The validity of law and a sense of self-righteousness: the missing concepts in the psychological doctrine of law by Leon Petrażycki

Abstract

At the turn of the 19th — 20th centuries, when L. I. Petrażycki announced his psychological doctrine of law the interest of the scientific community was focused on the concept of the famous German jurist Rudolf Iering. Deprived of a philosophical and speculative rationale, his sociological interpretation of law as an interest subject to the state protection was in the spirit of the time, but at the same time it did not answer the question regarding scientific criteria that determine priorities and limits of protection of the specific interests. Together with V. S. Soloviev, L. I. Petrażycki shared the belief that law and morality have common grounds, but he did not recognize the state to be competent in the matters of morality. He attributed the task of progress and approximation of moral ideals to social life solely to the human personality and culture. Since at the beginning of the 20th century only psychology was regarded as the science of internal, that is intrinsic to a personality, laws of behavior and choice of solution, L. I. Petrażycki called his concept of law a psychological doctrine of law. The article expresses the thesis that in fact L. I. Petrażycki by psychology meant the theory of legal personality formation of which started only in the twentieth century within the process of philosophical comprehension of the “law validity”. It is founded on the legal claims designed for the authoritative recognition. L. I. Petrażycki failed to give the completed character to his own concept of law because the concept of an integral personality, without which its claims could not be understood and explained, would bring him back to the philosophical metaphysics with its method of “postulating” which he had rejected earlier. 

Keywords:

legal dogma, validity of law, claim, legal emotions, holder of right, methodology of the philosophy of law, Leon Petrażycki