This translation of Max Adler’s Die Staatsauffassung des Marxismus enables English readers to know a significant perspective on Marx’s theory of the state, which was central to the interwar period in which he was writing (1922). In an extended dialogue with democratic jurist Hans Kelsen, Adler shows that the so-called necessity of law as the neutral arbiter of a democratic society has been heretofore a flawed imposition of the authoritative understandings of the ruling classes. Adler’s brings to his argument the Kantian concept of “sociation”, where every human judgment perforce...