Engels held that legal superstructures condition the expression of economic life they serve

Evidence

Engels echoed this sentiment when, in Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy , in a long and interesting section on the state, law, and ideology, he shows how England retained the forms of the old feudal law, while giving them a bourgeois content: how Roman Law provided the foundation for the evolution of bourgeois legal relations elsewhere; how this “working up into a special code of law” proved to be a poor basis for the development of Prussia, but-transformed into the Code Civil -an extremely favorable one for France. Thus, though “bourgeois legal rules merely express” the economic life conditions of society in legal form, they can do so well or ill according to circumstances. In the same passage, Engels notes how to achieve articulation as a sphere of the superstructure, economic facts must “assume the form of juristic motives,” thereby leading on to the formation of a fully-fledged juridical sphere, a set of complex legal ideologies, with an efficacy of their own. “It is indeed among professional politicians, theorists of public law and jurists private law that the connection with the economic facts, gets really lost” (Engels, Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy ). — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 512

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the later Adorno/Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School reading of Marx on base-superstructure, where they also question simple economic determinism.
• DEFINE: Illustrates ‘articulation’ as used by Hall — economic facts must become juristic motives to form effective ideology.