Kultura prawna na tle myśli filozoficznej i społecznej o kulturze

Abstract

The starting point of my article is that the concept of legal culture, similarly to the concept of culture, is nowadays widely and extensively used, both in theoretical works and in relation to practice and empirical research. At the same time, this is accompanied by the observation that the term 'culture' does not have a generally accepted definition, and that the terms proposed or used are a foregone conclusion of disputes, wide-ranging polemics and discussions, which incidentally contribute to the growing number of research papers on the subject.

In the often cited work Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn have taken the trouble to present more than 200 definitions of culture found in works not only in anthropology but also in other social sciences and humanities. The authors attempted to build a general definition or rather concept of culture on this basis, however, the term they put forward, although it was partly adopted by the direction associated with the normative conception of culture, did not gain general acceptance from other strands of cultural research. Their distinction of the six aspects in which culture is defined, namely the descriptive and enumerative, historical, normative, psychological, structural and genetic approaches, can be considered a certain ordering of the problem.

However, further developments in cultural studies and the emergence of new disciplines termed 'cultural anthropology' and 'social anthropology' have not resulted in a generally accepted definition of culture. In the encyclopaedias of the social sciences, successively published from 1968 until the year 2000, one encounters the statement that the concept of culture is still undefined; this view also applies to some textbooks.

Similar caveats are associated with the term 'legal culture' and here the meaning ascribed to it deviates from uniformity. It is characteristic to use the terms 'legal culture' and 'legal awareness' interchangeably, without clearly defining the boundary between them, e.g. when we speak or write about low legal culture or low legal awareness of our society or of State administration officials, political activists, or those involved in law-making at its various levels.

Against the background of the situation presented above, in the first part the author  briefly sources the formation of the term 'culture', of further research and dilemmas against the background of selected trends in philosophical and social thought as well as sociology and cultural anthropology. It emphasises contemporary trends as well as concepts and directions that are more useful than others in defining 'legal culture', which, as the name itself implies, is a part or department of culture.

In the second part of the article, which is devoted to 'legal culture', I will deal with the definition of the term 'legal culture', the delimitation of the terms 'legal culture' and 'legal consciousness' and attempt to answer - in describing and explaining which problems we need these terms, especially when the perspective of our deliberations or actions is the role of law in contemporary society.