Governance as an object of study of social and legal sciences

Abstract

This article provides a framework of scientific understanding of the term «bureaucracy». The authors introduce interpretation of public administration in domestic law. The authors study the existing state-legal scientific view on the system of public authorities, about categories: mechanism of the state, apparatus of the state, about the institute of the public service. Theoretical views on management of public-sphere conditionality legal traditions are analyzed. On the basis of existing views on domestic legal science the authors change scientific understanding of the term «state bureaucracy» aimed at adapting it to jurisprudence. The authors outline theoretical and methodological approaches that allow conducting a theoretical analysis of the formation of legal and political foundations of the Russian bureaucracy, explaining problems of enforcement of the right in the given system. The authors selected theoretical and methodological complex, which facilitates identification of continuity from the inherent limitations of the Russian public administration and state bureaucracy characteristic in the context of the analysis of the identity of the statehood and legal system. In the article, the authors analyze both legal and general theoretical and methodological perspectives. Purpose. To generate a theoretical-methodological complex for objective study of public administration using the analysis of social and legal sciences. Methods. The research is based on the basic principles of theory of state and law, sociology. The authors also applied a formal logical method for theoretical analysis. The results. The authors come to the conclusion about the absence of the term denoting the entire system of public administration and equivalent to the general scientific notion «state bureaucracy» in legal science. On the basis of theoretical jurisprudence provisions general scientific term «state bureaucracy» is optimized to legal science. The authors identified a large significance of the theory of bureaucracy development made by German sociologist M. Weber for the jurisprudence. This theoretical concept develops a classic model of development; however, it has some potential to adapt to the identity of state and the legal system of a particular society. Scientific novelty. The existing general scientific definition «state bureaucracy» on the basis of theoretical notions, existing in law, is adapted to the state and legal science. The authors identified heuristic potential of M. Weber’s theory for legal science as a theoretical concept able to explore specificity of the development of the legal framework of state bureaucracy based on state-legal traditions.