Marx Against Bourgeois Law: A Historical-Materialist Critique of Liberal and Conservative Jurisprudence on Property, Rights, and Tradition

Abstract

This essay contends that Marx's historical materialist method furnishes a sustained critique of liberal and conservative jurisprudence by situating doctrines of property, rights, liberty, and tradition within the class relations that generate them. Reading Locke, Bentham, Mill, Burke, and Rousseau alongside Marx, it argues that these frameworks, though presented in universal terms, are historically specific formations bound to bourgeois social organization. Simultaneously, Marx does not simply discard these traditions; he exposes the tension between their formal ideals and the material conditions of their realization. Liberal legality and conservative appeals to inherited order thus emerge as juridical forms that both express and stabilize structures of domination. What remains normatively valuable within those traditions, including freedom, equality, and communal life, can be realized more fully only through the transcendence of bourgeois law and the social relations on which it rests.