Legal awareness of the individual: a view from the standpoint of cultural, historical and activity methodology
Authors: Kashirskii Dmitrii  Valer'veich , Molotova Viktoriya  Viktorovna 
Published: October 2024

The article is devoted to the theoretical understanding of the phenomenon of legal consciousness of personality from the standpoint of L.S. Vygotsky's cultural and historical theory and A.N. Leontiev's general psychological theory of activity. The regularities of the formation of the legal consciousness of the individual are presented, the psychological properties and functions of the legal consciousness of the individual are described, the hypothesis of the systemic and semantic structure of the phenomenon under consideration is theoretically substantiated. The content of the legal consciousness of the individual is described at the level of "meanings", "personal meaning" and "sensory tissue" of consciousness. The process of formation of the system of legal consciousness of personality is considered through the application of the principle of unity of affect and intelligence, formulated by L.S. Vygotsky, according to which the will of the subject is a single basis and an intermediary link in the formation of consciously controlled processes (the formation of arbitrariness), where in the process of development there is a change in the relationship between affect and intelligence. The theoretical propositions formulated by the authors can form the basis for extensive empirical studies of the legal consciousness of the individual in line with the national psychological tradition, laid down in the cultural-historical approach and the general psychological theory of activity. The regularities of the formation of the legal consciousness of the individual are presented, the psychological properties and functions of the legal consciousness of the individual are described, the hypothesis of the systemic and semantic structure of the phenomenon under consideration is theoretically substantiated. The theoretical propositions formulated by the authors can form the basis for extensive empirical studies of the legal consciousness of the individual in line with the national psychological tradition, laid down in the cultural-historical approach and the general psychological theory of activity. The theoretical analysis of the phenomenon of legal awareness from the standpoint of the national cultural, historical and activity methodology allows us to draw the following conclusions and generalizations. The process of formation and development of legal awareness is a transition from simpler semantic generalizations about law to more complex ones, in the course of general personality development. Thus, the system of meanings of the "language of law" (with different levels of generalizations) determines the content of the components of the structure of legal consciousness, the "development" of these generalizations may indicate the level of development of legal consciousness. A deep study of legal consciousness is impossible in isolation from the categories of "personal meaning", "sensual fabric", as well as those "meanings" in which law finds its objective expression in culture and in a specific person, a subject of law.