Evolution of legal motivation for the common good (basic formation models of communication)

Introduction. The article explores the main milestones in the history of understanding the possibilities of the phenomenon of law as a regulator and the legal possibilities of legal entities. The purpose is to study the evolution of legal motivation towards the common good in relation to the global-stage interpretation of the theory of socio-economic formations.Methodology and materials. The vision of the development of the phenomenon of law is based on L. I. Petrazhitsky’steleological hypothesis of “law as the intuition of the common good.” The study contains a complementary application of the communicative-phenomenological theory of law, the formation and evolutionary approaches to the study of society as a whole, and the principles of dialectics.Research results and their discussion. It is shown that the normativity of consciousness (specific historical moral and law) cannot be reduced to socio-economic conditions, since, by virtue of its autonomy, much of the values prioritized by consciousness remain truly mysterious; the construction of the concept of socio-economic formation (its very “atmosphere”) is impossible without the normativity of consciousness that constitutes and accompanies it; the normativity of consciousness is a condition and prerequisite for a concrete historical formational model of legal communication due to its epistemological primacy in relation to social matter, and it is the progressive changes in its content that determine the legal progress of humanity as a whole.Conclusions. The “zero cycle” of legal communication arises with the emergence of the human ancestral community as a limiter of the laws of sociality (hierarchy and inequality); it develops as an expansion of “pacified circles” (through the thorns of its own denial) in the slave-owning formation; the dialectical leap into feudalism is an increase in awareness of the possibilities of law as a personal interest of subjects of law, not only ruling, but and subordinates (denial of denial); “moving” towards the realization of law as the personal (formal) freedom of each individual (the initial state of modern normative consciousness, which is in the phase of denial).