Legal Form, Ideology and the Political

Abstract

In this chapter, I aim at exploring the question of the ideology of the legal form with an eye to the concept of the political. For this purpose, I first define the concept of legal form and identify the juridical as a separate field from the political, underlining the prevalence of the latter over the former. In ideological terms, I consider that the juridical serves to reproduce and propagate two distinct ideologies – the currently hegemonic political ideology (the current ideology of the political) on the one hand, and the residual ideology of the juridical (the juridical ideology), which is in fact the ideology of the legal form as such, on the other hand. The juridical ideology combines both elements of an ideology of external legal form (legal form in general) with elements of ideology of the internal legal form (the way that a particular legal form is internally arranged, e.g. valuing coherence and systematisation, or rather fact- orientedness and predictability).

Keywords: legal form, ideology, the political