ABSTRACT
Law must be distinguished from such spiritual values as scientific truth, moral perfection, and religious sanctity. Its significance is more relative: its content created in part by changeable economic and social conditions. The relative significance of law has given a few theoreticians occasion to fix its worth at a very low level. Some see in law only an ethical minimum, while others consider compulsion, that is, force, one of its essential elements. If this is so, then there is no reason to reproach our intelligentsia for ignoring law. It has aspired to higher and more absolute ideals, and on its path could neglect this secondary value. Our intelligentsia’s legal consciousness could have been developed by the exposition of legal ideas in literature. The Russian intelligentsia consists of people who are neither individually nor socially disciplined. This is related to the fact that the Russian intelligentsia never respected law and never saw any value in it.
