Petrażycki’s theory of law applied: between collective memory, legal consciousness and intangible cultural heritage. : Investigating the Lusophone communities

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Sadowski, Mirosław Michał; Holtermann, Jakob v. H. and Krešić, Mario and Novak, Marko, eds. (2025) Petrażycki’s theory of law applied: between collective memory, legal consciousness and intangible cultural heritage. : Investigating the Lusophone communities. In: Legal Consciousness. Law and Philosophy Library . Springer, ROM, pp. 139-163. ISBN 9783031879623 (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-87962-3_8)

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Abstract

Recent years have seen a veritable revival of the work of Leon Petrażycki, the Polish legal sociologist and theorist who, writing mostly in the Central and Eastern European linguae francae of his day (German, Russian and Polish), had fallen into obscurity for much of the twentieth century following his suicide in the early 1930s. This return to Petrażycki’s socio-legal realist and psychological approaches to law since the turn of the century has, however, for the most part been rather emulative, with few applications to contemporary issues. By contrast, Maurice Halbwachs’ concept of collective memory, which also spent years in sociology’s giftschrank following its creator death in a concentration camp, has not only since been rediscovered but also redeveloped and deconstructed in various ways, often applied to law. However, in spite of, in the author’s perspective, the visible correspondence between the two theories, thus far they have not been studied together. As such, the purpose of this chapter is to analyse Petrażycki’s ideas on law through a collective memory viewpoint in the hope of uncovering the relations between the two theories and cultural heritage. Divided into two parts, in the first section of the chapter, the author introduces the concept of collective memory, the main facets of Petrażycki’s theory of law and the notion of cultural heritage, with a particular focus on intangible cultural heritage, pondering their compatibility and the ways in which the different ideas inform one another. Then, in the second part of the chapter, the author proposes a practical analysis of the intangible cultural heritage in the different Lusophone communities, ultimately applying the results of his earlier theoretical investigations to the case studies, venturing to provide new understandings of the different dimensions of intangible cultural heritage protection by law.

ORCID iDs

Sadowski, Mirosław Michał ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2048-2073; Holtermann, Jakob v. H., Krešić, Mario and Novak, Marko
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)