Theory of State and Law in its infancy (the end of the XVI century.) Called "an encyclopedia of law", "encyclopedia of jurisprudence." She has been influenced by the ideas of Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, H. Grotius, Hobbes, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, SH.L. Montesquieu, GVF Hegel, Immanuel Kant, AN Radishcheva KA Nevolina, MA Bakunin, Marx, Engels, G. Plekhanov, VI Lenin and other thinkers, determined the direction of its development.
In Russia, this science has taught at the University of Moscow in the XVIII century. The modern name she received at the end of the XIX century. as a result of scientists understanding the continuity of the state and law. Among the representatives of the pre-revolutionary Russian legal science concerned with the theory of state and law, we can distinguish SA Muromtseva, MM Kovalevsky, NM Korkunova, GF Shershenevich, DI Kachenovsky, BN Chicherin, BA Kistyakovsky, EN Trubeckogo, LI Petrazhitsky, AN The tail, IV Hesse, PA Sorokin and many others.
The need for a theoretical understanding of the phenomena of political life, as the state and the right to have originated long ago. Replacing primitive social formations politically organized power required the introduction of a legal regulation of social relations and power management functions. Clarifying the value of law as a tool to influence public attitudes and functioning of the state is the main theme of the subsequent development of the political and legal thought.
The emergence of various theoretical concepts, expressing understanding of the state of law and their basic institutions, as well as ideas about the relationship between law and the state, associated since antiquity. The development of views on the state and the law in an era of early class societies based primarily on the general philosophical principles, religious beliefs, moral concepts. Formulation and presentation of these ideas in different periods of social development has been the lot of the representatives of the slave-owning aristocracy, priests, senior hierarchs of the church.
Later, the baton build legal concepts of "the best" of the organization of political life has moved to the medieval burghers, the ideologists of the bourgeoisie period of early-feudal revolution and subsequent conductors ideas against authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Their theory of law and political organization of power make up the history of theoretical and philosophical science of law (its law students learn in the course of history of legal and political doctrines), which in turn is part of the law in general and the source of the general theoretical knowledge of science of law in