ABSTRACT

This chapter considers the legal characteristics of the final economy and discusses the law reduced to a set of imperative rules, designed to protect the different producers in the enjoyment of the results of their labour, and in the accumulation of its products. Thus, as a coactive and imperative instruction, the law is likewise a necessary product of the capitalistic economy, serving to protect the income-holders from their own importunities and from attacks on the side of the labourers. If the law then constitutes the sanction that society, or more strictly, its ruling classes, accords to existing economic conditions, it must then of necessity reflect these same conditions, and docilely follow in the train of their successive transformations. The matter is also explicable from the fact that the non-exercise of the legal sanction continued even after the conditions of economic equality that first rendered this state of things possible ceased to exist.