formation of Marx’s methodology. The connection lies not in their conceptions of the state, but rather in the dialectical method used by Marx to construct his own political theories of dialectical and historical materialism.22
Hegel saw the world as an evolving living organism. As such, he argued that scientific and political progress was not smooth but rather moved dialectically and in accordance with a conflicting philosophical dialogue. According to this theory, person A states some partial truth, then person B advocates the very opposite (which is also partly true), and then the combining elements of both ideas finally comes about. In applying this dialectical premise to history, Hegel contended that truth is subjective and that it is impossible to judge cultural norms by any objective standard. Furthermore, Hegel’s theory also maintains that the historical process is affected by an ongoing conflict and evolution of human ideas.
Marx agreed with Hegel about the inevitable progress of history. However, Marx rejected the Hegelian belief that anything intellectual is the driving force in human history. “Hegel’s dialectics”, he said, “is the fundamental principle of all dialectic only after its mystical form has been sloughed off. And that is precisely what distinguishes my method.”23 Believing that material or physical forces were the real forces behind human progress,24 Marx replaced Hegelian dialecticism with his own dialectical materialism, in which the forces in conflict are not ideas or principles but solely the interests of social classes in their struggle over the ownership and control of material resources.25
When history is understood in accordance with that dialectical materialism, socio-political institutions appear to always correspond to the interests of the dominant class. The legal system is therefore interpreted as a superstructure that must suit the practical needs of this dominant class.22 Accordingly, the rule of law is merely another ideological mechanism through which that class is able to eventually justify its grip on the means of production and the sources of wealth. As Marx put it,
“I was led by many studies to the conclusion that legal relations as well as forms of state could neither be understood by themselves, nor explained by the so-called general progress of the human mind, but that they are rooted in the material conditions of life, which are summed up by Hegel after the fashion of the English and French writers of the eighteenth century under the name ‘civil society’, and that the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy [i.e. in economic forces] … . In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation, on which legal and political superstructure arise, and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond.”26
Marxist legal theory
Figure 2. Soviet poster “Comrade Lenin cleans the Earth from scum”, November 1920. The Soviet dictator considered that Marxism “subordinates the ethical standpoint to the principle of causality, in the practice it reduces to the class struggle.” As such, Lenin declared that“The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is ruled, won, and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie rule that is unrestricted by any laws.”
Darwin’s evolutionary theory had a profound impact on the Western conception of law. Under its influence there proceeded over the nineteenth century a thorough transformation of legal studies as well as a general assumption among the judicial elite that “since humans are allegedly accidents, so are their laws.”27 Following the trend of his time, Marx stood together with other social “scientists” in their absolute rejection of the concept of natural law that had guided and inspired the founders of modern-democratic constitutionalism in the United 