Engels, Friedrich (1820–1895)

Friedrich Engels is important as the junior partner in one of history's most successful intellectual enterprises. Unlike many men in his position, Engels acknowledged his subordination graciously, indeed gloried in it. He was careful never to gainsay the senior partner, Karl Marx (1818–1883), in gross or in detail, even after Marx's death.

A more complete appreciation of Engels's jurisprudence, however, should keep in mind two seeming ironies vis-à-vis Marx. First, Engels, who lacked Marx's formal training in law, nevertheless wrote a good deal more on specifically juridical questions. Engels stated, with characteristic clarity, the materialist conception of law, which Marx gestured at but did not develop: “At a certain, very primitive stage of the development of society, the need arises to bring under a common rule the daily recurring acts of production, distribution and exchange of products, to see to it that the individual subordinates himself to the common conditions of production and exchange. This rule, which at first is custom, soon becomes law” (1872–1873: 380–81). Law thus amounted to nothing but the ideological, glorified expression of existing economic relations.

Engels greatly expatiated upon this insight in his major contribution to social theory, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). The materialist conception explained humanity's evolution out of primitive communism, “group marriage,” and tribal custom, to individual proprietorship, chattel slavery, monogamy, patriarchy, and governmental legislation. The coming overthrow of the bourgeois mode of production, in its turn, would usher in an institutional millennium to right the wrongs of legal history. Similarly, he offered trenchant analyses of contemporary events and trends, including workplace regulation, usury reform, and urban criminality.

The second irony is that Marxists blame Engels, who espoused dialectical materialism, for infecting twentieth-century Marxism with a philosophically dubious strain of reductionism. In fact, he was capable of approaching jurisprudence with a humanistic nuance that the mature Marx himself did not match. Far from strict economic determinism, Engels accepted that forces that had nothing to do with production could shape law, including such plainly superstructure factors as the legalistic mind-set itself. “As soon as the new division of labour which creates professional lawyers becomes necessary, another new and independent sphere is opened up which, for all its general dependence on production and trade, still has a specific capacity for reacting upon these spheres as well.” Engels continued that in a modern state, “law must not only correspond to the general economic position and be its expression, but must also be an expression which is consistent in itself, and which does not, owing to inner contradictions, look glaringly inconsistent…. [T]o achieve this, the faithful reflection of economic conditions is more and more infringed upon” (Engels 1890/1934: 481).

Jurisprudence, which denies the economic basis of law, “forms what we call ideological conception, reacts in its turn upon the economic basis and may, within certain limits, modify it” (Engels 1890/1934: 481). These words keep with Engels's grand dialectical vision, whereby mind emerges from matter without being strictly reducible to it. One may regret that his ingrained modesty kept him from pressing these views more forcefully.

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