The Concept of Law: a brief introduction to jural aspects of Classical Eurasianism

NRU Higher School of Economics , 2015. No. 61.

Nazmutdinov B.

Jurists and historians have rarely highlightened jural aspects of classical Russian Eurasianism. There have been several attempts to describe Eurasianist jural philosophy as a coherent system, but they were not fully relevant to the source material. The paper focuses on problems in the background of the creation of holistic Eurasianist jurisprudence during 1920s and 1930s. It emphasizes that the complexity of this process depended on different institutional and especially conceptual terms. The Eurasianists displayed several different approaches to Law whose distinctions were based on metajuridical grounds – phenomenological ideas in the work of Nickolai Alekseev, who argued for legal individualism; the “Alleinheit” theory found in the writings of Lev Karsavin; and a positivist theory in paper by Nickolai Dunaev. Based on published works of Eurasianists and unpublished archival materials, this research concludes that these juridical views were contradictory. These contradictions meant it was impossible to create a coherent Eurasianist jural theory using the terms derived from the authors mentioned, despite the fact that Eurasianist views have some specific characteristics.

Keywords: евразийство, философия права, естественное право, феноменология, теория права, phenomenology, идеократия, natural law, legal theory, история русской философии, ideocracy, legal philosophy, history of Russian philosophy, Classical Eurasianism, классическое евразийство