On the Lithuanian Question: Contextualising Pashukanis' Critique of the Legal Form

Chapter Three connects the position of the theory of the legal form to the cultural/material ground of Pashukanis’ formative background. Toward this end, this chapter focuses on Pashukanis’ Lithuanian heritage in relation to how the ‘Lithuanian Question’ of his day invoked deep histories that spoke to numerous contemporary questions concerning law, rights, and identity. To uncover these histories, this contribution engages in the type of historical sociological inquiry into ‘the juridical’ that Pashukanis advocated in his General Theory of Law and Marxism. On this point, approaching Pashukanis through his background provides immense insights into his theoretical disagreement with his fellow Soviet jurist Pēteris Stučka, the leader of the short-lived Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, on the nature of law. While Stučka disagreed with Pashukanis that ‘law’ was reducible to the commodity-exchange facilitating bourgeois legal form, the chapter argues that diverging historical sociological consciousnesses as a result of their differing Latvian versus Lithuanian backgrounds can, at least partially, explain their jurisprudential disagreement.