HISTORICAL CRITERIA OF THE LEGAL APPROACH TO THE TYPOLOGY OF THE STATE
Authors: Sukhonos V.V. 
Published: January 2021

The article is devoted to the typology of the state. The main attention is paid to three main approaches to the typology of the state: formational, civilizational, and legal. In many respects, the typology is the result of the description of certain phenomena and their comparison. Based on this, typology problems arise in all sciences that deal with extremely heterogeneous sets of usually discrete objects and solve the problem of orderly description and explanation of these sets. However, it does not matter to which group of sciences these sets and objects belong. These can be both natural sciences (chemistry and biology) and humanities (psychology and linguistics), and social sciences (sociology).
In particular, in Western social thought, tendencies to rethink typology appear in both concepts of models of history and models of culture.
In contrast, Marxism gave rise to the doctrine of social formations, which was associated with the separation of economic and historical types of society, which were based on certain production relations.
It is using the methods of typology, Marxist sociology singled out certain structural units of the historical process, which allowed to formulate a certain, well-argued, explanation of the history of many historical types of society and culture, the existence of various systems within certain social formations.
And although the economic fetish inherent in Marxist sociology largely led to the purely one-sided nature of Marxist philosophy, it was its proponents who first raised the question of historical types of state at the scientific level, the first attempt to apply typology to political science.
As a result, there was such a category as the typology of the state – the differentiation of groups of states on common features that determine the essential characteristics of these groups of states.
In this case, the typology acts, in essence, as a reflection of the process of historically inevitable change of some types of state and law to others, and therefore is one of the most important techniques or means of learning the historical process of state and law.
Problems of state typology are traditionally studied by the theory of state and law. At the same time, until now, two approaches have traditionally been distinguished: formational and civilizational. Within the framework of the first approach, the typology of the state is identified with its genesis. The second approach identifies the state and civilization.
However, in modern political science, processes have begun in which scholars try to consider the types of state not only in the context of civilizations or social formations but also in the actual legal aspect.
Within the legal approach to the typology of the state, several criteria are distinguished. According to the historical criterion, we can distinguish such types of state as primary, evolutionary, bureaucratic, and minimal.
Keywords: type of state; typology of the state; formational approach to the typology of the state; civilizational approach to the typology of the state; civilization; formation.