Introduction

Karl Marx was born in Trier, a Rhenish town then belonging to Prussia. At the age of seventeen he entered the Faculty of Law at the University of Bonn; the year following, he transferred to the Law Faculty at the University of Berlin and, while he continued his training in jurisprudence there, he also pursued his interests in philosophy and history.

Marx and Engels were not the first scholars to attempt an economic analy­sis of law; nor, arguably, were they the best. Neither one held an advanced degree in economics or in law and, as self-avowed revolutionaries, they were studiously ignored by most professionals in both fields. But their exclusion from nearly all retrospective treatments of the law and economics movement is not therefore justifiable, or wise. Their writings crystallized in compelling prose the nineteenth century’s regnant views of the nature of man and society. More importantly, their views on the economic foundations of law reached and informed a far wider audience that any commentator before or since can reasonably lay claim to. This entry will set the record straight by showing (i) how Marx and Engels came by an economic conception of law, (ii) how they applied the economic way of thinking to concrete problems in jurisprudence, and (iii) the systematic differences remaining between their approach and that of the modern mainstream law and economics movement.