ABSTRACT
In this chapter Krzysztof Motyka discusses the reception of Petrażycki’s theory of law in Adam Podgórecki’s conceptions of law, sociology of law, and legal policy. Podgórecki studied at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, when during the Stalinist era he participated in a privatissimum conducted by Petrażycki’s St. Petersburg student and follower Jerzy Lande. The privatissimum was also attended by future luminaries of Polish social theory and sociology of law, Maria Borucka-Arctowa, Grzegorz Leopold Seidler, Kazimierz Opałek, Jan Górecki, Jerzy Wróblewski, and Wiesław Lang. Unlike most of them, Podgórecki was not influenced by Marxism and instead associated his scholarly work with the ideas of Petrażycki, whom he called “the unrecognized father of sociology of law.” Petrażycki’s theory was Podgórecki’s starting point in his attempts at defining law, in his metatheoretical proposals, in his classification of legal sciences, as well as in his conception of the sociology of law, legal policy, and sociotechnics. Podgórecki adopted and adapted Petrażycki’s broad understanding of law, which comprises both official and unofficial imperative-attributive norms. However, unlike Petrażycki but similar to Sorokin and Gurvitch, Podgórecki defined those norms in psychosociological rather than in purely psychological terms.
