Jurisdiction, Legal Form, and the Transition to Capitalism Debate: Recovering Agency and Discontinuity

Abstract

Abstract The increased interest in law and capitalism has not translated into an engagement in legal scholarship with the transition-to-capitalism debate. This article contributes a critique of commercialisation approaches to the history of capitalism and law from a Political Marxist perspective. It argues that combining jurisdiction and legal form provides a more flexible conceptual architecture to account for early-modern juridical practices. Conceptually, this enables an encounter between the structural and subject-centred commodity-form theory of law (cftl) and the more granular, agentic, and class-centred Political Marxist approach. Empirically, exploring two key institutions – property and sovereignty – provides an opportunity to focus on their jurisdictional dimensions driven by specific class struggles and agencies. These reflect, through the concept of jurisdiction, the ruptures and discontinuities of the transition, while form analysis accounts for the more continuous and structural processes of key institutions shaping the apparent linearity of law.