Rebuilding Marxist Legal Theory as a Lakatosian Research Program

A new theoretical paper published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications argues that the scattered and often fractious tradition of Marxist approaches to law can be given a coherent scientific structure if it is treated not as a single doctrine but as what the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos called a research program. The author, Andrés Blanco of the Public Finance Institute at the Universidad de la República in Montevideo, Uruguay, sets out to organize the central hypotheses of Marxist legal theory into a framework that can accommodate its internal disagreements while preserving its most distinctive claims. The article, published open access on 13 October 2026, is a work of legal and social theory rather than an empirical study, but its ambition is methodological: to show that a tradition often dismissed as dogmatic can be reconstructed as a progressive, self-correcting body of inquiry.

Lakatos, a Hungarian-British philosopher of science, proposed in the 1970s that scientific fields are best understood not as collections of isolated theories but as research programs: structured sequences of theories united by a hard core of indispensable assumptions and surrounded by a protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses that can be modified, refined, or abandoned as evidence and criticism accumulate. A program is theoretically progressive when it predicts novel facts and empirically progressive when some of those predictions are confirmed. This model was designed to capture how mature sciences actually develop, tolerating internal diversity while maintaining continuity around core commitments. Blanco’s central move is to apply this model to Marxist legal theory, asking which claims must sit in the hard core and which belong in the adjustable belt.

The most important element of that hard core, according to the paper, is the precedence of the relations of production and circulation over superstructures and over all other aspects of law. In classical Marxist vocabulary, the economic base of a society, meaning the way production is organized and goods are exchanged, exerts a determining influence on the superstructure, which includes law, the state, and ideology. Blanco takes up this precedence claim as the key organizing hypothesis of the program. Crucially, however, he insists that this commitment must be formulated without falling into economic reductionism, the crude reading in which legal rules are treated as mere mirrors of economic interests, mechanically derived from property relations and explicable entirely by reference to them.

Avoiding reductionism is not a cosmetic concession but a structural requirement for the research program to function. If every legal phenomenon were directly deducible from the economy, the program would generate no interesting auxiliary hypotheses and would collapse into tautology, unable to explain variation between legal systems with similar economic bases or the relative autonomy that legal institutions demonstrably display. By placing the precedence of production relations at the core while allowing a flexible belt of hypotheses about how that precedence operates, Blanco’s reconstruction leaves room for the tradition’s genuine diversity. Different Marxist theorists have emphasized different mechanisms, from the functional needs of capital to the class struggles that shape legislation, and these differences can now be read as competing auxiliary hypotheses within one program rather than as rival dogmas.

The paper also introduces a novel conceptual tool: the notion of a generative process of discourse, proposed as a way to analyze the evolution of law. While the abstract does not elaborate the full mechanics of this concept, its purpose within the program is clear from its position. Legal systems change over time, and a research program needs hypotheses capable of explaining that change, not merely describing static correspondences between economy and law. By modeling law as the product of a generative process of discourse, the framework treats legal development as something produced through identifiable processes rather than given in advance, opening the evolution of legal orders to theoretical analysis and, potentially, to empirical investigation.

A further hypothesis extends the program’s scope beyond law itself. Blanco argues that law must be studied in relation to other superstructures, above all the state and ideologies. This is a significant methodological commitment. Legal theory frequently treats law as a self-contained system of norms, analyzed by its own internal logic. The Marxist program, by contrast, holds that legal forms cannot be adequately understood in isolation from the political institutions that enforce them and the ideological frameworks that legitimate them. The state and ideology are not background conditions but co-constitutive superstructures, and the relationships among these elements become part of the program’s explanatory target. This relational requirement connects the paper to long-standing debates about the relative autonomy of the state and the role of legal ideology in securing social order.

Perhaps the most technically interesting contribution is methodological. Blanco proposes a heuristic as a design strategy aligned with the program’s central hypotheses. In Lakatos’s original framework, research programs contain a positive heuristic: a set of directions or puzzles that guide theorists in building out the protective belt, suggesting which problems to tackle and which models to construct. By specifying a heuristic for Marxist legal analysis, the paper aims to give researchers concrete guidance on how to generate testable or at least critically assessable hypotheses about law, rather than leaving each theorist to improvise from first principles. A well-specified heuristic is what allows a program to accumulate results over time, and its absence is often what makes broad theoretical traditions feel stagnant.

The significance of this reconstruction lies partly in what it says about the status of Marxist legal theory today. Approaches rooted in the critique of law have produced points of common ground as well as sharp differences across more than a century of scholarship, and critics have often seized on that diversity as evidence of incoherence. The Lakatosian framing offers a different reading: diversity within a shared hard core is precisely how living research programs look. It also provides criteria for evaluation. Auxiliary hypotheses can be judged by whether they generate novel insights and withstand criticism, and the program as a whole can be assessed by whether it remains progressive or degenerates into defensive rationalizations. This gives Marxist legal scholarship a vocabulary for internal self-criticism that does not require abandoning its foundational commitments.

The paper is published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, a peer-reviewed open access journal of the Nature Portfolio, and was received on 12 May 2026 and accepted on 17 September 2026. The author, who declares no competing interests, acknowledges the reviewers for their help in refining the argument. Because the work is theoretical, its claims are addressed to scholars of legal philosophy, sociology, and political economy rather than to experimental scientists, but the methodological stakes are recognizably those of philosophy of science: what makes a body of thought scientific, how traditions maintain coherence amid disagreement, and how abstract frameworks can be organized to produce cumulative knowledge. The article is citable under its permanent DOI and is released under a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.

For readers outside the field, the paper offers a case study in how a modern social science discipline can borrow tools from philosophy of science to discipline its own theoretical house. Treating Marxism in law as a research program does not settle the truth of its core hypothesis about the primacy of production relations; that remains a substantive claim about how societies work, subject to ongoing theoretical and empirical contestation. What the reconstruction does provide is structure: a defined hard core, a flexible belt of hypotheses, a novel concept for analyzing legal evolution, a relational mandate connecting law to state and ideology, and a heuristic to guide future work. Whether the program proves progressive in Lakatos’s sense will depend on the research it inspires, but the paper makes a concrete proposal for how that research should be organized, and it does so at a moment when questions about the relationship between economic structures and legal institutions remain as contested as ever.

Subject of Research: Reconstructing Marxist approaches to law as a Lakatosian research program in legal theory

Article Title: Marxism as a research program in law

Article References: Blanco, A. (2026). Marxism as a research program in law. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09254-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09254-w

Keywords: Marxism, legal theory, Imre Lakatos, research programs, philosophy of science, superstructure, relations of production, economic reductionism, state theory, ideology, legal evolution, methodology