Legal Form and the End of Law : Pashukanis's Legacy

Following the 100th anniversary of Pashukanis’ General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924), this volume aims to breathe new life into the main category of Pashukanian legacy, the concept of legal form.

This book offers new, deeper and more general, ways in which the concept of legal form can be used to push forward Marxist – post-Marxist or hauntingly Marxist – legal theory. Accordingly, this book does not pledge allegiance to reconstructing and reconsidering the official interpretative legacy of the legal form. Instead, it mobilises the revolutionary conceptual potentialities that this term contains. When investigated thoroughly, and in many dimensions, the legal form becomes a privileged vantage point not only into the greatest law-related riddles of Marxism (such as the relation between economy and the state or withering away of statal apparatuses), but the whole of modernity as the epoch determined by – if not overlapping with – capitalism. This book aims to think with the legal form rather than explain this concept. In so doing, it offers a panoply of theoretical perspectives that address legal subjectivity, abstraction, autonomy of the law and, last but not least, withering away of the law.

This contemporary interrogation of the relevance of the concept of legal form will be of considerable interest to scholars and students of legal and political theory.