A. Hagerstrem's Legal Views: the Conflict of Idealistic Objectivism and Psychologism

Abstract

The subject of the study is the legal views of A. Hagerstrem, a Swedish philosopher, lawyer, founder of the intellectual trend in European legal science and epistemology, which has received the name of Scandinavian legal realism. The positions of this scientist constitute a significant milestone in the history of the philosophy of law of the twentieth century. At the same time, they remain poorly studied, both in Russian and in European literature. Among the few studies devoted to the study of the content and specifics of A. Hagerstrem's legal views, the similarities of his main positions with the ideas of phenomenological teaching are mostly uncritically reproduced, parallels are drawn with those movements in jurisprudence and philosophy that declared a struggle against metaphysics. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the nature of the conflict of principles of the concept of objective cognition and psychologism in law. The article presents brief results of the analysis of both the principles of the epistemological teaching of A. Hagerstrem, and provides a deeper analysis of the content of legal representations in comparison with traditional interpretations of his views. Moreover, the study demonstrated that the principles of the epistemological teaching of this scientist significantly contradicted the ideas of his so-called practical philosophy in the field of the study of law. The nature of the relevant conflict can be explained by an attempt to combine idealistic objectivism with a psychological approach to understanding law. The study contains the results of the analysis of A. Hagerstrem's legal ideas, which allow us to significantly clarify the nature and content of the views of this scientist in the recent history of legal thought.