The crisis of the legal science of the XVIII century and its resolution in the classical German idealism

The German classical philosophy of law did not deny the tradition of humanism and enlightenment formed in the legal science in the 18th century, but developed its own doctrine of law and state on the basis of a completely new methodological paradigm. This paradigm relied on the idea of the unity of the cognizable and cognizing, the subject and object, the basis and result of cognition. The transition to a new paradigm of legal thought allowed overcoming the crisis of rationalistic and empirical methodology in law. The doctrine of human inalienable rights, of monarchical rule based on the rule of law, as well as moral foundations of law, had already developed in the era of antiquity and reached a level of systematic interpretation in the classical works of the 17th century, which became the theoretical ground of teachings of the greatest representatives of the Enlightenment. The principle of historicism in the XVIII century had not yet received sufficient concreteness either in the works of Montesquieu, or in the writings of Giambattista Vico and Gustav Hugo appealing to the idea of historicism. The new social reality, which manifested itself in the practice of the Great French Revolution, in the ideas of humanism, enlightenment, republicanism and human rights laid the foundation for the epoch-making legal documents (the American Declaration of Human Rights of 1776 and the French Declaration of Human Rights and Citizen of 1789 ), demanded its reflection on a fundamentally new theoretical and methodological basis. Its ground was the transcendental interpretation of the essence of freedom as the basis of law.