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Marxism and Law
This book applies the insights of Marxist social theory and politics to law. After presenting a clear and unified discussion of Marxism, Collins examines the special characteristics of legal institutions, rules, and ideals. He focuses particularly on the Marxist critique of the ideal of the Rule of Law, discussing law and class oppression, ideology and law, base and superstructure, the future of law, and class struggle and the rule of law.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfictionLaw
168 pages, Paperback
First published August 26, 1982
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 23, 2017
Has some good aspects, especially in the first few chapters, but overall quite disappointing.
First of all, the author’s consistent use of “men” when he means “people” is at best lazy and in several places outright absurd. I might convince myself to overlook “mankind” or even “man”, in a general context, but when he writes that Marx thought commodity fetishism was “an insidious and misleading way of thinking about and treating other men” I can’t help but read this as gendered, and an assumption that women are neither subjects nor objects of this process.
The more fundamental issue simply boils down to the fact that the author is not a Marxist attempting to apply Marxist theory to law, but a liberal legal scholar attempting first of all to construct a Marxist theory of law and then to criticize it. It would be difficult in the best circumstances to avoid a strawman and unfortunately the author does not always succeed. It’s hard to entirely trust his claim that certain phenomena are inconsistent with Marxism when his conception of Marxism is an amalgamation produced for the purposes of this very comparison. At one point he simply asserts that he finds one Marxist claim “ultimately unconvincing”, and thus doesn’t bother to write more than a few paragraphs about it. At another, it’s very clear that he has a strong opinion on a subject, and gives excessive weight to his side of the argument (which I, in turn, find unconvincing, not least because it amounts to a defence of the marital rape exemption).
There are also several errors that are frankly embarrassing; one would think, for example, that the author of a book on Marxism might understand the difference between Marxism and communism and the difference between a state governed by a Communist Party and a communist state; the author twice claims that the USSR has failed to achieve communism because it still has a legal system, despite this not being (to my knowledge) something that was ever claimed to have been achieved. In the same vein is the (seemingly out-of-context, and unsupported) claim that Mao was not a ‘real’ Marxist.
The first few chapters do give a worthwhile overview of Marxist analysis of legal systems, and of Marxist theory more generally, but from chapter 3 onwards it goes downhill; chapters 4 and 5 weren’t worth spending much time on, and I skimmed the final chapter.
First of all, the author’s consistent use of “men” when he means “people” is at best lazy and in several places outright absurd. I might convince myself to overlook “mankind” or even “man”, in a general context, but when he writes that Marx thought commodity fetishism was “an insidious and misleading way of thinking about and treating other men” I can’t help but read this as gendered, and an assumption that women are neither subjects nor objects of this process.
The more fundamental issue simply boils down to the fact that the author is not a Marxist attempting to apply Marxist theory to law, but a liberal legal scholar attempting first of all to construct a Marxist theory of law and then to criticize it. It would be difficult in the best circumstances to avoid a strawman and unfortunately the author does not always succeed. It’s hard to entirely trust his claim that certain phenomena are inconsistent with Marxism when his conception of Marxism is an amalgamation produced for the purposes of this very comparison. At one point he simply asserts that he finds one Marxist claim “ultimately unconvincing”, and thus doesn’t bother to write more than a few paragraphs about it. At another, it’s very clear that he has a strong opinion on a subject, and gives excessive weight to his side of the argument (which I, in turn, find unconvincing, not least because it amounts to a defence of the marital rape exemption).
There are also several errors that are frankly embarrassing; one would think, for example, that the author of a book on Marxism might understand the difference between Marxism and communism and the difference between a state governed by a Communist Party and a communist state; the author twice claims that the USSR has failed to achieve communism because it still has a legal system, despite this not being (to my knowledge) something that was ever claimed to have been achieved. In the same vein is the (seemingly out-of-context, and unsupported) claim that Mao was not a ‘real’ Marxist.
The first few chapters do give a worthwhile overview of Marxist analysis of legal systems, and of Marxist theory more generally, but from chapter 3 onwards it goes downhill; chapters 4 and 5 weren’t worth spending much time on, and I skimmed the final chapter.
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October 22, 2024i once again cant sleep so here i am
January 15, 2020
In addition to Collin’s book, pictured here, Oxford University Press published two other texts in its “Marxist Introductions” series: Marxism and Literature by Raymond Williams and Marxism and Politics by Ralph Miliband. All are rather mis-titled as “introductions” because each is an original work of considerable scholarship - especially the one by Williams which started a whole new type of literary criticism called “cultural materialism.”
Collins work also breaks new ground in the (still) relatively unexplored area of Marxist legal theory and jurisprudence. His book includes a detailed, subtle, and illuminating historical overview of the methodology of historical materialism and the manner in which that approach views law, especially law in a capitalist society.
Collins is careful to distance his discussion of the Marxist understanding of legal forms from the politics and government of so-called communist states such as the People’s Republic of China which, he argues, simply utilize Marx’s ideas for legitimation.
He carefully dissects the Marxian notion that the state - and its legal apparatus - is simply an instrument of class domination and the crude economistic idea that law in capitalist societies is only a reflection of a more basic economic structure.
