The Personalized Transition from Soviet Legal Science to Ukrainian Jurisprudence: On the Figure and Ideas of Petro Rabinovych (An Attempt at Critical Synthesis)

Abstract

This article proposes a substantiated hypothesis regarding the role of P. M. Rabinovych as a figure who integrates systemic methodological tendencies in the development of the scientific understanding of legal and, more broadly, socio-legal processes over the past seven decades. His trajectory is interpreted as a movement from the rigid, ideologically dogmatized positivism of the Soviet era towards the comprehension of the principles of the European humanistic legal tradition. The article also highlights the significance of his personal scholarly and creative contribution to contemporary Ukrainian jurisprudence. The study demonstrates the immanent connection of many of his texts with the methodological achievements of twentieth-century science and philosophy, which is particularly important given the limited engagement of domestic legal scholars and representatives of other social sciences and humanities with the achievements of Ukrainian philosophical and methodological thought. Anthropological and cultural approaches are considered in dialectical unity, the synthesis of which provides additional opportunities for the study of social events and processes, particularly within spheres regulated by law. The article identifies paradoxes in the methodological framework of P. M. Rabinovych, the critical examination of which makes it possible to outline potential ways of resolving their epistemological and ontological origins in domestic jurisprudence and legal practice. The main conclusions emphasize the general cultural and ideological foundations of these paradoxes, primarily of an economic and ideological nature, as well as the specification of evolutionary efforts undertaken by exceptionally gifted individuals within the scientific sphere. The necessity of such figures is evidenced both by their uniqueness and by the need to reintegrate domestic jurisprudence into global trends in the development of the humanities.