Adam Podgórecki’s Concept of Totalitarian Law in the Albanian Case Study

This author first met Adam Podgórecki in the mid-1990s at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL) in Oñati, Spain. Over a lunch organised by the IISL and at a cooking school in the local area, Prof. Podgórecki talked about the role these sorts of cooking schools had played under General Francisco Franco’s authoritarian rule. He referred to these schools as “pockets of democracy” because of the cherished space they provided for people to live in a polity, albeit in a suspended state. The cooking schools were a safe space for people to speak freely. This author is reminded here of the case of Albania. It is in this spirit that I talk about the “pockets of democracy” that existed in Albania, through the experience of one remarkable individual, about whom I have been writing for some time now, the writer and political dissident, Musine Kokalari (1917–1983). Her own account of her 1946 trial and her ruminations on the nature of historical memory recall Podgórecki’s work on totalitarian and non-totalitarian law. It is in this frame therefore that I will set out the discussion, elucidating the main points underpinning his pioneering work.

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