reprinted in 1966. In 1955, Kelsen turned to a 100-page essay, "Foundations of Democracy," for the leading philosophy journal Ethics; written during the height of Cold War tensions, it expressed a passionate commitment to the Western model of democracy over soviet and national-socialist forms of government. This 1955 essay by Kelsen on democracy was also important for summarizing his critical stance towards the 1954 book on politics by his former student in Europe Eric Voegelin. Following this, in Kelsen's book entitled A New Science of Politics (Ontos Verlag, reprinted in 2005, 140pp, originally published 1956), Kelsen enumerated a point by point criticism of the excessive idealism and ideology which he saw as prevailing in Voegelin's book on politics. This exchange and debate has been documented in the appendix to the book, written by the author on Voegelin, Barry Cooper, entitled Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science from 1999. Kelsen's other book defending his realist position regarding the issue of the separation of state and religion as opposed to that of Voegelin's position on this issue was published posthumously under the title Secular Religion. Kelsen's objective in part was to safeguard the importance of the responsible separation of state and religion for those sympathetic to religion and concerned with this separation. Kelsen's 1956 book was followed in 1957 by a collection of essays on justice, law and politics, most of them previously published in English. It had originally been published in the German language in 1953. The Pure Theory of Law Kelsen is considered one of the preeminent jurists of the 20th century and has been highly influential among scholars of jurisprudence and public law, especially in Europe and Latin America although less so in common-law countries. Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law aims to describe law as a hierarchy of binding norms, while refusing, itself, to evaluate those norms. That is, 'legal science' is to be separated from 'legal politics'. Central to the Pure Theory is the notion of a 'basic norm (Grundnorm)'a hypothetical norm, presupposed by the theory, from which in a hierarchy of empowerments all 'lower' norms in a legal system, from constitutional law downward, are understood to derive their validity, hence their authority or 'bindingness'. This is not logical validity (i.e. of deduction), but 'legal validity'; a norm is legally 'valid' if and only if the organ creating it has been so empowered by a higher