State autonomy generates an ideology disconnected from its economic conditions.

Evidence

It was Engels who remarked that “once the state has become an independent power vis-à -vis society, it produces forthwith a further ideology. It is indeed amongst professional politicians, theorists of public law and jurists of private law that the connection with economic facts gets lost for fair.… The interconnections between conceptions and their material conditions of existence become more and more complicated, more and more obscured by intermediary links” (“Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy”). — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 913

Categorization

• DEFINE: Engels’s account of how the state’s relative autonomy produces an ideology (jurisprudence) that obscures its own economic grounding.
• XREF: connects to: Devolved authority without resources is ghostly autonomy. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 254