Collins also examines - and rejects - more recent attempts like those of GA Cohen to link the legal “superstructure” of a society to an “economic” base. Marxist thinkers such as Gramsci and Althusser are more congenial to him, as they help to define a more useful theory of the ideology of the ruling class. For Collins, law is neither directly determined by the relations of production nor is it an independent form of thought. It is created through what he calls “a dialogue with the background dominant ideology on the basis of the formal constraints of coherence and consistency.” Or, as he elsewhere more concretely puts it: “The judge’s aim may be to treat like cases alike, but we can be sure that definitions of similarly and difference are determined by criteria supplied by the ideology of the dominant class.”
For Collins, the chief role of a Marxist lawyer (an experience he elsewhere calls “schizoid”) is to help demystify the concept of the Rule of Law. In the last chapter of his book he discusses several strategies for accomplishing this objective.
This is a challenging book to digest, partly because of the complexity of Collin’s argument and because of the subject matter itself. But I’m glad I made the effort.
To preview a little: I’m now reading two other interesting books; one made what turned out to be a controversial argument in educational theory ( ED Hirsch Jr’s Cultural Literacy and a collection of essays by one of my favourite philosophers, Moral Luck, by Bernard Williams.
Wish me luck!
Collins work also breaks new ground in the (still) relatively unexplored area of Marxist legal theory and jurisprudence. His book includes a detailed, subtle, and illuminating historical overview of the methodology of historical materialism and the manner in which that approach views law, especially law in a capitalist society.
Collins is careful to distance his discussion of the Marxist understanding of legal forms from the politics and government of so-called communist states such as the People’s Republic of China which, he argues, simply utilize Marx’s ideas for legitimation.
He carefully dissects the Marxian notion that the state - and its legal apparatus - is simply an instrument of class domination and the crude economistic idea that law in capitalist societies is only a reflection of a more basic economic structure.
Collins also examines - and rejects - more recent attempts like those of GA Cohen to link the legal “superstructure” of a society to an “economic” base. Marxist thinkers such as Gramsci and Althusser are more congenial to him, as they help to define a more useful theory of the ideology of the ruling class. For Collins, law is neither directly determined by the relations of production nor is it an independent form of thought. It is created through what he calls “a dialogue with the background dominant ideology on the basis of the formal constraints of coherence and consistency.” Or, as he elsewhere more concretely puts it: “The judge’s aim may be to treat like cases alike, but we can be sure that definitions of similarly and difference are determined by criteria supplied by the ideology of the dominant class.”
For Collins, the chief role of a Marxist lawyer (an experience he elsewhere calls “schizoid”) is to help demystify the concept of the Rule of Law. In the last chapter of his book he discusses several strategies for accomplishing this objective.
This is a challenging book to digest, partly because of the complexity of Collin’s argument and because of the subject matter itself. But I’m glad I made the effort.
To preview a little: I’m now reading two other interesting books; one made what turned out to be a controversial argument in educational theory ( ED Hirsch Jr’s Cultural Literacy and a collection of essays by one of my favourite philosophers, Moral Luck, by Bernard Williams.
Wish me luck!
November 9, 2023
By no means a bad book. But it is better on law then on Marxism. Collins spends quite a bit of this book defending the legitimacy of a Marxist approach to law. And then spends the rest offering what comes across as lukewarm critiques of that approach.
This book is written for an audience of those who have a basic understanding of the law and legal theory and no understanding of Marxism. To that end it does offer at least the beginnings of a "Marxist Introduction."
This book is written for an audience of those who have a basic understanding of the law and legal theory and no understanding of Marxism. To that end it does offer at least the beginnings of a "Marxist Introduction."
November 10, 2024
As a legal theorist I have always struggled with the claim by eg Engels and Lenin that, after capitalism, the state will wither away, including the law. I appreciate the Marxist claim that law is an instrument of class oppression, so, once the working class is no longer oppressed, there is no need for law. If so, what does this say about the nature of law in eg The Concept of Law by HLA Hart? The withering away of the law is surely naive and this book supports that.
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March 11, 2023Collins provides a well-reasoned analysis of the Marxist critique of law as an institution. He also lays out the fundamental tenets of Marxism in general as a background. That he did so as a non-Marxist who despite this, did his homework on understanding the critique he analyzes speaks to the usefulness of this book and the rare company he embodies in today's world.
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August 9, 2023Actually probably a good introductory text for absolute beginners in re: basic Marxist concepts like ideology. But imagine having the confidence of a white man in 1982 to be like, "I have a page limit and so won't be citing anyone or anything" while CLEARLY drawing on Bourdieu, like.
March 29, 2023
Pretty interesting at times. But felt pretty inconclusive and legally positivist in place of Marxist.
November 12, 2014
written by an attorney (a good thing), but here an attorney whose background is contracts and commerce, and not obviously trained in marxist theory. offers for a most part a critique of marxism.
April 30, 2017
The reason I came across and read this book was because it was part of my Jurisprudence class at university but I also have a bit of an interest in Marxist reading (and a lot of political reading in general really). Not a lot is written about the Marxist perspective of law, whether that's from Karl Marx himself or Marxist writers, most Marxist writing is about socioeconomic theory. But this book is one of the few that gives you a Marxian perspective of law and how it relates to the bourgeoisie and proletariat class system. So if you want to read about Marxist law theory, whether out of your own interest or for what you're studying like I did, then this is definitely one of the books I'd recommend. This was one of the books my lecturer would refer back to a lot when suggesting sources for what he was teaching us, so there's another reliable source for the recommendation.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews