Intentional Analysis of Social Acts in Adolf Reinach’s "The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law"

The subject of this study is the intentional analysis of social acts in Adolf Reinach’s "The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law" (1913) within the framework of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology from the Logical Investigations' period. The research investigates the structure of social acts as intentional experiences, including their immanent components and the connections between them through the lens of intentional analysis. A critical examination is provided of the "linguistic" interpretation of Reinach’s a priori theory of law, particularly the contentious reduction of social acts to speech acts (J.L. Austin, J.R. Searle). Special attention is given to the absence of a methodological section in The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law, which necessitates the reconstruction of phenomenological analysis of social acts within the jurist’s work. The aim of the article is to undertake a problem-theoretical reconstruction (following D.I. Lukovskaya’s interpretive method) of the methodology underlying Reinach’s phenomenology of law. It conducts a comparative analysis of Husserl’s Logical Investigations and Reinach’s works on social acts — The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law, The Essence and Systematics of Judgments (1908), and Non-Social and Social Acts (1911). The novelty lies in the application of intentional analysis to social acts. The study reconstructs the process of analyzing social acts using Husserl's framework and shows how Reinach's method is consistent with phenomenological principles. This paper argued: 1) every social act is an intentional experience that constitutes part of the complex intentional experience termed an "effective social act"; 2) the inner experience of a social act is a partial intentional experience whose objective correlate is identical to the intentional object of the social act. Thus, Reinach’s apriori theory of law explores legal experiences and their interconnections through Husserlian phenomenology (Logical Investigations), despite Reinach’s phenomenology retains a realist orientation.

phenomenology of law, social act, phenomenological attitude, intentional analysis, intentionality, social moment, validity, efficacy, Reinach, Husserl