State and law

an attempt at integration of the juristic with the sociological approach

Kazimierz Opałek

pp. 63-76

in: Kazimierz Opałek, Selected papers in legal philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 1999

Abstract

Both State and law are commonly considered to be 'social phenomena". We have grown so accustomed to this designation that we accept it mechanically and fail to analyze its content. The statment seems to be self-evident, simple, and at the same time casts a great deal of light on the problems of State and law. But in reality the simplicity of the above qualification is deceptive; it merely creates an illusion of clarifying a problem. By suggesting that it has dealt with the entire problem which needs no further consideration it functions as a formula conducive to mental indolence. The cause of difficulty is the fact that the phrase scial phenomenon" is often taken to have a weighty concrete content and a closely defined and rather limited range. This is what frequently happens on the basis of general knowledge supplemented by certain elementary concepts taken from political economy, such as 'socio-economic relations, "and from sociology such as 'social groups", for there is a tendency to equate the range of the idea under discussion with those phenomena which are both known and "important", though their number is rather limited. A close look at political economy and sociology would prove that both deal with a great number of varied social phenomena. At the same time there are a number of other disciplins which likewise study social phenomena; some, to be sure, study the same ones from different points of view, others concentrate on different phenomena altogether. If we glance at the whole vast area of social sciences and the humanities, and realize that all of them deal with particular social phenomena, we shall also realize that by defining State and law as 'social phenomena" we may have, from the cognitive point of view, made a step backward rather than forward.