ABSTRACT
Leon Petrażycki is widely regarded as the most famous and most important Polish legal theorist, and at the same time is underestimated and undiscovered by a wider academic audience. His oeuvre to a large extent also belongs to the Russian intellectual tradition, but his thoughts seem to be based on important elements of Polish culture. As a scientific loner, fierce polemicist, and author of an intriguing as well as difficult and hermetic theory, he did not create his own school, but remained in a way an independent point on the map of modern jurisprudence. He is best known for his attempts to create an adequate theory of law, which resulted in the formulation of an extremely antipositivistic psychological theory, treating law as the psychological imperative-attributive experiences of an individual. This theory, however, only served as an auxiliary to the science of legal policy proposed by Petrażycki. This postulate was the result of his noticing the absurdities of the traditional dogmatic-judicial approach to law, as well as his desire to create a tool that would help realize what he considered to be the ultimate goal of humanity—the ideal of active love and full socialization of people and their groups. This vision of progress, undoubtedly millenarian, is difficult to reconcile with Christian orthodoxy. However, Petrażycki, unlike many other modern thinkers, considered religion an unambiguously positive factor in human progress, and he named Christ and his disciples at the top of the list of great moral teachers of humankind.
