The essay reconstructs the semantics of the concept of law in Marx, tracking its transformations from his early writings to those devoted to the critique of political economy. Thanks to the critique of private law and the confrontation with Max Stirner, Marx abandons the idea of law as an expression of the universal, reaching a conception of political right as the outcome of the an-tagonism of social relations. Therefore, the overlapping and reciprocal influence between the properly legal meaning and that which he derives from the analysis of the social relationship of capital becomes crucial. Significantly, Marx repeatedly states that what he calls economic laws actually express only a tendency. Their actual normativity, and accordingly also the rule of capital, are thus always exposed to the risk of crisis and the effects of class struggle.
