Religioso vs. secolare: un'opposizione dicotomica? : gli argomenti di Hans Kelsen contro il concetto di "religione secolare"

Hans Kelsen’s critique of the concept of “secular religion” is based on a di- chotomic opposition between religious and secular. In the present paper we ex- amine the two main arguments advanced by Kelsen against those authors who improperly use the concept of “secular religion” in their interpretation of mo- dernity: the critique of false parallelisms, and the thesis of the self- contradiction implied in the very concept of “secular religion”. In the last sec- tion of the paper, we analyse the hypothesis of replacing Kelsen’s dichotomic opposition between religious and secular with a more articulated system of non-dichotomic polar oppositions: “religious vs. lay”, and “sacred vs. secular”.