A.L. Sakketti’s Historism and the Problem of the People

The philosophy of Alexandr L. Sakketti (Saссhetti, 1881-1966) is still an understudied area. Researchers pay attention to his publication devoted to understanding the philosophy of law from the perspective of Marburg neo-Kantianism and to his translation works. Sakketti’s socio-philosophical ideas are beyond the scope of all studies. In this research we analyze Sakketti’s ideas concerning sociocultural development. Supporting G. Simmel’s view of society as a set of interactions of many people, Sakketti viewed law not only as a tool for ensuring social order, but also as a necessary requirement for the creation of society. Through law a society is formed, and through the state it gains unity and becomes a collective social subject - the people. It was found out that the people is a collective social subject formed in the interaction between the folk (natural features of the social community) and the state (normative prescriptions of the social order). It is the people that plays a key role in socio-cultural development. It has been determined that determined that Sakketti proposed his own interpretation of the process of development of society and culture, distinguishing its three stages: natural, legal and moral. At the legal stage, the people are formed, and at the moral stage, they create culture. It was defined that he distinguished law and morality using the formula of minimum of morality. It is revealed that Sakketti proposed a new interpretation of law as a minimum of morality, different from the variants of G. Jellinek and V.S. Solov’ev. Morality evolves under the conditions of law: law allows a person to move from the natural state of existence to social being, to create social relations, the development and ramification of which will take place already at the stage of morality. Culture as a result of collective experience is formed in the moral interactions of a multitude of individuals. As a result, it is shown that Sakketti, thanks to his unique interpretation of the social role of law, was able to avoid sociological nominalism and universalism and to justify historism: to consider the development of society as a process of formation of culture, which is possible as a product of collective efforts due to the free acting of a multitude of individuals who constitute the people.