Situating Marx with Respect to Justice and Right

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of Marx’s understanding of right, justice, rights, and positive law. The chapter considers Marx’s earliest reflections on Recht, beginning with his youthful journalistic writings, which demonstrate a reliance on Hegelian natural law as basis for critiquing unjust laws. Later, Marx traces the origin of legal relations to historically specific relations of production. His new materialist outlook enables him to criticize unjust laws that do not accord with a newly achieved level of social development. The chapter closes with a functional argument for justice and right that is reformulated on the basis of Marx’s theory.