Historical foundations and conceptual transformations of the foreign theory of administrative law

The article examines the historical process of the formation and transformation of the doctrinal understanding of the subject area, methods, structure of administrative law as a legal branch, most integrated into a complex interdisciplinary system that determines the goals, principles and content of public administration. With all the variety of historical options for the development of statehood, an analysis of the main milestones in this history reveals a movement towards a relative unification of the ideological foundations of administrative and legal regulation. It seems possible to assume that the essence of this process is the adaptation of the mechanism of public administration to the requirements of the “social contract” as the fundamental concept of natural law theory. The “police” image of the state, which has evolved over the course of the New Age, is being supplanted by the understanding of the state in its interaction with society as “legal”, “social”, “service”. At the turn of the XX-XXI centuries, the state as a provider of public services is increasingly perceived as a consumer, without taking into account the bilateral nature of the “social contract”. At the same time, the initial contractual transfer to the state of the right to coercion and, especially, the use of violence is emasculated from the public perception of the “text” of the contract. On the other hand, the state, in the face of increasing complexity of administrative tasks, prefers not to focus on the “inalienable right of the people to resist”. In the transitional era of digitalization and the way of life of society and the functioning of the state, there is a need to “rationalize” the state, taking into account the scale of new tasks. Does this also mean the need to “edit” the provisions of the agreement between society and the state? Such a “rational” state can look for the answer precisely in the field of contact between the subjects of regulation of the branches of public law, primarily constitutional and administrative.