The Marxist Conception of the State: A Contribution to the Differentiation of the Sociological and the Juristic Method

This translation of Max Adler’s Die Staatsauffassung des Marxismus enables English readers to know a significant perspective on Marx’s theory of the state, which was central to the interwar period in which he was writing (1922). In an extended dialogue with democratic jurist Hans Kelsen, Adler shows that the so-called necessity of law as the neutral arbiter of a democratic society has been heretofore a flawed imposition of the authoritative understandings of the ruling classes. Adler’s brings to his argument the Kantian concept of “sociation”, where every human judgment perforce sets its determinations within its view of the social whole, demonstrating that an accurate comprehension of interdependent equality that realizes an objective “sociation” can only occur in a “classless” society.

Max Adler, born January 15, 1873 in Vienna, Austria, studied law at the University of Vienna. Renowned as a Neo-Kantian Marxist, he was active in Austrian Social Democracy as both a politician and theoretician until his death in 1937.

Mark E. Blum, Ph.D. (1970), University of Pennsylvania, is Professor of History at the University of Louisville. He has published monographs, translations and many articles on German and Austrian-German Marxists, including The Austro-Marxists 1890-1918, A Psychobiographical Study (University of Kentucky, 1985).