Contemporary Bourgeois Legal Thought

A survey of twentieth-century Western jurisprudence by a Soviet scholar who had actually read it, in the original languages, and quotes it so the reader can check him.

Vladimir Tumanov works through the normativist, sociological and natural-law schools from their own texts. Hans Kelsen is named on the order of a hundred and twenty times and cited to his own editions in three languages - the Pure Theory of Law from the Vienna edition, but also the early Socialism and the State of 1923 and the two Cold War books on Bolshevism and communist legal theory. H. L. A. Hart appears through The Concept of Law and Law, Liberty and Morality. Rudolf Stammler is quoted at length from the Leipzig edition of 1896, Roscoe Pound from Social Control through Law. Ehrlich, Radbruch, Gurvitch, Geiger, Fechner and Coing are worked in the German.

The core is a serious statement of the Marxist claim that law is a historical and class phenomenon rather than a self-subsistent order of norms - that behind the formal equality of legal subjects stands a real inequality of social power, and that jurisprudence which begins from the norm alone is describing the surface of something it has declined to explain.

Tumanov was a genuine comparative-law scholar, and the career bears it out: after 1991 he sat on, and briefly chaired, the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation.

For once the imprint is honest - the manuscript closed around 1972-73 and reached English almost at once.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on the one question the book cannot ask.