I. P. RAZUMOVSKY’S LEGAL THEORY

The article is devoted to the study of the legal understanding proposed by the Soviet lawyer, philosopher and sociologist Isaac Petrovich Razumovsky (1893–1937). I. P. Razumovsky was one of the active participants in the discussion among Soviet lawyers about the nature and concept of law and, in particular, Soviet socialist law. Razumovsky presented his views on controversial problems of the theory of law most fully in his main work “Problems of the Marxist Theory of Law”. In this work, the scientist identifies a number of theoretical and legal problems that are methodologically considered using the theory of historical materialism. Razumovsky attached importance to the research methodology as the foundation of scientific legal theory. In the absence of a correct methodological approach, lawyers will again and again argue about the legal understanding, formulating new and new definitions of it that will contradict the dialectical understanding of this complex phenomenon. Razumovsky traditionally pays great attention to the relationship between law and the economic structure of society, legal ideology. He proposes, while preserving the old legal terminology, to subject the bourgeois philosophy of law to a critical analysis, while going beyond its limits. Razumovsky believes that otherwise, all criticism of the old theory of law will remain exclusively legal, and, therefore, will not be combined with a critical analysis of political economy. As a result of this approach, the Soviet theory of law will deal with the form of law, study legal ideology, and not the economic content of law. The question of the subsequent death of law is recognized by Razumovsky as the highest stage of this process, the time of which has not yet come, since the construction of a consciously regulated system of human behavior in society, in which the relationship with the material conditions of production in the Soviet Union has only just begun.