"E. B. Pashukanis was the most significant contemporary to develop a fresh, new Marxist perspective in post-revolutionary Russia. In 1924 he wrote what is probably his most influential work, The General Theory of Law and Marxism. In the second edition, 1926, he stated that this work was not to be seen as a final product but more for ""self-clarification"" in hopes of adding ""stimulus and material for further discussion."" A third edition was printed in 1927. Pashukanis's ""commodity-exchange"" theory of law (...) spearheaded a perspective that traced the form of law, not to class interests, but to capital logic itself. Until his death, he continued to argue for the ideal of the withering away of the state, law, and the juridic subject. He eventually arrived at a position contrary to Stalin's who, at that time, was attempting to consolidate and strengthen the state apparatus under the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Inevitably, Pashukanis was branded an enemy of the revolution in January 1937. His works were subsequently removed from soviet libraries. In 1954, Pashukanis was ""rehabilitated"" by the Soviets and restored to an acceptable position in the historical development of marxist law. In Europe and North America, a number of legal theorists only rediscovered Pashukanis's work in the late 1970s. They subjected it to careful critical analysis, and realized that he offered an alternative to the traditional Marxist interpretations, which saw law simply and purely as tied to class interests of domination. By the mid-1980s the instrumental Marxist perspective in vogue in Marxist sociology, criminology, politics, and economics gave way, to a significant extent due to Pashukanis's insights, to a more structural Marxist accounting of the relationship of law to economics and other social spheres." --Descripción del editor. (shrink)

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. (shrink)