Legal culture as a factor of legitimacy of the social and legal order

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17072/2078-7898/2021-3-466-477

Legal culture as a factor of legitimacy of the social and legal order

Evgeny M. Shumkin
Senior Lecturer of the Department
of Administrative, Financial and Corporate Law

Novosibirsk State University of Economics and Management,
1, Leninskiye Gory, Moscow, 119991, Russia;
e-mail: 9100020@bk.ru
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3575-6161
ResearcherID: AAZ-6535-2021

In sociology, the interest in order is determined, among other things, by the identification of various factors that labilize and determine it. The factor under consideration, as a subject, is objectively difficult for social analysis and practical application of its results. Among the trigger reasons are legal culture and legitimacy, which are studied in this theoretical work from heuristic and analytical perspectives. It is assumed that legal culture, as a set of values aggregated by society and the state, can itself act as a factor of legitimacy for such an order. The disclosure of heuristic interest is carried out through legal consciousness of a person, a conscious choice of the model of rational (for oneself or the state) behavior, and the work of socio-legal institutions. Identifying the immanent signs of legal culture, we come to a conclusion that the critical mass of socially accumulated and legal knowledge provokes a qualitative leap in the development of both social and legal orders. This development determines the formation of an architecture of not only social but also nomological values, which creates the necessary conditions for the stability of social relations according to the objective rules provided by the legislator. The author emphasizes the impossibility of predetermining the primacy of the values under consideration since social and normative actions ensure the necessary balance of interests that are corresponding in nature, where unsatisfied frustrating expectations are considered as the main problems. Such expectations are associated with the violation of this balance, expressed in the permanent conflict between law and law enforcement, as the quintessence of the penetrating clash of social and legal orders, where society insists on defeating part of the monopoly on violence in the case of citizens’ deviant behavior and demilitarization of the work of legal institutions that is related to the condemnation of non-conformity, and where the state protects the objectivity of the rules of conduct and the extension of their sphere of influence by giving them legitimacy. The considered social order is seen as the basis for such an organization of life in society where the state acts as a moderator, introducing norms as irreducible standards of responsibility of each individual, correcting his behavior model towards rationality through legal culture that ensures legal awareness, conformity and legitimacy of socio-legal institutions. Legal culture laid down by society and supported by the state makes it possible to adopt a rational model of behavior in society and to make it resistant to destructive social phenomena.

Keywords: legal culture, legitimacy, social order, legal order, conformity.

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Received: 26.07.2021. Revised: 10.09.2021. Accepted: 11.09.2021

For citation:

Shumkin E.M. [Legal culture as a factor of legitimacy of the social and legal order]. Vestnik Permskogo universiteta. Filosofia. Psihologia. Sociologia [Perm University Herald. Philosophy. Psychology. Sociology], 2021, issue 3, pp. 466–477 (in Russian). DOI: https://doi.org/10.17072/2078-7898/2021-3-466-477