Or did he identify a solution to the counter-majoritarian difficulty? Michel Troper has vigorously argued that Kelsen’s defence of constitutional review is confused and fails to cohere with his conception of democracy. This chapter defends Kelsen’s argument for constitutional review against Troper’s charges. It argues both that Kelsen’s case for constitutional review is fundamentally sound and that it carries the potential to make an important contribution to contemporary debates on the legitimacy of judicial control of constitutionality. Kelsen’s argument for constitutional review offers a compelling case for constitutional review that focuses on the conditions of the proper functioning of electoral democracy rather than on the protection of liberal rights.

Multi-party, representative democracy is, according to Kelsen, an intrinsically fragile achievment – one that never can nor should be taken for granted. The fragility of multi-party democracies, based on party pluralism and free, competitive elections is the topic he explores in a lesser-know work published in the mid 1930s: La Dictature du Parti (1935). It focuses upon the underlying weaknesses of European interwar democracies which make possible their transformation into party dictatorships. The chapter explores Kelsen’s broader theoretical framework and contribution through a comparative analysis with those in the contemporaneous, early work of Franz Neumann, The Rule of Law: Political Theory and the Legal System in Modern Society (1936), which, through a critique of Kelsen’s legal positivism, developed a distinctive, sociological approach to the relationship between law and state. The comparison of the two works reveals the significant engagement of Continental political theory and jurisprudence, throughout the 1930s, with the question of the underlying fragility of European interwar democracies. It, thereby, adds depth and breadth to the study of the genesis of Kelsen’s theory of democracy allowing one to capture more vividly the argument at the core of his La Dictature du Parti: the transformation of democracy into autocracy rests not on the dissolution of the rule of law and the rise of a state without law (as for Neumann), but on the transformation of the very content of the legal system.

This manifesto emphasises the need to move beyond traditional, siloed approaches to education and embrace transdisciplinarity, particularly in the context of the rapidly changing modern world. Transdisciplinary is about collaborating across the sciences and arts, and including the diverse voices beyond the academic, including those of children and families. The manifesto argues that this can help us move beyond simply preparing for a predicted future and instead enable us to actively shape it together. It explores the concept of transdisciplinary creativities, arguing that knowledge and understanding are not limited to language and traditional academic disciplines and that embodied experiences and engaging multiple senses are crucial for effective learning. This approach challenges the separation between humans and the natural world, recognising the interconnectedness of all things, and proposes that education becomes a process of ‘making-with’, where humans and non-humans engage in collaborative knowledge production.

The response describes initiatives at the University of Cambridge Primary School (UCPS) and Laborschule Bielefeld in Germany that promote democracy education and provide children with the tools and opportunities to engage meaningfully in democratic processes. At UCPS, a Children’s Congress allows students to participate in school decision-making processes, a collaboration with academic researchers sought to understand how children think and feel about their disenfranchisement and a democracy curriculum teaches children key concepts and empowers them to form their own opinions and articulate them effectively. Laborschule Bielefeld focuses on peaceful conflict resolution as a foundation for democratic education. It uses the concept of ‘nonviolent communication’ to teach children how to express their feelings and needs constructively.

Since the 1930s there have been intense debates about how far democracy can go to protect itself against its enemies. Hans Kelsen’s antagonistic relationship to militant democracy is well established in the literature and is not controversial. First, this chapter anchors Kelsen’s opposition to militant democracy more deeply and systematically in his own theory of democracy. This sheds light on the reasons why his opposition to militant democracy remained consistently immune to the defeat of democracies – as painfully observed in the 1930s – and to the conviction, shared by many of his contemporaries, that such vulnerability legitimises the prevention of anti-democratic parties from abusing the democratic process. Second, the chapter challenges the common view that Kelsen’s rejection of militant democracy would have no contemporary adherents. It discusses similarities and discontinuities between Kelsen and a new generation of thinkers who also express doubts about militant democracy. In doing so, the chapter offers a fresh look at the strengths and weaknesses of Kelsen’s perspective on militant democracy and assesses its influence on the issue in contemporary literature.

Hans Kelsen was one of the first major legal and political thinkers to argue that political parties are indispensable to democracy. This chapter deals with an important but largely overlooked aspect of Kelsen’s thinking about parties, which will be called party constitutionalism. In short, party constitutionalism refers to the idea that party organisations should be regulated by constitutional norms in order to ensure that parties are democratically organised. Kelsen developed this idea at a time when constitutions had little to say about the status of parties, and even the normative desirability of the party form was contested. After reconstructing Kelsen’s case for party constitutionalism, the chapter turns to the question of how the constitutional regulation of parties has evolved in the second half of the twentieth century. It is argued that even in countries where constitutions prescribe that parties must be democratically organised, intra-party democracy has rarely flourished. However, the sobering reality of party constitutionalism should not blind us to the lasting importance of Kelsen’s observation that democracy is ill served by elite-dominated, oligarchic parties. In fact, Kelsen’s work can help inspire a broader conversation about how parties should be organised and how their internal life can be regulated.