Power and Law: The Context of Bureaucratic Regulation

The article describes various aspects of the general bureaucratization of modern society and analyzes their legal, political, and epistemological causes and consequences. It also discusses the problems of independence of law, the growth of legal regulation of social relations and processes, etatization of social life and thought, the right to resist power, trends of internalization and democratization of law. According to the research data, over the past hundred years, the sphere of legal regulation of social relations and processes in all states has increased. Given the complexity of establishing the boundaries between legal and bureaucratic regulation, Weber's tradition of social, economic, legal and political thought reinforces the general trend of nationalizing socio-economic life and thought. Throughout the twentieth century, arbitrary power and the desire of the authorities to control the behavior of citizens were embodied in the laws and rights of non-democratic states. In Russia, this trend forms a political tradition. It is reinforced by differences between the European and Russian interpretations of the rights of citizens to resist spiritual and secular power and to carry out a popular revolution. The causes and consequences of the interconnection of legal regulation and bureaucratization throughout the twentieth century consist in the phenomena of “legal wrong” and “supra-legal law”, the emergence of new spheres of human activity and the ensuing boom on the topic of security, the elimination of legal remnants of feudal society, long-term dominance in national legislation of the category of duty over the rights of individuals, internationalization of law in all its aspects, the primacy of international law over domestic law, revision of the traditional concept of state sovereignty, liberalization and secularization of law, development of information technologies. These trends give rise to opposite assessments and fail to solve the problem of fairness. A detailed analysis of the authoritarian and totalitarian systems of the twentieth century, which contributed to the total militarization and bureaucratization of society, is further required.

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