Marx, Karl (1818–1883)

In 1835, Karl Marx, age seventeen, enrolled at the law faculty at the University of Bonn, continuing in 1836 at the University of Berlin. While he studied jurisprudence there, he also pursued his interests in philosophy and history. In the end, those collateral interests won out, and the university granted his doctoral degree in philosophy. The rest, as they say, is history. Just as Marx's philosophical premises were never quite forsaken, even after his turn to political economy in the mid-1840s, so too did his jurisprudential training leave its mark on his mature work.

Together with his friend, collaborator, and fellow exile Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), Marx espoused a conception of law that we may broadly term materialist. Marx's writings crystallized the nineteenth century's regnant views of the nature of man and society. Posthumously, his views on the social foundations and functions of law reached a far wider audience than any commentator before or since can reasonably lay claim to.

The young Marx's intellectual development recapitulated in just a few years the slow evolution of Western jurisprudence over many centuries. Nineteenth-century legal theory stood out among the human sciences for its long and hearty resistance to the historicizing and sociological tendencies of Enlightenment thought. Accordingly, the neophyte jurist was at first swept away by the timeless categories of Roman public and private law. However, as he explained in an 1837 letter to his father, gradually he grew dissatisfied with elaborating such a “system of metaphysical principles.” Immersing himself in the study of history and modern languages, he suddenly concluded that jurisprudence, as a self-sufficient discipline, was fundamentally inadequate. “A curtain had fallen, my holy of holies was rent asunder, and new gods had to be installed” (1837: 15–18).

In its stead, Marx turned to Georg Hegel (1770–1831), who had insisted that one should view law in a wider frame of reference. Nevertheless, Hegelian jurisprudence, while it did subject law to systematic scrutiny, did so from a wholly idealist perspective. By its lights, one could understand law ultimately as emanating from the metaphysical idea of the state. Even after Marx went over to Left Hegelianism and followed the humanism of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), the result was still far from social science as we conceive it today. Marx subjected Hegel to a “transformational criticism” that made man, not incorporeal concepts, the protagonist of history. The ultimate criterion in assessing law remained a normative one: [Page 997]whether and how it served the higher purpose of human self-realization.

In effect, Marx and the other Left Hegelians continued to posit the ancient distinction between natural law, which deserved its sublime status as Law, and mere human law, which did not. He wrote in 1842 of Gustav Hugo (1764–1844), a member of the German historical school of jurisprudence, which was then experimenting with a sociological understanding of law, that he “profanes all that the just, moral, political man regards as holy” (1842a: 204). True laws are “the positive, clear, universal norms in which freedom has acquired an impersonal, theoretical existence independent of the arbitrariness of the individual” (1842b: 162). Private interest, the stuff of political economy and civil society itself, was by its very nature blind, immoderate, and even lawless.

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