A communicative approach to Leon Petrażycki’s theory of law

Petrażycki’s followers, Pitirim A. Sorokin, Georges Gurvitch, and Nicholas S. Timasheff, developed the psychological theory of law in a phenomenological and sociological direction. In this chapter, Andrey V. Polyakov asserts that in demonstrating the connection between law and personality, he and his followers saw law, not as something external to the individual, but as a “humanized” reality. Contrary to his followers, however, Petrażycki maintained that law essentially amounts to imperative-attributive emotions. Polyakov critiques this notion and shows how law’s imperative-attributive nature reveals that its defining feature is communication. Polyakov concludes that normativity—the general meaning of a legal text—is a communicative condition for the existence of law.