Gurvitch, Georges (1894–1965)

Georges Gurvitch grew up in Russia, but he spent a significant part of his professional life in France, where he succeeded to Émile Durkheim's (1858–1917) chair in sociology at the Sorbonne. Gurvitch, intrigued by the fusion of simultaneous manifestation of law in various forms and at various levels of social interaction, searched for the “real” basis of law. He wanted to develop the concept of “social law” as a law of integration and cooperation.

Gurvitch elaborated on social law in L'idée du droit social (1932). Although reminiscent of Leon Petrazycki's (1867–1931) “intuitive law” and Eugen Ehrlich's (1862–1922) “living law,” Gurvitch's social law was an integral part of his general sociology and, thus, a theoretical construct in its own right. It was also one of the early sociological contributions to the theory of legal pluralism, since it challenged all conceptions of law based on a single source of legal, political, or moral authority.

In Sociology of Law (1942), Gurvitch developed his concept of “jural facts,” which was the sociological manifestation of what he called “jural values.” To distinguish jural facts from other facts and values, Gurvitch borrowed Petrazycki's definition of law in terms of its imperative-attributive properties. Rules constituting law had a multilateral characteristic in the sense that they regulated behavior based on the link between claims and duties. This concept helped Gurvitch to distinguish jural facts from, for example, moral values, which have a unilateral and intrinsically imperative character.

True to his phenomenological learning, Gurvitch defined the sociology of law in terms of the sociology of the “noetic mind” or human spirit. Thus, he argued that the specific properties of law were to be identified and described by examining what he called the “immediate jural experience,” which was embodied in a variety of social forms, many of them taking place outside legal institutions.

Despite its theoretical richness and potential, scholars have neglected Gurvitch's pluralist theory of law within both the sociology of law and legal theory. His theoretical ideas do not appeal to most social scientists because he formulated them in a too complex and abstract fashion to be of use in empirical research. At the same time, legal theorists overlook the concept of social law because it questions the prevalent understanding of law among legal scholars, many of whom remain concerned with the problems of legal positivism.

Notwithstanding the complexity of Gurvitch's theoretical categories, there is little doubt as to the originality of his concept of social law, which brought together three valuable and interrelated insights. It acknowledged the diversity of social life and employed it to devise a sophisticated sociological model for the study of law; it captured the fluidity of law in action; and it recognized that law has many competing social sources that exist at different levels of social reality.