Legal Literacy - This writing aims to outline the relationship between social, political, and legal aspects that are fundamental in legal learning. The scope of explanation includes definitions, history, and the thoughts of previous philosophers, including interpretations based on the author's views.

Definition and History

Starting with the basic definition, social is a collection of individuals and human groups that carry out activities referred to as social phenomena. Politics is the effort of individuals or groups to achieve certain interests, which often ends in a struggle for power. Meanwhile, law can be interpreted as the rules of the game or agreements that arise from political activities in social interactions.

Basically, politics and law are products of social interaction. Therefore, these three aspects, namely social, political, and legal, are in the category of social sciences. Nevertheless, the development of science allows all three to have their own specializations. To facilitate understanding, these three concepts can be summarized as follows:

  • Social = community or collection of individuals
  • Politics = interests and power
  • Law = agreements and rules of the game

Referring to Aristotle's thoughts in his book entitled Politics, power is basically the same in every social group. Most of the arguments in this book highlight class conflict, the concept of the state as the largest community, and the ideal actions of individuals in society. Aristotle also discusses social reality and how ideal actions should be taken by individuals. A concrete example of this thought is the explanation of the history of the formation of city-states which illustrates the human tendency to socialize and engage in politics as political animal or political beings.

From the above considerations, it can be understood that social entities fundamentally desire order and regularity. However, this ideal value is often difficult to realize due to the basic nature of humans who have conflicting egos or interests. On the other hand, humans also have a tendency to depend on each other. To achieve this order, laws emerge as standards, ethics, or social norms. The simplest form of this law is custom or culture. The separation of science between social, political, and legal is necessary because the three are interrelated and often overlap in discussion and application.