The concept of “St. Petersburg school of legal philosophy” as used in this paper designates an intellectual community established in the beginning of XXth century around the recognized leader of the school, Leon Petrazycki, and represented by the names of his disciples G. Guins, G. Gurvitch, P. Sorokin, N. Timashev, M. Reisner and others. “Realistic” temper of the school harmonized with the strive for construction of large-scale social projects which, in particular, differentiates it from the “idealistic” Moscow school which declared refusal of social and legal idealism.
In conjunction with the idea of legal pluralism, the Petrazycki’s idea of the ethical progress which can be achieved with the assistance of law became a world-view foundation of the social and legal ideals of his disciples. They added to this world-view foundation (1) the idea of the intuitive law; (2) notion of the state considered as the law of social service; (3) the idea of social equality as the expression of the certain level of human mind’s socialization. However, while Petrazycki considered his ideal of the active love as “superlegal”, his disciples took global legal society as the social ideal, and the future organization of such society was interpreted by them in different ways.
M. Lazerson, while considering territory and sovereignty as historically passing attributes of the state, considered the “league of nations” as the social ideal. The “league of nations” means a public law based union which has the idea of eternal peace in its foundation, provided that its subjects will not be the states, but nations as legal unions organized in a hierarchy. G. Gurvitch, while also admitting the trend for dissipation of the state sovereignty principle and growing importance of the role of social law over the state law, thought that it is possible to construct the “ideal” society — pluralistic democracy as the most complete incarnation of the social law idea. G. Guins developed the idea of solidarism as the universal social formation — the only one which can lead humanity to the triumph of law and truth. The project of “altruistic transformation of humanity” by P. Sorokin, who supposed the “active love” as the only means to get rid of social ailments, is an exclusion from the general rule.