lation; formally, the literal and deductive approach must be supplemented with a pluralistic approach, allowing legal science to deduce and construct its conclusions in a manner harmonizing with social demands as well as legalistic demands.34 One reason explaining why Hägerström distanced himself from the theories above was that he defined the legitimacy of legal doctrine by means of its value to the legal community in general (to be more specific, the judges). He even went so far as to argue that if legal science wished to gain influence or authority over law in practice, then legal science must pursue a realistic avenue of approach – that is, adapt itself not only to the methods available to the judge, but also to those duties and the ideology defining the judge’s office in general.35 And do so even if it entailed the abandonment of strict legalistic formalism. Such openness, in fact, is necessitated by practical demands.To be explicit, the stability and existence of the legal order itself relies upon the proper use by jurists of statute law and legal precedent, thereby shortening the bridge between theory and practice. In law the perceived discrepancy between the theory of law and practiced law could be traced to traditional notion of the relationship between ideal and reality, wherein the ideal was identified with proper essence of reality or a specific category. But in modern scientific theory this notion had been abandoned. In fact, the idea of rational law standing over and above actual, positive laws, was once and for all rejected by modern legal science, and rational law reduced to serving “only as an ideal for legislation”,or as the theorist Rudolf Stammler (1856-1938) put it, as the “rightful and not necessarily the actual law”.36 The modern empirical notion of science forced legal scientists to defer to the methods of the material sciences and to work within the realm of facts, rather than ideals.37 By reducing the philosophical law, rational law, to the status of anideal for actual legislation, legal science reduced philomax ly l e s 169 33 Cf. Hägerström,“Kelsen’s Theory of Law and the State,” pp. 258-59. 34 Ibid. 35 Hägerström,“Begreppet gällande rätt,” p. 88. 36 Axel Hägerström,“The Conception of a Declaration of Intention in the Sphere of Private Law,” inInquiries into the Nature of Law and Morals:Axel Hägerström, ed. Karl Olivecrona (Stockholm, 1953), p. 299. 37 Ibid. 3.1.1. Legal Science:Actual or Rational Law? Law or Philosophy?
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