  The natural law and legal positivist positions are united, however, in the aim to provide a concept of the essence of law. This endeavour supplies them with a common enemy in the view of law as ideology, which finds trying to determine the essence of law as fundamentally misconceived. After all, if law is inevitably shaped by ideas emanating from power relations outside of the law, then it would seem that law has no essence, be it moral or institutional. If law is reduced to ideology, or seen as its mere effect, then legality looks contingent and unprincipled, having no necessary content or definition, no intrinsic character. If law both mirrors and distorts the realities of power, it is power, not principles of legality, which tells us what law is. Thus for most mainstream legal theorists, the ideological is no necessary feature of the law, and law should certainly not be defined according to the radical conception where intrinsic to law is a mystification of reality, or an obfuscation of social relations in order to exact compliance.