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Law and Social Revolution: Millenarianism and the Legal System

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Michael Barkun
Michael Barkun*
Affiliation:
Syracuse University
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Extract

In the 1920s and early 1930s the Marxist legal theorist, Eugene Pashukanis, advanced the thesis that the achievement of communism would produce not only the dissolution of the state but of the legal system as well. Briefly, he argued that law was a direct result of economic exchange, that economic exchange was an integral part of bourgeois society, that all law was hence bourgeois law, and, finally, that the demise of bourgeois society would carry law with it. The fascination Pashukanis exerts is a direct product of the purity of his conclusion. The Revolution does not bring about a revision of the legal system, nor (except for a transitional period) does it even substitute one legal system for another. To the extent that the Revolution succeeds, it obliterates law qua law altogether.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , August 1971 , pp. 113 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © 1971 by the Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This paper was originally prepared for presentation at the Sixty-sixth Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, September, 1970.

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