Retrospective analysis in managerial thinking at the beginning of the XIX century. According to the report of Prince P.V. Lopukhin to Emperor Alexander I "On the transformation of the Commission for Drafting Laws"

The subject of the article is managerial thinking, which manifests itself in the activities of the Commission for the Codification of the Laws of the Russian Empire in the early nineteenth century. The activity of systematization of Russian legislation was perceived as one of the most important management tasks throughout the XVIII century. But the results of this activity were negligible. This task passed into the XIX century, along with the understanding that without a serious study of the theoretical basis of work on the codification of law, this task cannot be solved. The activities of the commission of Prince P. V. Lopukhin became the first attempt to theoretically study all the problems of codification. The result of the commission's work was the report "On the transformation of the Law Drafting Commission", which served as the main source for this article. The basic method of the work carried out is a systematic analysis of the text of the article, the purpose of which is to identify and describe the methods of analytical work of the Prince Lopukhin commission used in the preparation of the commission's Report. The result of the analysis is the identification, as the basic method of the Commission's work, of a method of retrospective analysis of the activities of previous codification commissions, starting from the time of Peter I and ending with the beginning of the reign of Emperor Alexander I. The retrospective analysis applied by the commission was based on the study of the normative documents of the Russian Empire and the documentation of previous commissions in order to establish the composition and principles of the organization of the work of these commissions, the goals of their work and the results achieved. In the Report submitted by the commission, the principles of historicism and consistency were strictly observed, which allowed the authors to identify the stages of codification work, point out their features and evaluate them. The retrospective analysis carried out by the commission made it possible to draw significant conclusions on which the work on codification of Russian laws in the subsequent period will have to be based. The analysis of the report of the Prince Lopukhin commission has not been carried out before, which determines the novelty of this study. His conclusions can be applied in the study of managerial thought and public administration activities in Russia.