contracts, obligations,
etc.), by which we can bring it down as common-law to the use and
benefit of a still small bourgeois and half feudal society; or, with the
help of pseudo-enlightened and moralizing jurists, a code (which is bad
from a legal point of view) can be worked out suitable to the conditions
of the particular society (as the Prussian land law). And, still again,
after a great bourgeois revolution, a classical code for bourgeois
society, such as the French "Code Civil," may be worked out. If,
therefore, the bourgeois laws only declare the economic circumstances
of society, these may be good or bad according to conditions.

In the State appears the first ideological force over men. Society
shapes for itself an organ for the protection of its general interests
against attack from the outside or inside. This organ is the force of
the State. Hardly did it come into being before this organ dominated
society, and as a matter of fact, in proportion as it becomes the organ
of a particular class, it brings into existence the supremacy of that
class. The fight of the subject against the dominant class becomes of
necessity political, a fight in the next place against the political
control of this latter class. This consciousness of the connection of
the political fight with its underlying economic causes becomes more and
more obscure and may be altogether lost. Where this is not altogether
the case with the combatants it becomes nearly altogether so with the
historians. Of the ancient sources of history with regard to the contest
within the Roman Republic, Appian alone gives us plain and clear
information respecting its final cause, which was property in land. But
the State, once become an independent power over society, forthwith
displayed a further ideology. Among the practical politicians and the
theorists in jurisprudence, and among the jurists in particular, this
fact is first completely lost sight of. Since in each single instance
the economic facts must take the form of juristic motives so as to be
sanctioned in the form of law, and since, therefore, a backward view
must be taken over the whole existing system of law, it follows
therefrom that the juristic form appears to be the whole and the
economic content nothing at all. Public and private law are considered
as independent realms which have their own independent historic
evolution, which are considered capable of a systematic representation,
and stand in n