LAW AS A VEHICLE OF ALTRUISM

Abstract

Probably no area of thought has been neglected and abused by orthodox Marxism as much as the field of legal theory. Literature from the Left hearkens back to the dreary reductionism of such concepts as the state as an instrument of the bourgeoisie, culture as ideology and base-superstructure models of society. Marxists have rarely granted law any explanatory significance in their understanding of the organization of human communities. Rather, legality is considered a sphere of ideological domination, intrinsic to capitalism, that becomes superfluous with the inevitable demise of bourgeois property relations. An escape from 'the deepening crisis in Marxist theory' would require a revised critical analysis of law.' Such a critique may move Marxism closer to filling the gap left by its founder in the conceptualization of the political under socialism. Promising a 'conceptual analysis of the idea of socialist rights', Tom Campbell's recent book, The Left and Rights, is a welcome contribution to the formulation of a radical perspective on the place of legal rights in an emancipated society.2 Campbell states his aim to be to 'establish the appropriateness of the language of rights to describe the normative human relationships within a fully socialist community' (LR I93). He identifies a 'family quarrel' on the Left between 'revolutionaries', who contend that the whole notion of rights is 'incurably bourgeois', and 'reformists', who argue that there is something of lasting value to salvage from the traditional concept of rights (LR, 3). Campbell seeks to develop a coherent reformist position by investigating and refuting the revolutionary's objections to the concept of socialist rights. The book launches a three-pronged attack on 'moralism', 'legalism', and 'individualism' in order to establish an alternative basis for rights. 'Moralist' attempts to ground rights in natural law are rejected for a more 'positivistic' approach, which, although sceptical of the legalistic claims prominent in rule-based theories, affirms that rules would be an essential tool in the organization of socialist society. Such rules need not be coercive, however, since socialist man would be such that force would not be necessary to command obedience. These rules are given content by a theory of rights based on altruistic interests rather than the individualism integral to liberal