The Communicative Theory of the Society: Socio-Technological and Law Enforcement Contexts

Abstract

The article dwells on the causes and objectives of the emergence and evolution of the communicative theory of the society as a theory that allows not only to predict the development of the society, but also to manage social processes. Law enforcement system in general, and in criminal proceedings in particular, had been formed long before the emergence of this theory. But after the society was defined as a type of communication in the theory, the conditions for a truly scientific technologization of criminal proceedings were created: in fact, the whole theory of law was rebuilt in compliance with a new understanding of the phenomenon of sociality. Today, in the age of total digitalization of social and legal and law enforcement practices, the topic of the origins of the communicative theory of the society is actualized in a new way.The article analyzes the key elements of social and philosophical conceptualization of social processes and phenomena, compares the models of society proposed by O. Comte and K. Marx, whose works described the conditions for the presentation of the society as a reality. The author substantiates the statement that the alternative ways proposed by two theorists to explain social development as a function of “knowledge” or as a derivative of “social production” equally depend on the understanding of a person as a “set of social relations.” Particular attention is paid to the new opportunities opened up to theorists and philosophers in explaining the nature and functions of law in connection with the creation of the communicative theory of society. The article shows a fundamental difference in the understanding of law in the era preceding the development of sociology, and during the active interaction of legal theorists with the community of philosophers and sociologists. The author reconstructs a set of ontological assumptions that allow considering law as “a reproduction of the general conditions of the society existence” and make it possible to include the system of law in the system of social relations as a subsystem.