Law and Revolution? A Reading of Pašukanis

The Puzzle of Legal Form

At the heart of Spanò's talk lies a deceptively simple question: why do legal forms that originated in Roman law two thousand years ago continue to structure our social and economic relations today? This is what Spanò calls the "mystery of romano-bourgeois private law." Our institutions may be modern, but they are conceptually and structurally furnished with ideas inherited from over two thousand years ago. Understanding this temporal disjunction, Spanò argued, requires more than conventional legal history. It demands what he terms a "materialist archaeology of modern legal forms."

Spanò explained that this is where Pašukanis becomes indispensable. Pašukanis didn’t simply analyse legal doctrines, he interrogated the form of law, as a historical and social phenomenon by applying the critique of economy to critique of law.  Pašukanis’ work helps to critically understand these forms by conveying how legal abstraction functions and how law might be theorised historically and critically, and, according to Spanò, possibly beyond its existing bourgeois form.

Reading Pašukanis Through Three Hypotexts

Spanò explained his methodological framework for understanding Pašukanis' work. Rather than treating the text as a straightforward Marxist treatise, Spanò proposes reading it as a text constructed on top of three distinct "hypotexts" based on Savigny, Marx, and Lenin. He portrayed Marx, Savigny and Lenin as vertices of a triangle - Marx as the mediator and translator with Lenin and Savini communicating through the Marxian critique. Spanò explained that tradition and revolution can only be done through this mediation of critique because without Marx, Pašukanis would only be completely Savinian, or completely Leninist.

This triangular structure helps explain what makes Pašukanis so unusual. As a Marxist revolutionary, he might have been expected to reject the entire edifice of bourgeois legal thought. Instead, he positioned himself within the genre of legal theory, writing "as a jurist" in order to subvert the tradition from within. Spanò described this as an "oscillation between the rules of the genre and their suspension." Pašukanis is rewriting the canon by infiltrating the norm through the internal force of Marxian method.

Why Pašukanis Still Matters

Spanò was emphatic that studying Pašukanis today is not an exercise in intellectual history for its own sake. He described how connecting the critique of political economy with the critique of legal reason, remains as urgent now as it was a century ago. This is particularly relevant given how deeply legal forms continue to structure contemporary capitalism. Legal abstraction, the process by which concrete social relations are transformed into formal rights and obligations, remains central to how power is organised and legitimated. Pašukanis helps us understand that these abstractions are not natural or inevitable, but historically specific products of particular social arrangements.

Yet Spanò was also careful to identify limitations in Pašukanis' approach. Most significantly, Pašukanis tended to identify the legal form with bourgeois legal form too quickly, leaving open the question: is the legal form always bourgeois, or could there be forms of law not anchored in commodity relations?

A Laboratory for Critical Thought

Spanò described Pašukanis as a "laboratory for testing the connections between the critique of political economy and the critique of legal reason." This experimental quality makes the text valuable even where it fails or overreaches. For Spanò, the point is not to treat Pašukanis as providing definitive answers but to use his work as a methodological resource for thinking critically about legal forms today.

This approach reflects Spanò's broader project, which he characterises as anchored in the present while looking to the past. His research has two complementary dimensions: understanding how ancient legal forms could be reactivated in the 19th century, and analysing how those forms continue to shape contemporary social relations. This dual temporal orientation allows for what Spanò calls a truly materialist archaeology: tracing the persistence of legal structures through historical ruptures while attending to their transformations.

Discussion and Debates

Several participants pressed on the tension between legal form and commodity form, particularly how to understand legal relations beyond exchange. Spanò responded that for Pašukanis, legal form expresses social relations rather than merely reflecting them, and that Pašukanis' focus on circulation was the most accurate way to apply Marxian analysis to law.

When asked whether this approach applies only to private law, or whether can it illuminate public and international law as well, Spanò acknowledged that his project is anchored in private law but noted that Pašukanis has been productively redeployed in international legal scholarship.

Participants also questioned whether legal concepts themselves are historically variable. Spanò's answer was unequivocal: yes. He explained that legal tools are historically shaped, often through Roman law's long shadow, and may be re-operationalised across different epochs. He insists that "no critique without history and no history without critique."

In response to a question about how Marxist-based idea about legal structures could be reconciled with Lenin’s idea that revolution abolishes law, Spanò's answer was nuanced. He explained that Pašukanis could work with Lenin because he wrote inside a revolution, confronting these questions as practical political problems. But theoretically, legal form may prove more adaptable than either of them imagined, capable of surviving and mutating beyond bourgeois conditions.

Playing the Game

Spanò pushes for legal science to exist in the space between history and critique. This area provides a space for thinking about law's future, a space that Spanò's ongoing manuscript continues to explore. He challenges us not to abolish legal thinking but to understand it historically and critically, recognising its entanglement with capitalism while remaining open to its possible transformation.