question only is what content has this merely
formal will--of the individual as well as of the State--and whence comes
this content--why is just this desired and nothing else? And if we
enquire into this we discover that in modern history the will of the
State, as a whole, is declared through the changing needs of bourgeois
society, through the domination of this or that class, in the last
instance through the development of the forces of production and the
conditions of exchange.

But if in our modern times, with their gigantic methods of production
and commerce, the State is not an independent affair with an independent
development, but its existence as well as its evolution is to be
explained in the last resort from the economic conditions of the life
of society, so much the more must the same thing be true of all earlier
times when the production of the necessities of existence was not
furthered by these extensive aids, where, therefore, the necessities of
this production must exercise a greater control over men. If the State
is today, at the time of the great industries and steam railways,
merely, as a whole, the summarized, reflected form of the economic
desires of the class which controls production, it must, therefore, have
been still more so at a period when a generation of men must spend the
greater portion of their united life-time in the satisfaction of their
material needs, and man was, therefore, much more dependent on them than
we are today. The examination of the earlier epochs of history, as far
as it is earnestly conducted in this direction, establishes this
abundantly, but manifestly this cannot here be taken in hand.

If the State and public law are the creatures of economic conditions,
so, obviously, is private law, which only sanctions relations between
individuals under given normal economic circumstances. The form in
which this appears may, however, vary considerably. One can, as happened
in England in accordance with the whole national development, retain,
for the most part, the forms of the old feudal law, and give them a
middle-class content, even read a middle-class meaning into the feudal
names, but one may also, as in the western part of the European
continent, use as a foundation the first general law of a society
producing commodities, the Roman, with its unsurpassably keen
elaboration, of all the legal relations of possessions of commodities
(sellers and buyers, creditors and debtors,