Abstract

A legal critique that ties up to Pashukanis focuses not on the content of law, but on the specific form in which societal relations are conveyed. In analogy to Marx’s theory of value-form, Pashukanis unfolds a theory and critique that captures the specific way in which people relate to each other within the so called civil society. The concept of legal subjectivity becomes the scene of a dialectics of freedom and domination which unfolds in the interplay between obfuscation and reality. Contrary to the assumption of a legal fetishism in the sense of total delusion the practical potential of an immanent social criticism is to be conceptualized.