TO THE HISTORY OF COMMUNICATIVE SOCIAL THEORY ESTABLISHMENT AND DETERMINATION OF ITS ROLE IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN LAW RESEARCH

Within the scope of certain monads and fundamental stages of communicative social theory development elaborated in the second half of XX century by Western social science represented by T. Parsons, N. Luhmann, J. Habermas, K.-O. Apel and other authors have been considered. After the analysis of Russian prerevolutionary scholars of sociological school like P.A. Sorokin, A.S. Zvonitskaya, K.M. Takhtarev the fact that the said scholars used in their academic research works a number of notions and categories characteristic of the communicative social theory and also interpreted basic social phenomena, including law, through the lens of communication is becoming apparent. For example, investigations by K.M. Takhtarev were based on such notion as “social intercourse”, whereas A.S. Zvonitskaya used the category of “social communication” and P.A. Sorokin elaborated the edifice of “social interaction”. During the next, Soviet period of Russian science development despite negative attitude to such “bourgeois” investigations, scientific thinking tried to use certain notions characteristic of a communicative approach. Thus, on that academic stage Russian scholar Y.I. Grevtsov who had dedicated his works to the problems of legal relations and rights exercise extensively used a category of interaction, this category being one of the basic concepts of communicative social theory. At the present time when Soviet ideological dogmas ceased to exist and vital necessity of contemporary Russian jurisprudence further development and evolutional transformation came into existence, new concepts and theories claiming revision of classic jurisprudence principles and based on using a communicative approach as well came into being. All this has become possible owing to heuristic value of the communicative social theory and due to the scientific basis laid in the preceding period by the Russian scientific ideas.

law, society, social phenomenon, communicative social theory, law investigations