ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the particular context of the development of legal doctrines of contract, some aspects of the relationship between historical patterns of doctrinal legal development and changes in socio-economic structure. Max Weber suggests that legal concepts can serve in appropriate cases as ideal types of social action. The primary ideological significance of legal contract form is twofold. Firstly, it lies in the idea of legal equivalence, the exact legal balancing of reciprocal rights and obligations of formally equal contracting parties assumed to be acting freely. In this way the law systematically interprets actual relations and conditions of inequality and substantial unfreedom as relations of equality and free choice, and attaches legal consequences accordingly. Secondly, the ideological significance of legal contract form lies in the idea of its universality. The importance of legal contract to capitalism is thus not primarily in the provision of technical devices to support the developing complexity of economic relations.
