Originating in the third quarter of the XIX century, legal positivism was based on the principles of the same philosophical positivism, and it was developed mainly in Western Europe, as well as in Russia. The emergence of the tradition is traditionally associated with the name of John Austin, who transformed into a new theory a well-known postulate: "The governance of the country must be formed in such a way that it remains manageable."
Right is sovereign power, and nothing more. Any rule or rule becomes the rule of law only if the sovereign's will makes it binding for an unlimited number of persons. In Russia, the follower of the idea of legal positivism is GF Shershenevich, who viewed law as an instrument capable of acting as a balance for class contradictions that arose in view of heterogeneity in education and well-being. Entering into confrontation with the generally accepted at that time natural-legal theory, legal positivism refutes the division of the right to positive (dictated by the state and its laws) and natural (granted to man at birth by nature). The only possible and valid law, according to the proponents of the theory of legal positivism, is the positive, "positive" law that arises in the individual on the basis of the law - there are no other rights and can not be.
The theory considers the law to be real, not historical, existing today, it is given the role of defender of the interests of society and its individual members. Legal positivism does not identify the notions of morality and law, believing that the fulfillment of laws, that is morality, is the internal perception of everyone, and it is the reverse side of law, separated from it. At the stage of formation and development of bourgeois relations in society, the growth of commodity-money turnover, the identification of the will of the legislator and the law, which proclaimed legal positivism, had a positive influence, allowed to regulate contractual relations from the position of law.
At the same time, the current did not eliminate the legitimacy of that necessary role in the number of signs of the state, which is declared by modern democratic legislation. Obviously, including for this reason, the legal positivism failed to become a full-fledged theory of law, as it was based on a substitutionary notion that the state was undoubtedly a legal one, and this was repeatedly It was refuted by the practice of unreasonable violence by the authorities at that time. In addition, the rule of law presupposes the supremacy of the will of man and his freedoms. Positivism rejected this , because a person was considered only as a subservient member of society, to whom only those rights that the legislator gave him belonged. With legal positivism, natural-legal theory, for which the possibility of a person (man, not just a "thinking animal"), has its own rights - to life, to freedom, to health and to work, to motherhood And self-determination.