RUDN Journal of Law (Dec 2017)
THE SOVIET NORMATIVISM AS A PARADIGM OF LEGAL THEORY
Abstract
The reason for writing this article were two circumstances. The first is the constant desire of mod-ern authors to treat law as a system. In according to this view elementary cell (or, so to say, kernel) of this system is the set of rules, and all the structures of this system, regardless of their content, are com-posed of norms according to the logical and syntactical prescriptions and with the intentions of the leg-islator. The second is the discussion between supporters of a «narrow» and «broad» understanding of the law. In our humble opinion, this phenomena has not only cognitive, but also value arguments. In this connection, a hypothesis was born about the paradigmatic nature of the normative legal concept, as it developed in the USSR.This work was written to verify this hypothesis. The two questions are posed: 1. to what extent it is permissible to reconstruct soviet normativism in a paradigmatic manner; 2. by what rules this reconstruction should be carried out. The conducted research allowed to reach the following conclusions. Legal normativism (in its so-viet version) as a single and continuous tradition of setting and solving scientific problems fully corre-sponds to the criteria of paradigm, designated in the postpositivist philosophy of science. It is character-ized by technical universalism, since the normative definition of law proved to be suitable for the im-plementation of different goals. It is also characterized by ontological reduction - the reduction of nondiscrete legal phenomena (for example, the principles of law) to deontological judgments and the manipulation with them. The article affirms that the positive significance of the narrow-normative view of law consisted not only in the adaptation of the legal discourse to the discourses of power, but also in the indirect, albeit intensive, mental efforts of lawyers, which was affiliated to alternative legal schools.
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