Summary Robert Knox 'The World Outlook of the Bourgeoise' in B Skeggs et al (eds) THE SAGE Handbook of Marxism (2022)
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This is a summary of Robert Knox 'The World Outlook of the Bourgeoise' which focuses on MARXISM AND LEGAL THOUGHT AN ABSENT PRESENCE, MARX AND ENGELS ON LAW, BOURGEOIS LAW and DEBATES IN THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
• Friedrich Engels reflected on the relationship between legal thought and the
rise of the bourgeoisie in an 1887 article entitled Lawyers Socialism.
• He argued that the medieval world view was essentially theological, with the
Church being the link between the different countries.
• However, as the bourgeoisie developed within European feudalism, it found
its needs could not be contained within this theological prison.
• This new legal outlook was perfectly fitted to bourgeois hegemony, as the
exchange of commodities on the level of society requires universally valid
regulations, which can only be provided by the community - legal norms laid
down by the State.
• Evgeny Pashukanis went so far as to note that in bourgeois society
jurisprudence has always held a special privileged place, serving as first
among the other social sciences.
• Marxists have attributed bourgeois political economy such a role, but a brief
glance at the works of the classical political economists reveals that any
attempt to separate the legal and political-economic world outlooks is a
mistake.
• The classical political economists were all steeped in legal thought,
MARXISM AND LEGAL THOUGHT AN ABSENT PRESENCE
• Marx and Engels never completed a systematic analysis of law, which has
been reflected in Marxist theory more generally.
• This is due to the fact that law has tended to be theorised primarily by
lawyers, who have historically been hostile to the labour movement.
• Marxists have also tended to collapse discussions about law into discussions
about the nature of the state and revolutionary strategy.
• Despite these obstacles, there have been attempts to understand the role of
law.
• This chapter will attempt to locate some of the broad themes characterising
the trajectory of Marxist theorising about law.
MARX AND ENGELS ON LAW
• The young Marx studied law and jurisprudence at Bonn and Berlin, but found
it unsatisfying.
• He then sought to elaborate a philosophy of law covering the whole field of
law.
, • This idealist schema eventually came up against its limits, particularly in his
reflections on the debates around the Law on the Thefts of Wood.
• Marx argued that the law was an attempt to make us believe that there is a
crime where there is no crime.
• He also displayed the beginnings of a more concrete, class-based account of
the low.
• He noted that in making cutting down trees an aggravating circumstance, the
law acknowledged a difference between gathering and theft proper, but
onlyrecognises this difference when it is a question of the interests of the
forest owners.
• Marx combined two positions, arguing that the customary rights of the
aristocracy conflict with the form of universal law.
• His solution was a liberal one, arguing that both owners and infringers were
citizens and both deserved the same right to protection by the state.
• This debates saw the seeds of much of Marxs later radical analysis, as Marx
found himself in the embarrassing position of having to discuss material
interests.
• Law was a key element in Marxs early attempts to articulate the base-
superstructure metaphor.
• There were three registers in which Marx and Engels wrote about the law, all
of which were to some degree anticipated in the debates around the theft of
wood.
• The first register was in their study of how the struggle between classes was
expressed through the law, the second was their conceptualisation of law as
an ideological form, and the third was of law as a structural product of
capitalist social relations.
• Law and Class Relations Marx and Engels argued that law had a role in
articulating class relations and conflicts.
• In The German Ideology, they linked the rise of civil law with that of private
property.
• In Capital, Marx demonstrated the role that law played throughout processes
of capital accumulation.
• He described the crucial role that law played in primitive accumulation, the
legal regulation of the working day, and the ways in which specific legal forms
were needed to articulate changing forms of capital accumulation.
• Law mediated the social relations and contradictions of class society, but
there was no sense of law as ideology.
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