Human Rights in the Leon Petrażycki’s Psychological Theory of Law: Reconstruction and Critical Interpretation

The purpose of this article is to reconstruct Petrażycki’s ideas on human rights by using the scattered and sometimes contradictory remarks on the issue to be found in his works. Leon Petrażycki did not pay special attention to human rights in his works, although this problematic has been a major focus of legal theory and legal philosophy, including the Russian one, throughout the modern history. Petrażycki viewed law as imperativeattributive emotions experienced by individuals. At the same time, the imperative component of such emotions arises as a reaction to the attributive one – i.e., an obligation is conditioned by another’s claim, and it is the satisfaction of the obligee’s interests that plays a decisive role, not the mere performance of the corresponding obligation as such. Petrażycki’s assumed that certain intuitive legal beliefs, being fundamental in nature, are absolute and do not derive from positive law – e.g., the beliefs that torture, rape, human enslavement, and certain methods of capital punishment are unacceptable. Such psychological beliefs can well be equated to human rights. However, Petrażycki denied that a right is an intention to implement one’s selfish interests. Petrażycki argued that law, as well as morality, pursues public welfare and prosperity, and the spiritual and cultural education of humanity. It is not only human beings that can obligees. Petrażycki held that animals, spiritual beings, or even paintings can play this role as long, as the satisfaction of their claims becomes the focus of emotions experienced of an imperative side. He obviously did not share a liberal understanding of human rights as personal freedoms. Even more, Petrażycki believed that his social ideal of universal active love is the ultimate goal of law’s educational effects, and this ideal requires the overcoming and elimination of exactly those aspects of the human psyche that manifest themselves in the rights understood as personal freedoms. By the same token, Petrażycki anticipated many trends that characterise the contemporary understanding of human rights.

Keywords: Leon Petrażycki; human rights; psychological theory of law; imperativeattributive emotions experiences; morality; social ideal of universal active love