The mentality and the juridical consciousness

The matter of the article is the correlation of the mentality, culture, juridical consciousness and legal culture» concepts. It is supposed that all these phenomena are closely associated, implied and codetermine each other. The mentality is a broad and nondescript concept. Actually, it is not strictly defined in the modern science. However, the new prospects in the culture conception arose since the moment of its insertion in the domain of social sciences. There was opened up a new vista also in jurisprudence. It is possible to define more exactly the concepts of the national juridical consciousness and legal culture through mentality; to resolve the contradictions and to explain the nature of the law-abiding of some nations and the legal nihilism of other ones. Now we have more possibilities in historical and legal research of the juridical consciousness formation, the origin of different states and legal institutes, the medieval European statehood formation. The national culture has been forming on the basis of mentality. Consequently, the national mentality is the basis of the legal culture as one of the aspects of the global culture. The language, social norms (including, rules of law), social myths forming the basis of some popular culture (concept of the justice, good and evil, ways of struggle of the good against the evil, personal and group identification) are among the most widespread signs describing the concept of mentality in aggregate. The mentality is perceived as the set of images of reality creating the system of ideas about the world and about the human part in it. Consequently, the juridical consciousness as the reflection of legal aspects of reality, and the legal vision of the world created on this basis are the mentality substructures. At the same time they represent the substructure and the basis of the social legal culture and the personal legal culture formation. The corresponding way of behavior, typical for the nation, including, the situations connected with the right is formed on the basis of the juridical consciousness. As a result the stable national and personal legal culture arises.