State As a Jural Phenomenon. a Critical Defense of Leon Petra?ycki's Conceptions of State

The paper is in two parts, corresponding to the two ways adopted by Leon Petrażycki for addressing the social phenomenon called ‘state’. In the first part, Fittipaldi discusses Petrażycki’s hypothesis as to the way naïve people and jurists represent to themselves a state, godusarstvo, państwo, etc. Fittipaldi compares this hypothesis to those formulated by Petrażycki about: juristic persons, hereditas iacens, and the possibility of indeterminate right-holders. In the second part, Fittipaldi discusses the stipulative concept of a state devised by Petrażycki for investigating social phenomena scientifically. In this context, Fittipaldi examines some criticism levelled at that conceptualization, and tries to defend it from the perspective of a strictly psychological theory of jural phenomena.